Posted on 05/20/2004 8:10:58 PM PDT by ijcr
The true story of Count Laszlo Almasy, the Hungarian explorer and hero of the film The English Patient, is told in MI5 files released to the National Archives today.
In the film, Almasy, played by Ralph Fiennes, is a disfigured patient in an Italian hospital who had been the handsome young lover of an Englishwoman (Kristin Scott Thomas) in pre-war Cairo.
The truth is more prosaic. Although Almasy was a Hungarian explorer and airman who mapped the Libyan and Egyptian deserts and was prominent in pre-war Cairo society, he was no hero.
He was a bungling Nazi intelligence officer who, according to his MI5 file, was "very ugly and shabbily dressed, with a fat and pendulous nose, drooping shoulders and a nervous tic".
The image of the romantic hero portrayed in the film will be further damaged next week when a new book, The Secret Life of Laszlo Almasy, reveals that he was also homosexual.
But Almasy's interest in exploration is not in doubt. The files chart an epic, but ultimately flawed, journey he made across the Libyan desert to infiltrate two German agents into Cairo.
Sadly for Almasy they were a pair of no-hopers who within weeks blew the £3,600 he gave them on cheap champagne for exotic dancers and prostitutes in a succession of nightclubs and brothels.
Almasy was one of a number of minor pre-war explorers recruited by German intelligence to roll back British influence across Africa. He first came to the attention of MI5 when it emerged, in messages deciphered by Britain's wartime codebreakers at Bletchley Park, that he had made a dramatic flight to the Great Pyramid at Giza to extract two Hungarian agents.
He was operating under the codename Salam, an anagram of the first five letters of his surname, and initially tried to replace the Hungarians with two Egyptians, one of whom was later picked up in Dar es Salaam by MI6. Mohsen Fadl, who was recruited by Almasy in Paris where he was head of the Egyptian tourist office, was supposed to be the money man in the "Pyramid Organisation", the title given to the German spy network.
Fadl's main contact in Cairo was to be Prince Gamil Shehab Ed-Din Hussein, who according to the files was "a man of loose morals and not in fact entitled to call himself a prince at all". They produced no useful intelligence. So a new plan, Operation Condor, was devised under which two German nationals would be smuggled in to Cairo.
Heinrich Sandstede, 29, codenamed Max, had spent nine years in Africa before the war working for the Texas Oil Company and spoke fluent English.
Hans Eppler, 28, codenamed Moritz, was the illegitimate son of a German woman who later married an Egyptian judge. He was a cotton trader in Cairo before the war, spoke fluent Arabic and was using his real Egyptian name, Hussein Gaafar. They were to be taken by Almasy across the desert from Libya to the Egyptian city of Asyut, on the Nile, 200 miles south of Cairo, from where they were to make their own way to the Egyptian capital.
But even before the journey began, the preparations had been picked up by Bletchley Park. By the end of December 1941, the codebreakers knew Almasy was in Tripoli organising an espionage operation. During February, March and April of 1942, they monitored the build-up of people for the expedition, including a number of Ford V8 lorries - "the only cars suitable for desert work".
The team of eight men in six Ford lorries left the Jalu oasis 250 miles south of Benghazi on May 12, 1942, their every move tracked by Bletchley Park. They followed the desert tracks to the Khufra oasis for 40 miles before turning east towards Asyut. But they swiftly became stuck in the sand and had to turn back, abandoning one lorry.
Once they got back on the Khufra track, one lorry returned to Jalu. The remaining four continued south until 15 miles before Khufra when they again turned east, trying to find the Gilf Kebir plateau.
A third lorry had to be left in a wadi before they found the tracks of an expedition which Almasy had conducted in 1932. But very soon they were again bogged down in the sand and a fourth lorry had to be dumped. The two remaining lorries continued and Max and Moritz were dropped seven miles from Asyut. They made their way to the city by foot, taking the train to Cairo where they found most of the pensions full.
They spent their first two nights staying in a brothel before moving to a flat in another building which also turned out to be a brothel and the subject of frequent police searches. They eventually met Hekmet Fahmy, a belly dancer at the Continental Hotel, described in the MI5 file as "an exponent of the danse de ventre", who found them a dahabia, or houseboat, on the Nile.
But they failed to make contact with their German base station, largely because it had been captured by the British, and spent most of their time enjoying Cairo's nightlife.
"They were too intoxicated with the possession of so much money and too intent upon enjoying the fleshpots of Egypt in the form of women and wine," the MI5 file says.
"Their average outlay nightly for these things was round about £20 and it was their extravagance that got them into difficulties."
Desperate for more money, they sought out a young signals officer in the Egyptian army, the then Capt Anwar Sadat, later Egyptian president, and persuaded him to help them get in touch with the headquarters of the German commander, Edwin Rommel.
They then went around asking anyone with any kind of link to Germany to help them to fly to Rommel to obtain more funds and all, including the young Sadat, were promptly picked up and jailed by the British.
He's no Ralph Fiennes.
I am proud to say I have never seen it. My pre-conservative feminist leanings come back everytime that movie comes on. What in the world is attractive about watching some whore 'hit the big time' with a john? By watching a woman do absolutely nothing with her life but wait for Prince Charming to come along and rescue her? What on earth is attractive about the world of streetwalkers? The needle marks? The bruises from being beaten by pimps and johns?
What a role model for the young 'uns.
How ironic. I found this thread while I'm in the middle of watching the Seinfeld episode where Elaine hates the English Patient.
Did Michael Ondaatje know this when he wrote his novel? Because that makes Almasy the Great Canadian Epic HeroTM.
If you read "The Pink Swastika" you'll learn as much about the Brown Shirts and their history as you'll ever want to know. By Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams - available at Amazon and
http://www.abidingtruth.com/index.php?viewmode=resources
I agree. Most gay folks are pretty moderate and don't really want to be radical either with their lifestyle or politically. The minority who we hear about constantly are extremely vocal, but I don't think they yell, er... speak for many gay people in general.
:-)
If they are a small minority, why are they calling all the shots? Why are they changing the entire moral climate of the country?
And why, O why, do not their "moderate" brethren speak out against the militant radicals?
Could it be that like the silent majority of non-jihadi Muslims, they really agree with the vocal minority? Or maybe afraid of speaking out?
The only homosexual I really respect (of course, there are many I don't know of) is Tammy Bruce, because she does speak out against the radical homosexual agenda, especially regarding the indoctrination and sexualization of children.
Stupid movie anyway.
**** SPOILERS ****
If the woman dies in the end, it's not a good movie.
Agreed. Oddly enough, on the repeat of a Seinfeld tonight, the character Elaine was griping about the movie too. Everybody else loved the stupid thing, only she (surprisingly) had the guts to say it was trash.
ping
Oh, me too.
"Look, she's cheating on her husband! Isn't that sweet?"
By the end of that ponderous, funereal "epic", I was practically rooting for him to go ahead & die.
Why does the obviously large majority of American conservatives suffer under crushing tyranny of socialist politicians? Why do the most liberal democrats get elected in even very conservative states?
The answer is apathy. The voters in those states simply DO NOT CARE enough to get active, go to the polls, elect their people, etc. Hell, they don't even have "their people" to elect in most cases!
The gays are a similar situation. Most gays just want to be, they do not want to get married, they do not want to scream about gay pride and equality, they just want to live their lives with the least amount of problems as possible.
So I think your comparisons to the "silent majority" of Muslims is not correct. In fact, I think that the "silent majority" of Muslims are another apathetic group, one who may not "get it" until it's too late.
I can't accept your premise that "most gays" just want to live their lives quietly and peacefully. If that was so, the world would not be kowtowing to their insane demands. Of course, their willing handmaidens and assistants in the media - basically the entire left, being secularists, have swallowed the homosexual agenda in toto. So they have great allies.
But considering the popularity of "Gay Pride" parades, GLSEN in thousands of schools across America, AND the fact that Tammy Bruce is about the only homosexual spokesperson who decries the radical "gay" agenda, you are wrong.
In the Moslem world, we don't really know how many are radical and how many aren't, since even the non-radical ones may be afraid to speak out against the radicals for fear of their lives.
In the US, no homosexuals will be slaughtered if they speak out for moderation.
The silence is deafening from such "moderate" homosexuals is defeaning.
No, the worst movie of all time....was the Cat in the Hat. Followed by: Hercules in New York. You have to have at least four cases of Bud in order to watch either movie...hopefully to forget what you watched too.
I understand and appreciate your comments. My analysis was based on the gay people that I know. Of course this is probably a biased selection, as I am not friends with any liberals. My "sample selection" consists of libertarians, conservatives, or apolitical people. While your comment about no real ramifications for speaking out are indeed true, I still believe that most gay people simply do not care enough to speak out against the vocal minority of gay agenda activists. Further, you are currect in your analysis of the media and the entire left as a champion of their "cause", which I believe also is a huge, huge part of the volume of their cries, so to speak.
take care,
Thank you for your reply. I do not have any personal animosity towards any people who identify as homosexual. But I loathe the entire leftist agenda, part of which is the destruction of personal responsibility, traditional moral values (which are non-sectarian, since all religions share the same basic traditional morality), the natural family, and control over ones' children.
Destruction of the family is necessary in a totalitarian/socialist state. If not complete destruction, at least ruining the influence of the parents. Look at Hitler Youth - the Germans used to call it "Homo Youth" since so many of the leaders were pederasts, and the children in it and in schools were told to report to the authorities any comments made at home that were critical of Hitler or Nazism.
OK. You're on double secret probation.
TEP was easily one of the worst-relative-to-hype-and-critical-acclaim movies of all time. I still don't get the appeal, other than that the stars were attractive and it glorified adultery. As I walked out of it, I was thinking of the fable "The Empereror's New Clothes". The Seinfeld episode mentioned on the thread earlier was brilliant in identifying and parodying the pretentious "you-can't-be-cultured-and-not-adore-this-movie" myth that grew up around it.
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