308 • LETTER INTERCEPTION UNIT
debate continues about whether the ruse was successful. The hated
Muller was recalled to Crete and was responsible for many atrocities,
for which he was hanged in Athens in December 1945. On 15 May,
having endured the company of Kreipe, with whom they communi-
cated in schoolboy French and Latin, the only languages they had in
common, they boarded a British motor launch and took their prisoner
to Mersa Matruh.
When the operation was recounted inIll Met by Moonlight,a
movie version of Moss’s book, there was but a single mention of hos-
tages being taken from villages around Heraklion in reprisal to the
abduction, a fact also skated over in Moss’s book, which suggested
that the hostages had been taken much later and that the principal
atrocities, such as the complete destruction of whole villages, includ-
ing Lokhria, Sakiouria, Magarikari, and Kamares, had been in retali-
ation for quite separate incidences of arms smuggling. Later, in 1944,
every house in Anoyia was dynamited, and the ruins then dive-
bombed by the Luftwaffe, and the connection between the two
events—Kreipe’s abduction and the execution of hostages—remains
highly controversial on the island to this day. Obviously these were
topics that neither Moss nor the filmmakers wished to pursue, but
they were certainly known toXan Fielding, the production’s techni-
cal adviser, not least because his SOE colleagueBickham Sweet-
Escott, in his 1965 memoirsBaker Street Irregular, claimed that 200
Cretans had been shot as a direct consequence of the escapade.
After the war Leigh Fermor settled in Greece and established a
reputation as a leading travel writer. He was knighted in 2004, for
encouraging Anglo-Hellenic relations, having previously declined a
similar honor for his contribution to literature.LETTER INTERCEPTION UNIT (LIU). Always an essential
weapon for the Security Service, the mail intercept warrant issued by
the home secretary has enabledMI5to monitor the correspondence
of suspects through the service provided by the LIU of the General
Post Office (GPO) based at Mount Pleasant. Monitoring of mail ad-
dressed toKarl Gustav Ernstin 1913 led to the detention of more
than 21 other German spies on the first day of hostilities in August
1914.
During World War I this work was undertaken initially at Salisbury