Gabriel Ronay
Into Africa
The Hunglish Patient
As far as love stories go, Anthony Minghella's film The English Patient has stirred up more international controversy and aroused more political passion than any recent "real life drama". Admittedly, it is the love story of the year, possibly of the decade.
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Almásy was a reputed homosexual, with absolutely no interest - either sexual or emotional - in women. According to Kurt Mayer, an Austrian filmman who is currently making a documentary about Almásy, the count wrote scores of tender and romantic letters to a Luftwaffe officer, the object of his wartime affections.
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Jean Howard, a wartime British intelligence officer, is probably the only person alive who actually knows the whole Almásy story and she affirmed that the US media is groping in the dark.
As one of the code-breakers of the top-secret German Enigma signals at Bletchley Park (Hut 3), she had been following Almásy's movements across the Sahara at a delicate point in the Eighth Army's battle with Hitler's panzers.
Her information comes straight from the horse's mouth. She came across Almásy by chance as Rommel was advancing in 1942.
We read and graded every German Enigma signal which came into Hut 3. The 50 separate ciphers covered the Luftwaffe, the Wehrmacht in North Africa, the Balkans, the Russian front, the Middle East and the specials, like the Nazi V1 weapons from Peenemünde and diplomatic ciphers.
One day, I chanced on a previously unreported Enigma signal about Almásy's commando. It was about to set off on its desert journey to Gialo. It was set to pass through a phantom army of ours, complete, as part of our strategic deception to deflect Rommel's advance, with a false army signals station. I continued to study Almásy's radiosignals on the Abwehr ciphers for the following three weeks, for it seemed important to pick him up alive if possible.
Thus Mrs Howard was the very person who had urged that Almásy be captured. Cairo was informed, aircraft at Kufra oasis were alerted and a Desert Long Range Group operation put in place. Nevertheless, Almásy managed to drop off two agents, Eppler and Sandstetter, near Assiut. They set up their transmitter on a Nile houseboat, but it was defective. They turned to a young anti-British Egyptian officer for help. His name was Anwar el Sadat, later to become President of Egypt.
In his memoirs Sadat recalled "the bungling German spies... leading a life of pleasure on the money the Abwehr had stupidly given them." The British raided the houseboat and the spies were picked up on the holding charge of "using false currency". "Well", said Mrs Howard, "with that Egyptian officer involved, we couldn't just shoot the German spies, could we?"
It was the start of Mrs Howard's interest in the mysterious count. "After we were freed from the Official Secrets Act in 1976", she said, "I was encouraged by no less than four former heads of our service to go back to Austria and talk to Almásy. He, however, had long been dead. Nevertheless, the Almásy research was a good excuse to clear up other unfinished business with the survivors of the Abwehr who, like Rommel and the generals of the July 20, 1944 bomb plot, had anti-Nazi sympathies."
Her researches took many years and gave her a crucial insight into the man who, for better or worse, is the role-model of The English Patient. She translated into English Almásy's book on his prewar expeditions, Die Unbekannte Sahara, and she interviewed his German superiors, Oberst Franz Seubert of the Abwehr's Rome and North Africa station and Frigatten Kapitän Hans Sokol, as well as the spy Eppler. She also picked the brain of Brigadier Bagnold, the founder of the British Long Range Desert Group, who gave her a captured copy of Almásy's Condor mission diary.
Among other key players, she consulted Camilla Russell, a wartime MI5 officer, who had read Almásy's file and found that "there was nothing derogatory about him in it".
The emerging picture of a Mid-European gentleman-adventurer would really make compelling viewing. It answers the key questions raised by the US media but poses others. On balance, the count seemed more suited to the fellowship of the Royal Egyptian Geographical Society than Rommel's Afrika Korps.
László Ede Almásy was born into a noble - though not titled - branch of the family in the ancestral chateau at Borostyánkõ in Hungary (now Bernstein in Austria), in 1895. He started his education in Graz but was soon sent to an English school at Eastborne for health reasons.
Young László had a flair for flying, got his pilot's licence at 17 and fought as a pilot on the Russian front throughout the Great War. The much decorated airman showed great loyalty to the Emperor Charles I - King Charles IV of Hungary - as the Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed in 1918. In a restoration attempt, he twice drove the dethroned monarch to Budapest, but the move was thwarted. A grateful Charles made him a count. There was, however, nothing to keep the young royalist in his kingless homeland mutilated by the Trianon peace treaty.
In the 1920s, he moved to Egypt and became an agent for Steyr, the Austrian car maker. He made regular desert journeys, not as a German spy, but to advertise the hardiness of Steyr cars. He used the trips to chart parts of the Libyan desert and made several important scientific discoveries. In the 1930s, while continuing his work for the Royal Egyptian Geographical Society, he instructed sports pilots flying Gypsy Moths at the new airport at Heliopolis. It bears his name, Al-Maza, to this day.
In 1939, with the threat of war growing, he was desperate to stay in his beloved desert and offered his services to Russell Pasha, Cairo's British police chief. The offer was turned down because of his close Austrian/German connections. He then turned to the Italians, who were still neutral, but they also rebuffed his approaches believing him to be a British spy. A dispirited Almásy returned home to Hungary.
When Hitler sent his expeditionary army to North Africa, Oberstleutnant Seubert of the Abwehr travelled to Budapest to enlist Almásy's help. He told Mrs Howard: "Despite his longing for the desert he was reluctant to help us. Only when ordered, as a reserve officer of the Hungarian Air Force, by Miklós Horthy, Hungary's Regent and commander-in-chief, did he join Rommel."
While he was clearly prepared to work for whoever suited his interest of the moment, he was a true explorer of the old school, not a fanatical Nazi spy, as alleged by Elizabeth Pathy Salett, the daughter of Hungary's Consul-General in Alexandria in the 1930s. Mrs Howard believes that she is wrong and quotes from a letter of the former Abwehr officer Seubert's thumb-nail portrait of the Count. "He was an anti-communist and a Hungarian patriot body and soul. His sense of honour as a sportsman and airman went beyond frontiers. He had an overwhelming love of the desert". Not of Hitler's war.
Rommel apparently got a similar impression of him. Almásy told Brigadier Bagnold in Cairo after the war that, at a critical point in the battle for the Libyan desert, Rommel took him aside and said: "Almásy, this is not your war... Go home to Budapest. We are going to lose it anyway."
He returned to Hungary and after the Red Army liberated the country in 1945, the NKVD Soviet secret police arrested him. He escaped but was recaptured. He was beaten and interrogated for months, then handed over to the Budapest authorities. This was hardly the treatment a "Soviet agent" would have received from its masters.
The Count was tried on charges of "serving as an officer in the German Afrika Korps" by the People's Court in December 1946. Although the prosecution had sought the death sentence, he was acquitted. S.E. Allaedihn Mokhtar, a cousin of King Farouk of Egypt, told Mrs Howard that there were no miracles in postwar Budapest: "A heavy bribe freed Almásy."
Early in 1947, the Count fled across the Iron Curtain to Austria and then on to Italy. By curious coincidence, at a recent London dinner party my wife and I were seated next to the Duke of Valderano, a participant of the ensuing drama. The Duke had served as a British army officer during the Italian campaign and in Rome after the war. In 1947, he had been directed by London to get Almásy onto a British aircraft but NKVD agents surrounded the Count's Rome hotel. With the help of his wife, the Duke used a clever ruse and got Almásy safely to the airport, "with the Soviet thugs in hot pursuit". As Mrs Howard aptly pointed out, "Britain would hardly have gone to all that trouble to get Almásy out of Europe and to Cairo had he been known to us either as a Nazi or a Soviet spy".
In 1951, Egypt offered Almásy the position of director of the Cairo Desert Institute, but the role-model of The English Patient died suddenly of dysentery in Austria before he could return to his beloved desert.
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Gabriel Ronay,
author, broadcaster and journalist, left Hungary in 1956 and was until recently on the staff of The Times. His latest book, The Lost King of England - The East European Adventures of Edward the Exile, was published by Bowdell & Brewer in Britain and the US in 1990.
