The handover did not take long; but by the time Paddy and Manoli were ready to leave, the sea had turned so rough that Bob Young decided it was too risky to take them back. Without warning and without goodbyes, Paddy wrote, ‘We were heading full tilt to Africa. Everything had changed.’40
9
Setting the Trap
When the boat reached Mersa Matruh on the Egyptian coast, Paddy and Manoli, together with the General and his entourage, were taken back to Cairo to be debriefed. From there they went their separate ways. Paddy hurried towards the centre of Cairo and the bright lights while Manoli, eager for news of what was happening in Greece, headed for the villa in Heliopolis that had been set aside for the use of Greeks and Cretans working for SOE. In urban areas all over Greece, people depended on the distribution of food coming in from the villages, but since the occupiers were more interested in stripping the country for their own use than feeding the inhabitants, town and city dwellers were living on the edge of starvation and thousands died of malnutrition: and ‘the acute shortage of food … created the conditions for widespread political mobilization.’1
The organization that harnessed these new political forces most effectively was the Communist-dominated EAM and, from December 1941, its military wing, ELAS (the National Popular Liberation Army). It demanded absolute loyalty, any failure of which invited a swift and bloody retribution. But its Robin Hood tactics, particularly evident in the early days of its existence, won growing support in both urban and rural areas. Bands of ELAS andartes would raid government warehouses and distribute the contents, while tax offices were burnt down and tax collectors attacked. At a time when inflation was soaring and barter was almost the only means of survival, EAM/ELAS kept roads safe and protected the peasants from bandits (though they were quite capable of banditry themselves). There were also two much smaller non-Communist resistance formations operating within Greece, EDES and EKKA;fn1 but they stood little chance against the power of EAM/ELAS which, with its formidable organization, became ‘a state within a state of chaos’.2
In July 1943, a delegation representing each of the three main resistance parties in mainland Greece had come to Cairo. The delegation’s arrival had been arranged by SOE, and was supposed to be secret, but since its members stayed in Cairo for two months, it did not remain so for long. Each of the parties had one representative, except the Communists who had three.
These men had not come, as Monty Woodhouse put it, ‘for a friendly chat and a pat on the back’.3 They had come to demand that the King should not return to Greece without a plebiscite, and that their appointees should hold the key posts in the post-war government. They saw themselves as the political leaders of occupied Greece, claiming an authority that put everyone off-balance. The British, the Greek king and his government-in-exile ‘simply could not understand that the overwhelming majority of those who were prepared to engage in active resistance were not prepared to do so on behalf of what they saw as a discredited monarchy and political system’.4The result was that the delegation went back empty-handed, and the one opportunity to bridge the gap between the government-in-exile and the bulk of the population in occupied Greece was lost.
The other worry for SOE was that now the Allied high command had decided to strike enemy-occupied Europe through Sicily rather than the Balkans, resistance operations in Greece were going to be scaled down if not put on ice. Cairo expected the resistance groups to go to ground obediently, and hold themselves in readiness to attack the Germans again when the time came for their withdrawal. Yet the urgent political demands of the delegation, and their barely concealed rivalries, revealed all too clearly that before long the Greek resistance groups would start fighting each other.
Paddy lost no time celebrating his unexpected leave, but he had much to think about. The successful evacuation of General Carta now prompted him to consider the idea of kidnapping a German general: and not just any general but the hated Müller, responsible for the butchery of the Viannos villages earlier that month. Supposing he were kidnapped and whisked off the island? At a time when Greece was beginning to feel like a backwater as the war pushed up through Italy, an operation of this kind would generate a lot of noise and publicity: it would make the Germans look remarkably foolish, and give a terrific boost to Cretan morale.
He had arrived in Cairo with fifteen months’ worth of back pay to his credit. But the cost of living in Cairo had risen sharply now that the desert war was effectively over, and GHQ was swollen by an influx of officers supporting their war-substantive ranks with desk jobs. In the endless round of pleasure, Paddy was always happy to spend the dregs of a night on someone’s sofa; but at the same time, he did rather hanker for a room of his own.
Through Amy and Walter Smart at the Embassy Paddy had met Countess Sophie Tarnowska, a beautiful Polish woman who founded the Cairo branch of the Polish Red Cross. She had married her kinsman Andrew Tarnowski, but this marriage was almost over by the time she and her sister Chouquette escaped from Poland. When Paddy saw Sophie again, she introduced him to the man she had fallen in love with: a tall young officer in the Coldstream Guards by the name of William Stanley Moss.
So far, the war had been good to Billy Moss. When just out of Sandhurst, he had had a spell guarding Rudolf Hess. He had met and dined with Churchill at Chequers, and been part of the victorious army that chased the Germans out of Africa after the breakout at El Alamein. Back in Cairo, he had found himself a desk job in SOE. The work was hardly exciting, but he was well placed to listen out for anyone recruiting volunteers for secret missions.
Billy too was looking for lodgings. When he heard that there was a palatial villa on Gezira Island for rent, large enough to include a garden and a ballroom, he seized the opportunity and set about filling it with congenial fellow-lodgers. Sophie Tarnowska was to become the presiding muse of the house, and to protect her reputation they invented a sad lodger called Mrs Khayatt, who was in very poor health and rarely left her room. Then came Arnold Breene, ‘a rubicund and youthful Pickwick’5 who worked in SOE, followed by Paddy. The last to join the group were Billy Maclean of the Scots Greys, and his second-in-command, David Smiley of the Blues. They had been in the wilds of Albania since April, and moved in to the villa at the end of October.
The villa was christened Tara, after the legendary seat of the high kings of Ireland. The place became notorious for its wild parties, sometimes fuelled by a lethal cocktail of prunes marinaded in raw alcohol (bought cheap at the local garage), which was mixed in large quantities in the bath. On one particularly rowdy night, all the glasses in the house were smashed. Then Andrew Tarnowski, Sophie’s ex-husband, picked up a vase of flowers and threw it through the biggest window in the ballroom. That autumn, the young warriors of Tara were bathed in a dangerous glamour that no other Cairene coterie could emulate. They were invited everywhere, and to be seen at their parties was to be part of a charmed circle.
Everyone at Tara talked about everything they had ever read, seen or done, and everyone they had ever known – though never about their post-war plans: that seemed to be tempting fate. Paddy talked more than most, yet David Smiley noticed that when others spoke of parents and home, he talked of Rumania, Balasha and Băleni; he seldom mentioned his immediate family. Paddy was also a serious fire hazard. Unless he fell asleep in the arms of his girlfriend Denise Menasce, he had a dangerous habit of dozing off with a lighted cigarette in his hands. One night he burst into Billy’s room in a panic, having set the sitting-room sofa ablaze.
Paddy had first outlined his plan to kidnap General Müller to Jack Smith-Hughes, of SOE’s Cretan desk. Smith-Hughes reacted positively to the idea, as did his commander, Brigadier K.V. Barker-Benfield. He was given the go-ahead, promoted to the rank of Major and told to put together a team. His instinctive choice for the job of second-in-command was Xan Fielding, but two things made that impossible. The first was that Xan was in Crete, doing other things. And while Xan was small and dark enough to pass for a Cretan, h
e would never make a convincing German. Whoever was chosen must look obviously Aryan, and it was essential that he should know how to handle a car. At the same time, Paddy knew that he had to have someone he could get on with; friction or rivalry would become unendurable once the mission was under way.
Paddy had already approached two different people for the post of second-in-command. It was only after they had both turned down the opportunity that he offered the job to Billy Moss, who accepted with alacrity. He was tall, blond, an excellent driver, easy company, and he looked up to Paddy as a hero. From his Russian mother he had learned Russian, and he also knew a little French; but he knew not a word of German or Greek.
Everyone in Tara knew about their supposedly secret operation, and they often discussed ways and means. David Smiley recalled one morning in their steaming bathroom, where Paddy and Billy Moss, along with Billy Maclean, were shaving and bathing and padding about in towels. Smiley had considerable experience in staging an ambush involving moving vehicles. ‘It’s quite a technical business. You have to make sure that there’s someone to warn the others when the party is coming, and you also have to have a covering party, in case there’s a fight.’ The most important thing to be considered was the point of attack. ‘I remember drawing a rough map on the steamy bathroom wall, demonstrating how an assault should be sprung on a narrow bend in the road, and indicating where the warning and the covering party should be.’6 Paddy went off for a parachute training course in Haifa, but he was back in Tara for Christmas – the highlight of which was a turkey stuffed with benzedrine.
Although SOE had given its backing to the plan, not everyone was convinced of its value. Bickham Sweet-Escott, one of SOE’s most experienced executives, was in Cairo at the time. Just after Christmas 1943 he was asked whether or not the operation should go ahead.
I made myself exceedingly unpopular by recommending as strongly as I could that we should not. I thought that if it succeeded, the only contribution to the war effort would be a fillip to Cretan morale, but that the price would certainly be heavy in Cretan lives. The sacrifice might possibly have been worthwhile in the black winter of 1941 when things were going badly. The result of carrying it out in 1944, when everyone knew that victory was merely a matter of months would, I thought, hardly justify the cost … 7
Nevertheless the plan went ahead, and Paddy and Billy Moss were told to be ready to go on 6 January 1944. A car came to pick them up from Tara in the early hours of the morning, and drove them to Heliopolis to pick up Manoli and George Tyrakis. Manoli was tall and aquiline, with a jutting nose and chin and penetrating eyes; Tyrakis was a shorter and more cheerful figure, who proved to be a brilliant lyra player. They sat in the back, in high spirits at the thought of going home, singing Greek and Cretan songs – Paddy joining in at the top of his voice. The party was accompanied by a cargo of stores which included a consignment of Marlin guns and four thousand pounds’ worth of gold sovereigns.
They flew to an airstrip east of Benghazi, where they spent two miserable weeks in sodden tents waiting for the weather to clear. Since it refused to oblige they were flown to Bari, hoping for better flying conditions there. On 4 February Paddy, Billy, Manoli and George took off from Brindisi for Crete, aiming for the Omalo plateau, a tiny shallow bowl in the jagged, snow-covered peaks in the mountains south of Neapolis. For the pilot, the zone was so restricted that the team could not be dropped in a ‘stick’ formation – he would have to circle and come in again four times, dropping each man off individually.
Snow and loose cloud swirled around the open bomb-bay, and far below they could see the dropping zone marked by three pinpricks of light formed by three signal fires. Paddy was the first to jump. Welcoming Cretan hands hauled him to his feet, and then all eyes turned again to the snow-streaked sky. Paddy gave the all-clear with a torch to signal his safe arrival, but the clouds were thickening and the pilot could no longer see the signal fires: he was forced to turn back.
Paddy spent the next seven weeks in a cave with Sandy Rendel, the SOE officer in charge of the Lasithi area, who took great pleasure in his company.
Best of all was the singing. Paddy could sing folk songs in half a dozen languages, but mostly he would sing with the rest of us the local songs, in particular Philedem, the old Turkish tune which became a form of code-name for him with the Cretans. In fact, throughout the … island they would refer to him as ‘the Philedem’ – as a Highlander might speak of ‘The Mackintosh’.8
A month later, after several attempts had been made to drop the rest of the team, Paddy was told they would have to come in by motor launch. Then, in late March, came news that threw the whole mission into question. Their intended victim, General Müller, had been posted to Chania to replace General Bräuer as commander of Fortress Crete. In the face of this disappointment, ‘All the delays seemed, retrospectively, more bitter.’9 SOE Cairo was informed, but decided to go ahead with the operation anyway. After all, the aim was to boost Cretan morale and damage German confidence; from this standpoint, one general was as good as another. The new target, who had succeeded to Müller’s post in Heraklion, was General Heinrich Kreipe. No one knew much about him, except that he had just arrived from the Russian front.
Billy, Manoli and George finally reached Crete on 4 April, near Tsoutsouros on the south coast. It was a happy reunion, but Paddy was busy overseeing the unloading of stores and the stowing of four German prisoners who were being taken back to Egypt. He seemed a different person from the recklessly ebullient partygoer of Tara: ‘I saw him go off,’ wrote Moss, ‘and watched him as he gave orders, commanded men to do this and that … he seemed to have the whole situation at his finger-tips and was capable of coping with anything.’10
They spent the rest of the night and next day near the beach, and with the stores mounted on the backs of four mules, they began the long march towards Heraklion. Trying to slip past the villages on the road was impossible, since every dog in every yard began barking. On these occasions Paddy enjoyed laying a false trail by shouting orders in German, and singing ‘Bomber über England’, ‘Lili Marlene’ or the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’. This had the added advantage of keeping the villagers safely in bed.
At Kastamonitza they were joined by two experienced resistance men whom Paddy had worked with in the past: Antoni Papaleonidas came from Asia Minor and had worked as a stevedore in Heraklion, while Grigori Khnarakis had been involved in General Carta’s evacuation. Paddy had also summoned Micky Akoumianakis, who ran the intelligence network in Heraklion. He lived in Knossos, near the Villa Ariadne – which had been built for the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, and was now the residence of General Kreipe. Micky’s father Manolaki, who had died fighting the Germans in 1941, had been Evans’s overseer and Micky had known the villa all his life.
A long conference between Paddy, Billy and Micky followed, during which Micky was told the aim of the operation. So far, this was known to no one but the four core members of the team, others being told only when it became necessary. The effect, as Paddy described it, was always ‘electric’ – a gasp of astonishment at the sheer audacity of the plan, followed by excitement and apprehension in equal measures. While Billy, George and Manoli stayed in hiding Paddy and Micky took the bus to Heraklion.
Here Micky contacted Elias Athanasakis, a young student involved in the intelligence network, to help with the planning. Their first idea had been to abduct the General from the Villa Ariadne itself, but it was too well guarded. The only alternative was to set an ambush for his car. The General usually made two trips a day to his divisional headquarters at Ano Archanes, some five miles south of Knossos. After spending the morning at work he returned to the villa for lunch, and then set off to work again from about four till eight. Sometimes he stayed on to play a few rubbers of bridge with his staff, and on those evenings he would not get back to the villa till nine or ten.
The only possible abduction point was on the last stretch of the way from Archanes, where a downward slope w
ould oblige the car to reduce speed before it joined the main road to Heraklion. Woody ground rose to one side, and there were plenty of hiding places among nearby rocks and bushes. Since it would be dark, it was vital not to miss the car. Elias undertook to study it closely, so that he could recognize the sound of its engine and the slits of light from its blacked-out headlamps. As soon as he saw the car leave Archanes he would bicycle hard to a point where an electric buzzer had been installed on a long wire, to signal the lookout on the higher ground. Three flashes from a torch from the lookout would tell the team to get into position.
‘The risk of passing traffic still remained, possibly of trucks full of troops. Here we would have to trust to improvisation, luck, speed and darkness, and, if the worst happened, by a party of guerrillas – un-lethal bursts of fire, flares all over the place, shoutings, mule-carts and logs suddenly blocking the road to create confusion …’11 Even if they succeeded in kidnapping the General, there was the prospect of having to drive the stolen car past the Villa Ariadne, and straight through the centre of Heraklion. This was the quickest way to get off the enemy-infested plain and into the hills.
To minimize the risk of reprisals, it was vital to convince the Germans that the abduction was planned by regular forces controlled from Cairo, and not the act of local ‘brigands and terrorists’. To underline the point, Paddy would signal Cairo as soon as they were safely away. The BBC would then broadcast the abduction, and the RAF undertook to drop leaflets over the island.
Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure Page 20