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Bassar, whose Pizhdar tribal territory extended into Persian Kurdistan
(Western Azerbaijan province). Müller originally planned to involve the
Turkish and Syrian Kurds too; however, he was explicitly warned by an
Abwehr staff officer not to cross the frontier into those countries. Together
with the Kurds, he then intended to carry out a three-part operation based
in northern Iraq involving espionage, the maximum disruption of Allied
forces, and Abw II’s stock-in-trade: sabotage. The operation was to be
staged in three phases. The initial parachute drop (MAMMUT 1) was to
be followed by two subsequent insertions: MAMMUT 2 (supply) and
MAMMUT 3 (political/medical). This plan, submitted to the head of
Abw II, Erwin Lahousen, for final approval in the spring of 1943, was
achieved only after many substantive revisions had been made that reflected
the Abwehr’s shifting priorities before and after the defeat at Stalingrad.
Besides Müller himself (promoted prior to insertion from lieutenant to
acting major [PANTHER]), the personnel selected for MAMMUT 1
were his deputy, Fritz Hoffmann (promoted to acting lieutenant [MAKI])
as W/T operator, Georg Konieczny (promoted to acting lieutenant
[QUHU]), and a young Kurdish agent, Rashid Ramzi (BAER), who was
to act as guide/interpreter. Left behind in Germany were six men who
would be ready to train others who had already been recruited for
MAMMUT 2 and 3. Accompanying the group as far as Simferopol
(Crimea) were the group’s Luftwaffe liaison officer and Müller’s brother
Hans (or Johannes [SEEHUND]), who was to handle all W/T commu-
nications with the group, relaying them from Crimea to Berlin.
The aerial insertion was hopelessly botched by the Luftwaffe special-
purposes squadron flight crew. Due to a major navigational error, the
MAMMUT stick was dropped 220 km off-target, into an agricultural
community near Mosul instead of over the Zagros foothills between Erbil
and Rowanduz. Most of their equipment was lost, including their two
Abwehr 85/14 W/T sets. Even those items that could be retrieved had to
be abandoned in the team’s eagerness to strike out for their intended
dropzone in the largely uninhabited mountains northeast of Erbil (i.e. in
the Rowanduz region, south of Rayat and the Gardaneh-ye-Shinak Pass).
After ascertaining that they had actually been dropped near the River
Tigris, not far from Mosul, and despite suffering acutely from the intense
heat, the group covered a considerable distance (81 km) on foot and
briefly by horse and donkey, reaching Erbil in four days. There it was
decided to press on towards the mountains, to the village of Benisilauya,
between Erbil and Koy Sanjaq, which belonged to Ramzi’s cousin, where