You Were Expecting Maybe James Bond?

MIDDLE EAST

Like many sensitive young Germans, Graduate Student Frowald Huettenmeister felt a sense of guilt for Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Studying Hebrew, history and archaeology, he made field trips to the Middle East and came to identify himself with the Jews because, as he later put it, "I was so well received in Israel as a German." Along the way, he became deeply entangled in Israeli-Egyptian espionage, one of the less publicized but most bizarre branches of the spy business.

Recruited by an Israeli agent, Huettenmeister became convinced that he could somehow make amends for Auschwitz and Buchenwald by helping Israel protect itself against Egyptian plots and plans. After training in cryptography and other techniques in an Israeli-operated spy school in Paris, Huettenmeister flew to Cairo with instructions to pick up a capsule of microfilm from a Sudanese clerk named Ismail Sabri and smuggle it out of Egypt. The neophyte spy had no sooner taken the film than he was arrested by Egyptian security agents.

Hearing his full confession last week, the Cairo Supreme State Security Court found the defendant guilty of working for the Israeli government. But Huettenmeister's death sentence was reduced to ten years at hard labor and a $2,500 fine "in view of the defendant's youth and inexperience, and in appreciation of the cooperation of German scientists in Egypt."

Triumphantly, Egyptian intelligence sources then revealed that the young German had been betrayed by Sabri, who, while pretending to work for the Israelis, had for four years fed them phony information. Espionage sophisticates wondered why, if Sabri had really been such a successful double agent, the Egyptians had not managed to catch Huettenmeister without exposing him. But then intelligence is apt to get fairly intricate, in the Middle East even more than elsewhere. So far this year, Syria has sentenced to death a Lebanese Protestant missionary for broadcasting information to Israel from transmitters hidden inside statues, and Lebanon meted out 20 years to a Jewish woman named Sholla Cohen for recruiting agents at "wild parties" in her apartment. On the other side, the Egyptians not long ago sent into Israel an Armenian agent who disguised himself so thoroughly as a Jew that he not only had a full set of ancestral documents but had even had himself circumcised.

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