Authors: Rick Stroud
The struggle against the remains of his band continues with inexorable harshness. I extend my hand once more to the peaceful population for the re-establishment of an ordered life, guaranteeing the safety of the individual and property.
The first measures have been taken. The forbidden zones in the gang territories have been abolished. The situation of the poorer population will improve through generous social security measures. I appeal to the wealthy population of Crete for the execution of the latter aim, so that it should contribute to this work of active solidarity through voluntary contributions. Contributions in money and in produce may be handed in to the Prefectures.
Furthermore the peaceful population is called upon to support the German Army’s struggle against Bolshevism, that international enemy of civilisation, family, religion and peaceful life, by every means.
The German army is the friend of the Cretan people. It will not again allow this beautiful island to become a theatre of war or a place of activity by gangs, the enemy of the people.
He who helps the army in this struggle is welcome.
The Commander of Fortress Crete
Few Cretans were deceived.
12
In Cairo, Leigh Fermor put his enforced leave to good use. It occurred to him that the Carta Affair might serve as a blueprint for the abduction of a senior Nazi officer – perhaps the hated Müller himself. Leigh Fermor’s plan was simple. He wanted to drop a small abduction team by parachute onto Mount Dikti, kidnap Müller from his headquarters and whisk him to the coast for a rendezvous with the Royal Navy and a boat to Alexandria. The Angelo Carta incident had shown that, with the help of the guerrillas, they would find it comparatively easy to evade German search parties.
The plan was put to Jack Smith-Hughes, now twenty-four and a major, who liked the idea and sent it on to Brigadier Barker-Benfield, overall commander of SOE in the Middle East. Barker-Benfield gave it his full approval. The only dissenting voice in Cairo came from Bickham Sweet-Escott, a senior executive of the Special Operations Committee. He argued strongly against the idea, saying that the risks of reprisal were not worth the capture of even an enemy general. ‘I made myself extremely unpopular by recommending as strongly as I could that we should not [go ahead] . . . the price would certainly be heavy in Cretan lives. The sacrifice might possibly have been worthwhile in the black winter of 1941 . . . the result of carrying it out in 1944 when everyone knew victory was merely a matter of months would, I thought, hardly justify the cost.’ His was a lone voice and he lost the argument. The operation was given an official thumbs up.
On Crete, Tom Dunbabin was surprised when, out of the blue, an order arrived from SOE Cairo marked ‘URGENT’: ‘Find and identify drop zone for four man parachute team under Paddy aim abduct Müller.’ Dunbabin received it while interrogating one Anastasios Symionidis – alias Kazakis – a German counter-intelligence agent and traitor who had been trapped and captured the previous day. Dunbabin had been trying to sieze Kazakis for nearly a year. The interrogation ended and Dunbabin ordered Symionidis’s execution.
Dunbabin then turned his attentions to the problem of the parachute mission, which he had himself suggested in a report to Cairo earlier in the year, writing: ‘It should be easy to kidnap Müller, one of our agents is on good terms with his chauffeur and he might be abducted on the road. Alternatively it sounds easy to break into the Villa Ariadne with a force of about twenty.’
Dunbabin sent word to the recently arrived Sandy Rendel, recently arrived from Cairo, telling him to prepare a landing site on the Omalos plateau, high up on Mount Dikti. At SOE Cairo, Leigh Fermor, now promoted major, looked for a second in command. He told his new friend Billy Moss about the plan and it dawned on him that this likeable young SOE officer, with whom he now shared the social whirl of Tara, was the obvious choice.
Next, Leigh Fermor and his liaison officer Manolis Paterakis were sent to Ramat David in Palestine for ten days’ intensive parachute training. On the course they met Giorgios Tyrakis, a tough, round-faced man of twenty-six, who wore his beret tipped to the back of his head. He had been fighting in Albania when Greece surrendered but had managed to get back to Crete in time to fight the German paratroopers. After the battle he helped evacuate scattered Allied stragglers and joined the intelligence network. An SOE wireless set was hidden in his village and he and others volunteered to defend it. Giorgios had been evacuated from the island for rest and recuperation and to train as a parachutist. Leigh Fermor asked him to become part of the kidnap team.
On the course they had to jump from the back of lorries travelling at thirty miles an hour, before graduating to aircraft and the real thing. After completing six jumps, four from a Hudson and two night-time jumps from a Dakota, they were entitled to wear parachute wings, which they wore, SAS style, above the left-hand pocket of their battledress. Moss was spared the training: at six foot he was considered too tall. Moss was delighted that his first jump would be untrained and that some people called him daring or brave. He confides in his diary that the truth of the matter is that he did not want to damage himself and that life in Tara was too enjoyable to have to go on a parachute course in Haifa. Moss’s most enjoyable moments at Tara were spent in the close company of Kitten – Sophie Tarnowska.
Much time was spent going over the details of the plan. Leigh Fermor was a close friend of the well-connected and spirited Annette Crean, who worked for Force 133 at Rustom Buildings. ‘In our flat we had an open fire,’ recalled Crean. ‘I often worried there could be concealed a microphone in the chimney that went direct to the enemy, so many secret plans were made round that fire. Paddy Leigh Fermor used to be a visitor . . . he was very keen to kidnap a particularly brutal German General [Müller] . . . and the arguments for and against this were discussed. He wanted to take Billy Moss with him, a tall, good-looking Guards officer who I felt sure would give the game away . . .’
They were not short of advice from their SOE comrades at Tara. One evening, Smiley, recently back from covert operations in Albania, sat in the bathroom with Moss and Leigh Fermor discussing the mission. Smiley began to lecture them on how to set up the perfect ambush. His audience of two listened in rapt attention. The three men sat nearly naked in the bathroom, drawing diagrams and maps with their fingers on the steamy tiles. Smiley advised them where the best place might be to stop the general’s car and what sort of back-up team they might need. Smiley knew what he was talking about and the two adventurers hung on his every word.
While the team prepared, Müller, the ‘Butcher of Crete’, was replaced by the more moderate forty-nine-year-old General Heinrich Kreipe. Leigh Fermor knew nothing about the potential new occupant of the Villa Ariadne, but he was not going to be cheated of his chance for excitement. He persuaded everybody that the capture of any senior German officer from his own headquarters would be a valuable blow against enemy morale, and a demonstration of Force
1
33’s capabilities.
The final preparations for the mission were to draw stores, to be packed into canisters and dropped by parachute at the same time as the kidnap team. Marlin sub-machine guns, automatics, revolvers and ammunition began to fill up the cupboards at Tara along with less orthodox devices such as explosive-filled fake cow pats, and gelignited goats’ droppings (Leigh Fermor claimed these had been devised by the famous magician Jasper Maskelyne). In mid-January, they received the go-ahead but bad weather then closed in and all covert flights over the Balkans were cancelled. When at last the news came that they were off the next night, the two agents flew into a frenzy of packing and tidying up their affairs. They even managed to cram in a last lunch with three young women who, given a few more minutes, might have swept them off to bed. Then back to Tara to finish the chaos of their packing. Guns and £4,000-worth of silver sovereigns were bundled into a sack and in the evening a tearful party was thrown to see them off.
The last hours at Tara had a profound effect on Moss, and the memory of it stayed with him for many years. Sitting around a small, red-laquer table they drank and sang, their faces lit by candlelight. The night dragged on as the two agents waited to leave on the first leg of their adventure. Just before the sun rose, Billy McLean appeared, a shy naked figure. He wanted to present them with the complete works of Shakespeare and the
Oxford Book of English Verse
, which he thought had brought him luck in Albania and he hoped the books would work the same magic for them.
On the way to the airfield they picked up Manolis Paterakis and Giorgios Tyrakis, who sat in the back of the car ‘looking picturesquely guerrilla-ish singing huskily and out of tune, and Paddy still a little drunk, joining in at the top of his voice’.
The trip took them via Italy and involved several changes of planes. They were delayed several times. On one occasion the four of them sat in a military canteen waiting for yet another cancelled aeroplane. They were a strange bunch: two British officers and two Greek guerrillas, all dressed up like something out of a novel by Ernest Hemingway. They were heavily armed with Marlin submachine guns propped up against the table, revolvers at their waists, explosives and God knows what in the satchels – and at their feet, a sack containing thousands of pounds in gold sovereigns.
Moss declared: ‘I can’t imagine having to do this excursion with anyone but Paddy, he is absolutely ideal and a perfect companion . . . the only trouble is that we are both horribly lazy, and so nothing gets done, but we both “muddle through” somehow’.
When at last they took off they were accompanied not only by McLean’s two books but by the canisters, the contents of which weighed nearly 500lbs and read like something out of an adventure comic. Apart from some German uniforms and other disguise materials, they were to take maps, pistols, bombs, coshes, commando daggers, knuckledusters, telescopic sites, silencers, sub-machine guns, wire cutters, signal flares, gags, chloroform, rope ladders, gold sovereigns, special silent footwear, gelignite, gun cotton, Benzedrine tablets, field dressings, morphine, knock-out drops and suicide pills.
13
At about four o'clock in the afternoon on 5 February 1944, Sandy Rendel sat in a cave. His radio operator George Dilley was squatting in front of his set, âknees bent, back hunched and earphones on his head like an eastern priest bowing forward to conduct some mysterious ritual'. Dilley was concentrating on the encrypted Morse being transmitted from SOE Cairo. Leigh Fermor and the others were to arrive that evening, parachuting onto the Omalos plateau between Kritsa and Lasithi. Rendel and Dilley were the only ones who knew that the reason for the mission was to kidnap the divisional commander. Later that afternoon they set off with a band of Cretan andartes to prepare the landing site.
At an airfield near Brindisi, on the southern tip of Italy, Paterakis, Leigh Fermor, Tyrakis and Moss clambered into a Handley Page Halifax bomber, especially adapted for the SOE, with a hole cut in the belly of the fuselage to allow parachutists to drop through. The plane lumbered into the sky, piloted by Cyril Fortune, who had been told that the codename for that evening's flight was
Whimsical.
As Fortune set course the abduction team did what men often do before enterprises of great stress and danger: they slept.
On the Omalos plateau, where it was now dark, the guerrillas gathered wood for the three marker fires â which identified the drop zone. To the edge of the landing site was a small hut in which one of the guerrillas, Christo, discovered a couple of Cretans. The men claimed to be hunting for hares but Christo believed them to be collaborators. Some of the guerrillas wanted to execute them on the spot. Rendel, worrying that this might trigger a Cretan vendetta, persuaded his men to lock the collabÂorators in the hut until the drop had taken place; the prisoners were warned of the terrible things that would happen to them and their families if they talked to the Germans. Rendel knew that within twenty-four hours everybody in the locality would know about the arrival of the parachutists, by which time, even if the prisoners talked, Leigh Fermor and his team would have vanished into the night, making any information useless.
In the freezing interior of the Halifax, just around midnight, the RAF parachute dispatcher took the cover off the jump hatch. The drop zone was very small, forcing them to parachute in four separate passes, rather than all together in a stick. Leigh Fermor was the first to go. He slid into position and sat on the edge of the hatch, his legs dangling into the slipstream of the bomber, his static line attached to the wire that ran the length of the aircraft and which would automatically open his parachute. On the plateau, Rendel and the reception committee crouched in the snow. The thick clouds scudding across the sky acted like a switch, turning the light of the moon on and off. Over the whistling of the wind they heard the noise of engines: the plane was dead on time. The signal fires were lit, illuminating the crouching figures. The aircraft circled low, moonlight glinting on the Perspex canopy of the cockpit.
To Rendel's disgust, the pilot fired a pink flare. This was not part of the plan. The flare looked âfilthily artificial in the middle of the wild dark scene, like the last dismal dropping of a spent firework over a seaside pier at home'. Peering over the edge of the jump hatch, Leigh Fermor could see the white mountain tops, the reception party's fires, and the snow reflecting the lurid pink of the flare. He tensed and looked at the dispatcher, waiting for the signal to jump. âGO!' Leigh Fermor tumbled into the freezing, roaring,
20
0 mph slipstream of the Halifax. With a tug on his shoulders, his chute opened and he drifted down, the noise of the plane's engines fading until suddenly there was calm.