Authors: Rick Stroud
In Heraklion, Micky led Leigh Fermor through the backstreets and narrow alleys that crisscrossed the ruined town, introducing him to an astonishing array of resistance workers – lawyers, dentists, teachers, headmasters, artisans, students, secretaries, wives, even the clergy. These were the people who had monitored Kreipe’s movements on his way to his new home. They were the eyes and ears of the network, secretly logging every move the Germans made, filling hundred of sheets of precious paper, some of it scrap, with number plates, unit badges, the ships coming and going in the harbour and the aircraft landing at Heraklion or Maleme; memorising the defences round the harbour and later drawing plans on brown paper showing every change in gun and sentry position, each bit adding another piece to the intelligence jigsaw.
Leigh Fermor was taken into cellars where resistance workers hunched over clandestine radios, listening to the news from the BBC. Items were scribbled down and turned into stories to be printed on secret presses and distributed to the population. Others worked on propaganda leaflets designed to demoralise the German soldiers, reminding them that while they languished in the hot sun of the island, back home their wives and girlfriends were being seduced by strangers.
Leigh Fermor could not resist pushing his luck. On one of his evenings in the city he and Micky attended a party given by General Sergiou, whose daughter, Kyveli, had infiltrated the
Kreiskommandantur
. In the room Leigh Fermor spotted three German NCOs, who he went over to talk to and ended up trying to teach them the ‘Pentozali’, a vigorous Cretan dance the name of which implies that the dancers will make themselves dizzy five times over: the Pentozali dancers hold each other by the shoulders and improvise acrobatics. The SOE agent and his non-commissioned German dance students lurched drunkenly round the room, the soldiers blissfully unaware that the friendly and dashing Cretan plying them with more and more raki was a twenty-nine-year-old, blond-haired British major who liked to quote chunks of Latin and spoke near-perfect Greek.
Leigh Fermor’s bravado nearly backfired when Micky offered round his cigarettes. They were in an English packet and the dance came to an abrupt halt while the Germans asked where they had got them. Thinking on his feet Micky said he had bought them on the black market, which was flooded with stuff left behind by the retreating Allies. The soldiers fell for the story, drank more raki and the dizzying lesson went on.
On
10
April, Leigh Fermor met a young man in a Force 133 safe house in Heraklion. His name was Ilias Athanassakis and he was Micky Akoumianakis’s second in command. He was a student and very good at collecting and collating information. A natural undercover agent, he combined daring and prudence with caution, not rushing in if he was uncertain what was going to happen or how he was going to escape. Ilias had a compendious knowledge of the distinguishing marks of the German units in the Heraklion province and a keen instinct for which units had just arrived on the island and where they were going.
The Cretan undercover network discovered that the Germans believed the guerrilla activity in the past two months on the Omalos Plain was proof that a British commando force had arrived on Crete and was hiding in the mountains in the region of Kastamonitsa. German search parties were said to be moving into the area near the Zografakis house. Micky thought that his men at the hideout with Moss were in danger and that they should send a runner to warn them; he did not know that they had already moved to safety higher up the mountains.
Micky and Leigh Fermor’s next step was to reconnoitre the Villa Ariadne – a ten-mile bus ride out of Heraklion. From the safety of Micky’s house next door to the villa, Leigh Fermor discovered for himself the extent of the security at the general’s heavily guarded residence: troops patrolled the perimeter and heavy machine guns watched over weak points in the defences. The building was surrounded by three separate fences of barbed wire, one of which was stretched on to white ceramic insulation fittings, suggesting that it was electrified. Anyone driving to the villa had to go through a guard point, fortified with heavy concrete blocks, and stop at an orange and white steel pole, which was raised once visitors had presented their identification papers and had been given clearance to enter. Getting in and out of the compound was going to be difficult. Getting into the villa itself, finding and overpowering the general and then making a run for it was impossible. They had to find some other way to kidnap him.
The general’s military headquarters at Archanes was about three miles south of the villa. Micky’s sister, Philia, and Kreipe’s driver, Alfred Fenske, whom he had inherited from General Müller, were on relatively good terms. She reported that, for a German soldier, he was a nice man. Fenske had a wife and small son whom he had not seen for over a year. In his wallet he carried pictures of his young family: his son posing in a dressing-up military uniform; his wife sitting with her family at a picnic. Before the war Fenske had unsuccessfully tried to avoid being called up by getting himself arrested and imprisoned for petty crimes. The general’s car was the latest Opel Kapitän, with a 2.5-litre, six-cylinder engine, all-steel body, front independent suspension, hydraulic shock absorbers, hot-water heating (with electric blower), and a centrally mounted speedometer. It was comfortable and luxurious. Fenske was proud of the car and spent a lot of time cleaning and polishing its black bodywork and chrome trim to an immaculate deep shine.
Philia used her friendship with Fenske to find out about General Kreipe’s routine, which turned out to be very straightforward: she reported that every morning, at the same time, Kreipe was driven to his military HQ at Archanes, and every evening he returned home. On some evenings he stayed later to play bridge with some of his officers and on others, if there was a military exercise on, he worked late.
In April the sun set about 8 o’clock, and Leigh Fermor and Akoumianakis wondered if it was possible to stop the general’s car, in the dark, somewhere on his way home. They walked the route to Archanes and discovered a bend in the road which forced traffic to slow down almost to a stop. While they stood in the warm sunshine, wondering whether this was the place to ambush Kreipe, a huge shiny Opel staff car appeared on the road ahead, each wing bearing triangular pennants: the one on the nearside wing striped in black, white and red, like the German flag; the other green with a gold eagle carrying a wreath with a swastika at its centre. The car slowed and, through the open passenger window, they glimpsed General Kreipe himself. The two men stood to the side to let the car pass; as it swept by Leigh Fermor waved. Kreipe turned his broad pale face, surprised perhaps to see two Cretans who seemed to be friendly, and raised his brown leather-gloved hand in salute. Like watching a film in slow motion, Leigh Fermor noticed Kreipe’s jutting chin, large nose and his coat fastened with glittering brass buttons. There were decorations sewn onto his chest and an Iron Cross at his throat. The two men’s eyes met, then the film speeded up and the car swept on.
That night in Heraklion, Leigh Fermor and Micky thought about the problems: how could they stop the car; how were they to deal with any escort; most of all, in the dark, how would they know they had the right car? Ilias was ordered to watch the general’s movements and to make detailed notes about his itinerary.
The next week was the Greek Orthodox Easter. By the Saturday, Ilias confirmed that Kreipe travelled to the villa not once, as Micky’s sister thought, but twice a day. He left the Villa Ariadne at
8
.
30
, arriving in Archanes to start work at the dot of nine. At 13:00 hours he returned to his villa for lunch and stayed there, until 16.15 when he returned to his headquarters and worked late into the evening. Philia found out that Kreipe’s aide-de-camp had a passion for bridge and often persuaded the general to play a late rubber: after all it passed the time, there weren’t many things on the island to entertain the troops, even high ranking ones.
The kidnappers urgently needed a hideout near the ambush spot where they could spend the day before the kidnap. Mickey had a friend, Pavlos Zografistos, who owned a farm about half an hour’s walk from the new proposed kidnap point. Without telling him exactly what was going on, Micky asked Pavlos if he was prepared to house a band of guerrillas for a couple of nights. Zografistos was a keen patriot and hated the German invaders; he agreed with pleasure, though he had no idea what this armed and dangerous band was up to.
In the remote cave where the rest of the team were hiding, the time passed slowly. The monotony was broken by the arrival of a runner with a letter from Leigh Fermor updating Moss on progress in Heraklion. After six days the weather changed, and it began to rain, a fine mountain drizzle. While Moss lay reading, smoke from the fire hovering in the low room, a face appeared at the door. It was a shepherd who said that two men had turned up at his hut claiming to be Russian prisoners escaped from a German labour gang at Kasteli airfield. The shepherd was afraid that the men were actually German Secret Police. Moss’s mother was Russian and he was fluent, so he and Tyrakis pulled on their coats, grabbed their weapons and went to see what all the fuss was about. When they arrived at the shepherd’s hut the so-called Russians had vanished.
Two days later the shepherd reappeared and said that the Russians were waiting in a gulley close by and willing to talk. Moss found them huddling in the drizzle, looking anxious and exhausted. They introduced themselves as Ivan and Vasily and said they had been captured in the Crimea in 1942. At first they were held on the Greek mainland, used as forced labour on roads and construction sites by the Nazis. In the summer of 1943 they were transported to Crete to help build the new runways at Kasteli. Three of them had escaped by crawling under the wire and heading into the mountains. The third man was shot during the break-out. Vasily and Ivan had been on the run for nearly five days.
Both men were starving: rations for the forced labourers were meagre – generally soup and potatoes, which were usually rotten and all but inedible. They were shivering with cold, their clothes were threadbare and their boots had disintegrated, revealing feet that were in a terrible state, blistered and bloody. Moss took them to the shelter of the cave, gave them clothing and fed them like prize bantams; Moss lent one of them his old service dress jackets, making him look like an oddly down-at-heel Guards officer. As they recovered, the men threw themselves into the life of the camp and spent the evenings teaching Moss and the guerrillas haunting folk
songs, including many beautiful Ukrainian melodies.
While waiting for the party to come back from Heraklion, Moss began to understand the Cretans better. On the beach he had seen only comic opera clothes worn by piratical villains; he had found Grigorios Chnarakis particularly irritating – he always seemed to do the wrong thing, like blowing his nose into his hand, especially when the wind was in the wrong direction, spitting, trampling on Moss’s head when he was asleep. But forced together in the cave, Moss saw through his off-putting habits, and found Chnarakis to be a likeable, humorous and valiant man. Chnarakis was grandfather to six children. He had become a mountain fighter after helping two British airmen who had baled out over the island and landed in his small olive grove. He rescued them by hiding them under a pile of wood and telling the German search party that he had seen some parachutes landing half a mile away. The search party left, Chnarakis stayed with the airmen and that night took them into the mountains, from where they were fed into the escape networks and eventually returned to England. After this escapade he chose to stay and fight with the guerrillas.
Leigh Fermor, Micky and Ilias arrived back from Heraklion just after midday on
1
9 April, Easter Sunday – a day of great feasting in Greece. In the mountain hideout the war stopped for the day. A sheep was selected, a shepherd drawing his knife across its throat, ending the animal’s life in a bleating gurgle. A demijohn of wine was produced and dozens of boiled eggs were offered round, each dyed red with cochineal for Easter. The Cretans crushed the eggs together ‘like conkers’, shouting ‘Christ is risen!’ To which the response was, ‘He is risen indeed.’ The abductors and the Russians joined in the spirit of the Cretan party, singing and dancing. Uneaten eggs were flung into the air and used for target practice. Vasily turned out to be a crack shot: standing, swaying with his glass in one hand, waving his pistol around in the other, and hitting egg after egg, shouting ‘Christ is risen’, bang ‘He is truly risen’, bang. He got so drunk that one round thudded into the gravel at Moss’s feet. Leigh Fermor coaxed the revolver out of his hand, after which Vasily sank to the ground, pole-axed, and lay comatose in the shade of a beech tree.
The revels went on through the long hot day, though some men dropped out, too drunk to continue. Others lay snoring on the rocks, recovering in the sun so that they could drink and eat more. They sang songs in what Moss thought was ‘every language of the world’. By midnight, Moss and Leigh Fermor were alone in the cave drinking the whisky that Moss had brought with him from Cairo. Eventually they too fell into a deep drunken slumber. Outside the last die-hards fired their weapons into the air, not caring whether they attracted the attention of the Germans, the noise of the shots echoing round the mountains. The andartes felt invulnerable, like eagles, perched in the safety of their high mountain fastness.
Easter Monday dawned, the sun shone bright and the hungover kidnap team reluctantly turned to the business in hand. Everyone agreed that a direct attack on the Villa Ariadne was impossible and that only an ambush on the road had any chance of success. For two days they worked over the same problems: What would they do if Kreipe’s staff car had an escort? How could they recognise the vehicle in the dark? If they pulled the kidnap off how could they prevent a Nazi backlash against the civilian population? The team did not want to be responsible for reprisal killings and the destruction of villages. Ilias offered to go back to Heraklion and spend his mornings and evenings spying on Kreipe’s coming and goings. He promised that in a few days he would be able to identify the car at night by the sound of its engine, the appearance of the headlights and its moonlit silhouette. He also promised to devise a way to give advance notice that the car was on its way, and soon began experimenting with a battery and wire attached to a buzzer or light.