191
gestion in the courts, Ramzi was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment,
albeit in the full knowledge that a subsequent government might reduce
such a sentence.^29
(Narrative 3 [Abwehr]) Operation ASLAN. In 1942, while Gottfried
Müller was planning his ill-conceived Operation MAMMUT, Lazaros
Contopoulos, a Greek cavalry major originally from Mosul, was recruited
by Abw II Athens station to execute a somewhat similar operation in
Kurdistan. Contopoulos was an intelligent, able linguist (English, French,
Greek, Turkish, Arabic) who had excellent connections in Iraq (and Syria),
but he had been forced to flee to Greece in 1937 after the assassination of
his powerful friend, the Iraqi military dictator General Bakr Sidqi al-
Askari (1890–1937).^30 Contopoulos planned to complete a W/T course in
Athens and then deploy to Hasakah (Syria). His plan was to stir up trouble
among the Kurds, to organize their bands into one force, and to transmit
military intelligence to Athens. The plan was approved by Berlin and
received considerable attention from Abw II, who provided Contopoulos
with the exclusive services of an Abw II NCO. In June 1943, instead of
running him as a solo agent, an attempt was made to have Contopoulos
cooperate on a joint operational plan with an Arab medical officer, Dr. Said
el-Katib. However, it quickly became evident to Abw II that the two men
were incompatible, so the idea of a joint plan had to be abandoned. Katib
returned to his Arab unit and was ultimately transferred to FAT 202, an
Abwehr field-reconnaissance troop in the Balkans. Several months later,
during the autumn of 1943, Contopoulos finally departed alone from
Bulgaria for Turkey, where he was to receive W/T equipment and funds
for his planned operation from KONO. However, somewhere between
Sofia and Istanbul, Contopoulos mysteriously vanished. He never appeared
in Turkey, nor was he ever heard from again. Operation ASLAN was aban-
doned and remains yet another unsolved enigma of the intelligence war.^31
For most of the war years, the enormous, highly vulnerable Anglo-
Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) refinery on the Shatt al-Arab at Abadan, as
well as its associated infrastructure in the hinterlands of Khuzestan and
Kurdistan (oil wells, pipelines, pumping stations, etc.), was considered by
the German intelligence services, both Abwehr and RSHA VI, to be the
greatest prize in the entire Middle East.^32 Together with the Persian Gulf
ports, railway installations, and huge numbers of vessels to be sunk, there
could hardly have been a more tempting sabotage target for operational
planners. Yet, the sheer size of the target area and its extreme distance well
beyond the normal range of German aircraft or submarines, especially
A PLACE IN THE SHADE