GROUPS AND SINGLE DECORATIONS FOR GALLANTRY
The following extract, taken from The Cat and The Mice, by Leonard Mosley, states:
‘His job in the desert was to intercept the bands of wandering Bedouin, who often strayed with their camels over the battle-lines, and check their bona fides; for both sides tried to infiltrate agents among them. He wandered about the desert on his own, calling in at Siwa Oasis and Giarrabub, sometimes in uniform, sometimes in native clothes, keeping his ears and his eyes open. He enjoyed the life, and he was sorry when G.H.Q. called him back to Cairo and gave him the job of guarding security in the capital itself.
But here too he found ample scope for his talents. He could be a Greek one day, a Copt the next, or slip easily into the role of an Armenian visitor from neutral Turkey, and long before Eppler came on to the scene he had achieved quite a few triumphs in tracking down and arresting the dissidents and traitors whose activities were hindering the war effort.’
And by way of an overview of his new post as Chief Field Security Officer for Cairo, Leonard Mosley continues:
‘Major Alfred William Sansom was a familiar figure to all those officers on leave from the Eighth Army who frequented the men’s bar of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. They undoubtedly looked upon him with that mild, tolerant contempt with which front-line soldiers regarded the desk-holders at G.H.Q., cynically known to them as “chair-borne types” or “gabardine swine.”
He was small and dapper and elegant. His uniform always looked as if it were fresh from the tailor’s; his moustache was trim; he smelled of expensive after-shave lotion and hair-tonic; and, to give him the last touch of smartness, he carried a slim switch-cane under his arm. Sansom, in fact, looked as if he had never heard a gun fired in anger in his life, but had spent his military career fighting a deft but hardly gallant war exclusively on paper. But appearances can be deceptive, and in the case of Major Sansom they were definitely so, for he was undoubtedly one of the shrewdest counter- espionage agents of World War II.
It would be true to say that he spent none of it actually firing bullets or shells at the enemy. He did not need to, for he was engaged in shooting down much more important targets with a rather more subtle and complex weapon, his intelligence. He had spent the early part of the war in North Africa acting as a security officer in the Western Desert ...
In Cairo Major Sansom had under his command a force of 2000 men to help him in his job of preserving security. They were a heterogeneous lot. The body of the force was composed of Egyptian policemen who had gone through a special training course in Intelligence and had been drafted to Field Security. Working with them were Greeks, Yugoslavs, Turks, Armenians, Syrians, Irakis, Israelis and even Kurds, plus a small, tight group of British N.C.Os who were all fluent in German or French and at least one other language.
Sansom had his agents in most places where they were likely to be useful. There was one British General who talked too freely about the plans in the Western Desert to a charming Free French journalist whom he took out to dinner; and he lived to regret it, for she was one of Sansom’s staff and made a full report on his indiscretions. In most cabarets and restaurants in the city one of the waiters was sure to be working for him. One of King Farouk’s most trusted servants was on the payroll and performed to some purpose, particularly in reporting upon the activities of another servant who was in the pay of the Axis powers.
But whatever success Sansom had had so far was not going to help him much with his present case. Though he did not know it at the time, he had already met John Eppler and was suspicious of him. He had watched him in the Kit Kat cabaret. He knew the name, Hussein Gaafer, under which he was living, and had even asked for a dossier on his activities to be prepared. But for the moment he was just another suspect Egyptian with a rather too European manner, and it was for a completely different person that he thought he was searching.
Out in the Western Desert the forces were beginning to take their positions for the great battle which was inevitably coming. Somewhere in Cairo was a spy who might well possess the vital information that could give the Germans a decisive advantage in the struggle. And all Sansom could do was send out his men, to watch and wait for the break they needed.
It was a piquant situation, though they did not realise it and it did not help either of them at the time that in fact spy and spy-catcher had already met each other - the one disguised as a playboy Egyptian and the other as a bibulous Greek. But it was going to be some time, and some complicated manoeuvres were destined to take place, before they confronted each other in their true colours … ’
As it transpired, it was an alluring belly dancer who provided Sansom with his much needed break, for Eppler, a German who had been raised in Egypt by his Egyptian stepfather, frequented the city’s nightclubs on a regular basis.
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