THEN THERE WAS THE FRANZ TEAM. From the tribal encampments in the foothills of the South, it was a four-day camel ride across harsh country to the bustling capital city—nearly a million inhabitants and growing—of Tehran. It was in this lively metropolis, as a disillusioned Schulze-Holthus waged his prickly verbal war with the SS brutes, that the other remaining German stay-behind agent tried to infiltrate the Operation Franz commando team into his clandestine world. But while there had been a procession of problems, Franz Mayr—the SD agent code-named Max—had not anticipated that he’d wind up chopping the body of one of the saboteurs into pieces, stuffing the arms, legs, and torso into a couple of valises, the head into a rucksack, and then burying the remains in an overgrown field outside the city, just off Varamin Road.
The Franz mission—Schellenberg’s and Canaris’s initial wildcat insertion scheme—had seemed doomed from the start. They came in blind, as the parachutists would say, on a moonless night without bonfires blazing to illuminate the landing site or a welcoming party to help them make their way. Mayr had sent a message through German sources in Turkey suggesting a drop at the foot of the Siah Kuh hills, a vast, congenial expanse of flat, green fields about sixty miles from Tehran. The six parachutists missed the drop zone by tens of miles. And straight off they were fighting for their lives.
They had landed in black mud. The twisting shoreline of Kavir Masileh, a great salt lake, seemed at first glance hospitable, a silty mix of sand and salt that would guarantee a soft landing. But directly beneath this cushion lay a deep, dark primordial ooze that could swallow camels whole and then, for good measure, devour their engulfed riders. The natives called this quicksand-like morass “black mud.”
It was only teamwork, as well as a surge of desperation, that got them through. As one of the commandos began to sink, mud up to his knees, then suddenly reaching his waist, then climbing up to his shoulders, the others, who had somehow managed to extricate themselves, formed a human chain. With a great tug, one final exertion of will energized by sheer panic, they at last pulled their comrade to safety. The fate of their supplies was not as fortunate.
The Junkers Ju-290 crew had shoved a bountiful payload out of the cargo door of the high-flying plane. It was an inventory carefully designed by the owls in the Section 6 planning section to sustain a sabotage campaign in enemy territory: nine machine pistols, six revolvers, one sniper’s rifle, more than fifty pounds of gelignite, four long-range radio sets, one receiver, four generators, about $20,000 in American currency, 600 gold francs, and, a fortune that could if necessary pave the way out of most any jam, about 2,200 gold sovereigns. The black mud had claimed the lion’s share of this trove, and what had survived lay scattered for miles across the adjacent desert.
But the commandos were alive. Now they could confront the next daunting problem: they needed to rendezvous with their control, Franz Mayr. After consulting maps, they realized that they’d landed not just off course, but bafflingly off course; Tehran was perhaps two hundred miles away. A scorching desert stretched between them and the city. And if they could somehow survive the journey, there still was the challenge of finding a single furtive spy in a city of one million. They had no idea where Franz Mayr had gone to ground, or how to contact him.
Yet they were soldiers, and they had no choice but to forge on. They’d head off across the desert as a team; as the black mud travail had demonstrated, when unexpected problems occurred, it’d be a godsend if they were in it together, able to work in unison to handle things. As their first night in the wilderness dragged on, a more thoughtful discussion killed this rash scheme. It was pointed out that there were six of them and that would mean buying or, if it came to it, stealing, six camels, and that was bound to attract attention in any village; the locals would rush to the authorities, eager to claim the reward they’d undoubtedly get for reporting a group of German-speaking soldiers. Provided, of course, that the British, Russian, or American troops scattered about the country didn’t spot them first. In wartime the soldiers would shoot before asking questions; that’s, after all, what they’d do.
Ultimately, only one possible plan made any sense. And for once luck seemed to be on their side. There was a man on the mission who could speak Farsi, had already mastered the cumbersome skill of riding a camel, had spent time in Tehran, and, although a Sudeten German, could pass in a pinch as a Persian. Corporal Karl Korel at thirty-eight was the oldest of the team, a rail-thin string bean of a man with a clerk’s unassertive, diffident demeanor, a man who listened carefully and then took his time before answering in a voice hardly more than a murmur. But he was a veteran Abwehr agent, and his natural quiet had been good cover for a daring secret agent in the course of several sticky situations; he was the last man anyone would suspect as a spy. Add to this that he’d done an undercover stint in Tehran before the war, and, more good fortune, had spent some time years earlier with Franz Mayr—well, the plan, despite the weight of all the imponderables, seemed to write itself.
As the sun rose above the salt lake of Kavir Masileh, Corporal Korel set out in the new day’s early light to make the long journey across the desert. His fanciful goal was to arrive in Tehran and then find one man among the million.
ON GRAND BOULEVARDS AND TUCKED into cobbled alleyways, Tehran was a city of cafés, some sprawling spaces, others just a single narrow room, but all deliberately shadowy haunts crackling with the energy of intense conversations, the stolid air at any hour wafting with hookah smoke and the pungent aroma of the nerve-jangling local espresso. Over a bowl of dizi, the bracing mutton stew thickened with chickpeas that the natives seemed to consume with gusto for at least one meal each day, or a glass of arrak with its sharp licorice bite, an afternoon could be pleasantly passed sitting on the terrace of the Naderi Café, sheltered by the red-and-white awnings that circled round Lalehzar Street. Or there was the Café Ferdowsi, with its murals celebrating ancient Persian heroes and where in the evenings there’d be readings of the Shahnameh, the kingdom’s great epic tale, that’d continue on relentlessly despite the unremitting clamor at the tables. And for those wanting something more cosmopolitan, there was the Continental, with its glamorous, well-heeled crowd of dark-suited diplomats and self-satisfied Iranian officials, peddlers of influence and information, fingering their worry beads and sucking on their opium pipes.
Franz Mayr would spend a good part of his days and most of his nights floating in and out of the city’s many cafés. They were his command posts. Experience had taught him that a secret spoken in public in a conversational tone would more likely go unnoticed than a confidence whispered during the course of a clandestine walk-and-talk on a deserted street; there was no telling who might wander by and what suspicions would then be sparked. Every spy who’s played the game long enough settles on the tradecraft that becomes his handwriting, his routine for getting things done. It was across the tables in these crowded haunts, in full view of anyone who cared to notice, that the agent code-named Max would invariably schedule meets with the soldiers in his army of secret sources.
For Max had been busy. Although on the run, in hiding from the authorities since the Allied invasion, he’d not abandoned his secret life. Rather, with diligence, his charmer’s skills, and a thick wad of foreign currency (albeit counterfeit, but that was his and his Berlin handlers’ secret), he’d recruited an impressive collection of assets, or “Joes,” as the old hands called them with a comradely fondness. He was as wired into what was going on in Iran, he’d boast, as the shah.
He had Ernst Merser, a steady Swiss businessman, the well-respected representative of a wide collection of American and European firms that did business in Iran, with his big Mercedes sedan and an impressive two-story villa on tony Kakh Street staffed by a collection of servants. Merser was a bachelor, short and portly, but he had impeccable manners, held his liquor, and could talk about anything with a fetching charm, and so he was invited everywhere. Even better, he had the gift of remembering whatever he heard. Whatever his motive—Money? Allegiance to the Reich? A daredevil need for danger?—he offered up a steady stream of intelligence product, some of which even had the added blessing of turning out to be true.
For muscle, there was Misbah Ebtehaj and the ragtag gang of hard cases who followed faithfully in his wake. Ebtehaj was one of Tehran’s celebrities, a shrewd, iron-chested hulk who had won his fame as a Pahlevani athlete, the wildly popular brand of traditional hand-to-hand combat that demanded both a wrestler’s brute force and a sufi’s soul-searching spiritualism. Flocking around him, ready to spring into action on his command, were a motley legion of the tsharukeshes, who, as the word accurately conveys in translation, were quite literally cutthroats; the garden koflot, or street brawlers; and, always good for tantalizing gossip or working a honeypot operation, the luty, the city’s pimps.
But Mayr’s most cherished conspirator was Lili Sanjari. She was Iranian by birth, and when her widowed mother had married a prosperous German named Lange she had gone off to Berlin. By the time she returned to Tehran as a teenager, she was the well-educated product of both cultures—fluent in several languages, versed in history, physics, chemistry, and mathematics, could play oompah on the accordion or concertos on the piano, and, as everyone she met couldn’t help but notice, had grown up to be a doe-eyed, raven-haired, fun-loving beauty. Working in tandem with her friend Lucille, her assignment was, as she’d put it, to promote “the propaganda angle,” to flit about town spreading earnest tales about how glorious life would be once the Germans came marching in.
Beyond Lili’s operational value, however, there was something else stoking the spy’s interest in the twenty-two-year-old: she was his mistress. But their long-running affair was more than just an unbridled romp. Mayr wanted to marry her. He loved her. And Lili loved him, too—in her fashion.
Whether it was because the spy talked of marriage but didn’t act, whether the prospect of being his bride had left her unsettled, or whether perhaps her covert life simply had left her accustomed to betrayal remains another buried mystery in this tale. But what is known is that while Lili was spending nights with the SD operative, she was also spending afternoons in rented rooms around the city cuddled next to a twenty-three-year-old American sergeant, Robert J. Merrick.
Merrick, who was a transport clerk, played in a dance band, and it was at a concert that the two music lovers had met. But while romances are often set in motion by fortuitous events, there are no accidents in the secret world. Merrick was also a spy, an Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) agent. His mission that first night was to bump into Lili, strike up a conversation, and see where it might lead. It led to rented rooms, double beds, and his conscientiously passing on typed summaries of their pillow talk to his intelligence superiors.
Lili had no idea of the rippling pools of betrayal in which she was swimming. And Mayr had even less of an inkling.
It was into this simmering world of spies, assets, and duplicitous lovers that Corporal Korel arrived. Straight from his marathon camel ride across the desert, he walked into the Café Ferdowsi, glanced about the room, and then, with a triumphant smile on his sunburned, unshaven face, took a seat across the table from an astonished Franz Mayr.
KOREL WAS NO LESS ASTONISHED. In the course of his arduous journey across the broiling desert, he’d settled on a strategy. He knew Mayr’s handwriting and so had made up his mind to visit every café in the city until he crossed paths with his handler. At the same time that he’d worked this out, he also realized that it was little more than a wild gamble. What were the odds of his showing up at the right café at precisely the right time? It was just as likely that their paths might never cross. But in the first café out of the dozens spread across the city that the corporal had decided to investigate, he found the man he was looking for.
Both men told themselves that their reunion was a harbinger of the larger successes Operation Franz’s commandos would soon celebrate. And this prediction seemed accurate when the corporal, now driving a truck one of Ebtehaj’s cohorts had rustled up, headed into the desert, found his comrades pretty much where he’d left them, and then brought them into Tehran without incident. On Mayr’s instructions the commandos split up into groups of two, and each pair was shuttled off to a separate safe house around the city that had been scrounged by his network of agents; it would be more secure that way, he explained. And more careful tradecraft, he also insisted that they go slowly. Get a feel of the city, learn to move around and blend in as he had done; time spent on preparation is never time wasted, he lectured. Only after all the pieces were in place should they start watching the railroad, discover when the American shipments occurred, and make the important decisions about where to place their bombs and when to detonate them.
Then, just as they were preparing to move into action, to strike the first blow for Germany in Iran, Korel was struck down with typhus. At first it seemed like only a cold, but as if in an instant it grew into something more horrifying, the corporal wasting away before their eyes. Lili managed to find a doctor they could trust, but the doctor took one look at the ghostly pale man soaking in a river of his own hot sweat, and threw up his hands in despair. Without medicine, what can I do? the doctor pleaded, as agonized, Mayr felt, as if he were the condemned patient.
When Korel died it was no surprise, but still a shock. Mayr and the others were left reeling. Once again the mission had turned on them. Once again they began to live with the dispiriting suspicion that Operation Franz had been doomed from the start.
Before they could regroup, a new concern pushed their spirits lower. It was brought about by nothing more sinister than the prudent realization that unless they disposed of the body, either through cremation or a burial deep in the ground, a deadly typhus plague would spread with relentless determination across Tehran. But for spies behind enemy lines the tasks would be challenges. There was nowhere in the city they could set a match to a corpse without attracting attention. Nor could they cart a body out to the desert without the fear of being stopped by the police and being pelted with questions that they didn’t dare to answer. Mayr resigned himself to the only feasible solution, and Lili, with a cold-blooded practicality, agreed to help.
Mayr did the lion’s share of the hacking. He couldn’t find a saw, and so he had to make do with a machete. It was gruesome, tedious work. There were so many pieces that Lili had to hurry home at the last minute to forage in her uncle’s closet for an additional valise. But finally the dismembered corpse was ready for transport.
There was a deserted field out by Varamin Road just beyond the city where the spy and his young mistress had once lain together in the tall grass on a languid summer’s afternoon, and now it became a burial ground. All the surviving commandos assembled to pay their respects. There was no ceremony; the fear of attracting curious stares was very strong. Their mute presence, they hoped, would demonstrate sufficient respect.
The team returned to their hideouts. The plan was to regroup, and then strike. But they could no longer find the will; it was as if part of themselves, whatever had remained of their fighting spirit, had also been buried in that lonely Iranian field. Two of the commandos headed off to the tribal areas; they had no plan beyond an eagerness to flee the city. The other three survivors spent their time being ferried from one safe house to another, shepherded all the time by the protective attentions of Mayr’s network.
For weeks the commandos talked among themselves and to the others about the attacks they would launch, but they lacked conviction. No one was surprised when their shallow schemes never came to anything.
Ernst Merser, who once had great hopes for the Reich, for the crucial role he would play as a gentleman spy, grew resigned, too. In the anticlimax of the saboteur’s plots, he decided it was his sad destiny to live on the far periphery of events, outside the flow of history. “Tehran was the last place in the world where I would have wished to bury myself till the end of the war,” he complained to Mayr, who by then shared the identical belief. “Whatever happens or doesn’t happen in Tehran, the fate of the war isn’t likely to be decided here.”
FOR THE MORE PRACTICAL SECTION 6 deskmen in Berlin, however, it was not so much the actual deeds as the long-term lessons that measured the success of a mission. They were willing to trade many losses for the prospect of a single stunning victory. Operation Franz, same as its brother expedition Anton Two, had established important capabilities, field experiences that could one day come in handy: a commando team had made its way to Tehran and managed to hide out in a labyrinth of safe houses without the authorities being any wiser. In addition—and this was a genuine accomplishment by any standard—a reliable network of capable, resourceful agents was already up and running in an enemy city. Schellenberg considered all this, and while he hadn’t done all he’d set out to do, he nevertheless had a high sense of achievement. He had learned a lot, and now he carefully filed it all away, not knowing whether a day would ever come when he might have a reason to put this hard-won knowledge to some clandestine use. Espionage, Canaris had lectured in the course of one of their convivial morning rides through the Tiergarten, is a game like chess: you must always think several moves ahead. For the first time, Schellenberg was beginning to appreciate that wisdom.