The Forgotten 500 (27 page)

Jibilian was still waiting for his first mission when he heard that OSS Lieutenant Eli Popovich was looking for a radio operator to join him and Colonel Lynn Farish on a trip behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia. Farish had already made one trip into Yugoslavia, but he had been unsatisfied with having to rely on British radio operators to get his reports out. He insisted that for this mission they should take an American radioman. There weren’t that many available, so the rookie Jibilian got the nod. He was thrilled to be selected, as he was eager to actually put his skills to use. The mission, code named Columbia, was launched from Brindisi on the night of March 15, 1944. Popovich, Farish, and Jibilian parachuted into Yugoslavian territory held by Tito’s Partisans. When Jibilian hit the ground, the most grueling two months of his life began.

Once they landed in the wooded hills at the base of a mountain range, the team made sure the area was safe and then Jibilian set up his transmitter to try to contact the OSS post. He was eager to prove himself and do his job, but he was also nervous. The adrenaline coursed through him and his heart pounded as he manipulated the controls of the radio, trying to get a signal through to Cairo and listening for a response. There was nothing despite repeated tries. He kept sending the signal over and over, waiting for a call back, and when nothing came, he decided he had to use more antenna. Popovich and Farish watched with concern as he unreeled more of the wire antenna hidden in the suitcase, hoping it would boost the signal strength but also knowing that he was increasing the chances that the Germans could use a direction finder, known as a DF to radiomen, to electronically home in on the broadcast and find the trio of spies. It was risky, but it worked. Jibilian finally got a signal to Cairo and felt he had redeemed himself with the other two more experienced agents. They were surprised to find out why it had been so difficult make contact. It hadn’t been Jibilian’s fault at all. His radio signals were going through just fine, but no one was listening for them in the Cairo OSS post because they thought the mission had been cancelled.

After straightening out the mix-up, the team was getting comfortable in their hiding spot and Jibilian continued transmitting some information to Cairo. Suddenly he heard planes overhead.

“They put a DF on us!” Jibilian called to the other two, instantly realizing what had happened. He turned off the radio’s power supply and hastily packed it all away. Popovich and Farish grabbed their gear and prepared to run as Jibilian slammed the radio suitcase shut and grabbed his own bags. They were already sprinting deeper into the woods when the Messerschmitts and Stuka dive bombers opened fire on their location, strafing them with large-caliber machine guns that would tear them apart instantly. The planes continued strafing, climbing, turning, and coming back for another attack. The trio narrowly escaped being killed as rounds hit the trees and the ground all around them, and then they thought they had made it up high enough in the hills so that the pilots didn’t know where they were. They were exhausted from running uphill, scared for their lives, while hauling all their gear. Jibilian fell on top of his radio suitcase, his chest heaving, gasping for air. But they had only a brief respite before the planes were on them again. The pilots must have guessed that they ran uphill into the more dense wood cover, and they were repeatedly strafing the area in hopes of a lucky hit. The men started running again and it wasn’t long before Popovich and Farish dropped their gear bags. Jibilian hung on to the heavy radio set as long as he could, but he couldn’t keep up. One of the other men looked back and yelled at Jibilian to drop the radio, and he welcomed the order. The radio set fell away like almost all of their other gear as they continued running, dodging trees in the dark and trying to outpace the plane attacks.

The OSS team remained on the run for five days and six nights. After escaping the initial attack on the first night, they knew the Germans were onto them. That was confirmed the next morning when they saw planes overhead looking for any sign of the spies, and they could see ground units moving into the area to hunt them down. They had no choice but to run and keep running, to get higher into the hills where it was harder for the German troops to follow and where they might find more hiding places. Their mission to gather intelligence had been abandoned for the moment and they were in the most basic of all mind-sets: running for their lives. Dressed only in their summer khakis, which had been appropriate at lower altitudes, they ran higher and higher into the snowy mountain trails, the air growing colder with every step. Eventually they ran into snowdrifts, some so deep that they had to pull each other out before continuing on. When they stopped to catch their breath, their sweat-soaked clothes froze to their bodies, thawing again once they started to move on.

As they reached higher elevations the trio thought the Germans were not quite so close on their trail and they slowed their pace. They would have slowed anyway, since they were all exhausted. Making their way along mountain trails used by the locals, they ran into local villagers who were pleased to see Americans. Though these were not Mihailovich supporters, like those harboring the airmen in Pranjane, these villagers were just as gracious and welcoming to the needy Americans. Jibilian and the other men lived on only what the local peasants could spare, a bit of goat cheese and bread made with hay to extend the meager flour on hand, perhaps a pear picked from a tree. The hay bread was tough and dense, but it was filling. The strange food and exertion gave all three men a bad case of diarrhea.

After about a week, the Germans gave up on finding the spies and the OSS team felt they could make their way back down the mountain to a lower elevation. As they made their way down, some of the local people told them of American airmen who were hiding from the Germans and awaiting rescue. These were not the same airmen being aided by Mihailovich in a different part of the country, but rather a smaller group of only a dozen. Their original mission compromised and all their equipment lost, Jibilian and the other agents decided it would be better if they accomplished something before they simply tried to escape from Yugoslavia. So they gathered as much information as they could from the sympathetic locals and determined where the airmen were. If they could, their plan was to go find the airmen and somehow get them out with them.

The distance to the airmen was not great, but there were plenty of Germans in between. Popovich, Farish, and Jibilian figured out that the best way to get to the airmen was by going through a German checkpoint at a bridge. The only alternative was an eight-day march around the checkpoint, and the trio wasn’t up to that, what with their exhaustion, diarrhea, and lack of food. And besides, finding a way through a German checkpoint with subterfuge or cleverness was exactly the kind of task at which OSS agents excelled. Jibilian had never done it, of course, because this was his first mission, but he remembered his training from the Farm and trusted the other agents to know best. With no radio to use, Jibilian relied on a submachine gun instead. The weapon was considered a good choice for a young, inexperienced agent like Jibilian, the thinking being that you didn’t have to be accurate if you could throw enough lead at the enemy in a hurry. He was ready to do whatever Popovich and Farish needed to make this rescue happen.

About eighteen of Tito’s Partisans joined up with the OSS agents to help with rescuing the airmen, and after some discussion, the agents decided that good old-fashioned bribery was the best way to get through this checkpoint. The Partisans told them that the guards could be bought off, and Farish still had some twenty-dollar gold pieces he had brought for just such an occasion. Using a go-between that the Partisans trusted, the group made contact with the German guards at the checkpoint and offered to pay them if they would allow passage. The Germans agreed, the gold pieces were delivered, and the group planned to cross the bridge the next night at a specified time. The agents knew they were taking a gamble, but bribery had proven quite effective in such situations before. If the guards were satisfied with their gold pieces, the deal was that they would know the group was coming at the appointed time and simply let them pass unmolested.

It was pitch-black as the group headed toward the bridge, the three Americans leading the way. They wanted it dark so they could travel without being noticed, and as they approached the bridge everything looked fine. Jibilian, Popovich, and Farish hid in the bushes near the bridge for a while to watch and see if anything was amiss, and then they checked with the Partisans to ensure that all seemed right to them. Everything did, and as the designated time approached, the group moved out onto the road and headed toward the bridge. They moved in a quick trot, eager to get over the bridge but also wary of surprising any Germans at the checkpoint. The moment of truth came when they approached close enough for the guards to see them. The Americans froze, everyone else waiting behind them and ready to bolt at the first sound of gunfire. But then Jibilian saw the two guards look directly at them, look at each other, and then turn their backs. The bribe had worked. They were letting the Americans and the Partisan fighters through.

The group hustled on up to the checkpoint and started across the bridge, needing to go only a few dozen yards to relative safety. But just as Jibilian and the other agents reached the middle of the bridge, flares soared into the sky and a spotlight came on that lit them up like daylight, followed immediately by machine-gun fire. Either the bribe just didn’t work with these Germans or the go-between the Partisans trusted had double-crossed them. Bullets hit all around the group and some of the Partisan fighters went down. Men were pushing and shoving, no one really knowing which way to run, everyone trying to get out of the searchlight’s beam. In the frenzy, Jibilian kept getting glimpses of the river below the bridge and prayed that he wouldn’t end up there. The look of that dark water at night, so far below, was about as scary as the idea of being shot. Jibilian and nearly every other man on the bridge opened fire on the spotlight, which soon went out, allowing them to sprint off the bridge and into the darkness again.

Over the next month, Jibilian and his team eventually found the dozen airmen and made contact with the OSS post in Cairo. The OSS men took the airmen, many of them weak and injured, from the villagers who had harbored them, traveling on foot and by oxcart for days to a spot that intelligence had identified as a possible pickup point. Popovich, strong but not especially large at six feet tall, carried one wounded man on his back for nearly two days. On June 16, 1944, a plane landed on an open field and picked up the agents and the airmen, ferrying them back to Bari, a small-scale rehearsal for what would come later in Pranjane.

Jibilian was awarded the Silver Star for his work on this mission, and those two months turned him from an expendable novice to a seasoned OSS agent. He was immensely proud of having helped retrieve those twelve airmen from Yugoslavia, and when he heard there were at least a hundred more, he knew he had to go back.

When Vujnovich explained the plan for rescuing the
downed airmen in Pranjane, now known by the randomly assigned code name Operation Halyard, not one of the three men chosen for the mission batted an eye at the enormous risk they were taking. Parachute into enemy territory and organize the most daring rescue ever? Sure, can do. Build an airstrip right under the German’s noses? No problem.

But they did have one question for Vujnovich. Will we be working on our own or with the British?

The answer, unfortunately, was that Operation Halyard would be a joint operation with the Brits. Predictably, the British were not pleased with Roosevelt’s approval of the rescue mission, but the complex agreements governing joint Allied operations in Italy required British and American spy teams to work together when putting agents in Yugoslavia. In many cases, the British were responsible for actually getting American agents into enemy territory, and until recently they had been responsible for all radio communication on the ground. The OSS had only just begun sending in their own radiomen, so Jibilian would fill that role instead of a British agent. At least they had that going for them. Vujnovich had his doubts about letting the British help at all, but he went along with it because he didn’t want to jeopardize a mission that already was on weak support.

The Operation Halyard trio also were warned not to interfere with international relations while on their mission. Your mission is to go in and get those men out,
nothing more
, they were told. A lieutenant commander from the Fifteenth Air Force specifically ordered them not to make “any military or political commitments on behalf of the United States of America or other Allied nation, or to make any commitments or promises for the furnishing of supplies or other material aid to any political or military group.” In other words, this wasn’t their opportunity to set right anything they didn’t like about the way the Allies worked with Mihailovich and Tito. They trusted Musulin to follow this order, and Vujnovich had been kept out precisely because they didn’t think they could trust him to comply.

As much as Musulin rankled at the continuing betrayal of Mihailovich, he was focused more on making this mission work. Vujnovich worked with Musulin, Rajacich, and Jibilian to plan their entry, thinking at first that they would have to make a blind drop into Pranjane, meaning they would arrive without Mihailovich’s forces knowing they were coming. This was always a risky move because even the friendlies on the ground might shoot you if they didn’t know who was dropping in without calling first. But as the planning proceeded, Vujnovich learned that the British had reestablished radio contact with Mihailovich and arranged for the trio to arrive between July 15 and July 20. Mihailovich’s men would be looking for them on those days. As that window was almost closing, the rescue team caught a break with the weather on the evening of July 19 and drove to Brindisi, about an hour south of Bari and where most mission flights originated. There they climbed into a C-47 painted black to make it harder to see at night. They were eager to go in and get the rescue started, so their adrenaline was pumping as they neared the drop zone. The trio checked their gear, double-checked their parachutes, gave one another hearty slaps on the shoulders and stood in the dark body of the cargo plane, waiting for the jump light to switch from red to green, followed by the British jump master’s signal to go out the door and into the dark night over Yugoslavia.