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the group sought refuge in a nearby cave, and Müller attempted to evolve
a new plan of action. Now focussing on Turkish Kurdistan, where he
thought he might—if Turkey were to declare war on Germany—rally
Turkish Kurds to fight against the Turkish authorities, Müller decided to
contact Paul Leverkuehn at KONO in Istanbul. Müller’s rather elaborate
plan was to send Konieczny across the Turkish frontier to get himself
arrested, interned, and brought to the attention of the German diplomatic
representatives, who would ultimately secure his release and direct him to
Leverkuehn. Ramzi was instructed to find a guide in Erbil to lead
Konieczny to the northern frontier; meanwhile a group of smugglers
agreed to guide Müller, Hoffmann, and Ramzi to the Zagros Mountains.
After Ramzi had left for Erbil, the three Germans spent the night in a
lonely house near their cave. It was approached on the morning of 29 June
1943 by an Iraqi police detachment, to whom the Germans immediately
surrendered without offering any resistance. Ramzi was captured the next
day. Operation MAMMUT had lasted 12 days and had achieved nothing.
When news of the disaster reached Berlin, MAMMUT 2 and 3 were
immediately cancelled. Even if all three parachute drops had been per-
fectly executed, unless the Germans had invaded from the north within
the year, and unless Müller had succeeded in mobilizing the estimated
120,000 Kurdish warriors whose support he anticipated,^21 it is doubtful if
these ill-conceived missions could have endured for more than a few
months at best, or possibly only for a few weeks. The British security forces
arrayed against them in Iraq would have been formidable; the operational
support they would have received from Berlin, Istanbul, or southern
Russia virtually nonexistent.^22 As things turned out, with Müller out of the
war, no operations in Iraq could be contemplated for the foreseeable
future by either the Abwehr or RSHA VI. For all his inadequacies, Müller’s
role as the driving force behind all phases of the MAMMUT operation was
indispensable, and the Germans’ talent pool was simply too shallow to
provide them with a suitable replacement leader. The irony remained, of
course, that it was not Müller himself who had failed; it was others who
had failed him.
Seen from the viewpoint of the Defence Security Office (DSO) Iraq, it
soon became clear that MAMMUT was essentially a reconnaissance mis-
sion that posed only a very limited threat to Iraq, but was presumably a
precursor of more potent missions to come. The most significant develop-
ment, however, which had far-reaching positive consequences for British
intelligence globally, was the high-yield interrogation of Gottfried Müller
A PLACE IN THE SHADE