Operation Urban

Operation Urban (Goetic: Unternehmen Städtisch) was a 1953 Great Kesh War military operation organised by the Alvak Abwehr intelligence organization under the command of the Tipslan desert explorer Lewis Lee. The mission was conceived in order to assist the Crown Coalition by delivering two Alvak spies into Kodeshia.

Background
In 1953, after numerous battles back and forth in the Lion Mountain Range, Alvak forces had pushed Kodeshi forces into a retreat that ended at Longshan Pass. This position was an excellent site for the defence of the region, and preparations had been ordered by General Teng Qigang months previously. The area is bordered on the west by Longshan Peak and Kammberg Mountain to the east. It is debatable whether the OKW had serious designs on the invasion of Kodeshia for the time being most viewed the Mountain Theatre as a sideshow and at the time of Operation Urban they were very much concentrated on the recently launched Operation Bison against Beifang. The Alvak Bundeswehr had demoralised Kodeshi forces with the fall of Yuhang and the Battle of Hezhong. The Alvak commander Nikos Sarratos had plans for capturing the rest of the major mountain passes which would have thus put Kodeshia in a very precarious situation with them under enemy control. Although the Alvaks had intelligence coups such as the Bauer code intercepts, they had few agents in Kodeshia itself. Operation Urban was intended to provide the eyes and ears in Songhari where the Kodeshi authorities and community were in crisis over the Selengerians' advance, with a citywide curfew in the months before June and many Kodeshis fleeing southward. Two spies would be delivered via a route taken far east of the mountain range where the numerous amounts of rivers would lessen the risks of being captured and increase the speed of which the spies would arrive in Songhari.

Lewis Lee was an experienced desert explorer, motorist and aviator. He had already explored the Ashari deserts in the 1930s and 40s with other Artemians such as Jose Zapatero-Koning who was now working for the Tipslan Eastern Command. By the end of 1949, Lewis was recruited by the Abwehr, initially to aid in the preparation of maps and the description of desert terrain. Subsequently, he was assigned to an Abwehr commando operating in southern Alvakalia under the command of Major Vassilios Zervides. After Zervides was injured in the first airborne attempt to deliver two spies to Kodeshia (the first being Operation Kreuz in 1950), Lee assumed command of the unit. Planning for what eventually became Operation Urban started in earnest in the fall of 1952.

The route
The initial plan was to enter Kodeshia by crossing the mountains east of Zimmermann Pass, starting from the Alvak held Remas Peak using captured Kodeshi trucks and patrol cars, delivering the two agents, Meng Ruogang and Wolfram Linse. Planning and preparations took several months, and the start was delayed several times due to the changing situation on the front. Finally, Operation Urban was ready to start from Adrak on 29 April 1953.

Reaching Remas Peak in Kodeshia they started out towards the east where Alvak pre-war maps suggested a smooth traverse down the mountain range, however, they soon encountered an impassable range of incredibly hilly and rocky terrain unmarked on the map. After several members fell sick and one of the cars was abandoned with a broken axle, the party returned to Remas Peak to make an aerial reconnaissance of the route. Starting out a second time they encountered the same difficulties, and Lee devised a new plan: with fewer cars and members they would go southwestwards towards enemy-occupied Bohai and then across Zhongmen Ridge along a route known to Lee from his explorations there ten years earlier. From this point onwards the account of Operation Urban is narrated by Lee himself, in his diary of the operation.

After successfully crossing Zhongmen Ridge they bluffed their way through Beifu and then dropped Ruogang and Linse off at a port off of the escarpment near Tongching. Operation Urban now became Operation Suburb with the two spies on their way to Songhari by boat, while Lee and his convoy of vehicles returned into Crown-held territory. He was awarded the Iron Cross (first class) and promoted to the rank of major by Alvak commander Nikos Sarratos.

Intercepted Wireless messages
In early 1952 Kodeshi code-breakers at Chang Manor (the manor was the headquarters for Kodeshi intelligence operations) had managed to decipher the Abwehr hand cypher used by field stations (including Urban), and by late 1952 had also broken the Paradox machine code which was used for the most-secret communication between Alvak commands. Code named Xiantong, this source of information was considered so vital to the war effort, that it was only declassified in the early nineties. Lee's presence in Alvakalia was already known to Kodeshi intelligence from captured messages by late 1951, however, the natures of his activities were not. It was only when Operation Urban was completed that a young intelligence analyst, Feng Guanting realised that an enemy unit was moving in the Eastern Passages behind Kodeshi lines. However, as Selengerian advances were imminent, messages from Selengerian sources had priority in deciphering and analysis, and there was a several-day delay in warning HQ North in Aodi. By the time a search was organised, Lee was safely back in Alvastadt.

Operation Suburb
In Kodeshia, Meng Ruogang, a Kodeshi-Alvak Republican, went under the name of Dai Jianhong. He had grown up in Fuyang and Tongchuan after his mother had remarried to a wealthy Kodeshi businessman and Jianhong had thus acquired this name. Wolfram Linse posed as a Merovingian 'Sigismund Ardaric' since he had worked in the Mero-Curgov shipping industry before the war and could pass as a Mero-Curgov. After a boat and rail journey to Songhari, the two spies rented a houseboat on the river Longbei. Linse had installed their radio set in a gramophone cabinet in the living room on the boat. This device of furniture was built by Linse himself as a masterpiece of carpenter craftsmanship; the radio unit and the gramophone unit (record player) could still be operated while the radio operator was seated inside the cabinet veiled behind a wooden panel unseen and undetectable from the outside and send Morse radio messages while the device played music.

Ruogang in his book claims that they garnered information on Kodeshi troop and vehicle movements with help from a monarchist-inclined saleswoman Yuan Liuxian (Ruogang's close friend from his younger days), as well as other businesses, bars, and nightclubs of Songhari - a very lively city during the war and the destination of thousands of Kodeshi service personnel 'on leave'. Ruogang claimed to have often posed as a lieutenant in the 236th Rifle Brigade of the Kodeshi Army and used expertly forged Kodeshi banknotes. Using a prearranged system of codes he claims to have managed to make temporary radio contact with an Alvak forward radio interception post near Zhaocheng (the nearest to Songhari Alvak forces had reached before the Battle of Zhaocheng). However, communication problems forced them to request assistance from the Songhari-based Free Officers Movement, who was at the time nominally pro-Coalition in the belief that they would 'liberate' Kodeshia from Guoist influence. A young Chen Wei (who much later would become President of Kodeshia) was sent to help with Ruogang and Linse's radio equipment.

The truth, however, was quite different, as revealed by the interrogation protocols taken after their capture. Ruogang and Linse never managed to collect any meaningful information, and they never made any contact with an Alvak radio station after they parted with Lee near Tongching. Unknown to them, communication was impossible as the designated Suburb wireless operators had been captured when Sarratos's advance headquarters were overrun near Thyrares Flats on 29 May. Thus in part Sarratos was responsible for the failure of Suburb, as he personally ordered the Urban operators to join his headquarters as there was a shortage of wireless operators during the battle. Fearful of reprisals in case Songhari was actually captured by Tipslan marines, they started to create fake diaries detailing their supposed intelligence gathering and meeting of various sources.

Apparently, all Ruogang and Linse ever did in Songhari was to spend the considerable sums they had at their disposal on women and a lavish lifestyle. Adham el-Khalifa, another Alvak Abwehr spy who operated in Kodeshia, was extremely critical of them in his book Revolt on the Longbei. El-Khalifa's view was that the two Alvaks deliberately sabotaged their own radio because they wanted to enjoy themselves and live with two prostitutes. Reading the Kodeshi interrogation reports, it is hard to argue with this view.

The spies' extravagant lifestyle (and the fact that unknown to them, most of the Kodeshi Huizi they had with them were forgeries), as well as the various other leads, picked up by Kodeshi intelligence, led to their hideout being discovered and the houseboat was boarded by Kodeshi Field Security. Linse flooded the vessel, but they were quickly taken into custody. Linse attempted suicide by slashing his wrists, but eventually, both Ruogang and Linse cooperated fully with their interrogators and were spared execution (the usual fate of spies out of uniform during the Kesh War) and were released and returned by 1955. Yuan Liuxian only received a suspended sentence, but later claimed that she provided valuable intelligence to Ruogang and that she was imprisoned for two years.

The Urban diary
The diary of Lee describing the events from 15 to 29 May 1953 surfaced in Alvastadt in 1959 or 1960, found by Lt. Col. Tsjamme Alberda, who was at the time working for the Tipslan Military Commission in Alvakalia. Seeing the name of Tuinen mentioned several times in the document, Alberda forwarded the diary to Brigadier Sieds Van Tuinen through intelligence channels. It is not known at what point was the original Goetic text translated into Anglic, however, two versions remain. One which was passed on by Tuinen to David Lloyd Owen, and is kept in the Tiperyn Imperial War Museum. This copy was found by Rimme Van Der Laan when doing some unrelated research and formed the basis for the Goetic re-translation that appeared in the re-publication of the Goetic version of Lee’s "Unknown Deserts" in 1981. Another version was prepared by Marie Boersma (née Alington), who received the Anglic translation from Tuinen in 1978, together with the cover note of Alberda and other forwarders. She re-typed the documents, correcting a number of errors and mistranslations based on her superior knowledge of Goetic, however at the same time also making some abbreviations to reduce the task of re-typing. This is also the source of the uncertainty regarding the finding date, as the note of Alberda (as copied by Jean Howard) dates 28 January 1953, while the later forwarding note dates 2 February 1952, obviously, one having been copied in error. The original diary is probably still in the unreleased Tipslan Intelligence Agency Personnel File of Lee. There is no question as to the authenticity of the document, the contents of which are corroborated by many sources including intercepted wireless messages. As it surfaced during Lee’s lifetime, it could have even been with his knowledge that it was passed to Alberda. The 2016 book on Operation Urban contains a merged transcript of the IWM and the Howard copies.

Other long-range operations in the region
Although Operation Suburb ended in a complete failure, Operation Urban is notable as one of the few Coalition operations that mirrored the important Kodeshi Long Range Desert Group activities in the Ashari Desert in the Western front. The Tipslan Auto-Naseri Companies (Bedriuwen yn Auto-Nasyr - a desert patrol group formed on three to five companies with various vehicles customised for desert operations and integrated air support, and sometimes referred to as It bedriuw), was a long-lived unit that harassed insurgent and KLRDG operations up until Coalition victory in Nasiria and Asharistan.