The track of the Siberian railway from the Sayan district made a relatively straight line west as far as Kuybyshev, whence a variety of switchings from track-line to track-line would bring the train southwest toward the Ukraine. Once in German-occupied territory, it could be driven straight to the Polish border and its contents then transferred to a Western train on the European track-gauge; or-and this was far less desirable on account of the risks-the train could turn south out of the Ukraine, cross the Crimea and deliver its cargo to Sebastopol, thence to be shipped by sea through the Dardanelles. (In 1942, while the Germans still held the Mediterranean, this was a viable possibility; by the time the mission was actually undertaken, it was not.)
In March 1943 the von Geyr plan was settled on. The delay had already amounted to nearly five months. Because the von Geyr plan was clandestine in nature, the training of Krausser’s force had to be rigorous and painstaking: every man in the force had to be able to pass as a Russian.
Documenting, equipping and costuming them took more time; not only did they have to look like Russians and talk like Russians, they also had to know enough about their own manufactured backgrounds to satisfy the suspicious, and they had to know enough contemporary Russian cultural history to sound authentic.
Under the coaching of Abwehr agents and various Russian prisoners-of-war, they made steady-but not exceptionally fast-progress in their effort to become Russians, and between the strenuous care of their training and the slow excavation of intelligence of Siberia from the Abwehr’s espionage field agents, it was the autumn of 1943 before von Geyr felt confident enough to report to Berlin that Krausser’s team was ready for action.
It had been decided that the Jagdsonderkommando would travel as a special unit of Soviet Transportation Corpsmen, led by a first lieutenant (the Leutnant who had been a locomotive driver) and chaperoned by a Communist Party commissar-a role played by Krausser himself, in the familiar grey choke-collared uniform of the Red Army, with the insignia of a commissar in place of officer’s epaulets.
The other lieutenant (the one who had been a civil engineer) played the part of a Russian army engineer officer, also a first lieutenant: again, a role close to his actual status.
The cover-story postulated that Moscow wanted a military survey of the iron mines to determine whether it was feasible to reopen them for wartime production. The expedition would have an air of authenticity to it, and even though everyone in the Sayan knew that the mines were empty of iron, no one would be likely to question the Kremlin’s bureaucratic decision to have them reinspected at such a time as this.
Along with the cover story went various sets of forged orders by which the bearers were authorized by the Kremlin to commandeer such rail transport and dispatching priorities as might be needed to transport ore samples out of the district. The signatures on Krausser’s phony orders were those of the highest-and thus least-likely-to-be-questioned-authorities: Malenkov and Marshal Zhukov.
Krausser’s detachment carried reams of documents designed to meet almost any foreseeable contingency. The files of Abwehr, Wehrmacht and RSHA records include copystats of billeting requisitions, orders allowing Krausser to commandeer provisions and tools and equipment, personnel orders (with the names left blank) authorizing the detachment to impress civilian workers into labor companies if it became necessary to repair the tracks and roadbeds of abandoned mining railways, and disciplinary authorizations by which Krausser-as People’s Commissar-was empowered to arrest, sentence and even execute officials who refused to cooperate. The latter were designed mainly with railway dispatching controllers in mind; once the train was loaded the Germans wanted to get it across the Soviet Union as quickly as possible.
On November 23, 1943, the bogus Russians were flown to a Luftwaffe military airfield near Donetsk, where they were fed lavishly and spent the night in Luftwaffe officers’ barracks.
The mission was scheduled to take off at 0430 hours the morning of November 24. The transport was a captured four-engine American long-range bomber, a B-24 Liberator, painted over with Russian markings to resemble the lend-lease aircraft with which the United States had been supplying Russia since 1942. The Liberator model had been selected for several reasons: its range (about 2,400 miles); its ability to fly at altitudes above most antiaircraft capacities; and the fact that many of the American-built planes had been delivered to the Soviet Union over the Alaska-to-Vladivostok Lend-Lease route, so that Siberian soldiers were accustomed to seeing the twin-tailed four-engine bombers overhead.
German antiaircraft batteries in the Donetsk region had been advised not to fire upon a single Liberator with Russian markings during the morning of the twenty-fourth. By the time the plane crossed the front lines into Russian-held territory it would be too high to be hit by antiaircraft bursts fired by either side; portable oxygen equipment had been provided for the twenty-two additional passengers, since the plane had been designed to accommodate a crew of seven.
The plane had extra fuel tanks on board but these would not be sufficient to make a round-trip flight. The pilot and his three-man flight crew had orders to drop Krausser’s group by parachute, then turn southeast and attempt to reach the Japanese-held airfield at Huhehot in northern China. If the fuel didn’t last, the crew was to bail out and make its way on foot to the nearest Japanese base.
At cruising speed the flight from Donetsk to the Sayan district would take some sixteen hours; the takeoff had been planned with a night parachute-drop in mind. The deep Siberian snow was expected to make for soft landings for the parachutists. They would be dropped from an altimeter height of eighteen hundred meters, which meant their drop to the high ground would measure some two hundred meters or less; a short drop which guaranteed no one would be frostbitten by the frigid air in the drop zone.
The weather went bad, unexpectedly, and takeoff had to be postponed twenty-four hours. A snowstorm then set in which lasted nearly two days, and meteorological estimates of the weather in the Sayan district were disappointing. Krausser had to drop into the right area or risk being isolated in freezing mountain fastnesses; furthermore, the jumpers had to be able to see their drop zone or they risked death in a blind jump. For those reasons the weather in the drop zone was more critical than the weather at the takeoff point, and in the end the Germans had to wait ten days before a favorable forecast allowed von Geyr to give them the go-ahead.
On the morning of December 3, 1943, the Jagdsonderkommando took off.
The absence of records to the contrary suggests that the drop was made as planned.*
Met records show it was a typical Siberian winter: a great deal of snow lie, temperatures subfreezing but not severely so, as they were farther north in the tundra, storms frequent-one or two a week-and high winds the rule.
Krausser’s nom de guerre was Ivan Samsonov; his railroad lieutenant went under the name Yevgeni Razin. The Red Army mess hall at Tulun issued twenty-eight meal tickets to First Lieutenant Yevgeni Razin on December 8; this may indicate that Krausser (“Commissar Samsonov”) found billeting and meals elsewhere, since he was not an army officer.
The next trace of the Jagdsonderkommando does not appear until December 24, when a conscript labor battalion (60 percent men, 40 percent women) was assigned to Lieutenant Razin on temporary assignment. Provisions and camping equipment sufficient for four weeks’ work were issued to the labor battalion at Cheremkhovo. The next day, December 25, Razin signed-with an endorsement by Commissar Samsonov-an official requisition by which he commandeered the use of two steam locomotives, seventeen goods wagons† and one passenger car. This train was assembled in the yards at Zima, the nearest marshaling area to the Sayan.