Kidnap in Crete Read online

  In Zamalek, an expensive and glamorous part of Cairo, close to the exclusive Algezira Sporting Club, a group of SOE agents congregated in a house they named Tara, after the legendary seat of the High Kings of Ireland.

  Tara was first acquired by a young SOE recruit, Billy Moss, who thought it would be more fun to live there than in the official SOE hostel at Heliopolis, known as ‘Hangover Hall’. Moss was recruited to Force 133 SOE in September 1943 at the age of twenty-three. He was born in Japan to a Russian émigrée mother and her wealthy English businessman husband. He had the sort of ‘exotic’ background that appealed to some SOE Cairo recruiters; a certain worldliness, a strong sense of adventure, and very useful linguistic skills. Moss was a tall, handsome, ‘devilishly languid man. An adventurer with a literary bent and an attractive air of unaffected self deprecation.’ At the outbreak of war he joined the Coldstream Guards as an ensign and saw action fighting with Montgomery’s 8th Army in North Africa.

  ‘I found Tara, a whole villa, by chance,’ Moss recalled; I ‘was very careful who to have in it’. The house was grand, and came with its own cook and several other servants, including a butler called Abbas. At its centre was a vast ballroom, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a sprung parquet dancefloor over which hung two huge crystal chandeliers. Moss moved in with Pixie, his Alsatian puppy, and began to look for kindred spirits within Force 133 to join him.

  An early housemate was the Polish Countess Zofia Roza Maria Jadwiga Elzbieta Katarzyna Aniela Tarnowska, or Sophie, and soon nicknamed by Moss ‘Kitten’; they would marry in 1945. The countess was reckless and headstrong. When her mother sent her to a convent she rebelled, stood on a pudding to prove it was inedible and ran away, refusing to return. She and her first husband, Andrew Tarnowski, had a son who died, aged two, in July 1939, the same day that she gave birth to their second son, Jan. When war broke out Sophie declared that she would never abandon Poland and burnt her passport; but when the German army flooded across the Polish frontier she fled with her son and husband, leaving behind an aristocratic world of riches and privil­ege. The journey was the start of a series of adventures that two years later took them to Cairo. On the way, Sophie’s son died and her marriage to Andrew broke down. She used her connections with the British governor in Cairo to help her found the Polish branch of the International Red Cross and spent her days nursing badly injured soldiers and airmen and her nights with Cairo’s high society. When Moss met Sophie, he realised she was perfect for Tara and persuaded her to move in. Sophie arrived equipped with a swimming costume, a uniform, an evening dress and two mongooses (both named Kurka) which shared her bed. Sophie’s initial impressions of her future husband were: ‘extremely good looking, he danced well, he was amusing. He was a very good companion.’ Sophie’s reputation was protected by a fictitious chaperone, Madame Khayatt, who suffered from ‘distressingly poor health’ and was never seen.

  Another recruit to the household was Xan (Alexander Wallace) Fielding, an athletic, boyish-looking young man. Like Moss, Fielding was ex-Charterhouse. Like many Force 133 SOE agents, he was also a classicist and a linguist.

  They soon welcomed the handsome name-dropping buccaneer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, fresh from his exploits with Cretan andartes. Since his earliest years, Leigh Fermor had seemed ‘impervious to all forms of external discipline’: he had even been expelled from his school in Cambridge as a young boy on the grounds that he was too dangerous a mixture of ‘sophistication and recklessness’. There is a legend about him at school that he used to creep into the gym, climb up the exercise ropes and walk backwards and forwards, like an acrobat, along the narrow beam from which they hung.

  In 1933, two months after his eighteenth birthday, and the year in which Hitler proclaimed the ‘Thousand Year Reich’, Leigh Fermor took off across Europe, intent on walking to Constantinople. With him he carried the Oxford Book of English Verse and a copy of Horace’s Odes. Leigh Fermor’s considerable charm and resourcefulness attracted invitations from members of the European establishment and aristocracy: his itinerary was studded with châteaux, palazzi and Schlösser where he was a welcome and entertaining guest. In 1935 he reached Greece and became involved in a campaign by Royalist forces in Macedonia to stop a Republican revolution.

  Other Tara habitués included two Force 133 agents operating in Albania: Lieutenant Colonel ‘Billy’ McLean was a doyen of White’s and had fought as a guerrilla leader with Orde Wingate’s Gideon Force in Abyssinia; by the time he was twenty-four he been promoted lieutenant colonel. The other was David Crespigny Smiley, whose father was a baronet and whose mother was the daughter of Sir Claude Champignon de Crespigny, a balloonist, sportsman and adventurer. After the war Smiley came to hold the record for most falls in the Cresta Run. He described the days spent at Tara as the happiest time of his life. ‘I loved it. I really loved it. We were all such good friends. I don’t ever remember an angry or a cross word. We all got on frightfully well.’

  Tara became the hottest social spot in Cairo, its guests including diplomats, writers, war correspondents and royalty; King Farouk of Egypt turned up at the house one night with a case of champagne. The inhabitants of Tara awarded each other nicknames and had a bronze plaque made which they screwed to the front door of the villa. It declared that the house was lived in by, amongst others, Princess Dnieper-Petrovsk (Sophie Tarnowska); Sir Eustace Rapier (McLean); the Marquis of Whipstock (Smiley); the Hon. Rupert Sabretache (Rowland Winn); Lord Hugh Devildrive (Xan Fielding); Lord Rakehell (Leigh Fermor) and Mr Jack Jargon (Moss).

  Life at Tara was high-octane and not for the faint-hearted. During the days the group could be found sleeping off hangovers, sunbathing on the roof, or ‘hustling things at the neighbours’. Moss wrote in his diary that the entertainments at Tara included mock bullfights in the ballroom, one of which ended with a sofa being set alight and thrown blazing through a window. (Leigh Fermor was notorious for falling asleep with a lighted cigarette in his hand and waking up to find his surroundings on fire.) Another night a Polish officer was encouraged to shoot out the lights. For their first Christmas together in December 1943, Leigh Fermor cooked turkey stuffed with amphetamines (Benzedrine tablets). Sophie, who acted as hostess, remembered that in Poland they had made liqueurs by adding soft fruit to vodka. She tried to recreate this by adding prunes to raw alcohol in the bath. The result was not a success. After two days the mixture was tasted and found to be disgusting. The two agents who tried it passed out and Sophie complained that they should have left it for at least three weeks before trying it.

  On the eve of an agent’s deployment, ‘there would be a big party and a car would call and those who were going to be dropped into enemy territory left just like that. Without a goodbye, without anything,’ recalled Sophie Tarnowska. ‘We never allowed ourselves to be anxious about them. We believed that to be anxious was to accept the possibility of something dreadful happening to them.’

  It was men like these who were to dominate the work of SOE all over the Middle East, in the Balkans, Greece, and on the island of Crete.

  See Notes to Chapter 8

  9

  The Cretan Resistance is Born

  For Colonel Michail Filippakis the fall of Crete was especially bitter. He had fought in the defence of Heraklion and at the end of the battle had been a member of the party escorting the mayor of the town to make his formal surrender to the Germans. The ceremony took place in Lion Square. After nine days of fighting the colonel was exhausted and needed a shave. In spite of this he wore an immaculate uniform, with a shining Sam Browne belt across his chest. Next to him stood the mayor, nervous but smart in a white blazer and straw hat. In front of them stood a German Fallschirmjäger officer wearing a gleaming new jump smock, and camouflaged helmet, his parachutist’s belt tight round his waist emphasising his athletic physique. Over the German’s shoulders Colonel Filippakis could see armed guards and the streets to the square blocked off by military vehicles mounted with heavy machine guns.

 
; The colonel had not only lost his command, his home in the city had been destroyed in the bombing. After the surrender he had no choice but to head south to the mountains just above the south coast and the village where he had been born, Achendrias. The house he owned there was small and primitive; he was nearly penniless.

  When he heard that a band of civilians were trying to escape on a boat that had lain abandoned for more than four years he warned them that they would die. Either the boat – which was little more than a wreck – would sink or it would be spotted and strafed by the Luftwaffe. The men ignored him. They cut down a telegraph pole to make a mast and tore open two mattresses to get at the cotton stuffing which they used to caulk the rotten wood of the hull.

  Filippakis was impressed and thought they might possibly get through. He wrote a message to GHQ Middle East, put it in a bottle and gave it to the escapers. The message said that he was going to light a signal fire on a nearby beach at Maridaki. He proposed to do this in exactly one month’s time. The men and the bottle set off on a clear bright day, in the makeshift vessel which was named Argos.

  A month later the colonel kept his word. He and his son went to the beach, collected firewood, and lit a fire. Most of the wood was damp and there was no flame, only a lot of choking smoke. With watering eyes father and son stared into the dark, and to their horror saw a red flashing light which they thought was coming from a German patrol boat. Trapped, they hid behind a few rocks.

  The light vanished and they heard the sound of oars. Slowly a small rubber dinghy rowed by two men appeared off the beach. The sailors revealed themselves to be Royal Navy officers; the Argos had made it to Egypt; the fugitives had been picked up half dead by a destroyer patrolling ten miles off the Egyptian coast at Mersah Matruh. In the dinghy were stores, including aspirin, bandages, coffee and corned beef for the colonel’s village. Filippakis was told to expect some British officers to appear in another month’s time and to prepare a hiding place for them. Then the sailors pushed off, rowing the dinghy back to the submarine Torbay, from which it had come.

  The next month, at night, Colonel Filippakis heard a knock on his door. When he opened it he found himself staring into the faces of two British SOE officers: Jack Smith-Hughes of SOE and Ralph Stockbridge of ISLD. They had brought with them a heavy portable radio, spare batteries and a charging machine. Filippakis welcomed them in. The Cretan arms of SOE and ISLD were in business.

  After his escape to Egypt, Smith-Hughes had written a report describing his contact with Colonel Papadakis and the AEAK organisation. Smith-Hughes volunteered to return Crete and help forge links with the colonel and his associates. His offer was accepted, he was rapidly put through Force 133 training and sent with Stockbridge on the Torbay.

  In addition to developing contacts with resistance leaders, Smith-Hughes’s orders were to send military intelligence back to GHQ, and to carry on rounding up British and Commonwealth stragglers. He was given the codename Yanni and dressed in Cretan baggy trousers, high boots, a black shirt and a black-fringed turban, though his bulky frame and pinkish complexion made it difficult for him to look like anything other than an Englishman. Eventually he was persuaded to wear long trousers, like a city dweller. Colonel Papadakis assigned Psychoundakis as Smith-Hughes’s runner. After ten weeks Smith-Hughes completed his mission and was recalled to Cairo in December, where he took over the running of SOE’s Crete desk.

  A few weeks later another SOE officer, Xan Fielding, codename Aleko, disembarked from the Torbay. Other agents followed, including classicist Tom Dunbabin and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Dunbabin hailed from Tasmania and, like John Pendlebury, was a distinguished archaeologist. A fellow of All Souls College Oxford, and former deputy director of the British School in Athens, he could not drive, did not shoot, box, ski or even ride a bike. He was, though, very tough, One night Dunbabin was sleeping with some guerrilla fighters in the mountains, his head resting against a rock as a pillow. A young fighter, a boy of about fourteen, offered Dunbabin a pillow made from the soft packing used in parachute containers. Dunbabin turned down the offer, throwing the pillow away and declaring: ‘We are at war!’

  Cairo put great store by Dunbabin, rarely acting without asking his opinion, sometimes bringing him back to the Egyptian capital to do so.

  In May 1942 it was decided to send parties of commandos drawn from the Special Boat Service and the Special Air Service to attack the airfields on western Crete. Crete had become an important transit camp and supply point for North Africa. Rommel’s army and the Germans were winning the war in the desert; the Afrika Korps had routed the Allies and it seemed to be only a matter of time before Rommel took Cairo.

  Tom Dunbabin provided the commando parties with local guides: Giorgios Psarakis, Kimonas Zografakis and Kostas Mavrantonakis. The raiders ran into considerable difficulties and with mixed outcomes: one group managed to destroy five aircraft and 200 tons of stores and fuel at Kasteli airfield, while another destroyed or badly damaged twenty Junkers 88 bombers; ten German soldiers were killed in the raids. In reprisals, fifty Cretan civilians – including Jews, a seventy-year-old priest, and a former governor general of the island – were rounded up and executed.

  By the summer of 1942 the small group of SOE and ISLD offi­cers on Crete were working closely with andartes, and strengthening the structure of the Cretan resistance. Manolis Paterakis, a slightly built man with a large nose and chin, who in profile looked like Mr Punch, became Patrick Leigh Fermor’s right-hand man. His job was to act as the Englishman’s guide and liaison officer. He was a brave fighter and former gendarme. Leigh Fermor described him as ‘a good egg, wiry as an Indian, crack shot, granite, with a sense of conviviality, irony, stoicism and humour’. Paterakis was the second-born of six boys and had fought against the Germans in the battle for Crete. After the German victory he fled to the mountains and joined a guerrilla group, becoming a senior member of the Cretan resistance.

  Yerakari remained an important centre of the resistance, a staging post on the route across the mountains that the British came to call the ‘High Spy Route’. The Amari valley – Lotus Land – was a welcome place of refuge to many British agents. The people were so hospitable, wrote Dunbabin, that they ‘plucked you by the sleeve as you walked down the narrow street, to come in and drink a glass of wine with them’. John Houseman, who would soon join Tom Dunbabin in Amari, remembered: ‘It was rather tiring, to be continually rather afraid of traitors and German patrols, but always without fail, if I went to a village or town, I was offered food, drink and company fit for any “King of the Mountains” as we were so often called.’

  Dunbabin succeeded in setting up an extremely efficient intelligence-gathering network. Like Stockbridge he believed in the power of good intelligence and thought it more important than sabotage or other forms of direct action. His radio was kept in a mountain hideout three hours’ walk away from another powerful resistance stronghold in Anogia. Messengers came from all over the island with information about Wehrmacht troop movements, shipping in the harbours and anything else that might help GHQ Middle East piece together what the Axis powers were up to. Dunbabin had spies everywhere, even in the Heraklion Kommandantur – where a female agent, Kyveli Sergiou, smuggled confidential military documents to the surgery of Dr Yiamalakis to be photographed and the negatives sent to Dunbabin to be passed on to Cairo.

  ‘Our work consisted chiefly of keeping our finger on the pulse by organising and using a most efficient spy service which covered the whole of the island,’ John Houseman wrote later. ‘Sabotage was virtually impossible, not because of the difficulty, but because of the small value and the disastrous atrocities which the Germans carried out after the act . . . The danger was not for us personally, for we could always run away, but the danger was with a few fam­ilies who put us up and offered us their all, for they, if betrayed, had to suffer the loss of their lives and all their belongings and perhaps the burning of the whole village.’

  As the resistance became mor
e organised, Colonel Papadakis became more difficult to control. He began to refuse to cooperate with any Cretans who were not part of AEAK (Supreme Committee of Cretan Struggle). On 12 February 1942, in the presence of Xan Fielding, Papadakis and three others held a meeting of the committee of the AEAK. The members drew up a memorandum to be transmitted by Fielding to SOE Cairo. The committee argued that it was the only appropriate organisation for GHQ to deal with. They asked for more agents to be sent to the island, and demanded that they, the committee, should have complete freedom of action and ‘must enjoy the absolute trust from General Headquarters’. It also demanded that GHQ did not interfere with the internal workings of AEAK and that it should have the final say in choosing people to work with.

  In Cairo, Jack Smith-Hughes wrote a response to Papadakis and sent it to Crete with two Greek SOE recruits: Second Lieutenant Evangelos Vandoulas (nickname Vangelis, codename ‘Rich’) and Private Apostolos Evangelou (nickname Manolis, codename ‘Poor’). The letter stated that it was the Allied intention to liberate Crete as soon as possible and apologised that the British had not already done so. It told him that Vangelis Vandoulas was to be the liaison officer between AEAK and Cairo and that ‘he is also authorised by our general to contact every person he judges he has to’.