'Salam' was a German plan to deliver two agents to make contact with Egyptian nationalist elements in the hope of fomenting an anti-British rising and/or persuading the Egyptian nationalists to undertake a programme of sabotage of British interests, military dumps and communications within Egypt (29 April/13 May 1942).

In 1942, after see-saw fighting back and forth in the North African desert, the German and Italian forces had pushed the British forces into a retreat which came to a halt at El Alamein in north-western Egypt close to the frontier with the Italian province of Cyrenaica in eastern Libya. Given its short length between the coast of the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the impassable Qattara Depression in the south, this position was an excellent site for defence of the British naval base at Alexandria and the Nile river delta, and preparations had been ordered by General Sir Claude Auchinleck some months earlier. It is moot whether or not Hitler had serious designs on the conquest of Egypt, for he viewed the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern theatre very much as a sideshow, and at the time of 'Salam' had this attentions focused on the recently launched 'Blau' offensives in the southern half of the Eastern Front. The German formations of what was now the Panzerarmee 'Afrika', which had reached North Africa in February 1942 to support to support the faltering Italian effort in North Africa, had demoralised the Allied forces their victory on the Battle of Gazala and their capture of Tobruk. Though a combatant since December 1941, the USA was months away from participation in the North African war, and Rommel had plans for capturing Egypt, which would have placed the Allies in a very precarious strategic situation with the Suez Canal under Axis control.

Although the Germans had gained a number of intelligence coups, such as their intercepts and decrypts of reports sent to Washington by Colonel Bonner F. Fellers, a US Army observer with the British forces in Egypt, they had few agents in Egypt itself. 'Salam' was created to provide them with an intelligence presence in Cairo, where the British authorities and community were in a state of crisis with regard to the Axis advance: a city-wide curfew had been introduced in the months before June, and many Europeans had removed themselves to Palestine. The German plan was that two agents would be delivered via a route passing far to the south of the Qattara Depression, where the enormous expanses of open desert would lessen the risks of their interception and capture.

A Hungarian, László Almásy was an experienced desert explorer, linguist, motorist and airman. He had explored the Libyan and Egyptian deserts in the 1920s and 1930s with other Europeans including the British Ralph Bagnold, founder of the Long Range Desert Group, and Patrick Clayton who were both now working for the British Middle East Command. When Hungary entered the war on the side of the Axis, Almásy was recruited by the Abwehr (German military intelligence), initially to aid in the preparation of maps and the description of desert terrain. Subsequently he was assigned to an Abwehr commando unit, part of Oberstleutnant Paul Haehling von Lanzenauer’s Lehr-Regiment 'Brandenburg' zbV 800, operating in Libya under the command of Major Nikolaus Ritter. After Ritter had been injured in the first airborne attempt to deliver two agents into Egypt in the first 'Condor' operation, Almásy assumed command of the unit. Planning for what eventually became 'Salam' began in the autumn of 1941.

The initial plan was to cross the desert to the south of the Siwa oasis, starting from the Italian-held Jalo oasis, in four Ford trucks and patrol cars captured from the British, in order to deliver the two agents into Egypt. Planning and preparations took several months, and the start was delayed several times as a result of changing situations on the front. 'Salam' was finally ready to start from Tripoli on 29 April 1942.

Reaching the Jalo oasis to the south of the Benghazi bulge in eastern in Libya, the German party started out toward the east, where Italian maps indicated a firm, flat serir of hard-surfaced gravel desert, but soon encountered an impassable range of low dunes which was not marked on the map. After several members of the party had fallen ill and one of the vehicles had to be abandoned in the dunes with a broken axle, the party returned to Jalo to make an aerial reconnaissance of the route.

Starting out a second time, the party encountered the same difficulties, and Almásy had now perforce to create a new plan: with fewer cars and members, the party would head to the south toward the British-held Kufra oasis and then to the east across the Gilf Kebir plateau along a route known to Almásy from his exploration of the area 10 years earlier.

After crossing the Gilf Kebir the party bluffed its way through the Kharga oasis in southern Egypt and then dropped the agents at the edge of the desert escarpment near Asyut on the Nile river to the south of Cairo. 'Salam' now became 'Condor' (ii) as the agents set off on their own to Cairo, while Almásy and his convoy of vehicles returned to Axis-held Libya after a 2,600-mile (4185-km) journey. Almásy was awarded the Iron Cross (1^st Class) and promoted from Hauptmann to Major by Rommel.

By a time early in 1941, British code-breakers at Bletchley Park had broken the Abwehr hand cypher used by field stations, including the 'Salam' party in 1942, and by a time early in 1942 had also broken the Enigma machine code which was used for the most-secret communication between German commands. Almásy’s presence in Libya was thus already known to British intelligence from captured messages by a time late in 1941, but the nature of his activities was not. It was only after 'Salam' was well under way that a young intelligence analyst, Jean Alington, realised that an Axis party was moving in the Libyan desert behind British lines. As Rommel’s advance was imminent, however, priority was given to the decryption and analysis of intercepted signal traffic from the Panzerarmee 'Afrika', and several days therefore passed before the Cairo headquarters of the Middle East Command could be warned, and by the time a search had been organised, Almásy was safely back at Jalo oasis.