The Champagne Spy: Israel's man in Egypt by Wolfgang Lotz 1972 240pg

14/7/23

This is an autobiography .Spies caught result in information coming out including Eli Cohen and Sylvia Rafael. Those who do their stint and return home safe the information will only come out many years later from the archives. 

1965 June 27th He was caught and his trial began then and lasted a month. He proved that he was spying for purely financial purposes. He admitted that he was a German who had been hired to spy for a lavish pay.  His German documents were absolutely genuine as he was born in Mannheim in 1921 and had left Germany in 1933. He had not had a circumcision. His father Hans was the theatre director of Hamburg State  theatre. His mother Helene was a Jewish actress had divorced her husband and he had died. Wolf got some acting skills from his parents and his mother moved with him to Palestine as she knew there was no future in Germany. She got a job at Habima theatre even though she spoke no Hebrew.

Aged 12 he went to an agricultural school in Ben Shemen and grew to love horses there.and did guard duty on horseback often. 1937 He joined the Haganah.  When WW2 broke he forged his birth date and volunteered for the British Army in commando training.  He now spoke German, Hebrew, Arabic and English and was based in Egypt. Here he had taken part in interviewing POWs in the 115th Division of Rommel's Africa corps which he said he had been  in for the war.

1948 he joined the Israel War of Independence  as a Lieutenant and was in charge of half trained immigrants in the Latrun area and they battled where they  build the Burma Road to Jerusalem.  In 1956 in the Sinai campaign his infantry brigade that  captured Rafiah. 

1951 Gamal Abdul Nasser came to power by a bloodless coup overthrowing King Farouk. The Americans had no objection as long as the regime kept the Communist out of the area. At first Nassar adopted a moderate approach to Israel. In 1958 Egypt forged a Union with Syria.  Now at the hight of his power the prisons in Cairo were full, from 1954 he started an anti-Semitic campaign and started sequestrating Jewish properties primary to fill the countries coffers.  This was encouraged by the Nazis living in Egypt. There were 100,000 Jews in Egypt at the time and they started migrating.

Wolf spent a year living in Germany creating a cover acting the role of an ex Wehrmacht officer and went to   riding clubs. He drove to Genoa and took a ship to Alexandria where he arrived to  breed horses. At Riding club in Gezira he met Egyptian cavalry officers. Back in Europe he met his wife to be  Waltraud who had been living in Los Angeles. She liked the adventure of his being a spy as long as it was not for the Soviets as she was from Eastern Germany and knew communism.

In Egypt he was great pals of the Generals and they gave him all the protecia that wb ex Nazi officer deserved. They stayed at the Mena Hotel but were aware of the poverty in the streets.  He mixed with Egyptian army officer and kept them with gifts and drinks and they were prepared to talk about military matters to an ex Rommel officer. By having been an Israeli army officer he knew how to deal socialize with them and the meaning of the  information. The van Leers were ex Nazi's who knew Goebbels well and  had escaped retribution by getting to Egypt most German businessmen would have nothing to do with them. The van Leers were well guarded by the secret police. The Nazi said Germany is dominated by Jews again felt that if Wolf returned to Europe he was taking a chance. 

Egypt was experimenting with biological weapons of plague or cholera germs for a warhead. progress in the rockets was slow as they couldn't get the equipment and were tied up in red tape. Wolf  kept denying he was a  Nazi but left a forged paper to show that he had been. A German engineer Vogelsang who was going to a convention said he had to buy a briefcase.Wolf said he had a perfectly new briefcase that the engineer should borrow so bought a new one and took a copy of the key. He was also shown the hotel room booking. This information and the key was sent to Wolfs handler with a note that the engineer likes female company.

He helped entertain Germans from a horse riders club and their tour was successful and this was a tourism industry that they government wanted to encourage

There was a couple , the husband Dr. Hendrick Bolter he was an archeologist on a Yale expedition in Upper Egypt while his wife Caroline  half  Hungarian and Dutch and was not very discreetly asking questions about the rocket making and when she was drunk lapsed into Yiddish.     Wolf sent in a message to his handler who sent her a message that her mother was ill and she must return to Europe. At a party the German engineers were arguing that the young German engineers break their contracts and leave even though they are getting paid 3 times what they would earn in Germany. They  were scared of Israeli agents back in Europe killing them. That the HA 300 fighter bomber which after 6 years and  $500 million had not yet got to production stage that the Egyptian workers were not suitable. He made notes of the technicalities they spoke about and would hand this in on his next trip So the future aircraft industry would not be a threat. 

When  he returned to  Europe with his wife and met his boss there. In Paris he phoned the handler and met him making sure they had no "tail"  Here he was shown a German Riders  magazine with him part of a group. If people in Israel read this they could identify him and accidently break his cover. The large amount of cash he needed was deposited in his German bank account, because he was getting results.

 ,He got an urgent message to find out about Shoufala they had photos of a rocket installation but could not confirm if it was a dummy or real. This was between Suez and Ismailia.  He and wife took a picnic to go fishing on the Bitter Lake and she drove into a military area and she ostensibly lost control of the car and ran into a sand dune. They were taken to the base where they saw what it was and got their General in security to release them and got help to drag the car out of the sand dune. He said his wife was driving and he was asleep and if their was aguard box there was no boom or gate indicating that they should not go past and the phone to the entrance was not connected.

His in laws Otto and Clara Neuman arrived and they were given a grand tour of   Egypt but when they returned were greeted by the secret police who had been tipped off about his transmitter in the bathroom scale. They had transcripts of the messages he had sent and replies that were also picked up by some foreign government.but only had they key to those of the last 5 months.  They interrogated him for 33 days as well as his wife who only admitted she knew he was  a spy but never knew more details. He was asked about the threat letters sent to German scientists as well as the letter that they received that exploded . He said he had been a Captain in Rommel infantry and they believed he was in the SS, which he ambiguously denied as he knew this was good for his defence. He claimed that he was a German who found this was lucrative income that he was paid. As an SS Colonel they thought he might have been blackmailed by the Israeli's, this hid his Israeli identity.. He also denied that he had a ring of spies under him. He and his wife were given an interview on Egyptian TV and he used this opportunity to make it clear to the Israeli handlers that he was regarded as a German. Perhaps the Egyptian would have been embarrised to admit he was Israeli

Then the show trial began after 33 days of interrogation. When they asked him about his contacts he described a person he pictured in his mind with only a first name. A German Lawyer was sent to defend him but only his Egyptian lawyer could talk in court. A letter from the Piltz group who defended the rocket experts said he was Israeli nobody accepted this statement. Der Stern's reporter Wolfgang Lohde managed to find the truth of his past but were approached not to publish it as it was a death sentence for him. He was sentence to 25 years in prison and his wife to 3 years as an accomplice. He may not have been executed as it would cause a diplomatic problem with Germany.

In jail he met up with Victor Levy who with a woman Marcello Ninio who had been involved in the failed Lavon Affair and had been in jail 11 years, also Phillip Nathanson and Robert Dassa. There were also political prisoners who had worked for the CIA or British intelligence as well as Islamic Brotherhood leaders. The German Consul brought him food parcels and books. When Waltrauds parents returned to German the press was prepared to pay a fortune for an interview but he had asked them not to as it would endanger them in Egypt.

Egyptian military people who had been his friends or received gifts from him. Some were demoted other were cashiered and one landed in jail. 1967 June With the 6 Day War over 5000 Egyptian soldiers and 9 generals were captured by the Israelis and they gave a list of 10 political prisoners that they wanted released. Early 1968 Wolf and Waltraud were extradited to Germany. 4 years later when this book was published they had retired to a rural house not far from Tel Aviv. Waltraud managed to learn Hebrew and integrate herself. The camera and 9 films of Egypt were returned to them and they had them developed.

By this time the German scientist and engineers had left Egypt in 1964  and Russians had taken their place the aircraft factory left was used to assemble Russian Migs. Waltraud died of coronary in 1973. After that he never returned to his Israeli wife and son Oded Gur-Arie. In Munich he married Hema Haddorp a journalist who he lived with till his death in 1993 of heart disease aged 72 in Munich , Germany.  Oded Gur-Arie became a professor of Entrepreneur Studies and then director of Adrian Collage, Michigan.

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Below is a novel with some interesting Jewish Aspect of Egypt. 

The Last Watchman of Old Cairo by Michael David Lukas 2018 264pg  16/8/24

Once Cairo was 2 cities Memphis and Heliopolis in the reign of Al Mustansir,  Fatimid Caliph from 1036 until 1094.

The narrators  father had been the son of the  Moslem guardian of the Iban Ezra Synagogue while his mother was one of the Jewish children of the congregation. The el-Raqb family from father to the eldest son had this position for over 1000 years.

His parents had never married the father had come to visit his mother in Paris after the 25000 Jews were expelled from Egypt under the Nasser Regime in 1956. The last 12000 were expelled in 1967

In 1896, the Scottish scholars and twin sisters Agnes S. Lewis and Margret D Gibson returned from Egypt with fragments from the Genizah they considered to be of interest, and showed them to Solomon Schechter  "their irrepressibly curious rabbinical friend" at Cambridge. Boxes of these documents were transferred to Cambridge.

In this novel the author describes that his mother fell pregnant after his father had visited Paris. They then went to the States where she taught French. But she could not marry his father even though she loved him as she realized their paths were different . She eventually married Bill the authors stepfather.

After his father died his visited the fathers family in Cairo and is shown all the letters his mother sent the father including the unopened ones that she returned as she loved him even though she was engaged. The narrator had studied both Hebrew and Arabic, he is gay and the book ends up with him in Cambridge where it will take years to documents all the genizah papers.