by Wes Davis
Leigh Fermor was not the dog’s only victim. One evening, at the tail end of a particularly boisterous drinking session, Sophie was awakened by a patrol sent out from the drawing room to locate aspirin for Rowland Winn, who had somehow broken his ankle. Sophie could not make out exactly what had happened, but it seemed that Winn, perhaps upset at being passed over for assignment to SOE, had decided to demonstrate his parachuting form. He had clambered onto some artificial precipice—a window ledge or the balustrade outside, it was unclear which—and leaped. When Sophie went to Winn’s room to deliver the aspirin, Pixie trailed along behind her, and as soon as the door opened, the dog flopped onto Winn’s bed, eliciting a howl of distress from the injured man.
It was not Pixie, however, who won the title of Tara’s most exotic resident. That distinction was shared by a pair of mongooses Sophie had rescued one day from a street performer. No one could tell them apart, so they had just one name between them. Sophie called them Kurka.
Unusual pets were nothing new to the countess. When she was a girl, she had had a pet fox, and she had kept a rifle in her room for shooting crows to feed it. Her family had also kept a pet boar.
At Tara the two Kurkas slept in Sophie’s bed, and if they found their way under the covers they would sometimes nip at her back to prevent her from rolling over on them. Now whenever she wore a party dress that revealed her shoulders, she found herself compelled to explain the tiny bruises that dotted her pale skin. “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said. “It’s mongooses.”
It was harder to explain away the Kurkas’ activities some time later when the animals killed a parrot kept by the well-connected Englishman who lived in the villa next door. Word of the incident soon reached the director of SOE in Cairo. He called Smiley and McLean to his office, issued a harsh reprimand, and ordered the mongooses destroyed. “It so happened that I had rather a good .22 silencer so I was nominated executioner,” Smiley recalled. “I got up behind the brutes and blew their brains out.”
“LIFE AT TARA was luxurious rather than comfortable,” Julian Amery thought. “Sometimes there were lavish dinners. Sometimes there was only bread and cheese. In principle, there were hot baths for all. But sometimes there were no baths at all because Vodka was being made in them. There were two kinds of Tara Vodka; Vodka and Old Vodka. Vodka took only twenty-four hours to make; Old Vodka, three days.”
The household had gone into vodka production once the frequent Tara parties had exhausted all other sources of alcohol. Earlier in the war it had been relatively easy to buy whiskey and French wine in Cairo, but these were now next to impossible to obtain. There was a variety of brandy imported from Cyprus and a locally distilled gin, but even these were in short supply. Sophie explained the method used to produce drinkable vodka on her father’s estate in Poland, but the six weeks of aging she recommended was out of the question at Tara. At least one guest stumbled home from a party at the house with a case of alcohol poisoning that left him temporarily blinded.
Dodgy vodka or not, the revelers kept arriving. Guests included the usual assortment of British officers, plus officials from the embassy and their wives, Greek friends and Polish soldiers, as well as more adventurous members of Cairene society. Even King Farouk made the occasional appearance. Casual dinners at the house frequently progressed to riotous merrymaking as the night wore on, and the revels might not die down until the muezzin’s call drifted in from neighboring mosques at dawn.
Moss’s former fiancée came to the Tara housewarming party, and the two of them had an awkward talk together on the stairs, after which she left Cairo for good. Sophie’s estranged husband, Andrew, also turned up, on a night when things got wildly out of hand. Guests started smashing windows—nineteen of them shattered before it was finished—and Andrew snatched up a bowl of flowers and hurled it through the biggest window in the house. Meanwhile, Arnold Breene had climbed onto the roof and begun chucking makeshift missiles at the neighbors. On a calmer evening one of the revelers had broken a finger while performing a belly dance. When they ran out of money, the inmates, as they liked to call themselves, rented out the house for someone else’s party and locked themselves in their rooms while all hell broke loose downstairs.
One of the highlights of the social season came when the Tara residents staged a mock bullfight in the drawing room, with Paddy as the toreador, flashing a great scarlet cape borrowed from Gertie Wissa, one of three Coptic sisters who were belles of the Cairo social scene. Sophie, McLean, and two of the guests were picadors, and Moss took the role of the bull. They all played their parts so enthusiastically that McLean wound up injured—a cornada, Moss dubbed it—and the bull’s death throes sent Sophie sprawling to the floor.
Tara parties were thrown to welcome friends home from the field or to see them off on a secret mission. Parties marked arrivals, departures, promotions, new assignments, and race day at the track. Lunch presented another occasion for carousing. As did breakfast. Julian Amery turned up at the house one morning to find the men of the house holding a breakfast party in their dressing gowns. This would not have surprised him, except that they were all perched on the edges of Sophie’s bed at the time. “She reclined on the pillows armed with a cavalry sword and used it to make sure they kept their distance,” Amery noted.
IN THE MIDST of the boisterous life at Tara, Leigh Fermor remained preoccupied with the Müller question. He could not get the massacres in Viannos out of his thoughts. At headquarters the effort to formulate a tactical response to General Müller’s brutal assault on the civilian population had made little headway. Any confrontation with German forces would only redound on the Cretans once again. Still, there must be some way of striking back.
“Were such a thing possible,” Leigh Fermor told himself, “it would have to be some kind of symbolic gesture involving no bloodshed, not even a plane sabotaged or a petrol dump blown up; something that would hit the enemy hard on a different level, and one which would offer no presentable pretext for reprisals.”
Killing Müller outright had been rejected as a possibility; the ramifications were unacceptable. There might, however, be another way to target the general. More and more, Leigh Fermor was coming to think that his recent flight over the mountains with Carta offered an answer. If he could find a way to get to Müller, perhaps he could bring him out alive. An unexpected blow of that kind, if obviously mounted from outside Crete, might forestall reprisals, and it could well cause even more consternation in the German ranks than a more bloodthirsty attack. Not to say that it would be easy. Carta had come willingly, of course, but Müller could be … convinced.
At first Leigh Fermor struggled with the problem of how to get to Crete, strike quickly, and get out. Then he remembered how smoothly the airdrop of arms for Bandouvas had been carried off back in August. A raiding party could drop in by the same route, parachuting onto a high plateau in the Dikti range. From there, at the western edge of Lasithi, they could slip into Heraklion district and mount an ambush to catch Müller in the course of his daily travels, most likely somewhere between his headquarters in Ano Archanes, south of Heraklion, and his residence, the Villa Ariadne at nearby Knossos, where John Pendlebury himself had once lived.
Soon parts of the plan were welling up in his imagination. Carta’s staff car had been abandoned near Sitia on the eastern tip of the island, where the proximity to deep water presented a red herring, inviting the Germans to assume he had escaped by submarine. Meanwhile, the general had been hightailing it over the mountains to the southwest. Capturing Müller as he traveled in his car would make the same ruse possible again. And with Müller’s car pointing to a deepwater extraction, Leigh Fermor and his party would again disappear into the mountains and make for the south coast.
When he thought about it like this, smuggling the Italian General Carta off the island looked like a successful dry run for a much bolder strike against German morale.
AS THE DAYS began to grow cooler with the deepening of autumn, the idea of kidn
apping General Müller took on clearer outlines in Leigh Fermor’s mind. When he could no longer keep it to himself, he floated the idea to a few of his housemates. True to character, he took an opportunity to broach the subject that gave the whole enterprise a whimsical air. It came up one day in the bathroom.
“We were all pretty well stark naked,” recalled David Smiley. The walls of the bathroom were fogged with steam and as the men talked they used wet fingers to sketch diagrams on the wall. Maps and arrows took shape in the mist. “A sort of road was here,” Smiley remembered someone saying, “we’d be able to stop the General’s car there, we’d have a covering party there—all that sort of stuff. But it was all in the bathroom.”
The kidnapping scheme passed the bath test. But whether it would fly at headquarters was another question. Around the beginning of November, Leigh Fermor went to see Jack Smith-Hughes, now head of the Crete branch, at his office at the SOE headquarters. There he laid out the plan that had taken shape in the bath. He explained the ambush, the false trails, and the escape through the mountains to the south coast, where a motor launch would pick up the party. As he talked, he scanned Smith-Hughes’s jovial, round face for some signal of his reaction. There was no way of predicting what he would say. A proposal for a similar undertaking had been squelched earlier in the year. But Paddy knew that spiriting General Carta out of Crete, right under the noses of the German garrison, had been a coup. And it had gained him an undeniable measure of clout.
As it turned out, there was no need to worry. Smith-Hughes endorsed the plan wholeheartedly. Later he accompanied Leigh Fermor to the office of their commander, Brigadier Barker-Benfield, where he went through the details once more. When Leigh Fermor finished talking, the brigadier, who had overall responsibility for SOE in the Middle East, voiced his support for the plan. Like that, the mission was approved, and Leigh Fermor was assured he would receive the resources he needed to mount the operation. The one open question was whom to tap as second in command. When the brigadier asked if he had anyone in mind, Paddy had to admit that his thinking had not progressed that far. “Not yet,” he replied.
Of course, he had given a good deal of consideration to the makeup of the team that would carry out this plan. Manoli Paterakis would play an essential role, it went without saying. He was staying nearby at a villa in Heliopolis. And Paddy would like to have George Tyrakis—Tom Dunbabin’s former guide from the Amari, who had come out of Crete on a boat earlier in the year—provided he could find him. But only now did it occur to him that he might ask Billy Moss to sign on as his lieutenant. Moss was aware of the plan, but it was not in his character to put himself forward as one of its leaders, though the idea must have crossed his mind.
Back at Tara, Leigh Fermor offered Moss the job outright, and he jumped at the opportunity. Some time later, when Paddy told his friend Annette Crean about his decision, she blanched for a moment. It was not that Moss was untrustworthy or lacking in the kind of courage required to pull off such a mission, she finally explained. He was simply too debonair. She was afraid his good looks would be a dead giveaway.
NOW THAT HEADQUARTERS had given the mission a stamp of approval, it was time for the real work to begin. Fortunately, Manoli Paterakis turned up at just the right moment, with his compatriot George Tyrakis in tow. It turned out that Tyrakis had been away at the RAF base at Ramat David, in the Jezreel Valley south of Haifa, where he had taken the parachute training course many SOE operatives received. It was good to find him all in one piece at the end of the course.
There was a story going around at the time that illustrated the greater risks these fierce Cretan andartes ran in such an undertaking. “During a parachute course in the Middle East the instructor, jump-training a group of commandos from various islands, saw one of them fumble with his harness and hesitate to advance into the bay for the jump,” as the writer Lawrence Durrell told it. “Incautiously, he made a pleasantry—asking if the novice was scared. The response was unexpected. ‘Scared?’ cried the young man. ‘You dare to tell a Cretan he is scared? I’ll show you who is scared.’ He unhooked his safety harness altogether and jumped to his certain death.” Nobody believed the story, but there was no arguing with its spirit.
Tyrakis’s safe return was a good omen for Manoli. Since the mission plan had the team parachuting onto Mount Dikti, he and Leigh Fermor would both soon depart for Ramat David to take the same course. Moss, it turned out, was judged too tall for parachute training. It was feared that an injury received during a practice jump could jeopardize the mission itself. When the time came to drop into Crete, he would have to wing it. Although he enjoyed being told how brave it was to make an operational jump without any training, he was in fact happy not to have to risk getting hurt before it mattered. And he was having too much fun at Tara to go traipsing off to Ramat David for a few weeks.
Once Leigh Fermor and Manoli completed the course, they would have the core unit they needed in order to launch the mission. As always, Manoli would serve as Leigh Fermor’s guide and right-hand man, his “man Friday,” as Paddy liked to say. George would take up the same role for Moss. He quickly became “Man Thursday.” Once on the ground in Crete, they would gather the rest of the team.
THE PARACHUTE COURSE started with basic instruction in how to land. At first, students tumbled from stationary platforms of various heights, learning to absorb the energy of the fall by rolling when they hit the ground. From there they progressed to flinging themselves off the back of a moving truck. This went on for three days, until finally the students could hit the ground and roll safely at forty miles an hour. Then, on the fourth morning, they boarded a modified bomber to make their first real jump.
Statistically it could be shown that parachuting was not particularly risky, but as Julian Amery learned when he made his first jump in a similar course, hurling yourself from a plane for the first time “is undeniably contrary to every human instinct.” Even worse than the actual jump was the anticipation. Each man was assigned a number designating the order in which they would jump, and they waited nervously in the cargo bay as the bomber spiraled its way up to altitude. “As the roar of the engines drowned our talk each of us was left to his own thoughts and fears all too clearly mirrored in the tense features of his fellows,” Amery recalled.
Once the aircraft leveled out over the drop zone, the instructor removed a trapdoor from the floor and the first two jumpers edged into position and sat on the rim of the hole with their legs dangling below. When it was your turn, you took your place, and at this point the only dignified thing to do was muffle the inevitable doubts and fix your eyes on the instructor, who stood watching a signal light that flashed red above the doorway. Soon the light turned green and the instructor brought his hand down. You eased over the edge and immediately felt the impact of the wind ripping past the plane. Tumbling through this slipstream was like being rattled by a giant hand, but as you passed through the plane’s turbulence, the shaking gave way to what Amery called “the full horror of falling through space.” For several seconds the acceleration continued. Then, finally, the chute opened and falling turned to floating. Since there was no spare, an open chute came as a tremendous relief, and it was accompanied by a sense of elation that you could enjoy for a few minutes before you had to wrestle yourself into position for landing. In the last few seconds the ground seemed to rush at you faster and faster, and the wallop of the first landing often took students by surprise. The instructors compared the impact to jumping from a twenty-foot wall.
The training jumps continued for another week. Students were dropped from various heights—ending as low as five hundred feet—and under differing conditions. The final jumps took place at night, when darkness made the whole enterprise much more challenging. At the end of the course, both Manoli and Leigh Fermor had made it through successfully. As qualified parachutists, they were now eligible for a bump in salary, an extra two shillings per day in Paddy’s case. But for now there was to be no outward sign of
their accomplishment. In order to avoid telegraphing the nature of their mission, SOE officers did not wear the parachute-wing insignia on their uniforms until they were in the field. The compensation was that, after making an operational jump, they could wear them proudly on their chests, rather than on the sleeve as ordinary paratroopers did.
THE DROP ONTO Mount Dikti was planned for the beginning of December, and there was much to do before departing. Leigh Fermor and Moss devoted their time to gathering the equipment they would need. Before long, Tara began to look like a munitions dump, its cabinets and cupboards larded with weapons and explosives. As the departure date neared, the stockpile grew to include rifles, machine guns, revolvers, a large cache of ammunition, and a strange assortment of bombs made of a moldable explosive called gelignite, some of them disguised as ordinary objects, including cow manure and, more useful on Crete, goat droppings. If the mission went as planned, none of this would be needed. If something went wrong, all the munitions they could possibly carry would be a drop in the bucket compared to what the Germans would throw at them.
Still more outlandish equipment waited to be picked up at Jasper Maskelyne’s office. Maskelyne had shown up in Cairo in 1941 with a task force of a dozen-odd camouflage officers and a very peculiar history. Both his father and grandfather were well-known stage magicians, and before the war he had made a name for himself in the family business. He was just ten years old when he first appeared onstage at the Palace Theatre in London, as a magician’s assistant in a show performed before George V and Queen Mary at the 1912 Royal Command Performance. The act involved an illusion in which eggs were retrieved one after another from an apparently empty hat. Not long after he turned twenty-one, Maskelyne was performing on his own. He soon became famous, as much for his dapper good looks as for his illusions. As a boy Paddy had seen his show at the Regent Theatre in London. “He used to lock ladies into boxes, then saw them in half, and they would step out blowing kisses,” he recalled.