'Ugly' count was inept spy

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By Michael Evans
The Times
Snip


THE desert explorer and spy, Count Laszlo Almasy, who was the inspiration for the hero of The English Patient, was “very ugly” and a hopeless spymaster, according to the files.
In the film he is played by Ralph Fiennes. But his MI5 file gave this description of the Hungarian aristocrat: “Very thin, tall, prominent nose, spectacles, brown hair, very ugly with nervous tic.”

Count Almasy was recruited by German intelligence after being ordered to leave Egypt in 1939, following the outbreak of the Second World War, and was sent to work for General Rommel’s Afrika Korps. He was given the task to infiltrate agents into Cairo to pass on intelligence about British troop movements. At that point in the war Rommel’s troops were threatening to overrun the British in Egypt.

Count Almasy launched Operation Salaam in May 1942 under which two agents were to be taken across the Libyan desert to Egypt. Everything went wrong from the start.

The two agents, Johann Eppler and Heinrich Sandstede, set off with the count and a team of drivers in six Ford V8 lorries. But they ran into a sandstorm and lost the use of three of the lorries. When they eventually arrived in Egypt, the agents were dispatched by train to Cairo, and Count Almasy returned to Libya. Eppler and Sandstede booked into a brothel while they looked for somewhere to base their wireless transmitter. But they were never able to contact Rommel because the German radio operator who was supposed to receive their messages had been captured.

More:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,174-1117703,00.html

Mmmmmmmmm...........glad to see that "O" in "Count".........