The Secret Rescue (18 page)
Authors: Cate Lineberry
When they had completed their training, the men traveled from Cairo to a desolate camp in Derna, Libya, where they anxiously awaited their departure into the Balkans. The delivery of men into the field was often delayed because of bad weather, lack of available aircraft, or problems with the drop zones. Trouble with the planes themselves also plagued the missions, and several men were killed on their flights into Albania. When one SOE mission was sent in early December, their plane caught on fire while in the air over Greece and crashed. All five of the men, along with the flight crew, were killed.
The day before their departure, Duffy and the other men learned their Albanian interpreter had refused to go with them for reasons not entirely clear and had been arrested to prevent the mission from being compromised. Though rattled by the change in plans and the lack of an interpreter, the men boarded a Halifax bomber the following night wearing battle dress, flight suits, padded overalls, and parachute harnesses and feeling like “trussed chickens.” While some slept, Smiley was so anxious that he read the latest issues of
Horse & Hound
and
Tatler
from cover to cover, including the advertisements.
The plane flew for some four hours before the pilot saw the sign on the ground that it was safe to jump: nine signal fires made into a V. “We sat round the hole with our legs dangling through. It was all rather unreal and ghostlike. The landscape below us was grey and white and green with the dark shadows thrown up by the clouds from the full moon. Suddenly the red light went out and a green light flashed on. I jumped immediately,” recalled twenty-four-year-old McLean, the leader of the mission. Smiley wrote, “We dropped from two or three thousand feet. My first reaction was relief as my parachute billowed opened. Our descent took barely a couple of minutes, the noise of the Halifax engines fading as their aircraft gradually disappeared from view up the valley, below the tops of the snow-covered mountains, then came a silence broken only by the whistling of the wind in my rigging lines.… As we neared the ground I heard the jingling of the bells of the goats or sheep in their herds, then shouts, followed by a heavy thud as I hit the Epirote mountains of Greece.”
The men were lucky, as all four landed safely, though Smiley tore a leg muscle when he hit a dry riverbed only some fifteen feet from one of the signal fires. Their plane circled the area and dropped supplies until the new arrivals used a torch to signal the pilot that they were safe. With that, the plane headed back to the base.
One SOE officer who had tried to parachute into Macedonia, a spot McLean had first considered, just two nights before, had disappeared. It was later learned by SOE that he had been captured by Bulgarian troops.
A
s the Americans huddled together outside one of the small village houses in Krushovë, Palmer explained that Duffy and Bell, the wireless operator who had also dropped into the Balkans in April, would lead them to the west coast where SOE personnel had successfully evacuated others by boat. SOE knew that OSS was sending an American captain to help get the party out and would meet them along the way. Some of the Americans were also aware of the American captain, but not all of them knew, including Hayes.
Duffy, who the Americans would soon learn was all business, and Bell, whom the Americans dubbed “Blondie,” were both due for a respite from being in the field for some eight months and would leave Albania with the party when they were rescued. The two had seen their fair share of action and had adjusted as much as possible to the hardscrabble life, though it wasn’t easy for any SOE men in Albania. Duffy viewed himself as “a kind of guinea pig set up by the Communist dictators in that country, being exploited to test how far they could go.” Smiley later wrote of the toll the environment took on the men’s mental state. “Under these conditions we were, to a certain extent, living on our nerves, and, as a result of the heavy mental strain, nightmares were not uncommon.” Smiley and McLean had recommended to Brig. Davies when they left a few weeks earlier that men only serve in the field in Albania for six months before being given “time to rest and refit.” They were certain some would never want to come back.
The British officers estimated it would take the party fourteen days to get to the coast, which would put them behind Allied lines a few days before Christmas. It looked like Jens was going to win her bet with Wolf. To the bitter disappointment of the anxious Americans, however, they would not get started until the following day. The Germans had just destroyed a village they would travel through, and the British wanted to be certain the Germans were long gone when they arrived.
While the men and women spent their final night in Krushovë, Lloyd Smith, the young American OSS officer, headed from Brindisi, Italy, to the coast of Albania in a British Motor Fishing Vessel under the cover of dark and wearing the uniform of a captain in the AAF to help support his cover story as a downed pilot if the Germans captured him. The treatment of a prisoner of war was far better than that of a spy, particularly with Hitler’s Commando Order in place.
In charge of Smith’s boat was Lt. Jack H. Taylor, a former dentist from California with the United States Navy Reserve who also served as Chief of OSS Maritime Unit in Bari. Taylor was not only secretly delivering Smith into the Nazi-occupied country, he was also bringing desperately needed supplies, some of which eventually landed in the hands of the Americans. Between December and January, he and his crew maneuvered through Nazi-infested waters to deliver seven sorties, each carrying ten tons of supplies, to the Allied men working in Albania.
Rough seas had forced Smith’s boat to turn around during two previous attempts, and on one evening the crew had hastened their retreat when they spotted German patrol boats. Tonight, however, around eleven p.m., the captain was able to safely anchor a half mile off the Albanian coast, and the crew rowed Smith and supplies to the narrow shore.
With the black shadows of mountains looming over him, Smith hiked some eight hundred feet up a switchback trail to reach Seaview, a series of caves overlooking the Adriatic that had been established by SOE as a secret base camp just weeks earlier. Seaview allowed SOE and OSS to infiltrate and evacuate personnel, deliver weapons and supplies into the country, and pass on intelligence material. Because the Germans had occupied much of the Albanian coast through October, it was only in early November that an SOE officer was able to establish the camp, which he picked for its location in the Kanalit mountain range. The mountains ran adjacent to the coastline and created a barrier between the sea and the main road, which offered significant protection from the Germans. The main difficulty with the camp’s location, however, was that it sat in the middle of BK territory. Because the BK was no longer fighting the Germans, the British would only give arms to the partisans, the BK’s rivals. The BK, however, had no intention of letting the British supply the partisans with weapons to use against them, “so they lay there uselessly until in the end the base was betrayed to the Germans, who stepped in and took the lot.”
Filled with lice and black scorpions, Seaview became the temporary home of several SOE personnel, an officer with MI6—Britain’s secret intelligence service—as well as two Americans, twenty-eight-year-old civilian Dale McAdoo and twenty-one-year-old Corporal Don Orahood, and their Albanian guide and interpreter Ismail Karapiçi. McAdoo had volunteered for OSS’s first mission in the country after previously heading OSS Albania in Cairo and was operating under the cover name of Maj. S. S. Kendall. Born in New York, he had a master’s degree from Harvard and spoke Italian and French fluently. Orahood, a Chicagoan who stood over six feet four inches tall with blue eyes and blond hair, had been an amateur radio operator before the war and joined OSS in December 1942. While in Cairo he had expressed interest in fieldwork, and when he was transferred to the OSS office in Bari and OSS needed a wireless operator to go into Albania, he was chosen. Like Smith, McAdoo and Orahood had arrived at Seaview by boat. Referring to the easy docking, McAdoo recalled, “The landing was duck soup, except that we had all vomited ourselves to a mere shadow just before arriving.”
McAdoo and Orahood spent their time in Albania working at or near Seaview to establish a critical intelligence system that relayed information to and from the Bari base station. With the help of Karapiçi, as well as two other Albanians, they established an intelligence network along the coast. Karapiçi, a partisan from Vlorë, had been imprisoned in Italy for five years, accused of plotting to kill Mussolini, and had been in a displaced persons’ camp when OSS had tapped him for service. McAdoo considered him “an outstandingly capable worker of great courage and intelligence” and was distraught when Karapiçi was killed just a couple months later.
While traveling with thirty gold sovereigns on a reconnaissance mission with a guide from Dukat hired by McAdoo, Karapiçi had been shot in the back three times, once in the palm of his hand, and then stabbed. He was found naked, his belongings stolen, and the gold long gone. His guide alleged that two unknown men had attacked them, but the village of Dukat found the young man guilty and sentenced him to death. The man’s family retaliated by threatening to expose the British mission at Seaview to the Germans if he was not released, and the village was forced to let him go. McAdoo blamed himself, because he had hired the guide and given the money to Karapiçi in front of him. In a letter to Fultz, the head of the OSS Albania desk, he wrote of Karapiçi: “Ismail had become a real friend of mine. I am too sick to write anymore.… Is Ismail’s fate the fate of any man who tries to be honest in this God-forsaken, savage country?”
With little knowledge of Albania’s culture or terrain, newly arrived Smith settled into the barren camp at Seaview with these other men and waited for information about the location of the American party to come over the wireless from Bari and Cairo.
Lt. Duffy, Sgt. Bell, and the American party met the next morning to begin their journey to the coast. It was December 7, the second anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war and nearly a month since the party crash-landed. Several partisans joined them, including Stefa. To make sure the Americans understood what they would face over the next two weeks, Duffy explained in his thick Yorkshire accent that they would walk five to six hours a day and possibly more as they got closer to the coast. They would also face meager lodgings, little food, and a constant threat from the Germans. The grim news, however, was nothing new to the Americans who, more than ever, were willing to do whatever it took to find a way out.
Going with them were two mules that would carry Bell’s wireless set, which included a transceiver, batteries, a gasoline-powered generator, fuel, and an antenna. It was a Type B Mark 1, a suitcase set with a canvas cover that had been designed just the year before at Station IX, a secret SOE research and development lab at the Frythe, an estate north of London. The inventor, Capt. John Brown, had been tasked with quickly developing a portable radio set that would allow communication between Great Britain and Northern Europe. He first designed the Type A, a lower-powered set with a frequency range of up to about four hundred miles, and quickly followed it with the Type B, which was a more powerful set with wider frequency ranges that could be used for communicating over longer distances. His next set was a Type B Mark 1, the kind used by Bell, which was supposed to weigh only about twenty pounds but with everything in its suitcase it pushed the scale to forty-two pounds. The inventor, who regarded it as an “ad hoc, rush job” and considered it too fragile, began designing the lighter Type B Mark II, but Bell found his set reliable and relatively easy to transport using the mules.
As their only link to the outside world, the wireless set was critical to the men in the field. Though they could not use it to communicate with other SOE operating in Albania for security reasons, they were in frequent contact with Cairo to inform them of their supply and ammunition needs, their sabotage efforts, and information on the enemy, resistance groups, and the weather. The operators sometimes had difficulty getting messages in and out of the mountainous terrain, however, particularly in the winter months. They also had to be concerned with the Germans using their transmission signals to pinpoint mission headquarters, so they often moved to locations several hours away before sending and receiving messages.
Field operators, like Bell, sent coded messages at designated times and frequencies to operators at the Royal Corps of Signals working from Cairo’s Mena House Hotel in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza. By 1943, most SOE operators were coding messages using one-time pads, which required the original message plus a random key that both the field operator and the home operator held. Each key was used for one message and then destroyed, which made it unbreakable if used properly. Once the encrypted messages arrived at the Mena House Hotel, they were sent via teleprinter to coders, often young women officially working as members of FANY at Cairo’s SOE headquarters at the Rustum Buildings, called “the Secret Building” by taxi drivers in Cairo. If an operator was unable to get his message through at the designated time, or “sked,” for one reason or another, he had to wait until the next appointed time. The process was inefficient, but it invariably saved lives.