by Wes Davis
Meanwhile, Leigh Fermor and Manoli helped Carta and his party into the dinghy, launched it, and then scrambled in themselves. The men held tightly to the rigging as they were pulled across thirty yards of choppy water. At last, with the dinghy thumping against the side of the motor launch, they managed to clamber aboard the ship. Leigh Fermor had intended only to escort the general aboard, hand off the satchel of documents Tavana had given him, and then return to the beach. But the wind, already fierce, suddenly grew stronger. With the mission now running more than an hour behind schedule due to the weather, Bob Young feared that his ship would be once again caught in range of enemy aircraft when the sun rose. He decided he could wait no longer. Leigh Fermor and Manoli were still aboard when the skipper turned the launch to sea. After fifteen months on the island, Paddy was on his way to an unexpected leave in Cairo. Loose ends remained on Crete that he regretted not tying up. But he could now escort his general all the way to North Africa and see to it that the satchel of documents made it to headquarters.
Along with the commandeered documents, he was carrying a report written in haste by Tom Dunbabin that afternoon, while the shore party waited for the arrival of Bob Young’s motor launch. In it Dunbabin proposed a string of more aggressive plans for future operations. He knew from his interrogation of the prisoners Bandouvas had taken at Kato Symi that German morale was at a low point. Soldiers felt betrayed by the Italians and beleaguered by an occupation that had gone on far too long. They were also running short on stores. One of the prisoners reported that since July he had been detailed to a “Potato detachment” that moved about the island gathering produce, which was then doled out to various units to supplement their dwindling rations.
As Dunbabin saw it, this was the time to strike a blow. One idea was to capture a coastal outpost. He pointed to Tsoutsouros, now disappearing in the darkness behind the launch, as a likely candidate. This possibility had been considered before. In May 1942, Dunbabin had recommended an attack on a coast-watching station—involving a submarine if possible—that would be made to look like an outside job. This time around, he imagined a similar operation could take place without help from outside the island. The attack, he recommended, “would be carried out from the land on receipt of a signal.”
Now, however, Dunbabin was also hatching an even bolder plot. He proposed a mission to capture the general who commanded the German garrison in Heraklion district, the man responsible for the recent massacre of villagers in the Viannos region. “It should be easy to kidnap Müller,” he believed. “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 strength of about 20. This operation, if carried out, should be synchronized with operation Brauer.” Putting this new plan into action at the same time as the Bräuer operation—Xan Fielding’s long-standing plot to capture the German commander in Chania—would deliver a humiliating one-two punch to German morale and organization. Dunbabin was not the only one beginning to think this way.
PART II
IN THE MINOTAUR’S LAIR
6
Fleshpots
THE MOTOR LAUNCH carrying Leigh Fermor and Manoli Paterakis, along with General Carta and members of his staff, chuffed into the port of Mersa Matruh, west of Alexandria, the following evening. There the entourage boarded a plane that carried them on to Cairo. Lieutenant Tavana was not with them. Eager to fight the Germans and hoping to convince other Italians to defect to the British, he had volunteered to stay behind on Crete. “I am sure I can be useful,” he had written in a letter Leigh Fermor was now carrying to headquarters. The letter included a request to be put under Paddy’s command, but the unexpected departure of the motor launch made that impossible for the moment. By now Tavana would be making his way toward Tom Dunbabin’s old wireless station with Sandy Rendel and his men. Leigh Fermor could picture the outpost, which occupied an oleander-fringed gully above the Heraklion plain. From there they would strike out to the east through the village of Demati and finally up the rocky path into the Lasithi mountains, where Paddy had left a wireless transmitter, which they would use to set up a new outpost in the heart of the Lasithi province.
When the plane reached Cairo, a detachment from the office of the commander in chief was waiting to take charge of Carta. The general was joined in Cairo by another Italian commander, one General Negroni, who had recently been extracted from Athens. Over the following days, Carta cooperated willingly with a string of British interrogators, who were particularly anxious to learn whether the German and Italian commanders had exchanged information about their intelligence networks. If they had—if Carta was aware of the identities of German agents in Crete or if the two armies had secret agents in common—that information could prove vital to the ongoing operations on the island. Meanwhile, Carta had one request of his own. Recognizing that his family in Italy might be put in jeopardy if word got out, he asked that his cooperation not be publicized. Once the interviews had concluded, it was agreed that he would be sent to Brindisi, in southeastern Italy, closer to home than he had been in some time.
Before Carta left Cairo, however, Leigh Fermor helped him deliver a stinging message to the German commander of Fortress Crete. General Bräuer had by now raised the reward for Carta’s abduction severalfold. Dead or alive, the Italian was worth one hundred million drachmas, and Carta understandably felt that Bräuer’s unsavory tactic warranted a response. The reply he drafted gave him a final chance to put his former ally in his place. “I am in Egypt,” Carta wrote to Bräuer. “I assure you, however, that no one, and especially no Cretan, would be found to betray me and take your 30 pieces of silver. But be sure that there are a great many Cretans who would be only too happy to kill you for no reward at all.”
While General Carta vented his anger at Bräuer, discussions were under way in the Crete section at SOE headquarters about Bräuer’s counterpart in Heraklion, General Müller. No one knew quite how to respond to the brazen massacre the German divisional commander had ordered in the villages of Viannos. The problem was that any form of retaliation SOE might undertake against Müller would only call down more reprisals against Cretan civilians. It looked as if there was nothing to be done. Again and again, the daily meetings ended in little more than hand-wringing. Keeping his recent experience with General Carta in mind, however, Leigh Fermor was beginning to formulate a plan. Although he had not intended to leave Crete just yet, perhaps taking a leave after some fifteen months would be for the best. He would now have time to think.
And he was certainly not the only one fretting about the situation in Crete that fall. By the end of September, anxiety about the destabilizing effect of Italy’s surrender had reached the highest levels in Germany. Fearing Allied air attacks as the Italian withdrawal weakened their grasp on the Aegean, German commanders considered pulling out of the region. During a high-level meeting at Hitler’s headquarters, officers of the army and navy called for the evacuation of Crete “while there was still time.” But Hitler said no. He knew that the loyalty of Germany’s remaining allies required shoring up their faith in the Nazi war machine. Abandoning the Aegean islands—Crete in particular—“would create a most unfavorable impression.” Instead, German forces began mobilizing for attacks in the Dodecanese, and Crete was becoming an important staging ground.
Near the end of the month Sandy Rendel reported sighting some sixty Stuka dive-bombers winging their way toward the Dodecanese. After that his radio fell silent and would not be heard from for weeks. The RAF was now bombing German-held facilities in Heraklion on a nightly basis. In Cairo, however, Leigh Fermor found that life went on as usual.
RETURNING TO CAIRO after months in the field always entailed a jolt to the system. Partly it was the sheer number of people. Egyptians from rural areas had been flocking to the city since the late 1930s, nearly doubling its size in a decade. And they were not alone. Although Egypt had been granted independence in 1922, the Britis
h retained the right to protect the Suez Canal, as well as the power, in time of war, to establish bases in Egypt and occupy ports and airfields. Now Cairo had become headquarters not just for SOE but for all British forces in the Middle East. As a result, the city was bursting at the seams with British and Commonwealth soldiers. And sometimes it seemed there were nearly as many French nationals and Greeks and Poles. The city swarmed with people. It was a far cry from the mountains of Crete.
More than just the bustle, though, Cairo was a world apart in other ways. “There was death and tragedy in Europe,” one wartime resident wrote, “but here all was affluence and sparkle—or so it seemed.” Despite the uniforms in evidence, the war felt far away. In fact, Cairo could seem to a British officer more like home, as it had existed before the war, than London itself. Wherever you went you were likely to run into someone you had known back then. “Dickens would have had no need to tie up his stories with the fantastical granny knots of coincidence, if he could have set them in war-time Cairo,” Evelyn Waugh’s friend Christopher Sykes believed. “The amount of meeting and re-meeting and unlikely hearing about friends was worthy of the craziest melodrama.”
Although it was Crete that Leigh Fermor and his SOE colleagues called “Never-Never Land,” life in Cairo often felt even more like a game of make-believe that had been lifted out of time. The effect was strongest on the Gezira island, a lush oasis in the middle of the Nile that was home to the majority of the British in Cairo. “What was so remarkable about Gezira was that, unlike the rest of Cairo, it was so green,” recalled an SOE coder named Margaret Pawley, who lived aboard a houseboat docked at the island. Relatively cool breezes filtered through the lush tropical gardens of the island, creating what one wartime resident described as “an atmosphere of permanent holiday.” Leigh Fermor’s friend Annette Crean, an attractive and athletic young woman who worked in Sykes’s office at SOE headquarters, started her days before dawn with an hourlong pleasure ride on one of the polo ponies kept at the Gezira Sporting Club, which was called by one historian “the most magnificent sports grounds ever seen in the heart of a capital city.” Later Crean lunched by the club’s pool. After work she rounded out the day with tea at Groppi’s, the popular café off Soliman Pasha Square, then dinner and dancing.
In many ways the city was a hybrid—both ancient and modern, glamorous and primitive. At times the streets were clogged with vehicles. But in the predawn hours before motor traffic took over the roadways, you might still see a leisurely cow ambling across the Bulaq Bridge, which linked Gezira to the rest of the city lying east of the Nile. In the posh urban neighborhoods grand villas were protected by Sudanese guards whose faces were scarred by ritual markings.
A traveler marveling at Cairo’s grandeur in the fourteenth century had called her “mother of cities,” but to many of the Europeans now living there it seemed that a few basic matters of urban sanitation were yet to be worked out. Margaret Pawley, who had come at the end of 1942, fell ill almost immediately, and it did not take long for her to fix the blame on her new surroundings. “The air we breathed was heavily polluted and what we ate and drank loaded with a deposit of bacteria,” she noted, “and then there were the omnipresent armies of flies.” At the same time, Cairo had an atmosphere of elegance and style that was unmatched anywhere else. A message Xan Fielding had dispatched from Crete earlier in the year hinted at the mixed feelings Leigh Fermor and his friends had toward the city. “Hope you’re enjoying the fleshpots and cesspools of Egypt,” he wrote.
It was hard to say whether the past or the future had the upper hand in Cairo. An American journalist who fled to the city from Crete in the wake of the invasion thought the Egyptians were working overtime to “keep alive the tradition of Oriental splendor and mysticism while Ford automobiles zip around the streets and movie houses show the latest Hollywood films and you can buy Granger tobacco for sixty cents per ten-cent package.” Altogether the mixture of people and the whirl of vehicles—heavy trucks and sleek limousines vying with donkey carts—created a hurly-burly atmosphere. “The hot dusty streets were crammed with humanity which seemed to represent the culture of several centuries,” one SOE officer concluded.
Julian Amery, a Cairo friend of Leigh Fermor’s who had been a war correspondent in Spain and was now an SOE captain awaiting infiltration into Albania, liked to tell a story about a popular Arab restaurant near Shepheard’s Hotel called Hatih, where diners who lingered over evening meals in the rooftop garden often wound up tangling with the city’s less glamorous nightlife.
“The food was good,” Amery claimed, “but late in the evening, as the guests began to leave, rats used to come out to eat up bits of food from the floor. They were the biggest rats I have ever seen and quite tame.” One night, when he found himself alone at the restaurant with a beautiful but demure Englishwoman, Amery took advantage of the situation by discreetly scattering food around her chair. “Presently three very large rats crept to within a few inches of her feet,” he said. “When I pointed out that we had company, she literally fell into my arms.”
NOT LONG AFTER his return to Cairo from Crete with General Carta, Leigh Fermor met a young lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards named William Stanley Moss. Billy Moss was a tall, languorous twenty-two-year-old with striking good looks. Not only did he have the chiseled face of a movie star, but his manner somehow suggested he had just stepped out of an actual movie. He had fought with his regiment at Tobruk and El Alamein. Now he was awaiting his next assignment.
When they met, Moss and Leigh Fermor were both living in an officers’ flophouse known as Hangover Hall. It was a cramped and cheerless accommodation that felt even less desirable than usual that fall, which was particularly hot, with afternoon temperatures edging past 110 degrees even as late as October. Neither of the young men was happy with the arrangement, but in the dismal surroundings they quickly became friends. To Paddy, Moss was a “charming figure, with his fondness for books, his humour, spirit and knack of enjoying things.”
His parents’ only child, Moss was born in Yokohama, Japan, where his family had deep roots, one branch having served as missionaries there, as well as in China. His grandfather was a onetime manager of the Japan Gazette who went on to become head registrar for the court formed in 1879 to try cases involving British subjects in Japan. Moss’s grandmother served on the committee of the Yokohama literary society. The grandfather’s family crest—on which a shield that bore a griffin’s head between two sprigs of moss rose over a motto reading Pro patria semper—had passed down to Moss’s father and uncle. His father, and namesake, was a merchant with business in Tokyo. His mother, Natalie, was the youngest daughter of a Russian landowner from Nikolsk-Ussuriysky, a trading outpost sixty-odd miles north of Vladivostok. Moss had picked up his mother’s language, but there was not much call for Russian in North Africa. (It would turn out, much to his surprise, to be useful later on, in Crete.) Even before he could walk, Moss began to see the world, traveling with his father to Shanghai when he was only a few months old. It was the first of many family trips. Before his first day of school, he had been around the world more than once.
He was just two years old in 1923 when a powerful earthquake struck the Yokohama area, destroying thousands of buildings and killing more than a hundred thousand people. The quake triggered a towering tsunami and ignited fires that raged all around Tokyo Bay.
Later that same fall, Moss left Japan with his family and returned to England. As he grew into a tall, athletic schoolboy, he began to develop a wide range of interests. He boxed and played soccer, tennis, and cricket. He had a knack for drawing and was soon filling pages with beautifully detailed sketches, often of the plants and animals he enjoyed spotting in the English countryside. He loved to sing and liked going to movies and plays. And he read a great deal. In particular, he admired Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island was his favorite book, and when, at the age of fifteen, he wrote a book of his own—and published it in a handwritten
eighty-page “presentation copy”—the debt to Stevenson could be seen even in the title: Island Adventure.
In 1938 Moss was at Charterhouse, the prestigious boarding school in Surrey thirty miles southwest of London, when he received word that his father had died. He remembered how the bespectacled housemaster had called him to his office in the middle of the night to tell him that his father was ill and he should prepare himself for bad news. The news came first thing the next morning. Moss later learned that his father had in fact died the day before. The midnight ruse was the housemaster’s personal touch. “He always did it like that,” Moss had heard, “so as to soften the shock.”
This was not the first death Moss had been aware of. He knew vaguely that his uncle Edward had been killed in action with the Gloucester Regiment on the first day of the Battle of Loos in 1915. Then when he was a boy in Japan, he had watched a man pulling a rickshaw collapse and die on the street. “Most of the rickshaw coolies died young from heart strain,” he recalled, “and this one just flopped down between the handle-bars and lay in the middle of the road, quite still.” Some years later an Austrian housemaid who worked for his family had slit her own throat in the room she occupied in the attic of the family house. But none of these deaths had hurt him as his father’s did. It was a wound he carried with him all his life, and the pain of it seemed to grow stronger, not weaker, with time.
Not that it showed. On the outside Moss remained energetic and charming. With the help of a classmate he launched a new school magazine and invited illustrious “old boys” to send him articles. Many did, including Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the scouting movement, who submitted a story of the Boer war. Moss produced a stunning series of posters to publicize the new magazine.