Kidnap in Crete Read online

Bandouvas took the war into his own hands. Thinking that the Allies were only days away from storming ashore and liberating his homeland, he led his newly equipped force on a premature attack which started with the killing of two German soldiers collecting potatoes in a field near Kato Simi. Bandouvas broadcast a call to arms, mobilising the whole province of Heraklion. On the 11th he set an ambush near the village. A German unit was caught unawares and in a fight that went on into the afternoon more than 400 enemy soldiers were killed; many more were wounded and twelve were taken hostage.

  Retribution was swift. Under the orders of General Müller, 2,000 troops of the 65th Luftlande (Infantry Division) poured into the area on 12 September. Their orders were to: ‘Destroy Viannos and promptly execute all males beyond the age of 16 as well as everyone who was arrested in the countryside, irrespective of age or gender.’

  At first the troops persuaded the villagers that they meant no harm and coaxed some who had fled into the mountains to return. The next day, the 13th, the soldiers went berserk. For two days they murdered, raped and tortured villagers. Then they blew up the buildings and set them alight with flame throwers. No one was spared, not children, women or the infirm. A German daily report stated: 440 enemy dead, 200 taken hostage and that fresh action was being taken against newly reported enemy concentrations in the area. The survivors were not allowed back into the ruins, nor were they allowed to bury their dead.

  The reprisals so terrified the people in the villages surrounding Bandouvas’s headquarters that they refused to continue helping him. Bandouvas sent a message which asked: ‘When are the British landing to help us fight the Germans?’ He realised that the British were not going to land after all. He was now wanted by the Germans, and the Cretans were angry with him for the havoc that he had brought down on them. Bandouvas asked Tom Dunbabin to evacuate him and the remains of his group to Alexandria, something that Dunbabin was only too happy to do.

  Leigh Fermor saw that the situation with the Italians was spinning out of control. It was decided to get General Carta off the island as soon as possible. Carta agreed, and, led by Leigh Fermor and the Cretan officer Manolis Paterakis, the party set off across the mountains with several of the Italian’s senior staff. The trek took three days and nights. On the first morning they were woken by a German reconnaissance aircraft. The plane circled the olive groves dropping leaflets with a message in Greek which read:

  The Italian General Carta, together with some officers of his staff have fled to the mountains, probably with the intention of escaping from the island. FOR HIS CAPTURE DEAD OR ALIVE IS OFFERED A REWARD OF:

  THIRTY MILLION DRACHMA

  Carta’s response to the dropped message was: ‘Ah! Ah! Trente pièces d’argent! C’est toujours un contrat de Judas!’ He folded the leaflet into his pocket, vowing to reply.

  Eventually the fugitive party found their way to a huge cave by the sea where Tom Dunbabin, Bandouvas and forty of his guerrillas were waiting to depart. Bandouvas argued that he and his men should be evacuated first.

  In the dark they heard the noise of a motor launch, about a hundred yards off the beach. It was commanded by a Conradian figure, the white-bearded Captain Bob Young. Since the fall of Crete he had put ashore and taken off many SOE operatives in his 112-foot motor launch; on its forward deck was mounted a Hotchkiss 3-pounder gun. Calm and unflappable, Young stood on the armour-plated bridge peering through his binoculars, looking for the line of white surf that would tell him he was near the shore and for the Morse code signal flashed by torch that would tell him he was off the right beach.

  As soon as the recognition signals were seen, a rubber dinghy splashed into the sea, men clambered aboard and rowed towards the land, paying out a line as they went. A storm was brewing, sending up a swell. Leigh Fermor stood watching on the sand holding a large leather briefcase in his hands which, without Carta’s permission, Franco Tavana had given him. It contained comprehensive details of the defences of Crete. Leigh Fermor was anxious to get aboard, hand them personally to Captain Young, and return to the beach. The wind blew harder, drenching the fugitive party in spray as the dinghy bucked though the waves. Once on board Leigh Fermor went below to hand over the documents. On shore the noise of the sea drowned out the voice of Bandouvas, who was shouting, arguing that he should have been the first to go aboard.

  The sea was now very rough and Young decided that it was too risky to hang about so close to shore. He ordered his crew to weigh anchor and head for home. Leigh Fermor came back on deck and realised what was happening. He was being taken to Cairo. Bandouvas stood on the beach, humiliated by his rejection in favour of the Italian general, watching the wake of the launch as it powered south towards the horizon.

  It took another month before the another launch appeared to take Bo-Peep to Egypt.When General Bräuer realised that the kapitan had gone he had thousands of leaflets printed and distributed:

  17.11.43

  APPEAL

  The gang leader Bandouvas has abandoned the island altogether with his bodyguard. Thus has Crete been delivered from this paid subject who has caused so much harm to the peaceful population. If so many women have to be widowed and children orphaned, then this criminal is to blame.

  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.

  See Notes to Chapter 11

  12

  Operation Abduction

  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 133’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.

  See Notes to Chapter 12

  13

  The Best Laid Plans . . .

  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, ‘knees 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 la
nding 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 – 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 collab­orators 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.