The Odessa File

So he smoked another cigarette and fell asleep alone at quarter to two to dream of the hideous face of the old gassed man in the slums of Altona.

While Peter Miller was eating his scrambled eggs at midnight in Hamburg five men were sitting drinking in the comfortable lounge of a house attached to a riding school near the pyramids outside Cairo. The time there was one in the morning. The five men had dined well and were in a jovial mood, the cause being the news from Dallas they had heard four hours earlier.

Three of the men were Germans, the other two Egyptians. The wife of the host and proprietor of the riding school, a favourite meeting place of the cream of Cairo society and the several-thousand-strong German colony, had gone to bed, leaving the five men to talk into the small hours.

Sitting in the leather-backed easy chair by the shuttered window was Hans Appler, formerly a Jewish expert in the Nazi Propaganda Ministry of Dr Joseph Goebbels. Having lived in Egypt since shortly after the end of the war, where he had been spirited by the Odessa, Appler had taken the Egyptian name of Salah Chaffar, and worked as an expert on Jews in the Egyptian Ministry of Orientation. He held a glass of whisky. On his left was another former expert from Goebbels’ staff, Ludwig Heiden, also working in the Orientation Ministry. He had in the meantime adopted the Moslem faith, made a trip to Mecca and was called El Hadj. In deference to his new religion he held a glass of orange juice. Both men were fanatical Nazis.

The two Egyptians were Colonel Chams Edine Badrane, personal aide to Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, later to become Egyptian Defence Minister before being sentenced to death for treason after the Six-Day War of 1967. Colonel Badrane was destined to pass into disgrace with him. The other was Colonel Ali Samir, head of the Moukhabarat, the Egyptian secret intelligence service.

There had been a sixth guest at dinner, the guest of honour, who had rushed back to Cairo when the news came through at nine-thirty, Cairo time, that President Kennedy was dead. He was the Speaker of the Egyptian National Assembly, Anwar el Sadat, a close collaborator of President Nasser and later to become his successor.

Hans Appler raised his glass to the ceiling.

‘So Kennedy the Jew-lover is dead. Gentlemen, I give you a toast.’

‘But our glasses are empty,’ protested Colonel Samir.

Their host hastened to remedy the matter, filling the empty glasses with a bottle of scotch from the sideboard.

The reference to Kennedy as a Jew-lover baffled none of the five men in the room. On the 14th of March 1960, while Dwight Eisenhower was still President of the United States, the Premier of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, and the Chancellor of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, had met secretly at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, a meeting that ten years earlier would have been deemed impossible. What was deemed impossible even in 1960 was what happened at that meeting, which was why details of it took years to leak out and why even at the end of 1963 President Nasser refused to take seriously the information that the Odessa and the Moukhabarat of Colonel Samir placed on his desk.

The two statesmen had signed an agreement whereby West Germany agreed to open a credit account for Israel to the tune of fifty million dollars a year without any strings attached. Ben-Gurion, however, soon discovered that to have money was one thing, to have a secure and certain source of arms was quite another. Six months later the Waldorf agreement was topped off with another, signed between the defence ministers of Germany and Israel, Franz-Josef Strauss and Shimon Peres. Under its terms Israel would be able to use the money from Germany to buy weapons in Germany.

Adenauer, aware of the vastly more controversial nature of the second agreement, delayed for months, until in November 1961 he was in New York to meet the new President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Kennedy put the pressure on. He did not wish to have arms delivered directly from the USA to Israel, but he wanted them to arrive somehow. Israel needed fighters, transport planes, Howitzer 105 mm artillery pieces, armoured cars, armoured personnel carriers and tanks, but above all tanks.

Germany had all of them, mainly of American make, either bought from America to offset the cost of keeping American troops in Germany under the NATO agreement or made under licence in Germany.

Under Kennedy’s pressure the Strauss – Peres deal was pushed through.

The first German tanks started to arrive at Haifa in late June 1963. It was difficult to keep the news secret for long; too many people were involved. The Odessa found out in late 1962 and promptly informed the Egyptians with whom their agents in Cairo had the closest links.

In late 1963 things started to change. On October 15th Konrad Adenauer, the Fox of Bonn, the Granite Chancellor, also resigned and went into retirement. Adenauer’s place was taken by Ludwig Erhard, a good vote-catcher as the father of the German economic miracle, but in matters of foreign policy weak and vacillating.

Even when Adenauer was in power there had been a vociferous group inside the West German cabinet in favour of shelving the Israeli arms deal and halting the supplies before they had begun. The old Chancellor had silenced them with a few terse sentences and such was his power they stayed silenced.

Erhard was quite a different man and already had earned himself the nickname the Rubber Lion. As soon as he took the chair the anti-arms-deal group, based on the Foreign Ministry, ever mindful of its excellent and improving relations with the Arab world, opened up again. Erhard dithered. But behind them all was the determination of John Kennedy that Israel should get her arms via Germany.

And then he was shot. The big question in the small hours of the morning of November 23rd was simply: would President Lyndon John

son take the American pressure off Germany and let the indecisive Chancellor in Bonn renege on the deal? In fact he did not, but there were high hopes in Cairo that he would.

The host at the convivial meeting outside Cairo that night, having filled his guests’ glasses, turned back to the sideboard to top up his own. His name was Wolfgang Lutz, born at Mannheim in 1921, a former major in the German Army, a fanatical Jew-hater, who had emigrated to Cairo in 1961 and started his riding academy. Blond, blue-eyed, hawk-faced, he was a top favourite among both the influential political figures of Cairo and the expatriate German and mainly Nazi community along the banks of the Nile.

He turned to face the room and gave them a broad smile. If there was anything false about that smile no one noticed it. But it was false. He had been born, a Jew, in Mannheim but had emigrated to Palestine in 1933 at the age of twelve. His name was Ze’ev and he held the rank of Rav-Seren (major) in the Israeli Army. He was also the top agent of Israeli Intelligence in Egypt at that time. On February 28th, 1965, after a raid on his home, in which a radio transmitter was discovered in the bathroom scales, he was arrested. Tried on June 26th, 1965, he was sentenced to hard labour in perpetuity. Released after the end of the 1967 war as part of an exchange against thousands of Egyptian prisoners of war, he and his wife stepped back on to the soil of home at Lod Airport on February 4th, 1968.

But the night Kennedy died this was all in the future, the arrest, the tortures, the multiple rape of his wife. He raised his glass to the four smiling faces in front of him.

In fact, he could hardly wait for his guests to depart, for something one of them had said over dinner was of vital importance to his country, and he desperately wished to be alone, to go up to his bathroom, get the transmitter out of the bathroom scales and send a message to Tel Aviv. But he forced himself to keep smiling.

‘Death to the Jew-lovers,’ he toasted. ‘Sieg Heil.’

Peter Miller woke the next morning just before nine and shifted luxuriously under the enormous feather cushion that covered the double bed. Even half awake he would feel the warmth of the sleeping figure of Sigi seeping across the bed at him and by reflex he snuggled closer so that her buttocks pushed into the base of his stomach. Automatically he began to erect.

Sigi, still fast asleep after only four hours in bed, grunted in annoyance and shifted away towards the edge of the bed.

‘Go away,’ she muttered without waking up.

Miller sighed, turned on to his back and held up his watch, squinting at the face of it in the half-light. Then he slipped out of bed on the other side, pulled a towelling bathrobe round him and padded through into the sitting room to pull back the curtains. The steely November light washed across the room, making him blink. He focussed his eyes and looked down into the Steindamm. It was a Saturday morning and traffic was light down the wet black tarmac. He yawned and went into the kitchen to brew the first of his innumerable cups of coffee. Both his mother and Sigi reproached him with living almost entirely on coffee and cigarettes.