The Special Operations Executive (SOE) section coordinating operations in Yugoslavia during World War II, also designated DH. The campaign in Yugoslavia was one of contradictions. Most of the missions, particularly to Draza Mihailovic’s liaison officers, were dreadfully ill equipped and ill prepared, and the choice of personnel was quite eccentric. When, for example, there was a determined effort to send in reinforcements during the spring of 1943, the majority of SOE’s Serbo-Croat speakers were Canadians and members of the Communist party. Two of FUNGUS’S three agents had fought in the Spanish Civil War, and HOATHLEY I consisted entirely of miners from Quebec. About 28 Canadian or American immigrants returned to fight in their homeland, of whom five disappeared, and at least three chose to remain in Yugoslavia after the war, taking jobs in the Communist regime, evidently undeterred by the appalling massacres that followed Tito’s takeover.

Several of those who fought with the Cetniks and Partisans have written accounts of their experiences, with varying degrees of bitterness. Certainly many of the SOE personnel who managed to return to Bari held strong views on what was perceived to be mismanagement in Cairo, if not ruthless political manipulation. Occasionally the high feelings reached Castellani, where Force 266 was accommodated, and sometimes those who had backed the Cetniks, and thought they had been betrayed, had to be separated from the rest. A few of the survivors have recounted their adventures. Jasper Rootham, who liaised with Mihailovic’s forces wrote Miss Fire in 1946, while William Deakin (The Embattled Mountain), Donald Hamilton- Hill (SOE Assignment), Lindsay Rogers (Guerilla Surgeon), Michael Lees (The Rape of Serbia), and Basil Davidson (Partisan Picture) have described their experiences fighting with the Partisans. Together they provide an epic picture of disjointed supplies, atrocious weather, inadequate shelter, and poor food, but an indomitable spirit among the native population that, regrettably, rarely set aside the complexities of local politics to combine against the common enemy. Against a backdrop of spasmodic communications, insufficient air support, and a headquarters staff that could never be completely up to date with the latest developments in the field, the liaison personnel often felt isolated if not ignored. All those who experienced the Yugoslav scene at first hand found it both harrowing and rewarding. Another common strand, highlighted by Deakin and based on his own acute observation while leading TYPICAL, SOE’s pathfinding mission to Tito in May 1943, was the ‘‘lack of vital and accurate intelligence of events within Yugoslavia at crucial moments.’’ The fact that TYPICAL’S mission was officially concluded in September 1943, but its survivors were unable to reach Italy until early December is itself evidence of some of the other difficulties encountered by SOE’s men in the field that they regarded as avoidable.

The Albanian subsection of Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Cairo established a forward base, designated Force 266, at Bari, Italy, in 1944 to run operations into Albania. The country had been under Axis occupation since Easter 1939 when Mussolini’s troops had invaded, forcing King Zog and his family to flee to Greece. After that, Julian Amery had plotted from Belgrade for Section D, and Fanny Hasluck had formed the nucleus of an Albanian Section by teaching a handful of volunteers about the country and its fiercely tribal people. Since the German invasion of Yugoslavia and the loss of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) station in the British Legation in Belgrade, there had been no news from Tirana, Albania’s capital.

 

The first mission to Albania was consensus in April 1943, in which Billy McLean and David Smiley parachuted into northern Greece intending to walk across the frontier; they were accompanied by Lieutenant Garry Duffy of the Royal Engineers, who was a demolition expert, and a wireless operator, Corporal Williamson. Their interpreter, an Albanian named Elmaz, decided at the last minute to abandon the mission. Despite this setback, consensus landed safely in Epirus, linked up with John Cook of SOE’s Greek Section and then undertook a trek across the mountains into Albania where, on the second attempt late in June 1943, contact was made with Enver Hoxha, the Communist leader of the local partisan guerrillas. Once relations had been established with him, by a series of airdrops to equip his men, permission was granted for the installation of a British Military Mission.

 

The main British military liaison officer, Brigadier Trotsky Davies, parachuted into Albania with a full headquarters team, dropped from two aircraft based at Benina, to a reception committee organized by consensus; a couple of nights later, Alan Hare arrived with the remainder of the contingent. In July 1943, two Royal Air Force (RAF) officers, Tony Neel and Andy Hands, were dropped, and in August four teams were launched on the same day in two Halifaxes from Derna: sculptor, led by Major Bill Tilman; sconce, by Major George Seymour; sapling, by Major Gerry Field; and stepmother, by Peter Kemp. Together these missions, attached to large mixed bands of Communist irregulars, Italian deserters, and Bulgarian stragglers harried the occupying forces by setting ambushes and organizing raids on local enemy garrisons. Although none of the actions by itself led to any general collapse of the occupation, the Germans were obliged to waste precious resources at a critical time by strengthening an area that had virtually no strategic value.

 

McLean and Smiley were extracted in November 1943 by motor torpedo boat from the coast to Bari, and by that time SOE’s presence in Albania was considerable. Richard Riddell and Anthony Simcox were flown in to replace McLean and Smiley, and John Hibberdine was dropped in December with Lieutenants Merritt and Hibbert. By the end of April 1944, Smiley was back, on consensus ii, this time accompanied by Julian Amery. These operations were not achieved without casualties. Two Halifaxes crashed in Albania while approaching their drop zones, killing their crews and two entire SOE missions. Major Field blew himself up with high explosives while fishing, and Colonel Arthur Nicholls died of gangrene. sconce’s wireless operator, Bombardier Hill, was killed by enemy action and Trooper Roberts of stepmother died of exposure after he had been captured and then managed to escape. Brigadier Davies was also captured, in January 1944, along with Jim Chesshire, Captain F. Trayhorn, and his RAF sergeant, a former rear gunner named Smith. Another significant loss was Philip Leake, killed in a German air raid six weeks after he landed in May 1944.

 

SOE personnel sent to Albania endured appalling privations, but perpetuated the strategic fiction that the Balkans was the likely target for an Allied thrust straight into Germany. This scenario, ever popular with Winston Churchill, was never a likely prospect, but the German High Command failed to appreciate the strength of opposition articulated by the chiefs of staff and the Americans. In consequence, a disproportionate number of Axis units was kept tied up in southeast Europe by what amounted to a tiny group of Allied liaison officers attached to a rather larger number of guerrillas who, it must be recognized, spent almost as much of their time fighting each other as engaging the common enemy. SOE failed to persuade the disparate factions involved from participating in what amounted to a civil war in Albania and Yugoslavia. In both countries, SOE’s logistical support contributed to eventual Communist supremacy.

 

Predictably, SOE’s experience in Albania included friction with both the SIS and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Smiley and McLean fell out with a representative of the former, a Greek who called himself Tony Corsair, when one of their supply drops was hijacked. Perhaps unwisely, they had confided their signal system to Corsair, who intercepted the containers ‘‘and used the weapons for his own purposes.’’ Relations with the Americans were strained because SOE ‘‘refused to cooperate with OSS agents unless they accepted British command and used British communications’’; the OSS was unwilling to accept these conditions, so no special operations teams were ever dispatched to Albania. Instead, some five SIS missions were sent, the first of which, tank, arrived in November 1943 by an SIS-sponsored motorboat from Italy and based itself in a cave by the sea. This team was obliged to withdraw three months later following enemy activity in the area and the ill health of the group’s three members. They were replaced in March 1944 by bird, which provided a reception committee for three further OSS secret intelligence (SI) teams, all of which remained with the Communist guerrillas until Tirana was liberated. The OSS’s official historian had some harsh words for the lack of British enthusiasm for the SI Division’s efforts: ‘‘The principal difficulty encountered by SI/Albania was its lack of control over transportation. . . . Support of U.S. teams by the Balkan Air Force (British) was unreliable throughout. After months of waiting had beset several missions, the head of the Albanian desk unsuccessfully proposed, as had sections chiefs in other areas, the establishment of an OSS air unit to obviate such delays.’’

 

Several of those who emerged from Albania subsequently wrote about their experiences: Amery in Sons of the Eagle, Kemp in No Colours or Crest, Smiley in Albanian Assignment, Davies in Illyrian Adventure, and Anthony Quayle in A Time to Speak. Xan Fielding, himself a member of SOE’s Greek Section, recounted McLean’s adventures in One Man in His Time. Squadron Leader Neel’s memoirs, though written, have yet to be published. All have a common theme of mismanagement at SOE headquarters in Cairo and Bari, and they display great affection for the guerrilla bands with whom they lived and fought.

 

After the war, SIS misinterpreted the loyalty expressed by some former comrades-in-arms and employed some former members of SOE’s Albanian subsection to subvert Hoxha. Hare, Hibberdine, Smiley, Kemp, Amery, Anthony Northrop, and Dayrell Oakley-Hill all played active parts in mounting an ill-fated clandestine offensive against Tirana in 1949. Blame for the debacle has often been attributed to Kim Philby’s duplicity, but the reality is that SIS’s postwar planners underestimated the determination of the Albanians to defend themselves, and even a despotic government, from external interference. The first three missions sent into Albania by SIS overland from Greece or across the Adriatic suffered only minimal casualties, and it was not until the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) embarked upon large-scale airdrops, employing émigrés trained at a major camp in Germany, that the Communists inflicted a really heavy toll on the infiltrators. Most were captured and then subjected to show trials in Tirana that ended in executions or long terms of imprisonment. The prospects of those that completed their missions and tried to leave the country were not much better. Both the Yugoslav and Greek authorities were hostile to the scheme and refused to cooperate with SIS or the CIA. The whole project was finally abandoned late in 1951, leaving Albania to Hoxha, who ensured that it remained a political and economic backwater for the next half-century.

The Air Crew Rescue Unit was formed in summer 1944 to evacuate Allied airmen forced down in either Partisan or Chetnik territory in Yugoslavia. Lt Nick Lalich (left), team leader of the “Halyard” Mission with Lt Mike Rajacich (right), is interviewing a P-51 pilot who was shot down south of Belgrade in September 1944. Their names are a reminder that the OSS sought out Americans of suitable national heritage to operate in particular countries. Rajacich wears British parachute wings on his left chest, while Lalich has a British holster. (NARA)

LIAISON WITH THE PARTISANS; CENTRAL YUGOSLAVIA, FALL 1943
Intelligence from deep within enemy territory was obtained by OSS liaisons with resistance groups such as Tito’s Partisans (though the quality of the intelligence was at the mercy of the Partisans who provided it, and who saw it as a form of leverage.) This agent has started to prepare a coded message for his SSTR-1 suitcase radio. Although this was a successful design the power supply was a constant challenge; operators found that it used less battery power when transmitting than receiving messages. Inserted with a uniformed paramilitary group rather than operating undercover, this operator has no need to wear civilian clothing.

The OSS found itself in the middle of a quasi-civil war in Yugoslavia between Josip Tito’s Communist Partisans and Gen Draza Mihailovich’s royalist Chetniks. In order to assess all local efforts against the Axis occupation and to obtain intelligence in-country, in August 1943 OSS liaison officers were parachuted in to both these guerrilla movements to report on their activities and capabilities. In October 1943 MU gathered a small fleet of schooners and other cargo vessels at the Italian ports of Bari and Monopoli, and shipped supplies to the Partisan-held island of Vis off the Yugoslavian coast until January 1944. Some of the Allied arms supplied to Tito were not used against the Germans, as several OSS personnel with the Chetniks discovered. From January to August 1944 OG teams and British Commandos conducted several reconnaissance and raiding operations in the Dalmatian Islands to harass the German garrisons. The first penetration of the Third Reich by the OSS occurred in June 1944, when Maj Franklin Lindsay and a band of Partisans crossed into an annexed portion of northern Slovenia, successfully blowing a 150ft gap in a stone viaduct bridge and cutting an important rail line for the rest of the war.

At the Tehran Conference in November 1943 the decision was taken to cease all aid to Mihailovich and instead to fully support Tito; the reason was the Chetniks’ less than aggressive guerrilla campaign, and charges of collaboration with the enemy. Mihailovich claimed that a lack of supplies and fear of wholesale reprisals against civilians prevented him from fighting the Germans at the level the Allies demanded, but the decision stuck, and the OSS was forced to withdraw its last liaison officer with the Chetniks in May 1944. That summer, however, a large number of American airmen continued to bail out over Chetnik-held areas. In collaboration with the USAAF, the OSS established the ACRU that parachuted into Chetnik territory in August 1944; the unit built a rough airstrip that enabled C-47s to evacuate over 500 Allied airmen by the time it departed in December.

When the Red Army crossed into Yugoslavia in September 1944, and as more territory came under Partisan control, Tito imposed severe restrictions on the movement and activities of the OSS teams that prevented them from gathering any useful intelligence for the rest of the war. The OSS established a mission in Belgrade after it was liberated in October 1944, and reported on political, economic, and medical conditions there before withdrawing in July 1945.

Darkness had gathered over German-occupied Athens, Greece, on October 10, 1941, as the sleek Mercedes sedan carrying two passengers in the backseat sped toward the municipal airport. One of the men was Hans Müller, an Abwehr officer, and the other was Paul Ernst Fackenheim, who had received several decorations for valor as a German Army officer in World War I and who later became a prosperous hardware dealer in Berlin.

At the Athens airport, Fackenheim boarded a black-bodied German transport plane, which took off and set a course for a pasture outside Haifa, one of the chief ports of Palestine (later Israel). Soon the former businessman bailed out of the aircraft and floated toward the ground in a parachute. He was the Nazis’ most unlikely secret agent of the war: a Jew.

Fackenheim’s weird odyssey into the murky world of espionage had begun a few weeks earlier, when Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s vaunted Afrika Korps had been stalled by British forces in the Germans’ drive to reach Egypt. In Berlin, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr, had been given the task of recruiting an agent to report on the strength of British reinforcements being collected in the Middle East for a counteroffensive against Rommel.

Canaris’s aides concluded that the spy would have to be Jewish so he would be warmly received by Zionists when he arrived in Palestine. So an Abwehr officer went to the Dachau concentration camp and interviewed Paul Fackenheim, an inmate. The Jew was flabbergasted to be taken off a rigorous work detail, escorted to a room in the administration building, and interviewed by a courteous Abwehr officer. His amazement increased when the Abwehr agent called him Herr (Mister), a courtesy never accorded to Jews in Germany.

Soon the interviewer was convinced that Fackenheim was the ideal man for the espionage job. He was highly intelligent, had been known for his great energy, and spoke several languages fluently, including Hebrew. In fewer than twenty-four hours, Fackenheim was given a haircut, and his tattered prisoner garb was replaced by a new civilian suit, shirt, tie, and shoes.

The espionage recruit was escorted to Berlin, then flown to Athens, where he was given a brief course in spying techniques, operating a suitcase-size radio set, writing with secret ink, and identifying British tanks, airplanes, and unit insignias. Then he took a practice parachute jump and was assigned the code name Paul Koch.

As he rode through the night toward the Athens airport, Fackenheim had no way of knowing that he would be a pawn in the lethal rivalry between the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence arm of the elite Schutzstaffel (SS), the black-uniformed private army led by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. An SD agent tipped off the British to the time and place of Fackenheim’s arrival outside Haifa. However, the British were told that the parachutist would be a prominent SS general, Obergruppenführer Erich Koch.

The purpose of the SD machination was to discredit Admiral Wilhelm Canaris in the eyes of Adolf Hitler by arranging for the secret espionage mission to be botched. Then, the SD leader Reinhard Heydrich hoped, the Abwehr would be absorbed into the SD and he would become chief of a single German intelligence agency. As such, Heydrich would become the Reich’s second most powerful figure after Hitler.

Above the dark countryside outside Haifa a green light flashed on in the German transport plane, and Paul Fackenheim bailed out. Hardly had he parachuted to earth than he became aware of the headlights of numerous vehicles parked on an adjacent road. He could discern dim figures dashing about, and hear orders being shouted in English.

As envisioned by Heydrich, the British had concluded that a high-ranking SS general would be parachuting secretly into Palestine to orchestrate a huge sabotage operation or to instigate a massive Arab uprising. Consequently, the British High Command in the Middle East was eager to capture this dangerous German general.

Fackenheim managed to slip out of the British trap. At dawn, he lined up with residents at a bus stop, then took the conveyance into Haifa, where he melted into the crowds. Soon he became aware that British military police were posted at almost every corner, checking identity papers in an effort to nab the presumed SS general.

Finally, Fackenheim entered a British headquarters and told the officer in charge that he was a Jewish refugee from Germany who had landed in a boat on a Haifa beach the previous night. As soon as his interrogators saw that his forged identity papers listed him as Paul Koch, they arrested him.

Fackenheim was taken to a jail outside Cairo and grilled intently by British intelligence officers. They refused to believe his story that he was but a small-time spy who had agreed to his mission only to escape death at the Dachau concentration camp.

Some of the British officers clung to the notion that Fackenheim was indeed the SS general Erich Koch, who would be tried for espionage and possible execution because he had been wearing civilian clothes.

The trial was rapidly concluded, and it appeared that Fackenheim would be shot. Then, at almost the last moment, the Irish lawyer who had been appointed to defend him somehow located an elderly Jewish woman living in Haifa. She testified that she had known Paul Fackenheim and his parents many years earlier in Germany.

Consequently, the charges were dismissed, and Fackenheim survived the war in a British internment camp.