Kidnap in Crete Read online

To the German Authorities in Crete

  Gentlemen. Your Divisional Commander, General KREIPE, was captured a short time ago by a British raiding force under our command. By the time you read this both he and we will be on our way to Cairo.

  We would like to point out most emphatically that this operation has been carried out without the help of the CRETANS or CRETAN PARTISANS, and the only guides used were serving soldiers of his HELLENIC MAJESTY’S FORCES in the Middle East, who came with us.

  Your General is an honourable prisoner of war, and will be treated with the consideration owing to his rank.

  Any reprisals against the local population will be wholly unwarranted and unjust.

  Auf baldiges Wiedersehen! [See you soon!]

  PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

  Major

  WILLIAM STANLEY MOSS

  Captain.

  P.S. We are very sorry to have to leave this beautiful car behind.

  The two men signed the paper and added the imprints of their signet rings for good measure. Then they folded it and put it carefully in a heavy, important-looking envelope.

  While the work was going on in the house, Boutzalis and his men sat doing nothing in the gloom and heat of the disused wine press. After twenty-four hours they were getting restless. At first the kapitan only allowed his men out to answer the demands of nature. Before long he found it impossible to stop them crawling through the tiny passage that led to the tempting, bright, green outside world. He argued to himself that they had lookouts posted and were not likely to be surprised by a German patrol, so he too came out of hiding, followed by all the others.

  It is difficult to keep a secret in any rural community, and no more so than on Crete, where even the most deserted, scrubby hillside vineyards have eyes. A rumour began to spread in the village that something odd was happening in Pavlos Zografistos’s old wine press.

  Later that day Leigh Fermor told Pavlos what the mission was really about. The Cretan was horrified, asking if they had any idea of the reprisals the abduction could cause. He ordered the men to get out, ‘Leave my house I don’t want people to be killed.’ Leigh Fermor tried to persuade him that the letter he had written was going to make it clear that no locals were involved in the kidnap. Zografistos demanded to be allowed to talk to his father in the nearby village of Patsides about the wisdom of collaborating in ‘a big job’ with such potentially lethal consequences.

  Other men arrived to support the abduction team. Nikos Komis from Thrapsano and Mitsos Tzatzas, from Episkopi, two ‘silent mountain men’ who were to act as guides once the general was a prisoner. Another guide appeared, Yanni Vitoros, a young man who was to lead them from the abandoned car up to the village of Anogia, where they were to rendezvous after the kidnap. Anogia was one of the strongholds of resistance fighters, an almost impregnable and remote village, which the German soldiers hated going near. Another man joined the group, Stratis Saviolakis, a serving policeman from Sfakia, stationed in the Archanes area. The Germans knew and trusted him, which meant he could move about without causing suspicion. He had already reconnoitred the road from Archanes to the Villa Ariadne, pacing the junction and driving by in a car to see how long it would take to drive from Heraklion to the kidnap site. Stratis reported to the team morning and evening, keeping them abreast with events at the garrison in Archanes.

  The next day Zografistos returned from the meeting with his father. He had calmed down and said he would do everything he could to support the operation; he later confided to Tyrakis that his father had got angry with him and told him that he ‘was not a man’ if he did not help with the operation, even if it meant the ruin of the whole Heraklion region and the death of many hostages. Tyrakis wondered who else Pavlos had spoken to.

  Ilias Athanassakis was as good as his word. He had kept the general’s car under constant observation, night and day, until he could distinguish it from any other vehicle on the road. He knew the sound of the engine, the silhouette of the car and how the headlights looked at night: even though they were covered by slotted blackout cowls, they were still bright. He and Micky Akoumianakis had abandoned the plan to use a warning system of wires and buzzers; they would rely on torches alone. Ilias’s plan was to watch Kreipe leave and then jump on his bicycle and pedal to a spot where he could signal by torch to Mitsos, who would relay the signal to the abductors who were in his line of sight. One flash meant the car was on its way and on its own; two flashes meant that it had an escort.

  On 24 April, the day earmarked for the operation, Micky brought bad news: Kreipe had gone to his office as normal after lunch, but had returned to the Villa Ariadne before sunset. The team did not know why he had he done this. They wondered whether someone had tipped him off that bandits were in the area. Pavlos thought someone might have noticed the amount of activity near the normally quiet farm, and that perhaps this was the real reason for the visit by the four-man patrol the previous day.

  Pavlos Zografistos began to lose his nerve. What would happen, he wondered, if the Germans searched the area? They were cap­able of throwing a cordon of two or three hundred heavily armed men round a suspicious area and searching it with a fine-toothed comb. The abduction team had grown to twelve men; together with Boutzalis’s back-up men they were putting a strain on the villagers’ resources. Twenty-four extra mouths could not be fed for long. Pavlos Zografistos told Leigh Fermor that he had to do something to reduce the risks.

  In the evening, after the sun had set, the SOE men moved quietly along the goat track, through the olive groves to the wine press for a conference with Boutzalis. The big Cretan leader was devastated when Leigh Fermor told him that he and his men were no longer part of the operation and must go back to their base hideout at once. He was to take the two Russians with him in the hope that they could form the basis of the resistance group of escaped POWs that Moss planned to lead later in the year.

  In spite of their kapitan’s disappointment, Boutzalis’s men themselves did not seem to be too upset at having to go. They filed off into the night, shaking hands and each taking the gold sovereign which Leigh Fermor offered them. The Russians were given a Marlin sub-machine gun each and some ammunition. Then they embraced their English rescuers, and left. They were a real loss, being strong walkers always ready to carry twice as much as anyone else. With Boutzalis gone the team had no armed escort to protect them during the kidnap. Things would get worse later in the operation when they had to lose Micky and Ilias, whose job was to clear up the kidnap area, and then get back to Heraklion, where they could not be spared from counter-intelligence work. Moss and Leigh Fermor considered abandoning the plan.

  Micky knew that an old friend of Leigh Fermor’s was in the area, Antonis Zoidakis, another policeman, based in the Amari valley. A runner left with a letter begging him to join the group. Zoidakis had been with the resistance ever since fighting in the battle of Crete. In 1943, SOE had arranged for him to go to Egypt to be trained at their irregular warfare school near Haifa. According to Giorgios Tyrakis, Antonis’s favourite sport was ‘throat slitting’.

  Antonis Zoidakis appeared at around two in the morning full of enthusiasm and worried that he might have missed out on the big adventure. Leigh Fermor was delighted to see him and the two men spent the rest of the night reminiscing. He described Antonis, ‘sitting on my bed in his old policeman’s jacket, his cheerful face lit by an oil lamp. We talked and smoked until dawn.’

  The waiting and the constant threat of German patrols began to wear the group down. ‘Spirits were low,’ wrote Leigh Fermor, ‘anxiety hung in the air. It needed much outward optimism and cheerfulness to keep spirits from flagging. We talked, read out loud and worried.’ The man who found the stress most difficult to deal with was the guide Yanni Vitoros, who was becoming physically ill. Pavlos’s sister was also breaking down under the strain of hiding guerrilla fighters in her house. In the early morning of 25 April news came in that there was more enemy activity in the area; she could take it no longer and asked t
hem to leave.

  On the border of Pavlos’s property was a deep dried-up river bed. It had an overhanging rock that formed a sort of cave. The area was surrounded by saplings; not as comfortable as the upstairs room they had just vacated, but much more peaceful. The men spread their blankets and slept. The next day they were brought eggs, cheese and wine and they ate under a warm sun, enjoying the peace and quiet of their new hideout.

  At midday Pavlos Zografistos appeared, creeping up the dried river bed, his clothes and boots covered in dust. In his hand he held a letter from the National Organisation of Crete, the EOK, an organisation normally sympathetic to the SOE. The letter warned Leigh Fermor that they knew about the plan and demanded that it be called off because the risk to the local population was too great. If he refused they threatened to expose him to the Germans. A special envoy arrived from the EOK, Dr Lignos, a senior member of the group. He repeated that the proposed oper­ation was madness and must be abandoned because of the harm it would do to Crete, even if it was successful.

  The usually resourceful Leigh Fermor was stumped; he had no idea how the plan had become so widely known. Gathering the kidnappers together, he told them that he was calling the whole thing off. He ordered them to pack up and leave the area at once. The men looked at him in grim silence, shifting their weight, the rocks crunching under their feet.

  The silence was broken by Paterakis, who had been Leigh Fermor’s right-hand man for more than two years. ‘Major,’ he said, ‘we have come here to carry out a mission, and carry it out we must!’ One of the others added: ‘Dr Lignos is waiting for your answer in Pavlos’s house. Do not let him browbeat you, we are not leaving without the general, alive or dead.’ The others murmured their agreement. Leigh Fermor threw down his cigarette, trod it into the ground, and said: ‘Right we’ll talk to him again.’

  Before going back to Dr Lignos he wrote a letter to the EOK, which he hoped would confuse them about the timing of the kidnap, making them think that the abduction was not going to happen for at least another twenty-four hours. Then he trudged up the gulley to the house and spoke to the doctor, spinning him the same story. Lignos went away satisfied. Leigh Fermor gambled that they would capture Kreipe that night, before his letter reached Heraklion.

  After the departure of the doctor, two figures came crawling up the gorge, Stratis, the policeman and Ilias, both hotfoot from watching the general’s movements. He had not left the Villa Ariadne all day. In the last three days his routine had changed dramatically, making it even more likely that the Germans had discovered the plot. The group tensed, expecting to hear the grinding gears of lorries moving along the hill, disgorging soldiers armed with machine guns, grenades and rifles. If they were attacked the small band of kidnappers would not have a chance.

  They resolved to do nothing until dark, to stay under cover and not move about. The slightest sign that there were men in hiding in the area might bring the German army down on their heads. Darkness fell, Leigh Fermor drew an outline of the car in the dust, and made the team rehearse the ambush for the hundredth time. The two torch men stood in for the general and his driver. The group mimed dragging them out of an imaginary vehicle, spraying sub-machine-gun bullets at an imaginary escort, flinging themselves into imaginary ditches. At last they stopped for the night.

  Tired and depressed, the two British officers lay on their backs, talking, smoking, staring at the stars and singing softly. It looked as though the whole enterprise might come to nothing. They decided to give the operation another twenty-four hours before abandoning it.

  The next day dawned lonely for the kidnap team. Leigh Fermor wrote later: ‘Between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasmal or hideous dream.’ No one knew whether there was German activity in the area. No one seemed to know anything for certain; rumours were everywhere, unsettling the small band. To pass the time Leigh Fermor recited snippets of Shakespeare which he had taught himself to say in German.

  Around noon it began to rain and Pavlos Zografistos again rushed up the gorge saying they must move at once. Down in the valley they could hear the raised voices of men, women and children, hunting for snails, heading straight towards them. The team scrambled on up the hill, dragging their weapons and equipment. Their next hideout was a damp, chalky cave, its walls running with rainwater, soaking their clothes. They wondered whether General Kreipe had taken a good lunch and was now speeding back to his headquarters in the comfort of his staff car. Leigh Fermor kept spirits up with pep talks in Greek. Manolis Paterakis and Giorgios Tyrakis worried that Pavlos and his sister were losing their nerve. They thought it might be safer if Pavlos joined the kidnappers. The two men agreed that if he was with them he would be a sort of hostage, he would not be tempted to talk to anyone and neither would his sister.

  Without warning, Yanni, the guide, began convulsing: frothing at the mouth, gibbering, moaning. He started to hallucinate, grabbing Moss’s foot and banging the toecap with a cigarette tin. Next he tried to fling away his boots, ripping his socks off and holding them up in front of his eyes, chattering incoherently. Finally he lay on the ground in the pouring rain making strange clicking noises. The group dragged him into the shelter of a rock, where he lay, refusing to stand up. They were going to have to abandon him and leave him lying among the myrtle bushes with the rain dripping off the end of his nose. Moss hoped that the snail-hunters would not find him, or, if they did, that he would be too deranged to tell them anything. Stratis, the policeman, was deputed to take over to guide them to Anogia; he assured them he knew the route. The rain stopped, the snail hunters’ voices trailed away into the distance.

  In the morning Ilias appeared with the news that General Kreipe had left for his headquarters; he was back in his old routine. Calm descended on the group, ‘as though everything was out of our hands’. Leigh Fermor and Moss changed into their German uniforms and sat smoking, tense and silent as they waited for dusk.

  See Notes to Chapter 15

  16

  The Trap Springs

  That evening, in the officers’ mess at the German garrison in Archanes, Kreipe’s aide-de-camp asked him if he would care to join him in a game of cards. Kreipe accepted the invitation and asked his ADC to telephone the Villa Ariadne to say he would be late: he would dine later, at half past nine rather than eight.

  In his hideout above Anogia, Tom Dunbabin was running a fever. His radio was the only link the kidnappers had with GHQ and it was protected by Kapitan Petrakoyiorgi and his andartes. Dunbabin told his radio operator that he was going to retreat to the Amari valley until he recovered and would be out of contact. The operator would have to make sure that any news was sent to Cairo. Access to his radio was vital to the success of the kidnap. Dunbabin did not know that he was in the early stages of malaria.

  The sun set and the abductors walked through the darkness towards the ambush area, Point A. There were others out that night, shadows slinking through the dark, poachers and sheep rustlers. Leigh Fermor grunted at them in German, scaring them off. When they reached Point A, the team were surprised at how steeply the road from Archanes dropped to the junction; neither Ilias nor Stratis had warned them of this and the British agents had not spotted it on their first recce. Moss worried that if the chauffeur stopped without using the handbrake, the heavy Opel could roll forward, giving the general a chance to escape; he was also concerned that if they pulled the driver out of the car it might roll down the road and crash into one of the ditches, leaving them without a getaway vehicle. There was nothing they could do, it was too late to change the plan.

  For a full list of the kidnap team see p. 255.

  The team split up and moved into their positions. Micky and Stratis ran towards Archanes, disappearing into the dark, heading for the positions where they could relay Ilias’s torch signals to the main group at the junction. Leigh Fermor and Moss took up their positions on the junction itself, Antonios Papaleonidas, Grigorios and Manolis, their guns slu
ng over their shoulders, slid into place beside them; on the other side of the road, the driver’s side, Nikos Komis, Antonis Zoidakis and Giorgios scrambled into the ditch. Mitsos Tzatzas ran across the junction towards Heraklion to watch for traffic coming towards Archanes; neither Leigh Fermor nor Moss knew that he had Pavlos Zografistos with him.

  Leigh Fermor checked his red torch and Moss balanced the police paddle against the side of the ditch, ready to pick up when the time came to run into position. The noise of feet crunching on stones stopped. For a moment there was silence, then low whistles signalled that everyone was in place.

  In Archanes, Ilias leant on his bicycle, hidden in the shadows, staring at the entrance to the German headquarters, waiting for the general’s car to appear.

  In the ditches, the kidnappers heard the sound of a vehicle travelling fast. A Kübelwagen, the Volkswagen version of a light jeep, bucketed round the bend, the engine revving as the driver changed down, slowing towards the junction. Hidden by scrub, the kidnappers saw that the vehicle had its hood up, making it impossible to see who was in it. The Kübelwagen drove on, silence returned to the junction. Then another Kübelwagen travelling from the oppos­ite direction swung right, heading towards Archanes its headlights sweeping over the bushes hiding the crouching figures.

  After a long wait the grinding gears and revs of heavily laden lorries echoed across the rocky landscape, coming from the direction of Archanes. The headlight of a motorcycle combination lit up the road, the vehicle roared round the bend, the driver changed down and braked hard to a halt at the junction; in the sidecar next to him sat a machine-gunner. The two men peered about, the driver glanced back over his shoulder. The gunner traversed his MG34 Spandau across the unseen men in the ditches. The weapon was capable of firing 1,500 rounds a minute, faster than any other machine gun in the world. The powerful BMW engine ticked over while the driver waited, pulled up his goggles, and again squinted back into the darkness. The noise of the heavy engines got louder, two lorries ground into sight, the motorcycle driver slipped his goggles back over his eyes, revved his engine and drove on, the gunner leaning expertly into the bend as they swung left towards the Villa Ariadne,