Eastern Approaches Eastern Approaches ( 1949 ) is an autobiographical account of the early career of Fitzroy Maclean . It is divided into three parts : his life as a junior diplomat in Moscow and his travels in the Soviet Union , especially the forbidden zones of Central Asia ; his exploits in the British Army and SAS in the North Africa theatre of war ; and his time with Josip Broz Tito and the Partisans in Yugoslavia . Maclean was considered to be one of the inspirations for James Bond , and this book contains many of the elements : remote travel , the sybaritic delights of diplomatic life , violence and adventure . The American edition was titled " Escape To Adventure " , and was published a year later . All place names in this article use the spelling in the book . Golden Road : the Soviet Union . Fresh out of Cambridge , Maclean joined the Foreign Office and spent a couple of years at the Paris embassy . He loved the pleasures of life in the French capital , but eventually longed for adventure . Against the advice of his friends ( and to the delight of his London bosses ) , he requested a posting to Moscow , which he received right away ; once there , he began to learn Russian . Travelling within the Soviet Union was frowned upon by the authorities , but Maclean managed to take several trips anyway . The Caucasus . In the spring of 1937 , he took a trial trip , heading south from Moscow to Baku on the Caspian Sea . The Intourist official tried to dissuade him , but he found a ship to take him to Lenkoran ( Lankaran , Azerbaijan ) , where he witnessed the deportation of several hundred Turko - Tartar peasants to Central Asia . Stuck there for a few days , he bargained for horses with which to explore the countryside , and was arrested by the NKVD cavalry near to the Persian border . He explained that he held diplomatic immunity , but his captors could not read his Soviet diplomatic pass . Eventually , as the only person literate in Russian , Maclean " read out , with considerable expression , and such improvements as occurred to me " the contents of his pass , and was set free . He took an 1856 paddle steamer back to Baku , and then a train on to Tiflis ( Tbilisi , Georgia ) . British troops had supported the Democratic Republic after World War I , and Maclean sought out the British war cemetery , in the process discovering an English governess who had lived in the town since 1912 . He caught a truck through the Caucasus mountains , via Mtzkhet ( Mtskheta ) , the former capital of Georgia but by then merely a village , to Vladikavkaz ( capital of North Ossetia ) , and then a train to Moscow . To Samarkand . His second trip , in the autumn of the same year , took him east along the Trans - Siberian Railway . Although he disembarked without warning at Novosibirsk , he acquired an NKVD escort . He travelled on the Turksib Railway south to Biisk ( Biysk ) , at the foot of the Altai Mountains , and then to Altaisk and Barnaul . On the trains he heard the complaints of the Siberian " kolkhoz niks " ( workers on collective farms ) and witnessed another mass movement , this time of Koreans to Central Asia . His first main destination was Alma Ata ( Almaty ) , the capital of the Kazakh republic , which lies near to the Tien Shan Mountains . He characterised it as " one of the pleasantest provincial towns in the Soviet Union " and particularly appreciated the apples for which it is famous . From there he took a truck to a hill village called Talgar and went walking with one of his NKVD escorts ; Maclean availed himself of peasant hospitality and commented on the general prosperity . He managed to hire a car and made it to Issyk - kul , the lake that never freezes , but had to turn back because of the season . From Alma Ata Maclean took the train for Tashkent , passing through villages where " nothing seemed to have changed since the time when the country was ruled over by the Emir of Bokhara " ; men still rode bulls and women still wore veils made of black horsehair . From Tashkent , which then had a reputation for wickedness , he made the final leg to the fabled city of Samarkand . He returned to Moscow with plans for a further trip . Maclean spent the winter working in Moscow and amusing himself at the " dacha " ( country cottage ) of American friends , including Chip Bohlen . In March 1938 a show trial was announced , the first such public event in over a year ; he attended every day of what became known as the Trial of the Twenty - One . The book goes into great detail , spending 40 pages on description and analysis of the trial , its prominent figures and its twists and turns . To Chinese Turkestan . When the weather became more conducive to travel , Maclean began his third and longest trip , aiming for Chinese Turkestan , immediately east of the Soviet Central Asian republics he had reached in 1937 . This journey , unlike the previous two , was at the request of the British government . They wished him to investigate the conditions in Urumchi ( Ürümqi ) , the capital of the province of Sinkiang ( Xinjiang ) , which had fallen under Soviet influence . He was commissioned to talk to the tupan ( provincial governor ) there about the situation of both the consul - general and the British Indian traders . The first stage was retracing his steps on a five - day train journey to Alma Ata ; the train ran via Orenburg and the Aral Sea , then parallel to the Syr Darya and the mountains of Kirghizia ( Kyrgyzstan ) . From Alma Aty he travelled four hundred miles north through the Hungry Steppe to Ayaguz ( Ayagoz ) , where " a road which had been made , and was being kept up , for a very definite purpose " lay to the frontier town of Bakhti ( Bakhty or Bakhtu , about 17 km from Tacheng , known in Maclean ' s time as Chuguchak ) . The Soviet officials were , at first , willing to assist him but the Chinese ones were not , and in the course of the negotiations that surrounded his passage , Maclean discovered that the Soviets exercised some influence over at least the consul if not the provincial government of their neighbours . He crossed the border into China , where he was refused permission to continue ; he was forced to return to Alma Aty , whence he was expelled . Soon he found himself back in Moscow . To Bokhara and Kabul . His fourth and final Soviet trip was once more to Central Asia , spurred by the desire to reach Bokhara ( Bukhara , Uzbekistan ) , the capital of the emirate which had been closed to Europeans until recent times . Maclean recounts how Charles Stoddart and Arthur Conolly were executed there in the context of The Great Game , and how Joseph Wolff , known as the Eccentric Missionary , barely escaped their fate when he came looking for them in 1845 . In early October 1938 Maclean set out again , first for Ashkhabad ( Ashgabat , capital of the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic ) , then through the Kara Kum ( Black Desert ) , not breaking his journey at either Tashkent or Samarkand , but pushing on to Kagan , the nearest point on the railway to Bokhara . After trying to smuggle himself aboard a lorry transporting cotton , he ended up walking to the city , and spent several days sight - seeing " in the steps of the Eccentric Missionary " and sleeping in parks , much to the frustration of the NKVD spies who were shadowing him . He judged it an " enchanted city " , with buildings that rivalled " the finest architecture of the Italian Renaissance " . Aware of his limited time , he cut short his wanderings and took the train towards Stalinabad ( Dushanbe , the capital of Tajikistan ) , disembarking at Termez . This town sits on the Amu Darya ( the Oxus ) , and the other side of the river lies in Afghanistan . Maclean claimed that " very few Europeans except Soviet frontier guards have ever seen it at this or any other point of its course " . After more negotiations , he managed to cross the river and thus leave the USSR , and from that point his only guide seems to have been the narrative of " the Russian Burnaby " , a colonel Nikolai Ivanovich Grodekov , who rode from Samarkand to Mazar - i - Sharif and Herat in 1878 . The following day he and a guide set out on horseback , riding through jungle and desert , and detained on the way by dubious characters who may or may not have been brigands . ( Maclean , a proficient linguist , was hamstrung on entering Afghanistan by the lack of any " lingua franca " . ) They rode past the ruins of Balkh , a civilization founded by Alexander the Great and destroyed by Genghis Khan . After a night in Mazar , Maclean managed to get a car and driver , and progressed as rapidly as he could to Doaba , a village half - way to Kabul , where he had arranged to meet the British minister ( i . e . , ambassador ) , Colonel Frazer - Tytler . Together , they returned to the capital via Bamyan and its famous statues . Maclean circled back to Moscow via Peshawar , Delhi , Baghdad , Persia , and Armenia . Orient Sand : the Western Desert Campaign . The middle section of the book details Maclean ' s first set of experiences in World War II . He was invited to join the newly formed Special Air Service ( SAS ) , where , as part of the Western Desert Campaign , he planned and executed raids on Axis - held Benghazi , on the coast of Libya . When it became clear that the North African Campaign was drawing to a close towards the end of 1942 and it became too quiet for his taste , he travelled east to arrest General Fazlollah Zahedi , at the time the head of the Persian armed forces in the south . Joining up . The first challenge Maclean faced was getting into military service at all . His Foreign Office job was a reserved occupation , so he was not allowed to enlist . The only way around this was to go into politics , and on this stated ground Maclean tendered his resignation in 1941 to Alexander Cadogan , an FO mandarin . When his erstwhile employers discovered this to be merely a ruse or legal fiction along the lines of taking the Chiltern Hundreds , he was forced to run for office and , despite his self - confessed inexperience , was chosen as a Conservative candidate , and eventually elected MP . Prime Minister Winston Churchill jocularly accused him of using " the Mother of Parliaments as a public convenience " . In the meantime , Maclean had immediately enlisted , taking a taxi from Sir Alexander ' s office to a nearby recruiting station , where he joined the Cameron Highlanders , his father ' s regiment , as a private . Benghazi and the desert retreat . After basic training , Maclean was sent to Cairo , where David Stirling invited him to join the newly formed Special Air Service ( SAS ) , which he did . They worked closely with the Long Range Desert Group ( LRDG ) , a mechanised reconnaissance unit , to travel far behind enemy lines and attack targets such as aerodromes . Maclean ' s first operation with the SAS , once his training was completed , was to Benghazi , Libya ' s second largest city , in late May 1942 . He was joined on this operation by Randolph Churchill , son of the prime minister . They drove from Alexandria via the seaport of Mersa Matruh and the inland Siwa Oasis . They crossed the ancient caravan route known as the Trigh - el - Abd , which the enemy had laced with little bombs , and camped in the Gebel Akhdar , the Green Mountain just inland from the coastal plain . Once inside the occupied city , their patrol came face to face with Italian soldiers several times ; Maclean , with his excellent Italian , managed to bluff his way out of all of these encounters by pretending to be a staff officer . They spent two nights and a day in the city . They had hoped to sabotage ships , but both the rubber boats they had brought with them failed to inflate , so they treated the visit as a reconnaissance mission . The drive back was uneventful , but nearing Cairo , Maclean , along with most of his party , was seriously injured in a crash and spent months out of action . Once he had recovered , Stirling involved him in preparations for a larger SAS attack on Benghazi . They attended a dinner with Churchill , the Chief of the Imperial General Staff General Alan Brooke , and General Harold Alexander , who was about to assume control of Middle East Command , the post responsible for the overall conduct of the campaign in the North African desert . Four operations were designed to create a diversion from Rommel ' s attempt on El Alamein : attacks on Benghazi , Tobruk , Barce , and the Jalo oasis . These all started out from Kufra , an oasis 800 miles inland . Maclean ' s convoy drove to the Gebel across the Sand Sea at its narrowest point , Zighen , and made it there undetected , although " bazaar gossip " from an Arab spy indicated that the enemy expected an imminent attack . When Maclean ' s group reached the outskirts of Benghazi , they were ambushed and had to retreat . Axis planes repeatedly bombed them , destroying many of the vehicles and most of their supplies . Thus began a painful limp of days and nights over the desert towards Jalo , without even knowing whether that oasis was in Allied hands . They existed on rations of " a cup of water and a tablespoon of bully beef a day . . . We found ourselves looking forward to the evening meal with painful fixity " . When they got to that oasis , they found a battle going on between the Italian defenders and the Sudan Defence Force , and despite their offers to help , they received orders from GHQ to abandon the assault . Some days later they made it back to Kufra . The arrest of the Persian general . In September 1942 Maclean was ordered to Baghdad , where General Wilson , the new head of Persia and Iraq Command , wanted his advice about starting something like the SAS in Persia , should that country fall to the Germans . He proceeded there to recruit volunteers , passing through many of the places he had seen in peacetime four years earlier : Kermanshah , Hamadan , Kazvin , Teheran . He was soon diverted to a more urgent task . General Joseph Baillon , the Chief of Staff , and Reader Bullard , the minister ( i . e . , ambassador , as above ) , summoned him to Teheran . They were concerned about the influence of Fazlollah Zahedi , the general in charge of the Persian forces in the Isfahan area , who , their intelligence told them , was stockpiling grain , liaising with German agents , and preparing an uprising . Baillon and Bullard asked Maclean to remove Zahidi alive and without creating a fuss . He devised a Trojan horse plan : he and a senior officer would call on Zahidi to pay their respects , and then arrest him " at the point of a pistol " within his walled and guarded residence . He would be whisked out in the British staff car , driven a waiting plane , and flown into internment and exile . Maclean obtained and trained a platoon of Seaforth Highlanders to cover his retreat , and the plan went according to clockwork . ( Zahidi spent the rest of the war in British Palestine ; five years later he was back in charge of the military of southern Persia , by 1953 he was prime minister . ) By the end of the year , the war had developed in such a way that the new SAS detachment would not be needed in Persia . General Wilson was being transferred to Middle East Command , and Maclean extracted a promise that the newly trained troops would go with him , as their style of commando raids were ideal for southern and eastern Europe . Frustrated by the abandoning of plans for an assault on Crete , Maclean went to see Reginald Leeper , " an old friend from Foreign Office days , and now His Majesty ' s Ambassador to the Greek Government then in exile in Cairo " . Leeper put in a word for him , and very soon Maclean was told to go to London to get his instructions directly from the prime minister . Churchill told him to parachute into Jugoslavia ( now spelled Yugoslavia ) as head of a military mission accredited to Josip Broz Tito ( a shadowy figure at that point ) or whoever was in charge of the Partisans , the Communist - led resistance movement . Mihajlovic ' s royalist Cetniks ( now spelled Chetniks ) , which the Allies had been supporting , did not appear to be fighting the Germans very hard , and indeed were said to be collaborating with the enemy . Maclean famously paraphrased Churchill : " My task was simply to help find out who was killing the most Germans and suggest means by which we could help them to kill more . " The prime minister saw Maclean as " a daring Ambassador - leader to these hardy and hunted guerillas " . Balkan War : With Tito in Yugoslavia . The final and longest section of the book covers Maclean ' s time in and around Yugoslavia , from the late summer of 1943 to the formation of the united government in March 1945 . The Yugoslav front , also known as the Yugoslav People ' s Liberation War , had become important to the Allies by 1943 , although the Partisans had been fighting for two years without any help . He lived closely with Tito and his troops and had the ear of Churchill , and as such his recommendations shaped the Allies ' policy towards Yugoslavia . The list of characters . In the late summer of 1943 , Maclean parachuted into Bosnia with Vivian Street and Slim Farish ( whom he called his British and American Chiefs of Staff , respectively ) and Sergeant Duncan , his bodyguard . They were attached to Tito ' s headquarters , then in the ruined castle of Jajce . Here and elsewhere , Maclean lived in proximity to the Partisan leader for a year and a half , on and off . Maclean gives much of this section of the book to his personal assessment of the Partisan position and of Tito as a man and as a leader . Their talks , in German and Russian ( while Maclean learned Serbo - Croat ) , were wide - ranging , and from them Maclean gained hope that a future Communist Yugoslavia might not be the fear - wracked place the USSR was . The Partisans were extremely proud of their movement , dedicated to it , and prepared to live a life of austerity in its cause . All of this won his admiration . Some of the characters close to Tito whom Maclean met in his first months in Bosnia were Vlatko Velebit , an urbane young man about town , who later went with Maclean to Allied HQ as a liaison officer ; Father Vlado ( Vlado Zechevich ) , a Serbian Orthodox priest , " raconteur and trencherman " ; Arso Jovanović , the Chief of Staff ; Edo Kardelj , the Marxist theoretician who ended up vice - premier ; Aleksandar Ranković , a professional revolutionary and Party organiser ; Milovan Đilas ( Dzilas ) , who became vice - president ; Moša Pijade , one of the highest - ranking Jews ; and a young woman named Olga whose father had been a minister in the Royalist government and who spoke English like a debutante . Other Yugoslavs of note whom he met later included Koča Popović , later Chief of the General Staff of Yugoslav People ' s Army , whom Maclean judged " one of the outstanding figures of the Partisan Movement " ; Ivo Lola Ribar , son of Dr Ivan Ribar , who seemed destined for great things ; Miloje Milojević ; Slavko Rodic ; Sreten Žujović ( Crni the Black ) . Officers and soldiers under Maclean ' s command included Peter Moore of the Royal Engineers ; Mike Parker , Deputy Assistant Quartermaster general ; Gordon Alston ; John Henniker - Major , a career diplomat ; Donald Knight , and Robin Whetherly . Maclean arranged for an Allied officer , under his command , to be attached to each of the main Partisan bases , bringing with him a radio transmitting set . Maclean was not in fact the first Allied officer in Yugoslavia , but the few who had been dropped before him had not been able to get much of their information out . Maclean made contact with Bill Deakin , an Oxford history don who had served as a research assistant to Churchill ; Anthony Hunter , a Scots Fusilier , and Major William Jones , an enthusiastic but unorthodox one - eyed Canadian . First journey across Bosnia and Dalmatia . Maclean saw his task as arranging supplies and air support for the Partisan fight , to tie up the Axis forces for as long as possible . The Royal Air Force was reluctant to risk landing on what they saw as an amateur airstrip at Glamoj ( Glamoč ) , although Slim Farish was in fact an airfield designer , and night air drops were sporadic . The Royal Navy was approached , and they offered to bring supplies to an outlying island off the Dalmatian coast . Maclean and a couple of companions set off on foot for Korčula , being passed from guerilla group to guerilla group . They passed through battle - scarred villages and towns that had changed hands many times , some so recently that corpses still lay on the ground : Bugojno and Livno and Aržano . Once , they were billeted with a landlady whose sympathies clearly did not lie with the Partisans ; she would not sell them food , but there was no question of simply commandeering it . Eventually , after an all - night march across noisy stony ground , dodging German patrols as they crossed a major road , the little group reached Zadvarje , where they were greeted with astonishment as creatures from another world " as indeed in a sense we were " . After a few hours ' sleep , they continued over the final range of hills to the coast , and down to Baška Voda , where a fishing boat took them circuitously to Korčula . There , all seemed in order for a Navy supply drop , but the wireless set developed problems . Maclean was on the point of returning to Jajce when the motor launch arrived , with a crew that included Sandy Glen ( also , like Maclean , thought to be one of the inspirations for James Bond ) and David Satow . By this point the enemy were closing in to take the remaining access points to the coast , which would throttle the Partisan supply route before it had even begun . He sent top priority requests , asking for air and sea support from Allied bases in Italy , and these took effect . Maclean decided he needed to discuss matters with Tito and then with Allied superiors in Cairo to argue for more resources to push the project forward , and accordingly made his way back to Partisan HQ in Jajce . He returned to the islands , first on Hvar and then on Vis , to wait for the response to his strongly worded signals . On Vis he discovered an overgrown British war cemetery dating from a naval victory over the French in 1811 . Gaining support . In Cairo Maclean dined with Alexander Cadogan , his FO superior , and the next day reported to Anthony Eden , the Foreign Secretary . He stated his conclusions straightforwardly : that the Partisans were important militarily and politically and would influence the future of Yugoslavia whether the Allies helped them or not ; their impact on the Germans could be greatly increased by Allied support ; they were Communist and oriented towards the USSR . He says that his report created " something of a stir " . He was sent back to collect two Yugoslav liasison officers who had not been allowed to come out with him on the first Navy pick - up . From Bari on the Italian Adriatic coast , now a centre of operations for the Tactical Air Force , he saw that this would prove difficult , as the German offensive had captured the whole Dalmatian coast . Fortunately , he had asked Air Marshal Sholto Douglas to assign him a liaison officer , and Wing Commander John Selby proved a godsend . Together they obtained the use of a Baltimore bomber and an escort of Lightnings . Twice they set out from Italy on a sunny day and twice the clouds blocked them from the Bosnian hills . On the third day the fighters were unavailable so the bomber set out alone , but again the weather made it impossible to land . On their return to Italy , they received a signal that the Partisans had captured a small German plane that they proposed to use . As they were loading up the plane , an enemy aircraft , alerted by a traitor , bombed the landing strip at Glamoc , killing Whetherly , Knight , and Ribar , and wounding Milojevic . This event , at the end of November , proved a spur to getting the mission higher priority , and soon Maclean got a large Dakota and half a squadron of Lightnings to complete the landing operation . Milojevic and Velebit accompanied Maclean to Alexandria , where the Yugoslavs decompressed for a few days , while Maclean sought out the prime minister . Churchill received him in trademark fashion : in bed , wearing an embroidered dressing gown , smoking a cigar . He , Joseph Stalin , and Franklin D . Roosevelt had discussed the matter of Yugoslavia at a recent conference in Teheran , and had decided to give all possible support to the Partisans . This was the turning point . The Chetniks were given a task ( a bridge to blow up ) and a deadline , to show whether they could still be effective allies ; they failed this test and supplies were re - directed from them to the Partisans . The British government was left with the tricky political and moral problem of King Peter and his royalist government in exile . But the main issues were air supplies and air support , and to help co - ordinate this , Maclean ' s mission was expanded . Some of the new officers included Andrew Maxwell of the Scots Guards , John Clarke of the 2nd Scots Guards , Geoffrey Kup , a gunnery expert , Hilary King , a signals officer , Johnny Tregida , and , for a time , Randolph Churchill . Some of these were SAS or otherwise known from the Western Desert Campaign the previous year . Marshal of Yugoslavia . Maclean returned to the islands and settled on Vis as being the best site for an airstrip and a naval base . He then needed to garrison it . He discussed the matter with General Alexander and his Chief of Staff General John Harding , who seemed to think it might be possible , and who gave him a lift to Marrakech to put the matter to the prime minister . Churchill assured him on the point of troops , and wrote a personal letter to Tito which he commissioned Maclean to deliver . Maclean parachuted into Bosnia again , thinking it no longer an unknown , as it had been only six months before . Tito , since the end of November Marshal of Yugoslavia , was delighted with the recognition from Churchill , as from one statesman to another . The Partisan headquarters moved to the village of Drvar , where Tito took up residence in a cave with a waterfall . Maclean spent months there with him , " talking , eating , and above all , arguing " . He and Tito agreed a system of allocating the air drop supplies around the country , although there was some friction from officers wanting a bigger share . Air drops became much more frequent , as did air support for Partisan operations . At this point all support for the Cetniks was withdrawn , a fact Churchill announced in the House of Commons . Maclean decided to go to Serbia to see for himself what this stronghold of Cetniks held for the Partisans . In early April , before this could be arranged , he was ordered to London for further discussions . ( A stop - over in Algiers meant a specially arranged radio phone call with Churchill . Maclean , who hated telephone conversations , managed to wring amusement from the mix - ups of codes and scrambling . Churchill ' s son was referred to as Pippin . ) They arrived in England to find " the whole of the southern counties [ were ] one immense armed camp " . Despite the tension over the anticipated invasion of Normandy , the press and officials were eager to hear the Yugoslav story , and Maclean and Velebit had a busy time ; even U . S . General Dwight D . Eisenhower wanted to meet them . At Chequers Maclean participated in attempts to build a possible compromise between the Royalist government in exile and the Partisans . As Maclean was preparing to go back to Bari and Bosnia , he received news that the enemy had made a fierce attack on Partisan headquarters at Drvar , later known as the Knight ' s Move . " It was the kind of communication that took your breath away . " When he got the full story from Vivian Street , he heard how the German bombers had made a full and thorough attack , and , after Tito and the Partisans escaped , revenged themselves on the civilians , massacring almost everyone , men , women , and children . In the week that followed the attack on Drvar , Allied planes flew more than a thousand sorties in support of the Partisans . Tito , harassed and harried through the woods , reached the decision that he needed to leave and establish his headquarters in a place of security . Accordingly , he asked Vivian Street to arrange for the Allies to evacuate him and his staff , which they did . Maclean , on his way back from London , caught up with the Marshall at Bari , and found him proposing to establish his base on Vis . The Royal Navy took him across in fine style , with a memorable wardroom dinner , at which Tito recited , in English , " The Owl and the Pussycat " . Negotiating the future of Yugoslavia . Vis had been transformed in the intervening months , becoming a substantial base for aircraft , commandos , and navy boats " engaged in piratical activities against enemy shipping up and down the whole length of the Jugoslav coastline from Istria to Montenegro " . Meanwhile , other fronts of the war were progressing rapidly , and the Germans were hard - pressed . It was necessary to discuss the future shape of Yugoslavia at the highest possible level , and so Maclean was instructed to invite Tito and his entourage to Caserta , the Allied Force Headquarters near Naples . Maclean accompanied him on this , his first public appearance outside his own country . While the negotiations wore on , Maclean was told that Churchill would be in Italy in a week and wanted to see the Yugoslav Marshal , but security meant the prime minister ' s movements could not be released . Maclean helped to spin out Tito ' s visit with side trips and excuses , taking him to Rome and Cassino , " to tea with Hermione Ranfurly at her ridiculous little house of the side of the hill overlooking the Bay of Naples " and to Capri to meet Mrs Harrison Williams . Sitting outside one afternoon , Tito saw a heavy plane and a dozen fighters coming in , and announced that that must be Mr Churchill . Maclean commented wryly , " He was not an easy man to keep anything from " . The negotiations that followed were called the Naples Conference , with Tito , Velebit and Olga on one side of the table and Churchill and Maclean on the other . Churchill was happy to give this matter his personal attention , and , Maclean says , he did it very well . One day the two leaders were taking a rest , having handed things over to a committee of experts , when a matter arose required Churchill ' s immediate attention . Maclean was sent to find him ; he was believed to be bathing in the Bay of Naples . When they got to the shore , they saw the huge flotilla of troopships setting off for the south of France ( Operation Dragoon ) , and a small bright blue admiral ' s barge dodging around them . Maclean was assigned a little torpedo boat , complete with a cautious captain and an attractive stenographer . It zoomed after the barge , eventually catching up with the prime minister , who found Maclean and his crew ' s arrival a source of much hilarity . Immediately after the Naples Conference , Tito continued the diplomatic discussions on Vis , this time with Ivan Šubašić , prime minister of the Royal Yugoslav Government , and his colleagues . Ralph Stevenson , the British Ambassador to this government in exile , accompanied Šubašić to Vis , but he and Maclean stayed out of the negotiations and spent their days swimming and speculating . The two parties came to an agreement , the Treaty of Vis , which , Maclean said , " sounded ( and was ) too good to be true " . To celebrate this , Tito took everyone out in a motor boat to a local beauty spot , an underwater cave illuminated with sunlight ( Biševo ) . " We all stripped and bathed , our bodies glistening bluish and ghastly . Almost everyone there was a Cabinet Minister in one or other of the two Yugoslav Governments , and there was much shouting and laughter as one blue and phosphorescent Excellency cannoned into another , bobbing about in that cerulean twilight . " Planning for action . But by this point Maclean had had enough of high politics and garrison life . He wanted to be back in the action , and it looked as if the Germans were planning to withdraw from Yugoslavia . Accordingly , he came up with a plan known as Operation Ratweek , in which the Partisans and Allies were to harass the Axis troops in close co - ordination for seven days , destroying their communication lines . Bill Elliot , in command of the Balkan Air Force , supported the plan , as did the Navy and General Wilson . Tito committed himself too , although , as Maclean points out , it would have been understandable had he wished to let the Germans leave as soon as possible . Maclean got permission from Churchill to go to Serbia , previously a stronghold of the Chetniks , to supervise Ratweek from there . He landed at Bojnik near Radan Mountain , a position surrounded by Bulgars , Albanians , White Russians , and Germans . Through the latter part of August he , and his team back in Bari and Caserta , and the Partisans in Serbia and elsewhere , finalised the details of Ratweek . Almost to cue , the White Russians blew up their ammunition dump and the enemy started to retreat . The following day , Maclean moved to near Leskovac , and the next day , Ratweek began , with fifty heavy bombers attacking the town at 11 : 30 . " Already the Fortress es were over their target - - were past it - - when , as we watched , the whole of Leskovac seemed to rise bodily into the air in a tornado of dust and smoke and debris , and a great rending noise fell on our ears . When we looked at the sky again , the Forts , still relentlessly following their course , were mere silvery dots in the distance . [ . . . ] Even the Partisans seemed subdued . " That night , the land offensive began , and Maclean watched the Partisans attack the Belgrade - Salonika railway , blowing up bridges , burning sleepers , and rendering it unusable . When the Germans tried to repair it , the Balkan Air Force soon dissuaded them . They tried to evacuate Greece and Macedonia by air , but again the Allies thwarted them . Maclean , with three British companions and one Yugoslav guide , made his way on horseback north into Serbia . They travelled for several days through prosperous countryside , " so surprising after Bosnia and Dalmatia " , where the peasants , who expressed great friendship for Britain and a certain caution about the Partisans , gave them lavish hospitality and food . One evening they camped outside a village , and soon saw " a procession of peasant women arriving with an array of bowls , baskets , jars and bottles . From these they produced eggs and sour milk and fresh bread and a couple of chickens and a roast suckling - pig and cream cheese and pastry and wine and peaches and grapes " . The journey produced many such vignettes , some pleasant , others of confusion , discomfort , worry . Altogether Maclean found it " an agreeable existence " , reflecting " with heightened distaste " on the life he lived on Vis in the shadow of political negotiations . He hoped he could remain in Serbia to be there when Belgrade was liberated , but received a message that Tito had disappeared — or as Churchill put it " levanted " — and he had to try to find him . A plane was sent to pick up Maclean . End stages . From Bari , he calculated that Tito would want to be directing the recapture of Belgrade , so he headed towards there himself , landing at Valjevo with a jeep . It was here that " Lili Marlene " , the song broadcast from Radio Belgrade and which he had listened to night after night , from the desert to the mountain tops , finally ceased . " Not long now , " he thought . The Partisan troops travelled through Arandjelovac and soon met up with the Red Army , who were being hailed as liberators . Maclean noted that almost every one of them was a fighting soldier , and that their vehicles carried nothing but petrol and ammunition . For the rest , he presumed , they got from the enemy or the local people . " We were witnessing a return to the administrative methods of Attila and Genghis Khan , and the results seemed to deserve careful attention . " In the last ten miles outside the capital , they passed hundreds and hundreds of corpses from the recent battle , and a neat stack of a hundred or more who appeared to have been executed . When they reached the HQ of General Peko Dapčević , his chief of staff , who had only a vague notion of the geography of the city , took Maclean and Vivian Street out for a tour , through heavy shelling that he appeared oblivious to . From the terrace of the Kalemegdan , the ancient fort in the middle of the city , they witnessed the withdrawal of German troops over the Danube to the suburb of Zemun . Inexplicably , the Germans failed to blow up the bridge after the last of their troops were over it , allowing the Russians to follow only minutes behind . Maclean , some time afterwards , found out the answer to this puzzle , comparing it to a fairytale . An old schoolmaster , whose one experience of modern warfare was in the Balkan War of 1912 , saw the charges being laid and knew how to disconnect them . He got a gold medal in 1912 and another for this iniative too . A few days later Tito arrived and Maclean had to convey Churchill ' s displeasure at his sudden and unexplained departure . Tito had been to Moscow at Stalin ' s invitation , to arrange matters with the Soviet High Command . Maclean helped to hammer out a draft agreement , and went to London with it , while Tito ' s envoys took it to Moscow . " It was a difficult and thankless task . King Peter , quite naturally , was not easy to reassure , and Tito , sitting in Belgrade with all the cards in his hand , was not easy to satisfy . " The bargaining went on for months , and meanwhile Maclean ' s staff wanted to get away , to assist guerrilla wars elsewhere . When the Big Three ( Churchill , Roosevelt , and Stalin ) met at Yalta in February 1945 , and made it clear that Tio and Subasic had to get on with it , King Peter gave in , and all the pieces fell into place . The regents were sworn in , as was the united government , and the British ambassador flew in . Maclean was finally able to leave .