LEIGH FERMOR, SIR PATRICK• 307tion ofSpecial Operations Executive(SOE) and participated in one
of the most daring operations of the war.
The original idea, to abduct a senior German officer inCrete, had
been dreamed up by Leigh Fermor andW. Stanley Moss, and their
target was General Muller, the hated commander of the 22nd Sevas-
topol (Bremen) Division. However, by the time their team had as-
sembled, having flown separately from Tocra, near Benghazi, in
April 1944, Muller had been replaced by Major GeneralKarl-Hein-
rich Kreipeof the 22nd Panzer Division, a veteran of Verdun in poor
health who had arrived five weeks earlier to convalesce, following
two years on the Russian front. The original plan was to parachute
onto the Katharo Plateau to an SOE reception committee headed by
Sandy Rendel, formerly theTimes’s diplomatic correspondent, but
after Leigh Fermor had jumped, the plane flew into cloud and Moss
and the two Cretans accompanying them were unable to follow and
they returned to Brindisi. Over the next two months they made a fur-
ther seven attempts to reach the drop zone, but in the end they were
delivered by sea, at Soutsouko.
Despite opposition to the SOE plan fromELAS, the Greek Com-
munist guerrilla movement, which anticipated heavy reprisals taken
against the civilian population, Leigh Fermor and Moss succeeded in
using a traffic signal to stop the general’s unescorted Opel staff car
at a road junction outside Heraklion on the night of 26 April, en route
from the officers mess in Ano Arkhanais to his residence, the Villa
Ariadne in Knossos. Dressed as GermanFeldgendarmeriemilitary
policemen, the two SOE officers silenced the driver with a cosh and
then, having bundled the general onto the back seat, handcuffed to a
pair of Cretan partisans, drove through the center of Heraklion, with
Leigh Fermor sitting in the front seat wearing the general’s cap, and
past no less than 22 traffic controls and roadblocks, into the moun-
tains where they evaded German search parties for the next three
weeks. According to Dilys Powell, who interviewed the two Cretans
that sat on the general, Micky and Elias Athanasakis, his driver was
killed by other guerrillas who had been at the road junction and later
melted away into the night.
In the abandoned car they left a British greatcoat and a commando
beret, and a letter declaring that only British personnel had partici-
pated in the abduction. This was intended to prevent reprisals, but the