EYES AND EARS

“THE DETERIORATING HEALTH OF THE DESERT FOX WAS A BOOST TO THE NEW COMMANDER OF THE EIGHTH ARMY, GENERAL MONTGOMERY, AS HE BEGAN PLANNING THE SECOND BATTLE OF EL ALAMEIN”

The Germans believed they had an invaluable advantage over the British in North Africa at the start of 1942 – his name was Colonel Bonner Fellers, the American military attache in Cairo. Fellers was no spy – he was just loud-mouthed, careless and industrious. From his office in the Egyptian capital, he transmitted hundreds of coded messages to his military masters in Washington, describing in detail how the Allies were progressing in the war against the Axis forces. The problem was that the Italians knew the Americans’ ‘black code’, and every message sent by Fellers from September 1941 to June 1942 was decoded and passed to Rommel, who called them “my little Fellers.”

But the self-satisfaction of the Desert Fox was misplaced, because while he had his ‘little Fellers’ his enemy had their own little secrets. “I remember very vividly the day when I was introduced to ‘uncle Henry’, for uncle Henry was the pet name by which Ultra went in the Middle East,” recalled Lieutenant Colonel Enoch Powell, a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee in Cairo. “[It]… told us the most significant and important things,