Game of Spies: The Secret Agent, the Traitor and the Nazi, Bordeaux 1942-1944

Game of Spies: The Secret Agent, the Traitor and the Nazi, Bordeaux 1942-1944 Paddy Ashdown ‘Game of Spies’ tells the story of a lethal spy triangle between 1942 and 1944 in Bordeaux – and of France’s greatest betrayal by aristocratic and right-wing Resistance leader Andre Grand-clement.The story centres on three men: one British, one French and one German and the duel they fought out in an atmosphere of collaboration, betrayal and assassination, in which comrades sold fellow comrades, Allied agents and downed pilots to the Germans, as casually as they would a bottle of wine. It is a story of SOE, treachery, bed-hopping and executions in the city labelled ‘la plus collaboratrice’ in the whole of France. (#u1e7cad16-71a6-5cf5-904b-07983204534c) COPYRIGHT (#u1e7cad16-71a6-5cf5-904b-07983204534c) William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com) First published in Great Britain by William Collins 2016 Text © Paddy and Jane Ashdown Partnership 2016 Extract from ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’ © the Estate of W. H. Auden, reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the author and publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future editions. Maps by John Gilkes Cover photograph © CollaborationJS / Trevillion Imanages A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008140847 Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008140830 Version: 2017-04-11 DEDICATION (#u1e7cad16-71a6-5cf5-904b-07983204534c) To the young men and women whose lives were changed in Room 055 of the Old War Office Building in London – and ended in the death camps of Nazi Europe. CONTENTS Cover (#ubf8d9cdd-0955-58df-9965-381182ab9643) Title Page (#u4fbc5c57-4161-53d6-a574-f8b8a8fd1bc2) Copyright (#u24697d6c-5355-556d-8a1b-06e320188e60) Dedication (#u3c22d61e-2586-5698-aa3d-ad265fb766c4) Epigraph (#u203bd2d6-25c0-561a-beb8-72d2fab19af7) Introduction (#ue787c3e3-36fc-5bc1-b646-cd1a091df804) Author’s Note (#uadddcd5e-935c-551e-8f58-b6a137782935) Maps (#u3e7fd56c-48cc-56e6-94b5-bad6559f352d) Prologue: The Execution (#uedffdf64-3f9b-53f0-b5e9-9f6d1b6fb324) 1 Bordeaux – Beginnings (#u75fc1977-5370-5ca3-898a-c0f89ea3123b) 2 Roger Landes (#u2af6faba-9a42-5ee8-a511-fc9172dc394f) 3 Friedrich Dohse (#u7b8efc24-981f-556b-85fd-fc985e379f34) 4 Andr? Grandcl?ment (#u9114a799-f5fa-5ba7-9819-06ae76595d43) 5 A Happy Man and a Dead Body (#u3a539b40-cda8-528f-96d6-619f6cd638f7) 6 Scientist Gets Established (#uaf70d9fb-3e30-5995-b2aa-b7fb1ad00b1a) 7 A Visitor for David (#u53513b2e-b764-5ab5-bded-f7d907a7dc6b) 8 Crackers and Bangs (#u86d3956a-aea5-501f-a08c-eb983b2c53b0) 9 Businesses, Brothels and Plans (#ud034f890-376b-55d2-8b48-52c4905c5d85) 10 ‘Je suis fort – Je suis m?me tr?s fort’ (#litres_trial_promo) 11 A Birthday Present for Friedrich (#litres_trial_promo) 12 The Wolf in the Fold (#litres_trial_promo) 13 The Trap Closes (#litres_trial_promo) 14 The Deal (#litres_trial_promo) 15 Arms and Alarms (#litres_trial_promo) 16 Progress and Precautions (#litres_trial_promo) 17 The Battle of Lestiac (#litres_trial_promo) 18 Maquis Officiels (#litres_trial_promo) 19 Lencouacq (#litres_trial_promo) 20 Of Missions and Machinations (#litres_trial_promo) 21 Crossing the Frontier (#litres_trial_promo) 22 Cyanide and Execution (#litres_trial_promo) 23 Aristide Returns (#litres_trial_promo) 24 ‘I come on behalf of Stanislas’ (#litres_trial_promo) 25 ‘Forewarned is Forearmed’ (#litres_trial_promo) 26 ‘This Poisoned Arrow Causes Death’ (#litres_trial_promo) 27 A Deadly Charade (#litres_trial_promo) 28 The Viper’s Nest (#litres_trial_promo) 29 Two Hours to Leave France (#litres_trial_promo) 30 Nunc Dimittis (#litres_trial_promo) Epilogue: Post Hoc Propter Hoc (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Dramatis Personae (#litres_trial_promo) Notes (#litres_trial_promo) Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo) Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Also by Paddy Ashdown (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) EPIGRAPH (#u1e7cad16-71a6-5cf5-904b-07983204534c) ‘O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress: Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless. ‘O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.’ It was late, late in the evening, The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming, And the deep river ran on. From ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’ W. H. Auden INTRODUCTION (#u1e7cad16-71a6-5cf5-904b-07983204534c) The three main characters of this book – Roger Landes, Andr? Grandcl?ment and Friedrich Dohse – appeared as fleeting shadows in my book A Brilliant Little Operation, the story of the ‘Cockleshell Heroes’ raid on Bordeaux in 1942. And that’s the way they would have remained had it not been for a chance email from a friend. Richard Wooldridge, who I had got to know while researching my Cockleshell heroes book, runs the remarkable little Combined Services Military Museum at East Maldon in Essex, of which I am a sometime patron. He had been gifted some documents which had come to light after the death of the owner of a house called ‘Aristide’ in Liphook, Hampshire. The papers had first been passed to a retired gentleman in the Isle of Wight, who asked Richard if his museum could provide a home for them. Recognising the name ‘Aristide’ from the work we had done together, Richard contacted me and asked if I would be interested. I was, but, due to pressure of work could not visit the museum myself to look at the archive. So my colleague and collaborator in this book, Sylvie Young, made the journey to East Maldon and brought back around 400 photographs of letters and papers from the museum. It soon became clear that what we had was the personal archive of one of the Second World War’s most remarkable secret agents – Roger Landes. And that is how this book began. Since tracing Tito’s progress across the mountains of Bosnia (mostly on foot) and reading the remarkable accounts of F. W. D. Deakin and Fitzroy Maclean, who marched with Tito’s partisans, I have always been fascinated by that part of the Second World War in which Britain supported, fostered, and sometimes even created, bands of ‘freedom fighters’ (the Germans called them ‘terrorists’) dedicated to the liberation of occupied Europe. Looking back today, it seems to me extraordinary that our besieged little country commited so many of its young men and women and so much of its resources to secret and extremely hazardous operations to free the countries of Europe, which we have now chosen to be no part of. It seems extraordinary that a nation which today does less than any other member of the European Union to help those fleeing the misery of war, was, so short a time ago, their only refuge. After the shock of the Referendum result, I still cannot bring myself to believe that our country, which has now turned its back on solidarity with our European neighbours, was then so much their last hope that, from the alpine pastures of Norway to the mountaintops of Greece, those desperate for freedom from every nation in Europe gathered on moonlit nights to listen for the tiny reverberation in the air which would tell them that the dark shadow of an RAF Halifax from London would shortly pass over them, with its largesse of weapons and its message that they were not alone. Of course, I know that that is the romance of the story. I know that there is more to it than that. There are legends, and myths, and very black deeds – as well as brilliantly shining ones; and cowardice along with courage, and stupidity too, and vanity – a lot of vanity – and, it must be said, a good deal of betrayal as well. How could it be otherwise, since the basic ingredient of these stories is how ordinary, untrained, unsifted, unselected and unprepared individuals faced the great questions of life and death, which most of us have never had to face in our carefully pasteurised, cotton-wool worlds? Fortunately, there is now a new mood amongst historians of the Resistance – and especially the French Resistance. A much more granular picture is emerging. The role of women is, at last, coming to light. The failures and betrayals are being analysed, as well as the triumphs, and a much more objective view about the overall achievements – and lack of them – is beginning to appear. This is especially so in France, where the fashion for debunking the Resistance may now even be distorting the picture in the opposite direction. The role of organisations such as the Gestapo in the story of the European resistance movements remains, on the other hand, a monochrome black. Little has been written in popular form about how the Gestapo worked, how it fitted into the German hierarchy and especially about the individuals involved. In the popular imagination, Klaus Barbie – the ‘Butcher of Lyon’ – is the model for a Gestapo officer, and it is assumed they were all more or less like that. But of course they weren’t. It is time for a much more rounded description of what life was like then, not just for the secret agent operating in enemy territory, but also for the German security apparatus dealing with this so-called ‘terrorist’ threat, bearing in mind that in our age too we are faced with challenges which are, in practical terms even if not in moral ones, not totally dissimilar. Following up on the leads in the Aristide archives, we stumbled across the fact that Friedrich Dohse, a Gestapo counter-espionage officer in Bordeaux, had written his memoirs (the only such ones in existence, I believe). These covered the period when his overriding priority was to catch British SOE agent Roger Landes. The opportunity now presented itself to write something which gave both sides of the story. The third person in the triumvirate at the heart of this book is Andr? Grandcl?ment. He was responsible for one of the most controversial betrayals in wartime France. Much has been written on him, but little about his psychology and the deeper reasons for his ‘betrayal’ (if that, indeed, is what it was). In this book I hope to give a picture of those times seen through the eyes of these three men – three enemies – who all lived and operated in wartime southwest France. In these pages, I trace their lives, almost on a day-to-day basis, over the two and a half years from the early months of 1942 to the final liberation of Bordeaux in August 1944. This is not a book of moral judgements. The three men’s stories are presented, as far as possible, plain and unvarnished. Ultimately it is up to the reader to judge what to make of them. But if in the process of making those judgements, a more complete and detailed picture of this fascinating period and of some of the people who lived in it emerges, then this book will have achieved its purpose. AUTHOR’S NOTE (#u1e7cad16-71a6-5cf5-904b-07983204534c) This is a work of non-fiction, based chiefly on primary historical sources. The key details of the story remain disputed even today. With very few exceptions the accounts which form the basis of this work were written shortly after the war, and often by participants whose reputations were at risk – either because they faced accusations of collaboration, or because they were subject to legal action. For instance, a principal source in this book is the unpublished memoirs of Friedrich Dohse, written while he was awaiting trial by a French military tribunal in Bordeaux after the war. These were plainly designed to put the Gestapo officer’s wartime activities in the most favourable light and form part of his defence against the charges he was facing. The same caveat must also apply to the descriptions of events given by others who, while not necessarily preparing for formal court cases, were nevertheless explaining their actions before the court of post-war French public opinion, or simply leaving a record for posterity. There are, in consequence, often radically different versions of the same event. In these cases, difficult judgements of historical evaluation have had to be made. Where an account exists which is substantially different to the one used in this narrative, this fact has been identified in the endnotes. Sometimes it has been necessary to include some minor speculation in the narrative, where the basic facts surrounding an event have been already established. For example, on 24 September 1943, Andr? Grandcl?ment rode a bicycle through Bordeaux to pay a clandestine visit to the house of Charles Corbin. A visit to the Corbin house for research revealed that the building is very small with a tiny back garden and no back access. Based on these facts and bearing in mind that Grandcl?ment was paying a secret visit to the Corbin family, it seems reasonable to speculate that his bicycle would have been wheeled through the Corbin house into the back garden, rather than leaving it outside. The dialogue in the Prologue has been reconstructed in a manner consistent with the known facts of the event described. On all other occasions dialogue has only been included where it was either recorded at the time, recorded later by one of the protagonists, or subsequently verified as an accurate representation of what was said. There are also some important issues regarding terminology. The term ‘Gestapo’ originates from the first letters of the three words used for the Nazi state secret police (GEheimeSTAatsPOlizei). But the ‘true’ Gestapo was only a small element within the overall, highly complex German state security apparatus. However, the Gestapo gained such a reputation during the war that very soon (and with the active encouragement of SOE) the word ‘Gestapo’ became a generic word used to cover all parts of the German security system. In an attempt not to test the sanity of the reader too far with unnecessary complexity, the term ‘Gestapo’ in this narrative is, in almost all cases, used in its wider more ‘popular’ sense, rather than its narrower more technical one. In the 1930s and 1940s the term ‘spy’ carried pejorative overtones of cheating and underhand activity which it does not have today. For this reason – and perhaps also in the vain hope that their operatives behind enemy lines might gain some flimsy protection from the Geneva Convention provision that spies could be shot – the Special Operations Executive was very particular not to call its operatives ‘spies’, but ‘secret agents’. However, any such distinction was rejected by the German authorities at the time: they ignored SOE’s terminological niceties and treated all their captured agents as spies, liable to immediate execution. In addition to one or more false identities with which every SOE agent was equipped, each also had a number of aliases or codenames: one which was used under training, another for SOE files and correspondence, and a third for when they were in the field. For example, Roger Landes’s false identities in France were ‘Ren? Pol’ on his first mission and ‘Roger Lalande’ on his second. Under training he was known to his colleagues as ‘Robert Lang’; the internal alias by which he was referred to in SOE papers was ‘Actor’ (all F-Section agents had internal aliases based on occupations) and the nom de guerre by which he was known to his French colleagues was ‘Stanislas’ on his first mission and ‘Aristide’ on his second. In addition, SOE agents often accumulated nicknames while in France: Victor Charles Hayes, codename ‘Printer’, alias ‘Yves’, was more frequently known to his French colleagues as ‘Charlot’ – or, because of his prowess with explosives, ‘Charles le D?molisseur’. Although almost all the participants in this story would have used their aliases when communicating with each other I have used personal names throughout, except where the needs of the story dictate otherwise (for example, when it is appropriate to refer to Roger Landes by the noms de guerre by which he was known to the Gestapo officer Friedrich Dohse – that is, ‘Stanislas’, and later ‘Aristide’). During the war, the French resistance, diverse and diffuse as it was, was neither referred to nor seen as a single body. It was only after the war that the disparate resistance organisations were regarded as part of a single overarching structure known as the French Resistance (with capitals applied to both words). For ease of reading, I have, in this book, adopted the post-war habit of referring to the French Resistance (with capitals) when referring to the overall organisation, and French resistance when the noun is employed more generally. Latitude and longitude for places of key importance (such as parachute sites and places of execution) are included in the endnotes. For certain military operations, timings are given according to the twenty-four-hour clock and have been converted into Central European Time (Greenwich Mean Time plus one hour from 16 August to 3 April, and GMT plus two hours from 4 April to 15 August) – which was the standard time used throughout all Nazi-occupied Western Europe for the duration of the war. As is often the case, there are a bewildering profusion of characters who people this historical narrative. In an attempt to make things easier for the reader, I mention characters by their names only if they appear more than once. For those interested in the names of the others mentioned, these, where known, can be found in the endnotes (#litres_trial_promo). Even so, the reader may find the number of names challenging. I have therefore provided a dramatis personae (#litres_trial_promo) of all the main characters. (#u1e7cad16-71a6-5cf5-904b-07983204534c) PROLOGUE THE EXECUTION (#u1e7cad16-71a6-5cf5-904b-07983204534c) The man’s index finger slid forward along the cool metal surface of the Colt in his overcoat pocket and curled gingerly around the trigger. The signal would come soon now. The young woman walked half a pace ahead of him and a little to his right: she was lithe and pretty with auburn hair. Her wooden-soled sandals clacked on the dry path, and her wedding ring glinted in the last rays of the evening sun. She had dressed for London carefully, before leaving the house: slingback sandals with raised heels, a deep V-neckline green dress, which swung on her hips as she strode lightly along the forest track. She was happy: by the morning she and the husband she adored would be far away from this snake pit of betrayal and treachery. In a few moments he would have to kill her. He had agreed to this when they had decided on the executions an hour previously. He had not killed before – though he had ordered others to be killed. But he was calm. It had to be done and he was ready for it. On the woman’s right walked a second man, his hands too plunged deep into the pockets of a heavy coat, though it was a warm summer’s evening. They strolled along the track, between the fir trees, chatting amiably. ‘When will the aircraft arrive?’ ‘After dark I suppose. We’ll hear when we get to the landing site.’ ‘How long will it take?’ ‘To London? About three or four hours I should think.’ ‘Oh! As long as …’ The sentence died in a cacophony of shots and screams coming from the other side of a small copse to their left. With a flick of the wrist, the Colt was out of his pocket, its muzzle pressed against the back of the woman’s skull. He pulled the trigger. But it wouldn’t yield. In the millisecond it took him to push the safety catch down, the woman, feeling the cold of the muzzle, turned her head. He could already see the flared white of her left eye and the terrified gape of her mouth when the gun fired. She dropped silently to the ground, a crumple of green and red lying incongruously on the forest path, as his shot echoed through the woods, startling a small cloud of evening birds. They half-carried, half-rolled the woman’s body into a stream, which ran quietly in a nearby ditch. Her fresh blood billowed in the clear water. They were joined by two men half dragging another corpse, which trailed a wide smear of blood on the woodland path. ‘Both dead?’ the man with the Colt asked. ‘Yeah, but Christian botched the young man. I had to finish him off. He shouted for mercy.’ ‘Put him in the ditch and we’ll collect the other. The guys will clear up in the morning.’ Ten minutes later the two men’s bodies lay heaped in an awkward jumble on top of the woman’s. Their blood mingled with hers, turning the little rivulet into a meandering of crimson among the grasses and ferns. They covered them with branches, walked back to their vehicles in the gathering dusk and drove to Bordeaux, arriving just before the start of curfew. 1 BORDEAUX – BEGINNINGS (#ulink_fee6a4bd-2618-5ba6-be05-5deab78dd2da) After Paris, probably no French city was more affected by the drama of the fall of France and the early months of the German occupation than Bordeaux. On 10 June 1940, with the sound of German artillery ringing in their ears, the French government fled Paris. Four days later they set up their new emergency wartime capital in Bordeaux. As newcomers, they were not alone. The city was already bursting with a vast tide of humanity, which the French christened the Exode – the great exodus of refugees desperately fleeing south to avoid the advancing German armoured columns. Historically this was not a new experience for Bordeaux. Twice before the city had acted as the emergency capital and chief refuge of France: during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and again in 1914. But everyone sensed that this time was going to be different. This time it was going to be not just a military defeat, but a national catastrophe in which all would be engulfed. The last scenes of France’s tragedy were swiftly acted out. On the evening of 16 June 1940, General de Gaulle, who had been sent to London to secure the support of the British, flew back to M?rignac airport outside Bordeaux in a plane which Churchill had placed at his disposal. He booked into the H?tel Majestic and arranged an urgent interview with Marshal P?tain, who was headquartered next door at the H?tel Splendid. The interview was short and fruitless. De Gaulle promised Churchill’s help and pleaded with the old marshal to begin the fight back. But it was too late; the die was already cast. Later that day the French prime minister resigned and Marshal Philippe P?tain, the hero of Verdun in the First War, began negotiating an armistice with the Germans. Disgusted, de Gaulle returned to M?rignac and, on the morning of 17 June, took off for London accompanied by four clean shirts, a spare pair of trousers, 100,000 gold francs and the honour of France. The day after, he made the first of his great speeches from the British capital, appealing to all French men and women to rally to his cause and rescue their country from the shame of defeat. Initially, however, the general’s impassioned pleas fell mostly on deaf ears. The mood in France following its rout was predominantly one of stunned apathy. ‘The population was, if not pro-German, at least disposed to do nothing if they were left alone,’ one senior German intelligence officer put it. Under the terms of the armistice signed by P?tain, France was divided by a demarcation line – in practical terms, an internal frontier – running from the Lake of Geneva to the Pyrenees. This separated the northern, occupied zone – a virtual annex of Germany – from the zone non-occup?e, governed by P?tain’s Vichy government in the south. In the Bordeaux region the demarcation line ran along a north–south axis forty kilometres east of the city, and encompassed in the German zone not just the great port itself, but also the entire Atlantic coast south of the M?doc peninsula. Security along the Atlantic coastline was further supplemented by a ten-kilometre-deep zone interdite from which all French citizens were banned, unless in possession of a special pass. The Germans acted swiftly to take control of the occupied zone, not least by requisitioning a number of key addresses in the French capital, most infamously 82–84 Avenue Foch (soon rechristened by Parisians ‘Avenue Boche’). Here they established the headquarters of the main state security organisations – the Abwehr (officially the spy service for the German army); the Gestapo (which from mid-1942 would be responsible for all intelligence-gathering on Resistance movements in occupied territories); the Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP), the police arm of the Abwehr; and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), reporting directly to Heinrich Himmler at his headquarters in Berlin. The SD was originally tasked to root out domestic dissent in Germany, but it soon also expanded its activities into the occupied territories, establishing a strong intelligence presence in Paris and Bordeaux, where it would increasingly use the Gestapo as its action arm for arrests and interrogation. At 11 a.m. on 28 June, less than a fortnight after de Gaulle left the city, the newly appointed German commandant of Bordeaux and its region, General von Faber du Faur, entered his new residence in the city, an imposing townhouse on the Rue Vital Carles. Here the pr?fet of the Gironde presented him with a magnificent welcoming bouquet of flowers in a fine cut crystal vase. The city which formed the heart of the general’s new command was – and still is – one of the most beautiful and venerable in all France. Lying along a crescent-moon-shaped curve of the Garonne river (from which the city gets its nickname, the ‘Port de la Lune’), Bordeaux had been a port since Roman times, shipping iron and tin from its quays; in later centuries, slaves, coffee, cotton, indigo and agricultural products were added to the trade. But the most valuable of all Bordeaux’s commodities – and central to the region’s wealth and dignity – was wine. From the great clarets of the M?doc, to the Graves and Sauternes of the Garonne valley, to the cognac grapes of Charentes – Bordeaux’s rich hinterlands of vineyards made the city affluent, proud, and uncompromisingly mercantile in its outlook. In the pre-war years the entire port area had been rebuilt and renovated, from the working district of Bacalan at the northern end, south along the sweep of the Quai des Chartrons, to the elegant parks and apartments near the city centre. The most modern cranes were installed, a small-gauge railway was constructed, new warehouses were established, tarmac was laid in place of cobbles and a brand-new tram system was inaugurated to link the port to the rest of the city. Bordeaux was, at the fall of France, not only one of the most beautiful, but also one of the most modern ports in the whole of Europe. On still days a thin diaphanous haze, caused by the incessant bustle of the great port, hung over the city. In stormy weather, the wind funnelled down narrow streets, whipping the harbour into white-topped rufflets and sweeping fallen leaves from the city’s plane trees into drifts along the gutters and neat piles in the sheltered corners of alleyways and squares. Back from the waterfront, the city of 1940 was little changed from the previous two centuries. Its imposing centre, dominated by the town hall, the eighteenth-century H?tel de Ville, boasted impeccably manicured tree-lined squares, fine restaurants and elegant frontages. These led to broad boulevards radiating out towards the port’s trading and residential quarters. Beyond the main roads, this was a city of little restaurants, caf?s, scurrying markets and narrow cobbled streets, lined with shops and first-floor apartments. Here a cacophony of humanity jostled with a jumble of cars, v?lo-taxis, bicycles, lorries, barrows and horse-drawn carts. The city’s political landscape was also one of contrast. During the 1930s, communism found a strong foothold amongst France’s intellectuals and working classes. Most of the dockworkers, who lived in the city’s crowded Bacalan quarter – where the restaurants were as rough as the wine they served – were, if not communist, then communist sympathisers; as were the cheminots (the railway workers) and the post office workers. In the countryside, too, especially in the Landes region lying between Bordeaux and the Pyrenees, communism and socialism had strong roots. Many of the Bordelais, however, regarded communism with a fear amounting almost to paranoia – seeing it as some kind of modern reincarnation of the sans-culottes of the French Revolution. A secret British wartime report observed that ‘[amongst] the upper bourgeoisie [there is] an apprehension of Russia and a real fear of the former French Communists and of the mob … [they believe that] only evil can come to France from the disorder which would follow the coming to power of the extreme left’. Those in charge of mercantilist Bordeaux were above all pragmatists. What was good for trade was good for the city. Foreigners came and foreigners went. But if trade (and especially the wine trade) went on, the city prospered, whoever was in charge. The city’s bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie embraced the politics of conservatism and of ‘order’. Among these classes, right or centre-right views were dominant, extreme right nationalism not unusual, and anti-Semitism commonplace. ‘England’, regarded by some in France as the centre of modern Jewry, was often thrown into this mix of political foes. ‘The English, the yids, the capitalists, these are the true enemies of France which is threatened, like every other country, by the Bolshevik sword of Damocles,’ declared one local right-wing activist of the time. When it came to anti-Semitism, Bordeaux was by no means unusual in the France of the 1930s and ’40s. ‘The Jewish question was a subject of lively discussion in France at the time,’ one respected French commentator wrote. ‘There was a strong resurgence of anti-Jewish sentiment in the period before the war and during the years of the Vichy government.’ Von Faber du Faur did not waste time imposing his rule on the city. He laid on a grand military parade through the streets of Bordeaux, designed not just as a spectacle, but also as a show of force. The salute was taken by, amongst others, Erwin Rommel (who requisitioned a nearby ch?teau for holiday use). On 1 July 1940 a curfew, enforced by armed soldiers with dogs, was imposed between 2300 and 0500 hours, with curfew-breakers risking long terms of imprisonment or forced labour. All clocks were advanced one hour to match German time. All firearms, including hunting weapons, had to be handed in to the local mairies; all official notices (including street signs and administrative requests) had to be in German as well as French, and the swastika emblazoned on a red banner was hung outside all principal official buildings. Controls were introduced on traffic in the Gironde estuary and on all major road intersections and railway stations. In time, German oversight would be extended to cover the postal service, telecommunications, newspapers, cinemas, cultural events, agriculture (including, inevitably, wine), commercial transactions, the refining and distribution of petroleum products and the passage of goods and people over the demarcation line into Vichy France. Laws were passed to require farmers to give up a percentage of their produce to the German occupiers – though in most cases, thanks to peasant cunning, these were honoured more in the breach than the observance. German soldiers were under strict instructions to behave politely towards the French, and mostly did. But the terms of occupation were clear. On 10 October 1940 the city’s military administration published a decree stating: ‘Anyone who gives shelter to a member of the British Forces will be condemned to death.’ Almost overnight, it seemed, the German authorities also established an iron grip on the region, turning the whole of the Gironde estuary and the M?doc peninsula into one gigantic military base. Concrete pens were constructed in Bordeaux harbour to house the German submarines engaged in the deadly business of cutting the Atlantic lifeline on which Britain depended to save it from starvation. Italian submarines also had a base in the city. The Bordeaux quays were fortified with concrete pillboxes, a system of interlocking trenches and underground bunkers. This would soon also become the base for a small fleet of converted merchantmen which – fast, lightly armed and German-crewed – acted as blockade-runners, bringing in vital raw materials from Japanese-occupied territories in the Far East. The Atlantic beaches running south from the mouth of the Gironde, considered a likely place for an Allied invasion, were fortified with a network of defences, including heavy coastal guns in thick concrete casemates; searchlights; numerous machine-gun nests, and a small fleet of riverine patrol vessels. Some 60,000 German troops were stationed in and around Bordeaux. By the end of the war, this would include two infantry divisions, a Panzer division and an army headquarters. A Luftwaffe force of 150 aircraft was assembled at M?rignac airport and on small local airfields. Kriegsmarine units were brought in to protect the Gironde and the coastal waters of the Gulf of Aquitaine. The city itself was soon crammed full of German troops and dotted with a profusion of headquarters for the major military units, which jostled with buildings housing the German harbour authorities, civil government and the various security organisations charged with keeping order. A requisitioned passenger liner, the Baudouinville – last used by the Belgian cabinet when they took the fateful decision to surrender – was brought to Bordeaux and tied up along the quay at the Place des Quinconces as overflow billeting for German and Italian troops. There was also an array of soldiers’ brothels and watering holes: the Lion Rouge nightclub was specially reserved for Wehrmacht officers, the C?telette for Abwehr intelligence officers, and the Blaue Affe (the Blue Monkey) for ordinary soldiers. For most citizens of Bordeaux, shortages now became a way of life. The price of baby milk rose by fifty per cent; fish was limited to one tin of sardines per month and sugar was almost unobtainable. Even saccharine tablets were rationed to a hundred pills per person for every six months. Shopkeepers had to accept the Reichsmark at an exorbitant fixed rate of exchange and butchers were prohibited from selling meat on Wednesday and Thursday, with Friday reserved for horsemeat and tripe only. Most metal came from recycled stock. Leather was only available on the black market, or with an official authorisation; gloves and belts were difficult to find and most shoes had only wooden soles. There was a severe shortage of elastic (though this did not affect the availability of ladies’ suspenders, one British secret agent noted, cheerfully). German soldiers had priority on public transport, and horses were used extensively. Real coffee was such a valuable commodity that it became an article of barter, with most caf?s and restaurants serving a roasted acorn substitute christened ‘caf? P?tain’. Unsurprisingly – and very quickly – a flourishing and all-pervasive black market was established, as the French population in both town and country tried to find ways round these new discomfitures in their daily lives. Despite this – and contrary to the early hopes of the intelligence community in London, who claimed that ‘occupied Europe was smouldering with Resistance to the Nazis and ready to erupt at the slightest support or encouragement’ – secret feelers put out by the British and the Free French reported that the ‘spirit of Resistance’ in the city was depressingly frail. ‘Bordeaux was not a town for Resistance. It was more a town for collaborators. Most of our activity was outside Bordeaux,’ one early British agent concluded. It was not long before a climate of suspicion began to infect Bordeaux city life. People tended not to speak to each other in the streets and tried to avoid speaking at all to those they did not know for fear of agents provocateurs and collaborators. One commentator said, ‘Neighbours reported confidentially on one another. People were denounced for anti-German sentiments and for listening to foreign news broadcasts.’ Another, describing the attitude of the average Bordelais, reported, tartly: ‘[They believed] their duty as patriotic Frenchmen was more than adequately fulfilled by listening to BBC London in their slippers in front of the fire,’ adding, ‘influenced by German propaganda [the Bordelais] were terrified of Communism and of losing their money’. Though they found German rule irksome, the people of Bordeaux were, for the most part, content to continue with their lives quietly and as best they could in the circumstances. The great biannual spring and autumn fair took place as usual in the Place des Quinconces. Photographs from 1940 show unarmed German soldiers mingling with local crowds on the fairground rides. That year, as every year in the past, the Amar Circus – complete with lions, elephants, tigers and clowns – made the journey from Paris to play to full houses on the Bordeaux quays. La Petite Gironde, a broadly collaborationist Bordeaux daily newspaper, advised that the proper attitude to the occupation should be to ‘understand and be resigned’ – a proposition which many in the city followed. Even when the Germans began a drive against the city’s Jews, sentiment in the city remained largely unmoved. On 27 August 1940, a Jewish man, Laiser Israel Karp, was summarily condemned to death for raising his fist at a German parade. On 17 October a notice was issued requiring all Jews and Jewish enterprises in the city to register. Five days later, 5,172 Jews and 403 Jewish businesses had complied. Early in 1941, Jews were banned from seventeen public places in the city, including all parks, theatres and cinemas and many schools. A year later the Vichy authorities in Bordeaux hosted a travelling exhibition with a strong anti-Semitic theme. Entitled ‘The Jews and France’, it proved a huge success in the city, attracting 60,000 local citizens through its doors. During the course of 1941, however, as the German occupiers reacted to provocations and attacks with increasing ferocity, the mood in Bordeaux – as across the rest of France – began to shift. On 20 October the German military commander in Nantes was assassinated and the following day the weighted-down body of Hans Reimers, an officer in the Wehrmacht, was discovered in Bordeaux harbour. Hitler insisted on responding to these ‘outrages’ with maximum severity, overruling appeals from German military commanders in France for a more restrained response. In Bordeaux, fifty civilian hostages, most of them suspected communist sympathisers, were taken to the old French military camp at Souge, fifteen kilometres west of the city, and executed. They were the first of 257 ‘Resistance martyrs’ who would die before German firing squads at Souge before the war was over. More attacks were followed by more reprisals and, as French outrage grew, the ranks of resistants began to swell. In November 1941, a special French police brigade under the command of a ruthless pro-German Frenchman called Pierre Napol?on Poinsot, was established in close cooperation with the German authorities to tackle the new threat. His first act was to launch a major drive against the communists. In sweeps, notably in the Bacalan quarter of the city, and in a number of rural communities in the Gironde region, hundreds of suspects, men and women, were arrested and incarcerated in an internment camp at M?rignac. By now executions and deportations had become an established part of the German system of control and repression. According to secret British estimates, across France a total of 5,599 people were executed and 21,863 deported in the last quarter of 1942 alone. Resistance organisations started to spring up in Bordeaux and its hinterland. Some of these were small, personal and informal. Others were part of larger information-gathering networks. Many were under the control of foreign intelligence services, notably the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS – also known as MI6), the Free French in London and the Polish secret service. By the end of 1941 there were no less than nine of these foreign-controlled spy networks tripping over each other in Bordeaux and the Gironde. In addition there were also numerous smaller ‘private’ Resistance fiefdoms, such as the one run by Raymond Brard, the head of the Bordeaux port fire brigade, whose network was based on the membership of a weight-lifting and ‘Gironde wrestling’ club in a city backstreet. One of the first of these ‘private’ initiatives was established at the end of August 1940, just ten weeks after de Gaulle left France. Its founders were two neighbours who lived on the Bordeaux waterfront. Jean Dubou?, a strikingly handsome man of imposing build with a strong face and a direct, challenging gaze, was already an established figure in Bordeaux. Forty-three years old when the Second World War began, this was not Dubou?’s first conflict. He had been wounded in one of France’s bloodiest calvaries of 1914–18: the battle of the Chemin des Dames. A self-made man, Dubou? had left school in Bordeaux aged twelve to work down the coal mines of the Basque Country. Returning to Bordeaux, he began a new career as a restaurateur, managing the Grand Caf? du Commerce et de Tourny, one of Bordeaux’s most prestigious restaurants. From here he branched out with his own businesses. One was the Caf? des Marchands, a modest restaurant and boarding house frequented by dockers and travelling salesmen on the Quai des Chartrons. By the end of the 1930s, Dubou?’s businesses were doing well enough for him to purchase a country retreat southeast of Bordeaux, where he, his wife Marie-Louise and daughter Suzanne spent every weekend and most holidays. His co-conspirator, L?o Paill?re, recently demobilised and an ex-captain of infantry in the First World War, was, at fifty, older than Dubou?. A man of distinctly right-wing tendencies, Paill?re lived with his wife Jeanne and their five sons next door to the Caf? des Marchands. During late 1940 and early 1941, Dubou? and Paill?re set about recruiting a number of friends as agents. They gathered intelligence on German positions, troop movements, weapons and ships in the port – especially the blockade-runners and submarines. The intelligence was smuggled out of Bordeaux by Suzanne Dubou? (sixteen years old at the time and known in the family as ‘Mouton’, or ‘lambkin’ in English). She took the secret reports to a restaurant owner called Gaston H?ches in Tarbes, 140 kilometres south of Bordeaux. H?ches then passed them along a clandestine escape route he controlled, over the Pyrenees to the SIS representative in the British consulate in Barcelona. When this route was closed, or too dangerous, Suzanne carried the intelligence hidden in a basket across the border to the Spanish Basque coastal town of San Sebasti?n, where the British consulate doubled as the gateway to another escape line and courier service to Madrid, Gibraltar and London. The Dubou?–Paill?re reports on German activity first began to reach London early in 1941, the year which was, for Churchill and the British, the annus horribilis of the war. The heady days of solitary defiance and the Battle of Britain were over. Now British forces were engaged in a long struggle of retrenchment and attrition, and losing on all fronts: in the Atlantic, in the deserts of North Africa, on the plains of Russia and against the Japanese in the Far East. Churchill knew that after Dunkirk it would take time – probably years – to turn the tide. He knew too that if Britain was not to retreat into passive defence, then apart from RAF attacks on German cities, his only means of carrying the war to the enemy was through clandestine and unconventional warfare. In 1940 he created three new organisations to wage this secret war: Combined Operations, charged with conducting commando raids on the European coastline; MI9, tasked with helping escaped Allied prisoners and downed pilots to get back to Britain; and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), established in July of that year and ordered, in Churchill’s inimitable words, to ‘set Europe ablaze’. Staffed mainly by amateurs in the spying game, the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’ (as SOE swiftly became known, after their headquarters near Marylebone station) were regarded by Britain’s professional spies in SIS with a sniffy disdain, bordering, when occasion arose, on murderous enmity. Malcolm Muggeridge, himself an SIS officer, commented: ‘Though SOE and SIS were nominally on the same side in the war, they were, generally speaking, more abhorrent to one another than the Abwehr was to either of them.’ Operationally, SOE was run by a regular army brigadier, Colin Gubbins, and was an autonomous organisation which, for cover purposes, pretended to be part of the War Office. It was divided into country sections for each of the occupied countries of Europe – except for France which had two country sections: F (for France) Section, staffed mainly by British officers, and RF (R?publique Fran?aise) Section, staffed mainly by the French. Both sections sent their own agents into France, but their approaches were entirely different. The British-run F Section favoured small discrete spy networks built on independent ‘cells’, which had no contact with each other. This, they hoped, would limit the damage of penetration and betrayal. The French-run RF Section acted mainly as a logistics organisation for de Gaulle’s Free French spy service in London, the BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignement et d’Action). Unlike F Section, it preferred large, centrally controlled networks, more akin to an underground army. SOE was nearly a year old and under considerable Whitehall criticism for delivering little of value to the wider war effort at the time that Jean Dubou?’s intelligence started to arrive in Baker Street. Up to this moment almost all the secret agents SOE had dispatched to France had been sent to the Vichy zone non-occup?e. Suddenly, here was an opportunity to get involved in the spying business, not just in the occupied zone, but also, given Bordeaux’s role as a submarine base, in an area of real strategic importance to the battle of the Atlantic. SOE decided to send a secret agent of their own to Bordeaux to see what was going on. Robert Leroy was in many ways an unsuitable person for such a pioneering and precarious mission. A former marine engineer from the Brest area, Leroy’s SOE training reports describe him as ‘shrewd … [but] suffering from the weaknesses of his class – a proneness to alcoholic indulgence and women’ – and add, in a comment which tells us more about SOE’s snobbery than it does about Leroy’s table manners, that he was ‘out of place in an Officers’ Mess’. Under the codename ‘Alain’, Robert Leroy was landed from an SOE ‘ghost ship’ on a beach at Barcar?s near Perpignan on the night of 19 September 1941. His orders were to make his way to Dubou?’s contact, Gaston H?ches in Tarbes, and thence to Bordeaux, where he was to liaise with Jean Dubou?, get a job in the port and assess the possibilities of attacking the German submarine pens. Unfortunately, the explosives Leroy was supposed to take with him somehow got lost during the landing, leaving him with no option but to set off on his mission without them. His journey to Bordeaux appears to have been both leisurely and bibulous, for he did not reach the city until mid-November, leaving behind a trail of debt and unpaid bar bills. Arriving in Bordeaux, Leroy contacted Dubou?, who used his influence to get the newcomer a job as a tractor driver in the docks. The new arrival quickly established a relationship with the director of warehouses in the Port de la Lune, to whom Leroy hinted that he was involved in black-market operations which could be of mutual profit to both of them. In return he had his card stamped ‘Indispensable pour le Port de Bordeaux’. This meant that Leroy, provided he wore his docker’s blue blouse, could roam anywhere he liked, safe from German checks and roll calls. Other early information came from a fellow Breton marine engineer, who furnished Leroy with intelligence on the blockade-runners. These merchantmen were using Bordeaux in increasing numbers, unloading the precious raw materials (tungsten, molybdenum, rubber) needed by the German war machine and reloading their holds with blueprints and examples of new German technology – such as radar and proximity fuses – for the Japanese. In early 1942, Leroy sent back ‘detailed reports on the shipping and also a map of the docks’ to London. They arrived at a most propitious moment. On 9 May that year, the head of SOE and Minister of Economic Warfare, Lord Selborne, wrote to Prime Minister Churchill drawing his attention to the Bordeaux blockade-runners and their ‘most vital cargoes’ and proposing that it was now crucial to the national interest to ‘[stop] the trade altogether’. Suddenly SOE found themselves, through the unlikely person of the ever-convivial Robert Leroy, with a ringside seat on what had just become a national strategic war target. London immediately recalled their secret agent to make a full report. It seems probable that Leroy returned to Britain via San Sebasti?n with Suzanne Dubou? acting as his guide, for one of his first acts on reaching London on 29 May 1942 was to send a message back to Bordeaux through the BBC French Service, announcing his arrival with the words: ‘Bonjour ? Mouton’. After a full debriefing and a few days’ leave, Leroy was sent back to Bordeaux with instructions to continue his work and prepare for reinforcements. Bordeaux was about to become, along with Paris, SOE’s most important centre for spying and sabotage in occupied France. 2 ROGER LANDES (#ulink_80568fd9-ddd1-5296-a49c-af3bf49c1268) The piece of paper that changed Roger Landes’s life appeared on the noticeboard of No. 2 Company, 2nd Operations Training Battalion of the Signals Training College in Prestatyn, North Wales, sometime during the last week of February 1942. It was brief and to the point: Army Number 2366511 Signalman Roger Landes to report to Room 055 of the War Office in Whitehall on Wednesday 4 March 1942. A military rail warrant for a return journey to central London could be collected from the company office. Given the vagaries of wartime travel it is likely that young Landes (he had celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday just before Christmas) went down to London the day before his interview, and spent the night at his parents’ apartment at 48 Carlton Mansions, Holmleigh Road, London N16. Although the crescendo of the London blitz had passed by mid-summer 1941, the city’s overground rail system remained in many places unrepaired and everywhere prone to breakdown and delay. Most Londoners used the Underground to get around. No one would have paid much attention to the small man in the ill-fitting serge uniform of a private of the Royal Signals, making his way this cold grey March day on the Piccadilly line towards central London. If he had spoken, they would have noted his heavy accent, and concluded that he was just another foreigner in a city full of foreigners – from the ‘exotic’ to the ordinary, from kings and queens to commoners – all taking refuge from the German onslaught across the Channel. Born in December 1916 and brought up in Paris the son of a family of Jewish immigrants of Polish–Russian extraction, Roger Arthur Landes had inherited his British citizenship from his father, Barnet, a jeweller in the French capital, who, through an accident of fate, had been born in London. Sometime in the early 1930s, Barnet Landes was bankrupted by the Great Depression. Roger was forced to leave school at the age of thirteen and start work in a firm of quantity surveyors, while attending technical classes at night school. His parents emigrated to London in 1934, where they rented a small flat off Stamford Hill, an area much favoured by the Jewish community. Roger stayed on in France where, despite not having taken his baccalaur?at, he managed to obtain a place at the prestigious ?cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. On graduating (with the ?cole’s Prix d’Honneur, among other prizes), he took furnished rooms in the French capital and set about learning the practical aspects of his trade as an architect and quantity surveyor. By 1938, however, it was clear to all that war was coming. Landes knew that if he stayed in France he would soon receive his call-up papers for the French army, which, even half a century after the Dreyfus affair, still had a reputation for anti-Semitism. He left for England, moved in with his parents in Stamford Hill and secured a position as a clerk in the architectural department of London County Council. Later he was to say that his time in the LCC was one of the most enjoyable of his life. On the outbreak of the war, Landes signed up immediately and was posted to the Rescue Service in Islington, where he used his architectural skills to assess bomb damage during the blitz. Two years later he was redeployed to the miserable, windswept, wintry conditions of Prestatyn holiday camp in North Wales for training as a radio operator. It was here in 1942 that the mysterious note on the No. 2 Company noticeboard found him and ordered him to attend the War Office on this March Wednesday morning. Short (five foot four), slender and unprepossessing, Roger Landes was olive-skinned, with a narrow heart-shaped face, a rather sensitive (even feminine) mouth, oiled black hair carefully coiffed in the fashion of the day, and heavy eyebrows jutting out above eyes which combined humour and cunning in equal measure. He spoke English imperfectly and with a strong French accent, overlaid with the distinctive guttural ‘r’ and nasal cadences of the Jewish community of Stamford Hill. Though proud of being a Jew, he wore his religion lightly and was a rare practicant. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this slight figure amidst the press of wartime Londoners going about their daily business was that he was unusually unremarkable. A fellow British agent later observed: ‘his smallness and … particular facial features’ gave him an uncanny ability to vanish into the crowd, making him, even when undisguised, ‘a difficult man to track’. The early months of 1942 were the coldest in northern Europe since 1895. The ground remained frozen solid under a carpet of thick hoar frost, which persisted into the early weeks of March. The scene that would have greeted Landes as he emerged from the London underground and walked along the Embankment would have been a sombre one. The parks by the river’s edge had long ago been dug up for vegetable allotments and air-raid shelters. A leaden Thames, indistinguishable from its mud banks, flowed sullenly under a blanket of freezing fog. The trees lining the north side of the river appeared as a row of ghostly mourners emerging from the mist, their lopped branches raised like stumps in supplication to a vengeful sky. Thin drifts of unswept snow still lay in gutters and along the sheltered edges of buildings. Set back from the Thames, Whitehall, grimy from two centuries of coal fires, now also bore the pockmarks of the recent blitz. Every window was white-taped against bomb blast and curtained with condensation from the human fug inside; every door was protected by a tunnel of sandbags manned by soldiers with fixed bayonets. The War Office building itself had been hit and some of the great buildings of state had been turned into bombsites, which now sprouted young buddleia bushes, stalwart against the cold, and withered mats of brambles whose tentacles reached out across the rubble, hoping for the spring. Landes made his way to Whitehall Court and the back entrance to the War Office building, where a sentry barred his way. He showed his orders and was passed on to a reception desk. From there an escort took him down long ill-lit corridors with black-and-white mosaic floors and brown panelling to a large room used only for interviews, whose grimy windows looked out onto the inner courtyard. The space, carpeted in linoleum which peeled back in one corner, was empty of ornament or furniture, save for a bare desk behind which sat a forlorn, out-of-place-looking secretary. Landes produced his letter and was ushered into a second, smaller room. Here seated at a desk facing him was a cadaverous-looking man in the perfectly cut uniform of a British major. A small coal fire glowed bravely in the middle of one wall but made little headway against the entrenched cold of a room which had been inadequately heated all winter. The major rose, extended his right hand and – waving the other at the upright chair positioned opposite him – said: ‘I am Major Gielgud. Do sit down.’ The interview did not last long, for the major’s speech was terse and his manner brusque in the fashion of these urgent times. ‘We are sending British personnel into France who can speak fluent French and use wireless sets – radio operators who will be able to pass for French people. From the report I have on your skill in wireless communications, and as you have lived in France for so long, you are the perfect man to send, should you be willing to go. There are three ways to send you to France; by parachute, by motor-boat, or by fishing boat from Gibraltar. The danger is you may be caught, in which case you will probably be tortured and sent to a certain death. The fact that you are a Jew is not going to make life easier for you, as I am sure you understand. Will you accept? Yes or no? You have five minutes to think about it.’ Landes thought about it very little, before saying yes. ‘Good,’ said Gielgud, who was the brother of the great actor, John. ‘Then return to your unit. Say nothing to anyone, even your parents, and we will be in touch.’ Some days later Landes received another order: he was to report on 17 March to a flat in Orchard Court, Portman Square, and introduce himself as ‘Robert Lang’. The door at Orchard Court, a 1930s mansion block, was opened by a man in butler’s uniform, who welcomed him with a butler’s smile. His name was Arthur Parks, and he spoke perfect French, having worked for Barclays Bank in Paris before the war. Parks led the new recruit to a grand room where he was introduced to Captain Andr? Simon, who in peacetime had been a wine merchant. Simon was also brief, informing Landes that he was now formally a member of the Special Operations Executive, with the rank of temporary second lieutenant. He was, henceforth and for the rest of his life, subject to the Official Secrets Act and would receive an initial salary of five guineas a week. Captain Simon then gave Landes ?10 with which to buy two khaki shirts and ordered him to report back to Orchard Court with a small overnight bag the following day. Arriving the next morning at Orchard Court, Landes found he was not alone. He and another nine students, all young men and all of them looking equally uncomfortable in ill-fitting army uniforms, were swiftly introduced to each other using the aliases by which they would be known throughout their period of training. They were a hybrid collection, whose only common feature, as far as Landes could see, was their ability to speak French as a native. Most had dual identities, having been brought up in France as the children of mixed French–British marriages. Some had British parents who had chosen to educate their children in local French schools. One was the son of a well-known Francophone family from Mauritius; he was the first, but by no means last, SOE recruit to come from the tiny British colony. Introductions over, they were bundled into a small bus and driven out of London, along the A30 through Guildford to the little village of Wanborough, close under the northern flank of the Hog’s Back. Here they turned up a small farm track to a brick-built three-gabled Elizabethan house set about with outhouses, sheds and workers’ cottages. Wanborough Manor (known by SOE as Special Training School No. 5) was in many ways an odd choice for a spy school. Plainly visible from the road only 200 metres away, and famed for having one of the largest medieval wooden barns in southeast England, it sat right in the middle of the small hamlet of Wanborough. The house had a cellar, used for indoor instruction, a kitchen, a substantial sitting room and a dining room on the ground floor, bedrooms on the top two floors dedicated to staff accommodation and a small church in the grounds, where interdenominational services were held to cater for the needs of SOE’s wide variety of students. Physical training was held on the two lawns, back and front, which during fine weather in the summer months were also employed as occasional outdoor classrooms. SOE’s trainee agents were not the first unusual visitors to Wanborough. Gladstone’s parliamentary secretary had lived there and the Grand Old Man wrote his resignation speech in the Manor’s study. During Gladstone’s time as prime minister, Queen Victoria had also paid a visit to Wanborough, accompanied by Bismarck. The two marked the occasion by planting two giant sequoias on the front lawn, each adorned with a cast-iron memorial plaque recording the moment. What SOE’s new recruits thought about sitting in the shade of the Iron Chancellor’s memorial tree, while being trained to set Nazi-occupied Europe ‘ablaze’, is not recorded. There was almost nothing in the hitherto quiet and fastidious life of young Roger Landes that could have prepared him for the next four weeks. Wanborough Manor was a French-speaking microcosm. Its students were cut off from the world, save for carefully vetted letters and occasional accompanied trips over the Hog’s Back to the local pub The Good Intent (Landes drank alcohol only very abstemiously), or to the nearby gravel pit for hand-grenade practice. Landes was woken at dawn every morning from a hard army bed and went straight into PT, followed by a run around the manor house grounds. Then lessons all day, most of them requiring hard physical exertion, which cannot have been made any easier for Landes by his habit (which continued unabated all his life) of smoking sixty cigarettes a day. Soon every muscle of his slight, city-softened body ached. He ate voraciously and without discrimination. And at the end of the day sleep came to him as swift as the click of a camera shutter. Landes had never held, let alone fired, a gun in his life. But by the end of his four weeks’ intensive training he knew how to strip down and reassemble, even in the dark, every German, Italian, French, American and British small arm in common use. He knew how to fire them too – and found he was a surprisingly good shot. He also learnt how to move unseen across open country; how to prime and throw a hand grenade; how to find his way, even at night with a map and compass; how to kill a man without a weapon; how to disarm an enemy and how to dissemble convincingly in the face of inquisitive questions. At the end of the Wanborough Manor stage of the course, two of the original ten ‘disappeared’. By this time Landes’s colleagues had begun to resolve themselves into personalities. Of the eight remaining, three would feature prominently both in SOE’s history and in Roger Landes’s life as a secret agent. ‘Clement Bastable’ (real name, Claude de Baissac) was ten years older than Landes. An imposing man with the air of someone who expected to be obeyed, he too was of dark complexion and had a neatly trimmed moustache in the style of many Hollywood actors of the time – Clark Gable, say, or Errol Flynn. He had indeed been a film publicist in France before the war. ‘Hilaire Poole’ (Harry Peulev?) was the same age as Landes, but he was taller and more powerfully built, with a finely chiselled, handsome face and deep, rather disconcerting eyes. ‘Fernand Sutton’ (Francis Suttill) was thirty-two, but looked much younger. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, clean cut, with the fresh-faced look of an English public school boy, he was, in the words of a fellow secret agent, ‘magnificent, strong, young, courageous and decisive, a kind of Ivanhoe; but he should have been a cavalry officer, not a spy …’. Among these fellow students, Landes was the exception – perhaps sufficiently even to feel, and appear, a little out of place. Most of his colleagues were, like SOE itself, ex-public school and from the upper echelons of British society. Claude de Baissac was of course French – or to be precise Mauritian French. But he too had been to one of the best schools, the Lyc?e Henri IV in Paris. His family were not by birth from the upper reaches of French society, but they aspired to be so, adding the aristocratic ‘de’ in front of their name when de Baissac’s mother accompanied her son to Paris to begin his education, in the late 1920s. Landes’s Wanborough Manor colleagues were also, in one way or another, strong characters, bursting with charisma and natural leadership. Landes, the little clerk from the Architectural Department of London County Council, son of an immigrant Jewish jeweller from Paris, who had managed to educate himself at night school, was none of these things. His SOE reports refer to him, somewhat dismissively, as a ‘cheery little Frenchman’; he was less impressive, less significant and much, much less noticeable than his fellow recruits. Qualities which, whether SOE valued them or not, were precisely those he would require to be a successful secret agent. In early 1942, the eight students caught the train north for Scotland and four weeks’ intensive training at Meoble Lodge, beside Loch Morar in Inverness-shire. Here, where moor and mountain sweep down to the back door, they marched long distances carrying heavy loads, spent nights in the open under rough shelters made of bracken and fir branches, learnt how to set a snare for rabbits and how to skin, gut and cook them afterwards. Two ex-Shanghai policemen taught them how to kill a man noiselessly with the SOE’s specially designed fighting knife, and an ex-chartered accountant showed them how to pick a lock and blow a safe. They also learnt the strange artefacts and sacred rituals of explosives: how to place the primer, just so; how to crimp (but gently) one end of the fuse in the detonator so it wouldn’t pull out, and how to scarf the other end at an angle, waiting for the match. How to light it, even in a gale, by holding the match end against the scarfed face of the fuse and striking it with the box, rather than the other way round. Why, with the fuse lit, you should always walk away, never run. Parachute training at Ringway near Manchester followed, after which, in early May, Landes and his colleagues attended SOE’s ‘finishing school’ at Beaulieu, Hampshire. Here they learnt, among other things, codes and cyphers; disguise; how to follow someone and know if you were being followed; how to hide in a city; and how to place an explosive charge in just the right manner to cut a rail, slice through a bridge girder or blow the giant flywheel off a power station turbine, causing a hurricane of damage to everything it careered into. After Beaulieu, most of Landes’s colleagues were given leave, while waiting for an aircraft and a full moon to parachute into France. In Claude de Baissac’s final report he was assessed as ‘an excellent operator’ destined for leadership. Not seeing the same qualities of ‘leadership’ in Landes, SOE marked him out for a radio operator and sent him to their wireless school at Thame, near Aylesbury. Here he met another fellow student, destined to join him in France. Gilbert Norman, also an ex-public school boy, was an imposing figure whose regular features, permanent suntan and moustache gave him the air of an actor who specialised in playing cads – or perhaps army captains – in a seaside repertory company. In fact, he was a chartered accountant from Llandudno. In July 1942 the two men passed out as fully qualified SOE wireless operators. Roger Landes had done well. ‘He has the eye of a marksman … works well with others … liked for his keenness … very fit and tries hard … did exceptionally well on his own,’ his trainers wrote on his various reports: ‘a pleasant little man who takes great interest and trouble in what he does …’. Of all Landes’s attributes it would be his ability to work alone and his unobtrusiveness which would make him a truly great secret agent. But Roger Landes was now much more than the sum of his good reports. He had been transformed – and he had transformed himself – from a young Jewish refugee from Paris, working as an architect’s clerk in the LCC, into a fully capable secret agent and radio operator, ready to take the fight to the enemy in occupied France. To be sure, he still looked as he had always done: small, pleasant, unremarkable. But inside, he was now something completely different. Something hard, uncompromising, focused – even a little cold; always alert, always suspicious, always watchful. Above all, he was confident of his own strength and his ability to survive and to endure. 3 FRIEDRICH DOHSE (#ulink_2a116512-438f-55c1-ba9b-bbc985d963e8) On 26 January 1942, a fortnight or so before Roger Landes saw the message on the company noticeboard at Prestatyn, a young German officer stepped down from a first-class carriage at Saint-Jean station in Bordeaux. His Gestapo uniform, if anyone had glimpsed it, might have attracted attention, for few if any of these had been seen in Bordeaux at this time of the war. But muffled and greatcoated against the exceptional cold that had gripped France that January, he would have seemed to most to be just another German officer making his way in the throng that pressed towards the checkpoint at the station exit. Yet, over the next few years, twenty-eight-year-old Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Dohse would come to dominate the city and shape its events more than any other German who had come to Bordeaux since the occupation. Six foot three and of athletic build, with sharp grey eyes deep set under a heavy brow in a pale oval face; chestnut, but fast vanishing hair; an easy smile and regular features (apart from rather small a mouth) – Dohse (pronounced ‘dosuh’) was a man who commanded attention quite as much as Roger Landes deflected it. His journey to this moment had been a long one. Although his grandfather had been a peasant farmer in Silesia, his father, Hinrich, had risen to become a French teacher in the little Schleswig-Holstein town of Elmshorn, north of Hamburg. Here, Friedrich was born in July 1913. His family was respectable, bourgeois, Lutheran and of moderate political views (which he shared). Like his sisters and brother, he attended the local secondary school, before moving on to commercial college in Hamburg, where he excelled in French. Leaving school at seventeen, he travelled the short distance to the city’s port where he joined the merchant marine, serving on passenger liners to South America and East Africa. In 1933, at the height of the German Depression and finding himself unemployed, the twenty-year-old Friedrich joined the Hamburg police and local Nazi party. Later he would insist that he became a Nazi because it was the only way to get a job, though it was often remarked that, on the rare occasions he wore his Gestapo uniform, he never failed to emblazon it with the ‘Golden Party Badge’, awarded only to those in the Nazi party of ‘special merit’, or who had been amongst the first 100,000 to join. Whatever Dohse’s motives, becoming a Nazi seems to have worked, for after five months as an ordinary policeman he was offered a job with the criminal police in a Hamburg suburb. Dohse soon transferred to the Gestapo in Kiel, where he was employed in counter-espionage against marine saboteurs. He continued his progress into the hierarchy of Hitler’s Germany by joining the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi paramilitary wing, on 1 June 1934. Just weeks later Hitler destroyed the organisation in the great ‘blood purge’ of 30 June. Nothing daunted, two years after this reverse, Dohse became a member of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, Hitler’s ‘protection squadron’, and wore its badge, with the letters SS in the form of two jagged lightning bolts, for the rest of his wartime career. In 1937, Dohse completed his eight weeks’ infantry training and on the outbreak of war was called up, quickly rising to the rank of sergeant. It is difficult not to see the young Dohse during these years as a man of ambition and strong patriotic convictions, dedicated to serving his country, while scrambling up the Nazi ladder as fast as he could. After brief spells first in the army, and then the Luftwaffe, Dohse was posted back to the Gestapo as a sergeant in the spring of 1941. Now married and with two young children, he was sent on 15 June to Paris. Here he was seconded to the counter-espionage section of the newly established German directorate of security (the BdS), headquartered at 82–84 Avenue Foch – an address which was already becoming one of the most feared in France. At the time the Gestapo was not formally permitted to operate in France, making Dohse one of the first Gestapo officers to work on French soil. It was this posting, more than any other event of his young life, which transformed Dohse from a junior up-and-coming member of the Gestapo into a subtle, cunning and accomplished counter-intelligence operator. For it was here that he met the man who would become both the mentor from whom he learnt his skills and the protector who would cover his back in the dangerous times ahead. Karl B?melburg, aged fifty-six in 1941, was the son of a pastry cook and a man of many skills, disguises and aliases (including ‘Charles Bois’, ‘Herr Bennelburger’ and ‘Colonel Mollemburg’). According to both Paris rumour and British intelligence records, he was also – very unusually for a high-ranking Nazi – known to have homosexual proclivities. Elegant and cultivated, B?melburg was a notable bon viveur, fluent in French, an enthusiastic Francophile and a master of the art of spying. ‘Though not a political Nazi,’ according to his superior in Berlin, ‘he was completely loyal and a committed anti-communist.’ According to one account, he had spent eight years before the war operating undercover as a silk merchant in Lyon. Other records suggest that he was part of the German embassy in Paris in 1938, where, with the knowledge of the French government, he was tasked with rooting out communist subversives from the German immigrant population in France. During these interwar years, under the cover of his anti-communist work, B?melburg built a German spy network which extended deep into French society and commercial life. Regarded by his close colleagues as a ‘little God’, B?melburg seems to have immediately spotted something unusual and appealing – a kindred spirit perhaps – in the new arrival from Schleswig-Holstein. He dispatched Dohse first to the Berlitz school in Paris to perfect his French, and then on a month’s detachment to each of the departments in the Avenue Foch to get him acquainted with every part of the German security apparatus in Paris. His initiation complete, B?melburg appointed his young prot?g? as his personal secretary and, though B?melburg would not have needed it, his official interpreter. It was in this capacity that, in July and August 1941, Dohse accompanied his chief and another senior SS intelligence officer on a two-month tour across occupied and Vichy France and into Italy. The three men travelled in some state in B?melburg’s pride and joy, a requisitioned armour-plated Cadillac chauffeured by his personal driver. The main purpose of the tour was for B?melburg to reactivate and debrief his old spy network, but the trio did not ignore the opportunity to have fun as well. Their itinerary included Vichy, Dijon, Lyon, Saint-?tienne, Mont?limar, Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Toulon, Saint-Rapha?l, Cannes, Ventimiglia, San Remo and Monte-Carlo, where Dohse won 25,000 francs at the gaming tables (enough to have a fur coat made up in Paris and sent to his wife in Elmshorn). What B?melburg taught Dohse during their escapade of the summer of 1941, and in the months which followed at BdS Paris, is that counter-espionage is an art in which the techniques of subtlety and persuasion are more important, and usually more successful, than those of brutality and threat. Dohse was neither squeamish about torture, nor morally opposed to it. He argued that ‘enhanced interrogation’ – a euphemism used by the Nazis which is still in active use today – could be ‘necessary … in situations where the lives of German soldiers were at imminent threat’. Dohse had, moreover, no qualms at all about leaving brutality to others if it meant that he could use the techniques of persuasion, personal charm and the disarming power of an act of kindness to better effect. In his own words: ‘I didn’t need to dirty my hands – others did that.’ Later, after the war, Dohse was to invest this way of working with moral principle, claiming that it was all intended to ‘humanise’ (his word again) the struggle against Resistance ‘terrorists’. What, above all, Dohse the interrogator learnt from B?melburg was the importance of knowing his subjects and their psychologies, weaknesses and desires, the better to turn them to his purpose. As one commentator later put it, Dohse ‘did not terrify, he demobilised’. Neither these more subtle skills – nor Dohse’s habit of easy superiority, nor his elegant style of dress, nor his cultivated tastes, nor his pragmatic, non-ideological approach to his task; nor his Francophilia, nor his preference for French company over that of many of his German colleagues (he was referred to disparagingly as ‘half French’); nor the high level of protection he enjoyed in Paris made the young, pushy, newly arrived Gestapo officer at all popular amongst his more hardline colleagues in Bordeaux. He was, in many ways, a man apart amongst the more traditional Nazis who dominated the German security structures of the time. His loyalty to the German cause was unchallenged – and unchallengeable – at this stage of the war. His pride in his professionalism as a police officer, his sense of personal honour and his duty of loyalty to his superiors made it easy for him to be ambivalent to the excesses of National Socialism. Nazi politics and prejudices held no interest for him, beyond the point that they were necessary for the pursuit of his ambition and his ability to serve his country. Dohse was not intelligent in the intellectual sense of the word. But he was wily and clever and quick to win people to his point of view. Nor was his spirit a heroic one. He liked Bordeaux because it was congenial, and because he liked France. But he liked it most of all because it was not the Russian front. Dohse’s arrival in Bordeaux in January 1942 coincided with the centralising of the city’s security structure – chiefly the SS and the police – into the one new grouping known for short as ‘KdS Bordeaux’. The organisation would eventually grow to around a hundred German officers, assisted by a large number of French men and women in various supporting roles. They were housed in four large requisitioned residential properties in what was virtually a KdS colony, stretching along a 200-metre section of the Avenue du Mar?chal P?tain in the northern Bordeaux suburb of Bouscat. The new office was split into seven departments: I: Administration; II: Liaison with the French authorities and Jewish matters; III: Political affairs (also including Jewish matters); IV: Intelligence-gathering and the suppression of the Resistance; V: Economic crime and the black market; VI: Internal security; and, last but not least, Department VII: Archives and Records. The site also boasted a canteen converted from an old casino, indoor and outdoor recreation areas and staff accommodation. When Dohse arrived, the commander at KdS Bordeaux was twenty-nine-year-old SS-Sturmbannf?hrer Herbert Hagen, a close friend of Adolf Eichmann’s. Dohse was given command of Department IV: ‘Intelligence and the suppression of the Resistance’. His remit was the elimination of all threats to German troops, organisations and installations, and his department was the largest and – by common acceptance – the most important of the newly fledged organisation. This irked his new colleagues even more. Before the formation of KdS Bordeaux, security in the region had been more or less the exclusive preserve of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). Now the long-established SD officers would have to share the role with the uppity Gestapo man with well-connected friends in Paris. To make matters worse, Dohse’s initial role in Bordeaux was hazy. He was not at first sent to the city as a member of the KdS, but as a kind of liaison officer, representing the security police structures in the French capital. The fact that Dohse, a mere detective superintendent, was of more junior rank than most of the KdS section heads added insult to injury. Hagen – who despite being eight weeks younger than Dohse was the overall head of KdS – initially assigned only translation work to the unwelcome new arrival, and had him billeted in a pokey little bedroom which he had to share with a Spanish agent. ‘I took the first train to Paris [to tell B?melburg] that this would not do,’ Dohse later explained. Things changed immediately. The Gestapo officer was, albeit with bad grace, given accommodation suitable to his status, his own office to work in and the space and support he needed to begin assembling his new department. It was a demonstration to all that the young interloper’s power did not lie in his modest rank, but in the fact that B?melburg was his high-level protector in Paris. It was because of this, as one colleague later said of Dohse, that ‘everyone in KdS feared him’. 4 ANDR? GRANDCL?MENT (#ulink_852468e6-074a-557f-b991-4dd7704e5e56) Andr? Grandcl?ment was born with everything – except steadfastness of purpose, good judgement, and a father who loved him. Captain Raoul Gaston Marie Grandcl?ment, Chevalier de la L?gion d’Honneur, was serving as a staff officer to the French Second Naval Squadron in Rochefort-sur-Mer, 150 kilometres northwest of Bordeaux, when his son, Andr? Marie Hubert Fran?ois, was born in the local hospital on 28 July 1909. In his father’s absence (the future admiral was posted to Morocco two years after Andr?’s birth), the boy was brought up by his mother, Am?lia, the daughter of a colonel of infantry. When Andr? was seven, Am?lia died and his father married again. Care of the young boy passed to his stepmother, Jeanne, who he loved greatly. The couple lived in a grand house in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris, an area famously known as ‘the invisible ghetto’ because of the many members of the French establishment who lived there. Often criticised as being immune and insensible to the social upheavals that rocked France in the 1930s, the prevailing culture of the invisible ghetto during Andr?’s early years was one of conservatism, a firm belief that national order depended on the preservation of the national hierarchy, and a fierce and unshakeable belief, come what may, in La gloire fran?aise. Andr?, like many of the sons of France’s military, was sent to the Franklin Jesuit College just a few hundred metres from his home. Here the values of the invisible ghetto were as much part of the curriculum as the rote learning of mathematics, foreign languages, French history and literature. It was at Franklin that the young Grandcl?ment met and befriended a fellow student, Marc O’Neill. Descended from one of the ‘Wild Swans’ who had fled an oppressed Ireland in 1688 and subsequently fought for revolutionary France in the eighteenth century, O’Neill would, in the years to come, show that the family instinct for fighting oppression had not diminished in the intervening centuries. In what was to become something of a pattern in Andr? Grandcl?ment’s young life, he failed to finish his studies at Franklin College, leaving at the age of twelve to join his father, now an admiral and Grand Croix de la L?gion d’Honneur, who had been posted to command a French naval division in Syria in 1921. Admiral Grandcl?ment had won acclaim in the First World War, including two terms as naval attach? to President Raymond Poincar?, and in action at the battle of Verdun, where he was wounded while ‘showing the greatest dynamism and a superb disregard for danger’. Grandcl?ment senior spent his time in Syria, adorned with medals and a feathered hat, saluting everything military that moved as they passed him in review. Grandcl?ment junior, meanwhile, looked on in distant admiration from first Beirut and then Tunis, where he continued his studies under the Jesuits. Finally, in his late teens Andr? changed schools for the fourth time and returned to Paris to take his Baccalaur?at. Grandcl?ment senior, whose brother and cousin were also admirals, had long made it clear that he expected his son to follow the family tradition and join the navy. It was now time for Andr? to do his duty and prepare for the entrance exams for France’s naval college, the ?cole Navale, at Brest. But something seems to have snapped in young Andr? during his period of preparation for the great naval school. One day, he peremptorily resigned his place and joined up as an ordinary soldier in a Senegalese rifle regiment in Sfax, North Africa. Writing to a friend he said: ‘So now I am going to be with the negroes, with whom, if truth be told, I find a greater affinity than with the whites.’ Andr? Grandcl?ment had become – and would remain for the rest of his life – the outsider who longed to be inside. Explaining his sudden and perplexing flight from a naval career, Grandcl?ment junior later wrote: ‘At eighteen, I rejected my father as a result of a foolish row. If that had not happened I would have maintained the family tradition … [but then] I would have ended up less human – like my father.’ A little later, on a weekend visit to the Bizerta home of one of his father’s friends, the twenty-year-old Andr?, ever romantic, ever impetuous, fell in love with the colonel’s daughter, Genevi?ve Toussaint, known as ‘Myssett’. Almost immediately he announced his intention to marry his new sweetheart. The admiral was predictably furious, but his son was adamant. The couple married in Bizerta on 6 November 1929. Though he did it with bad grace and complained of the expense, the old admiral made the journey from Paris to join a small flotilla of senior naval Grandcl?ments who sailed into the cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-France in Bizerta for the ceremony, complete with clanking swords, heavy encrustations of medals, elegantly trimmed naval beards and, of course, the inevitable feather-festooned cocked hats. Andr? and Myssett had five children in quick succession. Three died young, leaving two daughters: Ghislaine, paralysed as a result of brain damage at birth, and Francine, four years her junior. A year after the wedding, Andr? suddenly announced yet another change of course: he was thinking of leaving the army. The young Grandcl?ment family, now feeling the pinch financially (another regular feature of Andr? Grandcl?ment’s life), transhipped to Toulon. Here, in 1932, Andr? declared that he was not after all leaving the army, but would instead attend the officer school at Saint-Maixent in the Somme valley. As ever, full of hope and resolution, he wrote to his wife: ‘I am very happy … and well aware of the value of two years of engagement once again in the business of learning and study.’ All seemed set fair once more. But then, fate again intervened – this time in the form of a serious riding accident which left him unfit for military service as a result of a damaged lung and, according to his doctor, tuberculosis as well. A short period of work in the wine business on the C?te d’Or followed. Then thanks to the patronage of a cousin, he was offered a job as a salesman with the insurance company Mutuelle Vie in Bordeaux. He and his family moved into a cramped first-floor apartment above a garage on the Rue Basse, a narrow street set back from the Pont de Pierre. It was all a long, long way from the pomp, gilt and glitter of the Bizerta cathedral wedding, just six years previously. The twenty-six-year-old Grandcl?ment who arrived in Bordeaux in 1935 was tall, slim, elegant, suntanned and clean cut. Though he had a curiously expressionless face, he was considered handsome, with blue eyes, a slightly hooked nose, a prominent chin and meticulously coiffured hair. Many who knew him commented on his verbal dexterity and his ability to carry an audience, albeit with a tendency, on occasion, to sound pompous. This together with a certain grace made him impressive – even beguiling – on first acquaintance: ‘intelligent, amiable, sensitive, good looking and with considerable presence,’ said one contemporary. Others were less enamoured. ‘He greatly overestimated his own importance. He was a kind of [ideological] gigolo,’ remembered one close colleague, while another described him as carrying ‘himself badly with a stooping head and shoulders as a result of some chest affliction. He has a pale face and a prominent nose.’ Andr? Grandcl?ment’s early opinions were those of his class and upbringing: Catholic and conservative, but not active in either cause. Later, preparing for the navy, he apparently shared the royalist sympathies of his classmates. After his marriage to Myssett the couple affected a bohemian lifestyle; there are even some suggestions of left-wing views during Andr?’s time with the Senegalese rifle regiment. By the mid-1930s, however, he was close to the Croix-de-Feu, a right-wing political organisation, subsequently banned for its fascist leanings. Later police reports reflect these internal ambivalences, one noting him as a ‘dangerously militant communist’, suspected of hiding arms, while another described him as ‘a faithful partisan’ of the Vichy government. In reality, in these immediate pre-war years, Andr? Grandcl?ment, the perennially restless optimist who was always certain that the next chance was the best one, was still seeking a safe harbour for his views, just as he was looking for a secure financial future for his young family and a fitting purpose for his life. The truth was that behind what was, at first sight, an imposing front, there lay a weak man in everything except his attachment to his daughters – especially little Ghislaine. The chief drivers of his personality were vanity, a hunger for recognition and the certainty that, despite the low opinion of his father and the moderate opinions of his contemporaries, there was nevertheless some important purpose to his life to match his hitherto unrecognised talents. On 24 September 1939, just days after war broke out, Grandcl?ment met a pretty young divorc?e who worked in the same office building in Bordeaux. Not long after, the two became lovers and in due course he declared Lucette Tartas – vivacious, intelligent, firm in her views, and in many ways much stronger than her lover – his ‘official mistress’. In this capacity, according to the curious French custom of the time, Lucette was recognised by the family and his wife. Myssett, her heart broken, took to the country with the two girls and began an official separation from her husband. The love affair between Grandcl?ment and Lucette Tartas was deep, genuine and endearing. ‘Their love for each other dazzled … like a couple straight out of one of those pre-war musical comedies,’ one contemporary observed. Weeks after meeting Lucette, and despite his physical incapacity, Grandcl?ment managed to pull enough strings to be declared ‘fit for service’. He joined the battle for France, fighting with an infantry regiment engaged in the frantic attempts to stop German armour breaking through the Ardennes forest. Here he showed considerable military ability and was mentioned in dispatches for bravery. But this too did not last. When France surrendered, he was demobilised and returned to the role of a humble insurance agent in Bordeaux. By 1940, with burgeoning medical expenses for the treatment of Ghislaine, the Grandcl?ments were once again in difficult financial straits. It was all too much for Myssett, who now sued for divorce. But by early 1941 the insurance business started looking up again – so much so that in September of that year Andr? and Lucette were able to move house. They rented an elegant and spacious apartment at 34 Cours de Verdun, in a fashionable neighbourhood of central Bordeaux and just opposite the main headquarters of the special French police brigade under Pierre Poinsot. By now, the public face of Andr? Grandcl?ment was hiding a deeper and much more dangerous life. The war had finally provided him with a secure political anchorage. He was, he decided, conservative, republican and, like many of his class (especially the fascist-leaning revolutionary group known as the ‘Cagoule militaire’ in the army, with whom he had both connections and sympathy), intensely patriotic, right-wing and nationalist. To start with he was a fervent supporter of P?tain’s Vichy administration. But, though he remained loyal to P?tain himself, he became disenchanted with the armistice and the Vichy government and began looking elsewhere for an organisation which would give him the opportunity to resist the German occupation, whilst remaining true to the right-wing authoritarian France in which he believed. Sometime in 1941 Grandcl?ment began to get involved in Resistance activities, working at a senior level in two relatively minor covert organisations. It was the beginning of a new enthusiasm in his life. But it was not enough. He needed something larger to match his talents. In September 1941, a school teacher from Bordeaux set up a local branch of an underground organisation called the Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCM). The OCM’s roots lay in a group of eight French ex-army officers who had set up a minor escape line to London in August 1940. By 1942 the organisation had expanded from these small beginnings into a vast, hierarchical, rambling movement made up chiefly of ex-army officers, intellectuals and government servants, covering the western half of the German occupied zone. Its activities included gathering intelligence, organising arms depots, managing escape routes, minor sabotage, setting up Maquisard units and hunting down collaborators. This was the kind of secret network that immediately appealed to Andr? Grandcl?ment’s sense of scale, romance and adventure – and these were his kind of people, too: ex-military, Catholic, conservative, strongly anti-communist and in many cases anti-Semitic as well. Jean Dubou? and L?o Paill?re, the neighbours from the Quai des Chartrons who were by this time sending regular secret intelligence reports to London, were also early members of the OCM. Indeed from late 1941 Paill?re was its chief of staff in southwest France. But in 1942 he was arrested and imprisoned for six months for black-market offences involving no less than 1.5 million francs’ worth of Armagnac and illegally distilled eau de vie. The regional OCM was left without a leader. OCM’s national head in Paris, Colonel Alfred Touny, sought a replacement and solicited the advice of two key southwest OCM members, both of whom just happened to be close to Andr? Grandcl?ment. One was his old Jesuit College friend, Marc O’Neill; the other, his uncle, General Paul Jouffrault (who was already head of the OCM in the Vend?e). Both agreed that Andr? would be perfect as the new head of the southwest chapter, which covered a vast swathe of France, from the Loire valley to the Pyrenees. This was a fateful and extraordinary decision. For, apart from high-level family connections and an ex-school friend in the right place at the right time, Andr? Grandcl?ment, though a good organiser and a patriot, was temperamentally completely unsuitable for the task with which he was now entrusted. For Grandcl?ment, however, his moment had arrived at last. Here was a role worthy of his talents as a mover of men and a shaper of events: a position of truly national importance. And if the Allies landed in 1943, as everyone believed they would – possibly even nearby, in the Gulf of Aquitaine – then here was a role which would assure him a place in history, too. What would his father, the admiral, think of that! In the spring of 1942, as Roger Landes was busy training as a spy, and Friedrich Dohse was setting up his counter-espionage department in Bouscat, Andr? Grandcl?ment, the thirty-three-year-old insurance salesman, was given the leadership of the largest and most powerful Resistance organisation in southwest France. The change in him was immediate and dramatic. ‘With Lucette on his arm, Andr? Grandcl?ment was now a man who was utterly content and sure of himself,’ wrote one close observer. ‘He was no longer the insurance agent always complaining about life’s unfairness and injustices … Now he was living another life, with entirely new aims. Now he was fighting for his country and need no longer concern himself with such petty matters as finances and money. The transformation in him was complete – both morally and physically.’ 5 A HAPPY MAN AND A DEAD BODY (#ulink_40a545a9-34ed-5a7c-b6e9-206f59fdec4a) The cold of January 1942 held on tenaciously into February and March. The vines of the M?doc and the plane trees of Bordeaux remained stubbornly and unseasonably bare. These had been frustrating months for Friedrich Dohse. Constrained by the passive obstructionism of his boss, Herbert Hagen, and open hostility in KdS Bordeaux, he was also held back by the fact that, until a special decree was issued by Hitler on 1 June 1942, the Gestapo (soon to be rechristened, in French argot, ‘La Georgette’) were not formally permitted to operate in France. But Dohse was not a man to waste time. Using the skills he had learnt in the criminal police in Hamburg, he spent the first few months of 1942 gathering information, creating a filing system and recruiting staff to his new department. Here too he had to cope with interference from his German intelligence colleagues – in this case the Abwehr, who made determined attempts to poach his new recruits; things got so bad that he finally had to ban their officers from all contact with his team. Despite these impediments, over the next months Dohse managed to recruit forty-eight German officers, who, supported by about twenty French assistants (including interpreters, typists, cooks and clerks), would form the base of his organisation. Amongst these, three were of particular note. Rudolf Kunesch was an Austrian Wehrmacht soldier drafted into KdS and, though senior to Dohse in rank, was assigned to be his deputy. This clumsy arrangement meant that Dohse could not give Kunesch direct instructions, except through Hagen. While Dohse himself normally initiated operations, it was Kunesch who frequently commanded them, leaving his ‘chief’ to attend only in the technical role of ‘observer’. Tensions were not improved by the fact that when prisoners were brought in, it was Kunesch, not Dohse, who interrogated them first. Overweight, balding, thick-lipped, an energetic drinker, with a face straight out of a 1930s gangster film, Kunesch was regarded as ‘brutal and stupid’. His heavy-handed approach stood in sharp contrast to Dohse’s preference for more subtle techniques. These differences, exacerbated by the lack of clarity about their relative seniority, meant that relations between the two men were very often strained to the point of open warfare – though there is no record of Dohse ever complaining about his deputy’s brutal methods. Kunesch was in due course supported by his ‘chief torturer’, Anton Enzelsberger. Known as ‘Tony the Boxer’, Enzelsberger had been heavyweight boxing champion of Austria. With only one working eye (ice blue) and a shaven head, Enzelsberger was as close as one could get to the caricature of a dyed-in-the-wool, hatchet-faced Nazi thug. He was also a regular soldier, untrained in police skills, and had been released from a sentence for murder when Hitler annexed Austria. Kunesch, Enzelsberger and their subordinates preferred torture to all other means of extracting confessions from their subjects. Among their favourite instruments of persuasion were a rubber cosh (Kunesch was known as ‘the cosher-in-chief’); a whip similar to a cat o’ nine tails; and an arrangement consisting of two braziers backed by a reflector, in front of which prisoners were placed to slowly roast like pieces of meat on a barbecue. Another new recruit was forty-two-year-old Marcelle Louise Sommer. Born in the Swiss Romande, Marcelle Sommer had been interned with her mother by the French during the First World War and spoke flawless French. She spent some years between the wars working first at a department store in Paris and then in – and very probably spying on – the Michelin factory in Clermont-Ferrand. Hated and feared in equal measure, she became known locally as the ‘lioness of the Gestapo’. Though she had started as Dohse’s personal assistant (and had been one of those the Abwehr had tried to poach), she quickly rose to become head of Department IV’s intelligence section. Tall, imposing and statuesque, even without the high heels she habitually wore, she was the mistress of one of Dohse’s section chiefs (and one of his few close personal German friends), SS-Obersturmf?hrer Sch?der. Dohse trusted Sommer completely and gave her full autonomy to run her own network of French agents, which included many women and prostitutes employed as agents provocateurs. Dohse’s personal assistant was twenty-five-year-old Claire Keimer, whose blonde tresses and Wagnerian proportions soon became well known in Bordeaux. Intelligent, quick-witted, ambitious, fluent in French and a natural in the spying business, it was not long before the two became lovers. Her role, however, extended well beyond being Dohse’s mistress, for over time she also became his chief confidante and adviser – often attending his interrogations and participating in conferences to decide strategy and policy. The main elements of Dohse’s staff assembled, he and Sommer set about creating a network of agents. Among the most important of these were 108 individuals each paid 5,000 francs a month (the equivalent of around ?1,000 today), plus expenses. These included ‘agents of influence’ – senior officials in the French administration and police, key leaders in pro-Gestapo French paramilitary units – and undercover agents who were used to infiltrate Resistance groups and organisations. The financial resources available to Dohse’s section were, like those of all the German secret services, almost unlimited. French counter-intelligence at the time commented that ‘[German] officers, civil servants and agents … spend without limit and enrich themselves without scruple’. There was even a fixed tariff for information and betrayal: denunciation of a Jew or a Communist = 1,000 francs denunciation of a Gaullist = 3,000 francs information leading to the discovery of a weapons cache = 5,000–30,000 francs (depending on the size of the horde) One French collaborator, the appropriately named Johann Dollar, is calculated to have earned, in a single year, the equivalent (at today’s prices) of ?18,600, for information passed to the Germans. Dohse’s most important collaborator on the French side was the local police chief, Pierre Poinsot, the scourge of the communists in 1941. Now, as the head of the new Vichy French police brigade known as the Section des Affaires Politiques (or SAP), he also ran his own network of agents. Dohse made Poinsot a paid informer, supplementing his meagre French policeman’s salary with occasional bonuses (amounting on one occasion to 10,000 francs, accompanied by a further 20,000 to be distributed to his men). Poinsot and his unit, who soon became known as the ‘murder brigade’ for their habit of killing and extreme torture, now became, to all intents and purposes, an extension of Dohse’s Gestapo organisation. Poinsot reported to Dohse daily, arrested whoever Dohse wanted, tortured (or refrained from torturing) whoever Dohse wanted, and did nothing unless Dohse approved of it. On one occasion Dohse ‘interrupted’ one of Poinsot’s torture sessions on a young resistant: ‘I said to Poinsot “Enough! Get him dressed”,’ Dohse later claimed. ‘Then I put the young man in my car and sat him next to me. He was not chained or handcuffed. I said “Listen. Tell me the truth … or I will hand you back to the French police” … it was not a nice thing to do – but it was my job … I took the young man to my home and had him fed – and he gave me everything.’ It is fair at this stage to point out that, although torture, extreme brutality and executions were largely institutionalised among the Nazi security forces and Poinsot’s SAP, the Resistance were also not squeamish about using ‘enhanced techniques of persuasion’ and punishment. A female SOE agent connected with Bordeaux describes in a post-mission report how two newspaper journalists in Poitiers suspected of collaboration were executed by the local Resistance, one by being shot and the second by being first tortured and then killed using a metal file, with which he was stabbed more than twenty times. In all, Dohse and Sommer recruited more than a hundred low-level French, Russian and Spanish agents scattered across the region. A headquarters for this spy network was established in the Place de la Cath?drale in Bordeaux. This was supplemented by the establishment of a number of safe houses around the city and by the formation of right-wing French paramilitary organisations, which provided Dohse with information and operational support as required. In due course, the French forces which Dohse could rely on also included the much-hated, black-shirted Milice fran?aise (‘French militia’). Raised with the help of the Germans in 1943, but not active in Bordeaux until the spring of 1944, this paramilitary force, created to fight communism and ‘terrorism’, was drawn largely from the ranks of the French fascists and the criminal fraternity. In early May 1942, Dohse finally found a proper home for his now fast-growing unit. He requisitioned a large property at 197 Avenue du Mar?chal P?tain, opposite the main KdS headquarters in Bouscat. The building, a substantial nineteenth-century ch?teau on three floors, stood in its own grounds and was protected by a low wall which supported a fence of robust cast-iron railings. Substantial wine cellars beneath the house were converted into prison cells and, when occasion arose, torture chambers. Dohse chose an airy room on the ground floor at the rear of the building, adjacent to a handsome glass veranda which gave access to the garden and stables, as his office. The stables, too, were converted for use as interrogation cells. The most notorious of these was christened the Chambre d’action. Above the door was a notice instructing ‘No water, no food’. At the start, Dohse was assiduous when it came to protecting his back, making a point of taking the train to Paris to brief B?melburg almost every weekend. He also acted as secretary and translator to a Franco-German body based in the French capital called the Cercle Europ?en. This discussed a future united Europe formed around an axis between Germany and France. As time passed, however, Dohse felt secure enough to visit Paris less and enjoy southwest France more. In the second week of April 1942, a mini-heatwave hit Bordeaux, bringing spring to the city in a rush. The vines in the Charente and the M?doc flowered early and the restaurants threw open the doors they had kept firmly closed all the long bitter winter and spilled out onto terraces and pavements in gay profusion. On 1 May, Dohse’s obstructive boss, Hagen, was posted to Paris. His replacement was a thirty-three-year-old ex-judge from Frankfurt called Hans Luther. Though Luther was punctilious and sociable, Dohse did not have a high opinion of his new commander, whom he regarded as lazy and ‘just an administrator … not qualified for this kind of post … he just gave the orders, that was all’. However, with Hagen gone and a chief who seemed more interested in having a good time than interfering, Dohse’s life became much easier. He was by now beginning to be recognised by fellow Germans in KdS Bordeaux as an effective, even if not likeable, colleague, while at the same time enjoying a certain notoriety – popularity, even – among the local population. Dohse at this stage could do more or less as he pleased. He moved his personal accommodation out of the Bouscat Gestapo colony and took up residence in a small town villa at 145 Route du M?doc, in the northwest of the city, which he shared with three colleagues. Here he held frequent dinners, inviting many of his French friends as well as those closest to him among the German contingent in the KdS. Soon the villa, permanently guarded by two French policemen, became something of a hub of social activity in the city. Each morning if the weather was fine, Dohse’s personal chauffeur would collect him in an open-topped car – invariably dressed in an elegant suit, set off with a fashionable tie – and carry him in state on the short journey to his office in Bouscat. At lunchtime his habit was to be driven to his favourite restaurant, where he would enjoy a glass or two of champagne and a convivial lunch with his French friends. Around this time Dohse seems to have copied his patron in Paris, B?melburg, acquiring, probably through requisition, a large black Cadillac which he used for longer journeys. At weekends, he and Claire Keimer would frequently be driven to the little seaside resort of Pyla on the gulf of Arcachon, where Dohse took a villa; or, if he had business to conduct with German intelligence colleagues in Spain, he would drive with Claire to the picturesque Spanish coastal town of San Sebasti?n, which had by now become a hotbed of spying, centred on the British and German consulates and a restaurant called Casa d’Italia. Here all the resident spies gathered to drink and regard each other with suspicion and as much enmity as they could muster in such convivial surroundings. Dohse even boasted he had literally rubbed shoulders with ‘Mr Gutsman, my British opposite number’. ‘I liked the good life and had lots of parties. And I had a host of French friends – not collaborators … (just friends) with whom I had many good dinners at which not a word of politics was spoken,’ Dohse claimed after the war. ‘I did not want to die on the Russian front. Life in France was much more pleasant – much more fun. One was able to enjoy all the things one could wish for.’ ‘Dohse loved Bordeaux,’ one observer wryly commented. ‘His table was refined, and his mistress, beautiful. Dohse was a happy man. And those are the most dangerous.’ At this point in the war, danger seemed rather far away to Friedrich Dohse and his German compatriots in Bordeaux. True, in mid-1941, agents parachuted in by London had attacked and destroyed a power station in the Bordeaux suburb of Pessac. But the damage had been slight, the interruption of power short and, apart from a dozen German soldiers shot for their failure to protect the installation, little of consequence had resulted from the British raid. On 23 April 1941, for the first time, a British parachute drop of weapons was discovered near the little village of Cestas, fifteen kilometres southwest of Bordeaux. This caused much astonishment among the locals and dramatic reports from the local French police. There had also been RAF bombing raids on the port of Bordeaux – but these had been infrequent, haphazard and poorly targeted, often killing many more French civilians than German personnel and causing damage to many more residential properties than military installations. If anything, the raids served to fuel anti-British sentiment in the city. Leaving aside the regular drives against the communists (there was one in June 1942, following Poinsot’s success in turning a senior communist), things on the security front were quiet and life for Bordeaux’s occupiers rather congenial. But beneath this seemingly placid surface, things were changing. By the middle of 1942, OCM, now numbering some 800 Resistance fighters and 100 officers, had expanded to cover almost the whole of southwest France, from the Charente region west to the Pyrenees and from the Aquitaine coast south to Toulouse. Among the local Resistance organisations which had by now been fully subsumed into the OCM was the Dubou?–Paill?re network centred on Dubou?’s Caf? du Commerce at 83 Quai des Chartrons. This group had grown too, and by this time consisted of fourteen active units with, between them, eight parachute sites in the area. Its new recruits included nine living along the Bordeaux waterfront. Two of these were Marcel Bertrand and his wife, who ran the Caf? des Chartrons at the Bacalan end of the quay. Dubou? used the Bertrand caf? as his chief clandestine ‘letterbox’ through which he passed his reports and messages to London and to other members of his group. Meanwhile, the new head of OCM Southwest, Andr? Grandcl?ment, had also been busy – recceing potential parachute drop sites, overseeing the hiding of arms, establishing escape routes, issuing orders, setting up a hierarchy of command and devising a system of secret communication. The pity was that, in almost every other way, the OCM was not secret at all. Its existence was by now widely known of and boasted about in the Bordeaux area. Grandcl?ment’s meetings – which tended to be a cross between a meeting of the golf club committee and a cocktail party – were held regularly and in the same place – at 34 Cours de Verdun, the home he shared with Lucette. Worst of all, members of the OCM could and did belong to other Resistance organisations as well. This meant that if one secret organisation was penetrated the rot could quickly spread to endanger all of them. In the spring of 1942 an event occurred which made it explicitly clear to the German authorities that this burgeoning underground activity was not just a local matter: London, too, was getting involved in Bordeaux. On the morning of Sunday 3 May 1942, the weather in Langon, a market town bisected by the demarcation line in the Gironde, was as bright and glorious as a spring morning could be. At 8.38, the regular Sunday morning country train from the small market town of Luxey, seventy kilometres south of Bordeaux, puffed slowly into Langon station, which stands astride the main junction between the rural lines which serve south Gironde and the express line from Toulouse to Bordeaux. Among the passengers who climbed down onto the platform and lined up to have their papers checked was a smartly dressed man who had joined the train at 0549 that morning at the tiny railway halt in the village of Sore, twenty kilometres away. He was young and handsome, with a round face enlivened by alert brown eyes and a small, rather unkempt moustache. He carried a rucksack and a small brown suitcase and, despite the warm day, wore a navy gabardine mac, a suit (light grey with white and blue stripes), a short-sleeved pullover, a shirt, tie (blue, with red and white spots), blue socks and dark brown shoes. When his turn came, he stepped forward and handed his papers to the German customs official for inspection. The official studied them carefully and, finding something out of place, ordered the young traveller to step into the customs office for further enquiries and a search of his luggage. It may have been Henri Labit’s suitcase which attracted the unwelcome attention – for at this stage of the war SOE was in the habit of issuing the exactly same make and colour of cheap cardboard suitcase (and, for that matter, the same make of pyjamas) to all their agents – something which the Gestapo had already spotted. Karl Schr?der, the head of the small German section at Langon, opened Labit’s case to discover a radio transmitter. Labit’s response was instantaneous. He pulled a Colt automatic out of his pocket, shot Schr?der dead, wounded three other guards in the room and made a run for it. Some of the wounded men gave chase, firing after the fugitive. The local gendarmes were called in. Someone reported that they had seen a man running near the town cemetery. The area was quickly surrounded and the young man was spotted leaning, seemingly wounded, against a wall with his Colt in his hand. Before the pursuers could get to him, he collapsed. By the time they reached him, his lips were blue and white foam was frothing from his mouth. Henri Labit (alias ‘Leroy’), twenty-one years old and originally from Bordeaux, had been trained by SOE and parachuted into France the previous day with false identity papers in the name of ‘G?rard Henri Laure’. Rather than be captured, he had swallowed the ‘L’ (for ‘lethal’) cyanide tablet, which he had been given before leaving London. The Germans stood to attention alongside the young man’s body as he passed through his last agonising convulsions. Among the incriminating papers found on the dead man’s corpse was a letter from a certain ‘Ginette’. No address was given, but there was reference to a pharmacy in Bordeaux. The Gestapo eventually narrowed their search down to a young girl called Ginette Corbin, the daughter of Charles Corbin, an ex-pharmacist turned wartime policeman, who, unknown to the Germans, was also active in the local Resistance. Ginette Corbin was Henri Labit’s cousin, and it seems clear that the letter was intended as a device by which Henri Labit could make contact with Charles Corbin and then, through him, with the Resistance in Bordeaux. Ginette and her mother were taken to Dohse’s headquarters and interrogated. They initially denied all knowledge of Labit, until, confronted with the letter found on Labit’s body, Ginette blurted out that she was trying, for personal reasons, to hide that she was, in fact, engaged to Labit. It was a complete invention intended to avoid having to reveal that the Corbin family were, in reality, related to Labit. But it worked. Ginette and her mother were released. Next, the Germans arrested and interrogated Henri Labit’s mother, Henriette, insisting that the dead man was her son. She too denied any relationship. So she was taken down to the cellars of the ch?teau and shown the body of her son hanging on a meat hook. Mme Labit coldly examined the cadaver and declared she did not recognise the young man. The orders given to Henri Labit before he left London were to establish a Resistance network in and around Bordeaux, identify parachute sites where weapons could be dropped, and reconnoitre amphibious landing grounds on the beaches south of the Gironde estuary. His mission was the first in a planned programme of British/French expansion into the whole of the German occupied zone, with special emphasis on Paris and Bordeaux. On 20 April, an SOE radio operator with orders to open up wireless communications from Tours, 250 kilometres northeast of Bordeaux and also in the occupied zone, was landed on the south coast of France. He arrived in Tours on 23 June and was joined three weeks later by an ex-RAF officer called Raymond Henry Flower. Quite why the tremulous and easily frightened Flower was sent to France as leader of a delicate and dangerous mission is difficult to understand given his SOE training reports: ‘no powers of leadership, very little initiative’, ‘lacking in strength of mind and body’, ‘very slow mentally and an uneducated type of brain’, ‘… probably only useful in a minor capacity, under sound leadership’. Ten days later, on the night of 29/30 July, a forty-five-year-old grandmother called Yvonne Rudellat was secretly landed on a beach near Cannes, with orders to make her way to Tours. Attractive, physically tough, with greying tousled hair, Rudellat had moved to London before the war and worked as, among other things, a shop assistant and the club secretary at the Ebury Court Hotel and Club, near Victoria, where SOE had found and recruited her. At Tours, Rudellat was to act as courier to Raymond Flower’s circuit, codenamed ‘Monkeypuzzle’. Another person who joined Monkeypuzzle at about this time was a locally recruited Frenchman called Pierre Culioli. Of Corsican-Breton extraction, twenty-eight-year-old Culioli – described as having ‘cold grey eyes behind his spectacles … resolute mouth … deeply cleft chin’ – was small of stature and slight of frame. This, together with the Hitler moustache he grew, half as a joke and half as hirsute protection against German inquisitiveness, resulted in him being nicknamed ‘Adolphe’ by his Resistance colleagues. Culioli and Rudellat, both strong characters, were ordered to work under the nervous Flower. Their task was to prepare parachute sites and receive the agents London now planned to drop in to create two new secret organisations in the German-occupied zone: the ‘Scientist’ network in Bordeaux and a new network in Paris, which was to be codenamed ‘Prosper’. Given the mix of personalities, relations within Monkeypuzzle were never going to be easy. In due course, they would become literally murderous. The day after Yvonne Rudellat landed from a felucca (fishing vessel) off the C?te d’Azur, two of Roger Landes’s fellow spy students from Wanborough Manor, Claude de Baissac and Harry Peulev?, were back in Orchard Court, Portman Square, receiving their final briefing before being parachuted into France. De Baissac, the ‘natural leader’, was given the key role of heading up the Scientist network in Bordeaux; Peulev? was to be his radio operator. After parachuting in, their orders were to make their way first to Gaston H?che’s restaurant in Tarbes and thence to Bordeaux, where they were to ‘investigate the possibilities of the Dubou? organisation’. Their primary task was to plan, organise and carry out sabotage attacks on the blockade-runners and the submarine pens in Bordeaux harbour. 6 SCIENTIST GETS ESTABLISHED (#ulink_c2792c9d-4d3f-57df-82ed-01daa2ee0df8) At 1.15 a.m. on 30 July 1942, above the town of N?mes in southern France, the sky was starlit, with a full moon and scudding clouds driven on a boisterous mistral. In truth, the wind was too strong for safe parachuting, but the risk of a jump tonight had to be balanced against the risk of flying a second sortie down the length of enemy-occupied France a few days later. As he flew south over N?mes, Pilot Officer Leo Anderle lowered his Halifax to 2,000 feet and, spotting the little village of Caissargues, its canal sparkling like a ribbon of tinsel in the moonlight, warned his two passengers, Claude de Baissac and Harry Peulev?, that he was running into their target and they should get ready to jump. He made a first pass over the drop site, a deserted aerodrome, while his co-pilot flashed the agreed recognition signal. There was no response from the reception committee on the ground. Anderle made a second pass and then a third – still no signal. He was nervous now that he was spending too long in the area – and drawing too much attention. He passed a message to his passengers. They had two options: abandon and turn for home, or drop blind on a field nearby and take pot luck. The two secret agents decided that they had come this far and did not want to go back. Anderle brought the big aircraft down to 500 feet and began his final run, choosing an open field west of the deserted aerodrome. De Baissac got into trouble almost as soon as he jumped. His parachute opened with a sharp jerk, pulling his left shoulder out of the harness. To make matters worse the brown cardboard suitcase strapped to his left leg had somehow broken free in the turbulence of the aircraft slipstream and become entangled in the parachute rigging above him. He tried to disengage it but couldn’t, thanks to the buffeting of the wind, which now carried him along at an increasing pace. Then it was too late. The ground was coming up fast to meet him. He crashed into the soil of France awkwardly and on one leg, spraining it badly. With some difficulty, he gathered his parachute in the strong wind, peeled off his jumpsuit, dug a shallow grave and buried both. Picking up his case and, dressed now as any wartime French traveller, he set off to find Peulev?. It was eventually Harry Peulev?’s cries which drew de Baissac to him. He had suffered an even worse landing and was lying in a ditch with a broken leg. The two men agreed that there was no option. De Baissac would have to continue alone, without his radio operator. Peulev? would wait until dawn, then drag himself to a nearby farmhouse and throw himself on the mercy of the local population. De Baissac buried his colleague’s parachute, jumpsuit and wireless, and limped off to N?mes railway station, arriving not long after the curfew was lifted at five in the morning. Two weeks later, in the second week of August 1942, Claude de Baissac – codenamed ‘Scientist’ after his network, known in France as ‘David’ and travelling under the false identity of a publicity agent named ‘Claude Boucher’ – arrived at Tarbes station, close to the Pyrenees. He had not had a trouble-free journey. At one stage his papers had been checked by a suspicious Vichy policeman. ‘And how long have you been here?’ De Baissac – who had fled the country for London just months previously with his sister, Lise – insisted that he had always lived in France and was on business. ‘Your papers are obvious forgeries. Tell London to be more careful in future!’ It was the second time in a matter of weeks that SOE had put the life of one of their agents at risk through a careless mistake in documentation. The difference between Henri Labit’s death and Claude de Baissac’s survival rested only on the good fortune for de Baissac that his flawed papers were first exposed to a sympathetic French official, rather than a hostile German one. De Baissac made his way from the station to Rue Avezac-Macaya near Tarbes cathedral, where he found Gaston H?ches’s restaurant and guesthouse, a substantial four-storey building with rooms on the top floors where ‘guests’ awaiting passage over the Pyrenees were accommodated. Entering the restaurant, de Baissac found a large, beamed, ground-floor room, full of rough tables and the chatter of H?ches’s lunchtime clientele. A huge cast-iron stove belching smoke occupied almost the full length of one wall, presided over by a small man so stricken with rheumatism that he could barely move his head or walk without the aid of two sticks. This was Gaston H?ches, the patron of the establishment, which he ran with his wife Mimi and their two daughters. To the casual eye this was no more than a thriving country restaurant in a market town. But behind the fa?ade, the building performed a second, more secret, function. It was the local headquarters for the ?douard line, one of SOE’s most successful escape lines over the Pyrenees. By the end of the war it would also become the base for a highly successful sabotage network, also run by H?ches. De Baissac installed himself at an empty table and waited for the opportunity of a quiet word with the patron. ‘I am a traveller and I am looking for ?douard,’ de Baissac said, using the password sequence he had been given by London. ‘Where are you coming from?’ H?ches asked, following the script. ‘From Switzerland.’ ‘And you are going to?’ ‘To the United States.’ Shortly afterwards de Baissac met up with Robert Leroy, who had been sent to escort him across the demarcation line into the occupied zone. The two men had to wait for a few days while H?ches contacted a local priest who arranged for new documents to be forged for ‘David’. Finally, after paying off Leroy’s latest bar bill from the 100,000 francs de Baissac carried in a money belt, the two agents took the little one-track railway line north from Tarbes, which wound its way under a sweltering August sun, through 150 kilometres of pine forest and heathland, to Langon. At Langon their papers would have been checked on crossing the demarcation line, just as Henri Labit’s had been. Then they continued on the final leg of their journey to Bordeaux. Arriving in the city at the end of August, de Baissac would have witnessed the aftermath of the first transportation of Bordeaux’s Jews. The French authorities in the occupied zone had wrestled with a demand to deport 40,000; eventually the German authorities accepted that the transportation should be limited to stateless Jews. Bordeaux was set a target of 2,000. That month the initial wave – 614 people, including, on Berlin’s insistence, their children – were taken from their homes and crammed into railway carriages at the Gare Saint-Jean. From here they were taken to a French internment camp, in a derelict housing estate at Drancy, on the outskirts of Paris, and then – though no one knew it at the time – onwards to the death camps of Nazi Europe. In Bordeaux, de Baissac wasted no time getting started. A few days after his arrival Leroy introduced him to Dubou? and the Bertrands at the Caf? des Chartrons. The caf?, a favourite haunt of dockers and labourers, was situated on the ground floor of a four-storey building with bedrooms on the upper floors and a rear entrance leading to the tangle of little streets and narrow ill-lit alleys of the working-class district of Bacalan. The caf?’s first-floor front windows directly overlooked Scientist’s primary target: the blockade-runners moored alongside the quay just a hundred metres away. It was, de Baissac decided, the perfect place for his headquarters. In return for a regular subvention of 8,000–10,000 francs a month, the Bertrands undertook to provide free daily meals to members of the Scientist network, and to give de Baissac access to the rooms on the first floor which could be used, without the need to fill in the usual police forms, by any who needed urgent refuge and by those visiting Bordeaux on Scientist business. What neither de Baissac nor the Bertrands knew was that two of Dohse’s agents lived less than 200 metres away. The most pressing problem, having lost his radio operator, was how de Baissac was going to communicate with Baker Street. As a stopgap, Yvonne Rudellat was tasked by London to courier between Scientist and SOE’s nearest radio operator in Tours, 300 kilometres northeast of Bordeaux. It was by this means that, on 14 September 1942, de Baissac sent his first brief report to London informing them that he had established the Caf? des Chartrons as his headquarters and primary ‘secret letterbox’ in the city, and giving the details of his first parachute drop site at the Moulin de Saquet, close to the little hamlet of Coirac in the commune of Targon, sixteen kilometres east of Bordeaux. On 19 September 1942, a further, more detailed report from de Baissac was carried from Bordeaux to Tarbes by young Suzanne Dubou?. From Tarbes it was taken over the Pyrenees to the British consulate in Barcelona for coded transmission to London. It reported that Scientist was preparing sabotage attacks on the blockade-runners at the Quai des Chartrons: ‘Louis [Robert Leroy] is only waiting for the necessary material [explosives] in order to get on with the job. He can then work on the painting of the boats down in the hold. He has already informed you how he needed the goods [in small packages] which could easily go into a workman’s haversack.’ De Baissac had been too fast off the mark. On 7 October, Baker Street responded with alarm instructing him not to carry out any attacks until ordered. For the moment, Whitehall, not wishing to give the Germans any excuse for an invasion of the Vichy zone, had prohibited all sabotage in the occupied zone, unless it was completely untraceable to British hands. The time would come to take the gloves off. But it wasn’t yet. Meanwhile, SOE urgently needed to find a radio operator to replace the injured Peulev?. Roger Landes, at the time enjoying some leave at Carlton Mansions after completing his wireless course, was the obvious choice. On 16 September Landes was recalled, promoted to lieutenant and told to prepare to be dropped onto the Moulin de Saquet site as Scientist’s new radio operator. On the same day an instruction from German headquarters in Paris arrived at KdS Bordeaux. Forty-one Germans had been killed in Resistance attacks; under the German reprisal policy, two hostages would be executed for every German death caused by the Resistance. Eighty-two hostages chosen from those already in German captivity would now have to be shot. But the Germans in Paris could only find thirty-two ‘suitable’ hostages for execution. So Bordeaux would have to produce the extra fifty demanded by Berlin. Some suggest that this extra number was imposed on the city in retaliation for Bordeaux’s failure to find more Jews for transportation. On the evening of the following day, 17 September, French communists threw a bomb into the Rex Cinema in Paris, killing one German soldier and injuring thirty. In response, Paris raised the number of hostages to be executed in Bordeaux to seventy. Friedrich Dohse contacted his chief, B?melburg, complaining that the decision would serve only to increase hostility in the area. He suggested that, if the number could not be reduced, then at least the condemned should be taken to Paris for execution, rather than being shot at nearby Souge. But even the appeals of B?melburg’s personal representative in Bordeaux were rejected. Dohse spent the next few days making summaries of the files of the most likely candidates for execution in local prisons and submitting them to Hans Luther for his decision. At midday on 21 September, seventy coffins were delivered to Souge. They were followed that afternoon by seventy male hostages; most were communists and many were very young. They were executed by firing squad in batches of ten, in the gathering dusk, among the camp’s pine trees, that still autumn evening. Luther attended the executions. But it was not the only thing he did that day. At 09.10 he sent a message to Paris: ‘In the morning, a transport consisting of seventy Jews left Bordeaux. The Jews have been placed in three railway wagons, connected to a fast freight train. As instructed, the destination was Drancy. The Jews are expected to arrive on 22 September,’ Luther ended. 7 A VISITOR FOR DAVID (#ulink_6d8e3877-35ce-5589-96c4-144961c75189) As his fellow Jews were travelling to Paris crowded into railway wagons, Roger Landes was being driven up the Great North Road to RAF Tempsford, eight miles from Bedford. A few days earlier he had been instructed to leave all unnecessary belongings at his parents’ home and make his way to Orchard Court. Here, after being dressed in his French clothes, he was minutely searched for anything incriminating and closely cross-examined on his cover story. Then, equipped with his brown cardboard mock-leather suitcase containing everything he would need as a traveller in France, he was taken to an SOE holding unit – a substantial Georgian mansion in Huntingdonshire – where he stayed for a few days in the company of other SOE agents waiting to be parachuted into occupied Europe. At Tempsford, Landes was given as good a meal – with wine – as the RAF could muster in wartime, before being escorted to a large farmhouse at the edge of the base. Another search for incriminating traces of British life – matches, receipts, theatre tickets etc. – ensued, together with a repeat examination of his cover story and a briefing on how to use his suicide ‘L’ tablets, which were handed to him in a small rubber box. Finally, he was equipped with French ration cards and documents made out in his new false name: Ren? Pol, a quantity surveyor working for the German military construction operation, Organisation Todt. An hour before departure, the RAF dispatcher, who would now escort Landes all the way to the moment he jumped, helped him into voluminous parachute overalls covered with pockets. These contained a folding shovel, a parachutist’s knife, a small flask of rum, a compass, a torch, a .38 Luger automatic, some Benzedrine tablets and a tin of emergency rations. On top of his overalls Landes wore a single-piece camouflaged parachute smock, buttoned up between the legs and closed by a zip at the front. On top of that came his parachute and harness, secured by two straps passed over his shoulders and two more under his buttocks. All four straps were clipped into a quick-release buckle on his chest. Thus, trussed up like a chicken, and carrying his parachute helmet, Roger Landes was led to a converted Halifax and installed in the back, along with a sleeping bag, a flask of coffee laced with rum, a brown paper bag containing sandwiches and four metal cylinders packed with his radios, weapons and ammunition. The dispatcher checked that his charge was comfortably installed and advised him to get as much sleep as he could. There was a long cold night ahead. Sadly, it was all in vain. There was no sign of the promised reception committee at de Baissac’s new Moulin de Saquet site. Landes, remembering what had happened to de Baissac and Peulev?, declined the offer to drop blind and the aircraft turned for home. Three further attempts were made to parachute Landes into France, but all were frustrated. (One because the wrong Morse recognition letter was sent by the reception committee; one because an incautious owl flew into the engine of Landes’s Halifax; and one because of a signal miscommunication.) Finally, at 1.40 a.m. on 1 November 1942, after yet another cancelled drop and an attempt to fly him to Gibraltar and send him by fishing vessel to the southern French coast, Roger Landes, codenamed ‘Actor’, alias ‘Stanislas’ and carrying the false identity of ‘Ren? Pol’, landed at Bois Renard, near the village of Mer in the Loire valley. Parachuted in with him that night was Gilbert Norman, his colleague from the SOE wireless school at Thame. Buffeted by strong winds, Landes and Norman had had an uncomfortable journey as their Halifax made its way south across France. To offset the wind, the Halifax pilot took his aircraft down to a spine-chilling 150 metres for the jump. Norman went first; then Landes. As the dark bulk of the aircraft passed away over Landes’s head, he felt the sharp jerk of his parachute opening. A moment or so later, he was down – in the middle of a muddy field. Looking around, he found himself alone with the sound of the Halifax fading away into the darkness. No reception committee, no lights, no Gilbert Norman: no one and nothing in sight. He stripped off his jumpsuit and buried it – along with his parachute – and started to consider his options. Perhaps he would have to make his own way to Bordeaux? He decided to hide in some bushes and wait to see what would happen next. Ten minutes later he heard the sound of Norman’s voice softly calling his alias: ‘Stanislas, Stanislas.’ He emerged to find Norman accompanied by a slender man with a slightly ridiculous Hitler moustache: it was Pierre Culioli. Raymond Flower, the head of the Monkeypuzzle reception team, should have been there, but he had become so frightened of almost anything that he could not be relied on and so Culioli had taken his place. The real cause of Flower’s petrified condition, however, was far worse than Culioli knew. Flower had convinced himself that both Culioli and Rudellat were Gestapo agents, and had sent to London for cyanide tablets to kill them both. The lethal tablets to do the job were contained in a special unmarked package which Norman had been given that night, with firm instructions that they were to be delivered personally into Flower’s hands only. In the end, the killing never happened because the petrified Flower could neither bring himself to do the deed nor persuade anyone else to do it for him. In reality, Culioli and Rudellat’s supposed ‘treachery’ was no more than the product of Flower’s fevered imagination. Nevertheless, Culioli’s survival, whether justified or not, would cost Gilbert Norman, his colleagues in Paris and the whole of SOE, very dear in the months to come. That night Culioli took Landes and Norman to the house of a local mayor, who also happened to be Culioli’s father-in-law. The following morning there was a knock on Landes’s bedroom door. Suddenly wakened from a deep sleep, the new arrival from London sat bolt upright and shouted: ‘Come in!’ – in English. Fortunately, Landes’s early morning caller was not the Gestapo, but his host, come to collect him for the next stage of his journey to Bordeaux. After breakfast, Norman left to take up the role of radio operator for the new Prosper network in Paris, headed by one of Landes’s ex-Wanborough colleagues – the young ‘Ivanhoe’, Francis Suttill. Norman took the morning train to Paris with his ‘guide’, Francis Suttill’s courier, Andr?e Borrel. Small-boned, dark-complexioned and twenty-three years old, Borrel was an ex-Paris ‘street urchin’, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and worked in an escape line before fleeing to London in 1941, making her the most battle-experienced of any of the Prosper or Scientist agents. One of the first women to be dropped into France, she had arrived in late September, with orders to join Suttill in Paris. As Borrel and Norman made their way to the station, Landes was loaded onto a cart which, with him at the reins, carried him in lonely state to a nearby farm. Neither SOE’s training, nor Landes’s city life in Paris and London had equipped him with the skills to drive a horse and cart. But luckily, as he explained afterwards, ‘the horse found its own way home. Though it was a very strange feeling being on a public road, full of uniformed Germans, when only the night before I had been in England …’ At the farm, Landes was surprised to find the jumpy Raymond Flower, together with Flower’s radio operator Marcel Clech and two of SOE’s most important women agents, waiting for them and a merry party in progress. Landes, who never relaxed his obsession with security, later complained that it was ‘more a social event than a business meeting’. He was of course right. If the farm had been raided that night the Gestapo would have netted Landes, Rudellat, Flower, Clech and Lise de Baissac, Claude de Baissac’s sister, who had been parachuted in a month previously and was on her way to establish a new SOE circuit in Poitiers. At six o’clock the following morning, 2 November, Landes set off on foot for the local station, while Rudellat and Lise de Baissac followed separately on bicycles, each with a suitcase strapped to a carrier rack. Rudellat’s suitcase contained Landes’s radio and revolver, which she was to carry for him to Bordeaux. (It was not her first experience of carrying compromising articles. She had already become famous in Baker Street for cycling round Tours distributing sticks of dynamite to the Resistance from a stock hidden in her underclothes.) The three secret agents took the train to Tours, the two women sitting together in one carriage and Landes separately in another. At Tours, Lise de Baissac caught a train south to the Charente, where she had contacts to meet. Rudellat had her own flat in the town, but decided that, as a single woman with an inquisitive landlord, it would attract too much attention if Landes stayed the night with her, so she directed him to a small hotel near the station. The two agreed to meet the following morning in the station buffet and catch the early train to Bordeaux, travelling as a married couple. In case the rendezvous failed, Rudellat gave her ‘husband’ the address of the Caf? des Chartrons, before they parted. Checking in to the hotel that evening, Landes made a mess of writing his new name on one of the five forms he was required to complete in order to register. He amended it as best he could, hoping the manager wouldn’t notice. The following day, 3 November, there was no sign of Yvonne Rudellat at Tours station. Landes had no option but to continue the journey to Bordeaux by himself. Now he was totally on his own. They had told him in training to invent a cover story for every journey, so as always to have a convincing explanation for what he was doing. Over time, this would become one of his cardinal rules for survival and one he would always impress on others who he trained. Now, however, with no previous experience in wartime France, he had to do the best he could with what little London had given him. He was returning to his job in Organisation Todt after a visit to Tours, where he had been seeing friends. But who were the friends? What were their names? What was their address? What was his address in Bordeaux? He had neither a past nor a future to draw on. If he survived, he would accumulate enough back history to create both. Looking out of the window as the train ground laboriously south through Poitiers, Angoul?me and the Charente vineyards, where the leaves flamed with the gold and red of autumn, Landes felt alone, out of place and very vulnerable. Finally, late in the morning, the train rattled over the iron girder bridge spanning the muddy waters of the Garonne and pulled into the glass and cast-iron cavern of Bordeaux’s Gare Saint-Jean, full of steam and noise and bustle. Safely through the German checkpoint at the end of the platform, he went to register at a local hotel which Yvonne Rudellat had recommended, and then set off for the Caf? des Chartrons. In general, cities are the most congenial places to conduct the business of secrets. The advantages of anonymity, a facility for easy contact and the ability to vanish into the crowd make spying, like any impropriety, easier in an urban setting than anywhere else. In due course, Roger Landes would become a master of his trade in this environment. For the moment, though, it was enough to feel safer amongst the crowds in Bordeaux than he did being drawn around the Loire valley behind a horse with homing instincts. That first day among the faceless throng filling the streets and squares of a foreign city must nevertheless have been a nerve-jangling one, even for someone trained to the task and used to living in France. After the huddled coats of London in November, it would have been strange to see people sitting outside street caf?s, soaking up the last warmth of summer. Stranger still to have to root his feet to the ground to stop them taking flight when the turn of a corner brought him face to face with a crowd of German soldiers coming in the opposite direction. He cut down onto the waterfront and, turning left, followed the crescent-shaped sweep of the quay north, towards the Pont de Pierre with its seventeen graceful arches, one for each letter in Napol?on Bonaparte’s name. He was passing through elegant Bordeaux now, with its magnificent eighteenth-century frontages, balconied apartments and spacious tree-lined parks. Turning briefly left into one of these, he found himself in the Place des Quinconces. Here, strolling idly through yellow drifts of fallen leaves from the park’s plane trees, he saw a little bistro, the Caf? des Colonnes, and noted it as a possible future meeting place. Back on the waterfront once more, he walked north, up the Quai des Chartrons, crowded with small merchant vessels and German warships and busy with the clatter of cranes, small goods trains and lorries. Here were quayside bars and chandleries and the imposing shop windows of great wine merchants. On the opposite side of the road a line of new warehouses marched along the quay, stretching north into the haze. It was there, in the Bacalan quarter – as he remembered from the map he had studied back in London – that he would find number 101: the Caf? des Chartrons, the rendezvous he had fixed with Yvonne Rudellat the previous day. It was midi, the sacred French lunch hour, when he arrived at the caf?. The restaurant was crowded, smoky and full of the noise of shouted meal orders and the clatter of plates. Landes ordered himself a drink and settled into a corner to wait for the place to empty enough for him to call the patron over. Using Claude de Baissac’s alias in France, he began: ‘I have a letter for David,’ ‘David? I don’t know any David.’ ‘You are Monsieur Bertrand?’ ‘Of course I am. But there is no David here. I don’t know what you are talking about.’ Landes asked him if he could leave a letter for his friend. Bertrand, not wishing to give any indication to this stranger that he knew de Baissac, shrugged and answered that of course he could. But since he didn’t know anyone called David, there was no guarantee it would be delivered. On a slip of paper Landes wrote: My dear David, I am briefly passing through Bordeaux and would love to see you. If you can make it I will be in the Caf? des Colonnes in Place des Quinconces from 11 in the morning and dining at around 7 in the evening in the Caf? Gambetta. I do hope we can meet, Stanislas Handing the note to Bertrand, Landes returned to his hotel near the station. That evening, Landes entered the Caf? Gambetta at seven o’clock sharp and was reassured to see Yvonne Rudellat already installed at a corner table with a thick-set, dark-haired stranger, who she introduced as ‘Monsieur Jean Dubou?’. She had had an accident while cycling to Tours railway station the previous day, she explained. She was only bruised, but her clothes had been badly torn. She didn’t want to attract attention on the train, so she had gone back to her flat, changed and caught a later connection. She had looked for Landes at the Caf? des Chartrons. Marcel Bertrand told her that a stranger had left a message. And so, here she was. ‘David is out of town waiting for your parachute drop,’ Rudellat continued. ‘If you missed each other, I was to tell you to go every morning to the Bar de Petit Louis, order a glass of wine and wait for him to arrive.’ The three of them went back to the Caf? des Chartrons, where Landes unpacked his radio and, relieved to find that it had not been damaged in Rudellat’s bicycle accident, tried to get through to Baker Street. He could hear London well enough. But they couldn’t hear him. He would have to find somewhere else to make his transmissions. On that same day, 3 November 1942, while Landes was trying to radio London, Admiral Raoul Gaston Marie Grandcl?ment, Grand Croix de la L?gion d’Honneur, pillar of the French navy, head of the Grandcl?ment family and pitiless mirror to his son’s failures, died at his home in Paris, with Andr? Grandcl?ment at his bedside. In Bordeaux, two days later, Claude de Baissac finally met Roger Landes. They discussed where the newly arrived radio operator should live and decided that he should move in with de Baissac that evening until somewhere more permanent could be found. That afternoon, trying to kill time, Landes went to the cinema and nearly gave himself away again by lighting a cigarette. The cinema manager rushed over and warned him in an urgent whisper that, under the Germans, smoking in cinemas was strictly forbidden. Although Friedrich Dohse in Bouscat knew nothing of the new arrivals in his city, he knew something was going on. Luftwaffe reports sent to his office highlighted a substantial increase in clandestine night flights into the Bordeaux region. They were probably, he was told, parachuting in arms and agents. Dohse ordered daily updates and persuaded local Wehrmacht commanders to provide roving raiding parties to intercept the new threat. Up to now, Bordeaux had been, for Friedrich Dohse, quiet, pleasant and comfortable. All this was about to change. 8 CRACKERS AND BANGS (#ulink_c401336f-5482-531c-8c46-b650133666e1) Eight days after Roger Landes’s arrival in Bordeaux, German tanks smashed through the flimsy barriers which marked the demarcation line and occupied Vichy France. Operation Attila was triggered by the Allied landings in North Africa and the German realisation that they were now vulnerable to invasion, not just on France’s northern Channel coastline, but on its southern Mediterranean one as well. From this moment, P?tain and his government, who had enjoyed a measure of genuine autonomy up to now, became little more than German puppets. The German invasion of Vichy France also marked the beginning of a new phase in the French Resistance and in the activities of SOE. Now there was no need for squeamishness in unleashing what Baker Street euphemistically referred to as ‘crackers and bangs’ (i.e. sabotage) wherever and whenever London wished. On 13 November 1942 Baker Street sent out a message to circuits across France calling for ‘sabotage immediately and on as large a scale as possible’. These were accompanied by specific instructions to de Baissac to take ‘action against all shipping that used the port of Bordeaux’. Events immediately started to move at an increasing pace. On 18 November, a week after the German invasion of the zone non-occup?e, Victor Charles Hayes, a pharmacist and dental mechanic whom SOE had turned into an explosives expert, was parachuted into a site just south of Tours with instructions to make his way to Bordeaux. Thirty-four years old, balding, short in stature (five foot four), with a tendency to plumpness, Hayes (known to all as Vic) looked like a comfortable country lawyer or bank manager of the day. After the armistice he had fled France for Spain, where he had taken a boat to Liverpool, leaving his wife, Raymonde, and their baby daughter to follow him on a later ship. On his SOE training course, he heard that both had been drowned when their ship was torpedoed in the Bay of Biscay. Vic Hayes arrived in Bordeaux on 28 November to find his explosives already waiting for him. They had been parachuted in a week before when, at the third attempt, a Whitley bomber dropped four containers to the Coirac reception committee. They were packed with sixty pounds of explosives, twelve Sten guns, twelve revolvers, sixty-six hand grenades and fifteen small clam mines, suitable for attacking coastal craft and cutting railway lines. Around the same date, a Slade School of Art graduate, fluent in French, Italian, Spanish and German, cycled into Tarbes and made her way to Gaston H?ches’s restaurant. Mary Herbert, alias ‘Claudine’, known to her friends as ‘Maureen’ and travelling under the identity of ‘Marie Louise Vernier’, was, at thirty-nine, the oldest of the Scientist team. A woman of pronounced Catholic views and a trusting character, she was pretty rather than striking, with a tall, willowy figure, blue eyes, a face enlivened by a winning smile and hair so fine that it had a natural aptitude for disorder. Mary Herbert had been stranded in Plymouth earlier in the month with Landes, waiting for a flying boat to take them to Gibraltar. In the end, she and four other agents had been infiltrated into France by submarine and fishing boat, landing fifteen kilometres southeast of Marseille on the same night that Landes was parachuted into Bois Renard. Her orders were to join the Scientist network as Claude de Baissac’s courier. Gaston H?ches installed Mary Herbert in one of the third-floor bedrooms above his restaurant, where she passed the time waiting to hear from Bordeaux by embroidering handkerchiefs and table linen for the H?ches family. On 22 November, Robert Leroy, now demoted to courier and rechristened ‘Robert the Tipsy’ by his Resistance colleagues, arrived in Tarbes with orders to smuggle Herbert over the demarcation line. She left her expensive leather handbag with one of H?ches’s daughters (‘too sophisticated for my new life’) and accompanied Leroy to a village near Bordeaux, where de Baissac was waiting for her. Yvonne Rudellat, sent down from Tours to warn de Baissac of his courier’s impending arrival, now busied herself with finding accommodation for her newly arrived colleague, eventually settling on an apartment in the same road as de Baissac’s flat. As Scientist’s courier, Mary Herbert was responsible for arranging de Baissac’s meetings, carrying his messages (often in a matchbox, hidden beneath the matches, or between the pages of a novel) and transporting Landes’s radios around the city. On one occasion in Bordeaux, struggling off a Paris train with a hefty case containing a wireless set, a German naval officer stopped her and demanded to know what was inside. She was moving flats, she replied. It looked heavy, the German suggested – and offered to carry it for her to the tram. He was rewarded with a charming smile and a mildly flirtatious ‘thank you’ for his trouble. It was in the nature of Mary Herbert’s job that she and Claude de Baissac spent a lot of time together, often late at night when she picked up or delivered the day’s messages. Sometime around December 1942, the two became lovers. Roger Landes spent the first weeks of November 1942 making further attempts to get through to London. He tried several locations in the city, but always with the same result; he could hear London, but they could not hear him. Eventually Marcel Bertrand suggested an empty villa which he owned, in the Bordeaux suburb of Cenon, a middle-class district situated on an escarpment above the city, on the east bank of the Garonne. The house, which was located in a sunny spot and had four bedrooms, was what the French call a pavillon and the English refer to as a bungalow. It was perfect for Landes’s needs. The front-door lock could only be opened in a certain way, so that it was detectable if a stranger who did not know the lock’s eccentricities attempted entry in the owner’s absence. There was a sizeable urban garden surrounded by high walls in which were set two doors, each giving access onto a different street. Best of all (and in what would become Landes’s trademark habit of hiding ‘in plain sight’), the house lay almost in the shadow of a powerful medium-wave radio mast serving the nearby headquarters of the German anti-aircraft batteries in Bordeaux. Landes knew that the tiny sliver of a signal from his little short-wave radio would be completely hidden from Gestapo detector vans among the forest of powerful German transmissions from the much larger station next door. Landes moved into the villa in the second week of November 1942, spreading the word amongst his neighbours, most of whom were billeted Germans, that he needed an airy house because he was recuperating from tuberculosis (an impression reinforced by his hacking smoker’s cough). This cover story had a double advantage. It explained why he lived by himself, while at the same time discouraging neighbourly inquisitiveness. He transmitted to London from the kitchen table and kept his radio set, when not in use, under his bed. His transmission schedules and ciphers were hidden in the garden shed, while six spare crystals, each on a different frequency, were buried in a tin box in the kitchen garden. On 15 November, after some aerial adjustments, Landes finally succeeded in getting through to SOE headquarters, ‘strength 3 to 4’. Scientist was, at long last, in direct touch with Baker Street. There would be no need for Rudellat to make any more hazardous journeys from Tours, or for Suzanne Dubou? to travel to Tarbes with de Baissac’s reports hidden under the shopping in her basket. Aware that the Germans knew that an irregular lifestyle was a tell-tale sign of a secret agent, Landes always followed the same daily routine. He left his house at 9 a.m. and went for a long walk. When he was sure he was not being followed, he collected his messages and cleared his letterboxes. The afternoons were spent in a local cinema, sleeping. Returning home around 5 p.m., he would have an early meal and then, after dark and with all the blinds pulled down, he began his transmissions to London, often continuing until late into the night. With his radio operating, Landes now needed to find himself a courier to carry messages to and from Claude de Baissac. He chose Ginette Corbin, the pretty cousin of young Henri Labit, who had died in agony in Langon rather than be taken prisoner. What Ginette did not know at the time was that Roger Landes had fallen for her at their first meeting, but kept his feelings secret. After the death of Labit, he would explain to her later, he did not wish to involve her and her family in more pain. But there was another reason for his reticence. He regarded serious long-term emotional involvements as dangerous to security. They were for after the war, not during it. The Scientist network was now complete. With five British SOE officers in Bordeaux and Claude de Baissac’s sister, Lise, running a support network in the Charente, east of the city, Scientist was now the largest and best-resourced SOE network in all of occupied France. Unusual cold gripped the whole of Europe in the last week of November 1942. Temperatures of minus eight degrees were recorded in Bordeaux and Toulouse. It was the advance guard of winter – the winter of Stalingrad. The parasols and tables outside Bordeaux caf?s retreated out of the cold, and summer strollers in the Parc Bordelais gave way to muffled stragglers taking shortcuts past frost-scorched flower beds and the leafless skeletons of trees. In the first week of December, a light dusting of snow fell across the whole of France. Sometime during these weeks, a tall and handsome man with an air of authority, startlingly blue eyes and a markedly retrouss? nose, knocked at the door of 34 Cours de Verdun. It was Charles Corbin, the father of Ginette, Roger Landes’s new courier. He was calling on Grandcl?ment, ostensibly in his capacity as a policeman investigating some minor infraction of economic law (Grandcl?ment’s cavalier attitude to finance and the law was a persistent feature of his life, both public and secret). What exactly happened during this encounter is not known, but by the end of it – in a move which would be full of consequence for both men – Corbin accepted Grandcl?ment’s invitation to join him in the OCM. Perhaps one of the things which brought the two men together was the fact that both had expressed strong anti-communist views and had close contact with the proto-fascist Croix-de-Feu. By now de Baissac, comfortably installed in the Caf? des Chartrons, had both the expertise and the materials to mount his attack on the blockade-runners he could see from the caf?’s front windows. A small team of saboteurs, under Jean Dubou? and Vic Hayes, began to prepare the explosive charges. The attack was set for 12 December when the explosive, timed to go off that night, would be taken on board in dockers’ haversacks while the ships were being loaded. Of this impending sabotage attack right in the heart of his area of responsibility, Dohse, in his office at KdS headquarters in Bouscat, just three kilometres from the Caf? des Chartrons, knew nothing. Indeed, the Germans had only recently woken up to the fact that they had a substantial armed Resistance, supported by London, planted in their midst. But Friedrich Dohse was not the only person who would be surprised by what happened next. When Vic Hayes’s demolition team arrived at the Quai des Chartrons a little before dawn on the morning of 12 December, they found the dock area swarming with German troops against a background of general pandemonium and chaos. Someone said that bombs had gone off on one of the blockade-runners. Suddenly, as if to confirm the fact, there was a dull thud and a tall column of water shot up the flank of a ship moored almost precisely opposite the Caf? des Chartrons. Already one of the other ships was leaning over, threatening, in the words of a German officer on the quayside that morning, ‘to capsize, but for her hawsers, stretched like violin strings, which are still able to hold her’. Throughout the morning and into the early evening the explosions continued, not only on ships alongside the Quai des Chartrons, but also on those tied up along the quays on the opposite bank of the Garonne. Fire broke out on a small oil tanker, the Cap Hadid, sending a pall of smoke over Bacalan. The Bordeaux port fire brigade were called in. What the Germans didn’t know was that Raymond Brard, the man directing the port firemen, was himself the leader of a local Resistance group. When the Germans weren’t looking, Brard ordered his men to reverse the direction of the pumps so that they sucked water into the stricken vessel instead of pumping it out, causing the Cap Hadid to settle gently on the Garonne mud, half submerged, alongside the quay. At first the Germans, mystified, suspected local sabotage. But Italian divers called in during the morning confirmed that the explosions had come from the outside. As the day wore on, the true story began to emerge. It had been a daring commando raid carried out by ten Royal Marines in five canoes, who had disembarked near the mouth of the Gironde from a submarine five days previously. On the first night, two of the raiders had perished in treacherous tidal rips at the entrance of the Gironde and two more were wrecked, swiftly falling into German hands. The captured Marines were interrogated, using, Berlin insisted, ‘all means necessary’. From the information gathered and the materials found in the captured canoe, the Germans were quickly able to piece together the details of the operation and the fact that the target was shipping in Bordeaux harbour. Nevertheless, through overconfidence, complacency, or perhaps just in the belief that no one could make it in fragile canoes down the dangerous, heavily patrolled, densely defended 110 kilometres from the mouth of the Gironde to Bordeaux harbour, the German admiral in charge of the defence of the area concluded that the raid was over and the danger had passed. But it hadn’t. Two of the raiders’ canoes had managed to slip past the German defences undetected and reach the port, as planned. On the night before the final attack, as their colleagues lay hidden in the reeds outside the port observing their targets, the two captured Marines were taken to Souge and, under Hitler’s infamous and illegal Commando Order, executed by firing squad. Of the remaining six Marines on Operation Frankton (more famously known as the Cockleshell Heroes raid), four were captured afterwards. They were interrogated by, among others, Friedrich Dohse, who tried to find out the names of French people who had helped them. But the Marines gave nothing. They were eventually transferred to Paris where they too were subsequently shot. With the help of the French Resistance, the final pair, the raid commander Major Blondie Hasler and his canoe partner Marine Bill Sparks, made it home over the Pyrenees. Hitler was furious, and sent a message through Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the commander-in-chief of the German army, scolding local commanders for failures which were ‘difficult to comprehend’, and warning that ‘the F?hrer expects [an end to] this carelessness which still appears to be widespread’. De Baissac was furious too – and with almost equally good reason. Operation Frankton had been masterminded by Combined Operations, whose headquarters in Whitehall were closer to SOE in Baker Street than Dohse’s office in Bouscat was to the Caf? des Chartrons. Yet neither had told the other what they were doing. ‘At the critical moment … the unfortunate Commando attack took place,’ de Baissac commented sourly, ‘charges were laid on seven ships, but the only result was that the ships, which were empty, settled one metre into the water and were immediately raised … the Bordeaux Docks are now in a state of continuous alert … the dock guards were increased to 200 men … armed with grenades and automatic weapons [who] … open fire at sight. As a result, Scientist has had to give up these targets.’ But this did not mean that the Scientist team was idle when it came to the business of ‘crackers and bangs’. Vic Hayes (who soon earned the soubriquet ‘Charles le D?molisseur’ amongst his colleagues) and Jean Dubou? assembled a team of forty or so saboteurs who they trained and led on a series of raids across southwestern France. This began just a few days after the Frankton raid with an attack on the rail network southeast of Bordeaux. Not long afterwards, railway lines were blown up at Dax, high-level pylons attacked at Facture and junction boxes demolished at Bayonne. The attacks caused a complete collapse of the electricity supply across the entire regional rail system. Following the sabotage, de Baissac’s men (no doubt with technical advice from the ardently pro-British cheminots) took advantage of the disconnections to short-circuit the railway’s electricity supply systems. The result was that, when the Germans turned on the supply again, there were more violent explosions and more serious damage. Rail traffic across the region was disrupted for days. Taken aback by the scale of the attacks coming so soon after the Frankton raid, the German authorities concluded that this was the prelude to an invasion. Panicky alerts were issued to all units, and trucks rushed to main headquarters, where they were swiftly loaded with the military archives and sent to dispersed locations outside the city. This spate of attacks was followed over succeeding months by raids on Bordeaux’s main power station at Pessac on the eastern outskirts of the city, on an electricity substation at Quatre Pavillons just 200 metres from the bungalow in Cenon where Roger Landes operated his wireless (Landes himself drew the sketch map for this raid), and on several small steamships in Pauillac harbour. Although Vic Hayes’s demolition teams could not gain access to the Bordeaux dock area, they did manage to contaminate a consignment of battery acid with a special chemical sent out from London, causing serious damage to the accumulators on German and Italian U-boats operating from the Bordeaux pens. On 22 November 1942, Landes signalled London informing them that de Baissac intended to appoint L?o Paill?re (who had by now been released from jail) as Scientist’s ‘organiser-in-chief’. This meant that Scientist was now intimately connected, through Dubou? and Paill?re, with Grandcl?ment’s Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCM) – though de Baissac had not as yet met the head of the OCM in Bordeaux (probably because Andr? Grandcl?ment had been in Paris, at the bedside of his ailing father.) Things were also now moving on the wider scale, as the balance of the war began to change in the Allies’ favour. Following Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa in November 1942, German, British and French minds turned to what everyone knew would happen next – the attempt by the Allies to gain a foothold on the mainland of occupied Europe. Torch had opened the way to the era of large-scale invasions, rather than small commando raids such as Operation Frankton. As 1942 drew to a close the idea began to take root in some circles in London (including Baker Street), in the high command in Berlin and amongst the people of France, that the long anticipated Allied landing on the French coast would take place sometime in the summer or early autumn of 1943. SOE, meanwhile, were still under some criticism in London for how little they were delivering to the main war effort, measured against the resources they were employing – especially Halifax bombers which could, the RAF strenuously argued, be more gainfully deployed attacking German cities than dropping secret agents and arms into France. In an attempt to boost their record of success, Baker Street claimed in their December 1942 report to Churchill that the blockade-runners in Bordeaux harbour had been sunk by them (de Baissac’s team), not Hasler’s Royal Marines. Churchill, however, knew the truth from German signals, decrypted by Bletchley, which told him of Hasler’s success little more than twenty-four hours after his limpet mines had exploded. It was now politically vital that SOE showed that it had a major role to play in the coming invasion – minor, random pinprick acts of sabotage would no longer do. It was in this context that, in the second half of November 1942, de Baissac and Dubou? travelled north to Poitiers for a meeting with the Paris-based leaders of the OCM. Among those present were Andr? Grandcl?ment’s uncle, General Paul Jouffrault, and the overall OCM head, Colonel Touny. The main task of what would come to be known as the conf?rence de Poitiers, was to reorganise the entire underground OCM structure in Bordeaux and the Gironde, rather grandiosely, along the lines of a conventional division of the French army. But the secondary purpose was to reach an ‘agreement’ with de Baissac that Scientist would henceforth act as the channel through which SOE would arm the entire OCM network across occupied France, estimated by de Baissac to number 15,000–20,000 fighters. This was a huge logistic undertaking which would, over time, involve de Baissac having control of sixty parachute sites and a dozen or so Lysander landing grounds spread from Brittany in the north, to Paris and northern Burgundy in the east, to the foothills of the Pyrenees in the south. When de Baissac put the Poitiers compact to London for approval, Baker Street agreed. It was a crucial moment in Britain’s secret war in France. For political reasons, which had more to do with increasing SOE’s influence in London than having secure and effective networks in France, SOE ditched its policy of small self-contained networks in favour of the more tempting prospect of having a whole underground army under its control in the case of an invasion. From now on Scientist, which had been tightly targeted and secure in Bordeaux, would be vulnerable to infiltration and destruction through any weakness in the vast rambling, rickety structure of the OCM, which sprawled across the whole of northern and western France. The OCM leaders in Paris wanted even more centralisation. At the end of 1942, Colonel Touny proposed to de Gaulle that he should have the command of the French Resistance in all of northern France. Although the OCM was clearly the largest Resistance organisation in the country, and despite the fact that the London French were at the time supporting it with a subvention of 1.5 million francs a month, the proposal was rejected by London on the grounds that the OCM was seen as too right-wing, too elitist and ‘too’ anti-Semitic. At some point during the Christmas holiday period, de Baissac went to Paris where, over lunch, he met Andr? Grandcl?ment for the first time. No doubt much of Grandcl?ment’s two months in Paris had been spent clearing up the old admiral’s affairs and taking on his duties as the new head of the Grandcl?ment family. But he had also been busy with politics – especially right-wing politics. At one meeting during this period he described his personal aims and those of the OCM in markedly ambitious terms: to create a force which would maintain internal order after the liberation of France so as ‘[to] establish a new system of civil, administrative and political government for the France of the future [which would be] anti-communist, anti-socialist … and strongly opposed to further Jewish infiltration’. Despite Grandcl?ment’s clear anti-Semitic leanings (and notwithstanding the fact that one of the key members of Scientist – Landes – was himself a Jew), the first meeting between the head of the most important British network in southwest France and the largest French Resistance organisation in the region was a success. A firm partnership – and friendship – were established between the two men, who agreed a merger between Scientist and the OCM in the southwest, with de Baissac in overall command and Grandcl?ment (who was now equipped with the alias ‘Bernard’) acting as his deputy. De Baissac later assured Baker Street that he considered his new colleague ‘very able and trustworthy’ and suggested that Grandcl?ment should be given ‘an official status in the hierarchy of the organisation’. Baker Street gave their approval to the relationship and opened an SOE file for Grandcl?ment – who would later claim that this moment had also been marked by SOE making him ‘a major in the British Army’. The scene was set for a new phase in the war against France’s occupiers in the southwest. For Dohse in his office in Bouscat a picture was beginning to emerge which he could no longer ignore. ‘In the course of 1942 we knew the Resistance was forming, but we could not work out in what form,’ he wrote later. ‘Our local intelligence services were unable to give us a detailed picture of what was going on … my job was to try to stick as close to the [newly forming] Resistance organisations as I could, so as to infiltrate my agents into the enemy networks … but we lacked French agents capable of doing this.’ Meanwhile, sabotage attacks in the region were increasing, as was the frequency of the mysterious night flights over the Bordeaux area by British bombers. The threat against German lives and interests was growing. An invasion looked more and more likely. It would not be long before Berlin would be calling for action. 9 BUSINESSES, BROTHELS AND PLANS (#ulink_6c3ebf6c-13ca-5d77-bc8c-6c0ddf8ad6a3) In the first days of 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt met in the congenial surroundings of the Anfa Hotel, Casablanca, under a warm winter sun, to discuss the next phase of the war. Stalin was absent, saying he could not leave Moscow during the battle of Stalingrad. De Gaulle and his arch rival, General Henri Giraud, attended briefly for an awkward photograph meant to illustrate their ‘unity’. It shows the two men – who enthusiastically hated each other – stiffly shaking hands from as far apart as possible, while Churchill smiles impishly at their discomfiture and Roosevelt looks on benignly, like an indulgent father watching his children behaving politely at a family gathering. At Casablanca, Churchill and Roosevelt decided that the invasion of France would not take place until 1944. The French leaders were of course not informed. Neither, more controversially, was Baker Street. Both continued to act on the presumption that the invasion would happen – indeed was a certainty – by the early autumn of 1943. Colonel Buckmaster, the head of SOE, went so far as to claim after the war that ‘[in] 1943 we had a secret message telling us that the invasion might be closer than we thought’ – a statement for which there is absolutely no supporting evidence. In Bordeaux the early cold snap of November 1942 gave way to a mild winter of wind, rain and mud. Repeated squalls lashed the elegant frontages of the Quai des Chartrons and beat at the windows of Dohse’s offices in Bouscat. The streets and alleys of the great port were empty, save for passers-by scurrying, collars up, to unavoidable destinations, a few cars sloshing through puddle-strewn streets and an occasional bedraggled horse pulling a bedraggled cart – and equally bedraggled carter – across wet cobblestones, under a leaden sky. It was not good weather for parachuting. In February, the weather at last turned, ushering in a long period of drought and unseasonable heat: in Bordeaux the temperature rose to twenty degrees. By the time April came, the ground was so dry that huge forest fires, driven by strong winds, consumed 100,000 hectares of conifer forest in the Landes region. It was whispered that the Germans had set the fires deliberately to destroy hidden Maquis camps and drive out the young men and women who had taken to the woods to escape being sent as compulsory labour to Germany. But the fine weather had its advantages, too; Jean Dubou? was now able to spend long days identifying and preparing parachute sites. This involved recruiting and training teams of men and women to act as reception parties who would mark the site with lights, collect the parachuted containers and spirit them away in lorries and carts to safe hiding places. He drew up sketch maps of each site with notable points, accurately established the location by latitude and longitude and agreed a special code-phrase for each dropping point, to be broadcast over the French service of the BBC when a drop was imminent. These were, in the main, utterly banal phrases such as ‘the circle has become a square’, ‘artichokes have a hairy heart’ and ‘perhaps, perhaps and then’. In all, Dubou? and his team established some sixty sites in and around Bordeaux and a further fifty across the rest of western France. These stretched from a water meadow near the village of Villedieu-les-Po?les, twenty-five kilometres from the Normandy coast, to a forest clearing close to the Burgundian village of V?ron, southeast of Paris, to Scientist’s most southern site, a field bounded on three sides by a river, near the town of Dax, in the shadow of the Pyrenees. The myriad details of all these sites were painstakingly encoded and sent to London in Morse code through Roger Landes’s little radio set, perched on his kitchen table, in his bungalow beneath the German radio mast in Cenon. The strain on both man and machine was immense. London began to consider sending out a second radio operator. Sometime towards the end of January, disaster struck when Landes’s radio burnt out. London ordered him to take the defective wireless to Paris, where a radio engineer, who was a member of Francis Suttill’s Prosper network, would either fix it or provide a replacement. Landes and Mary Herbert took the train north to the French capital, travelling as man and wife. By now the Prosper circuit had become SOE’s second-biggest network after Scientist in what had been the German occupied zone. During their week in Paris, Mary Herbert stayed at the flat of Andr?e Borrel, Prosper’s courier, close to where Landes had lived when he was at the ?cole des Beaux-Arts before the war. Fearful of being recognised, Landes steered clear of the area and, security-conscious as ever, moved from address to address, never spending two consecutive nights in the same house. Following this visit, the two British networks maintained close relations, with Borrel and Norman making several return visits to Bordeaux and staying in the rooms above the Caf? des Chartrons. It was friendly, fraternal and fun – but it was very bad security. As was another event which took place at about the same time. On 20 January, Andr? Grandcl?ment finally married his Lucette. A large reception was held afterwards at their apartment in the Cours de Verdun. It was all very grand, as one guest remembered: ‘All Andr?’s friends were there, together with their neighbours and many of those in the Resistance who worked with him. It was a brilliant affair and Andr? was in terrific form – very proud and full of self-confidence.’ Another described the constant passage of Resistance leaders swirling in and out of the front door of number 34, directly opposite the gates of Pierre Poinsot’s police headquarters on the other side of the road, as ‘like a windmill’. De Baissac was naturally among the guests invited to this grand occasion. And so too, at de Baissac’s request, were Vic Hayes and Roger Landes, who met Grandcl?ment for the first time. The two English newcomers were deeply shocked by what they saw. Everyone referred to everyone else not by their aliases, but by their real names. There was no security of any sort, nor any attempt by the more than forty of Andr? Grandcl?ment’s Resistance colleagues who attended to enter or leave discretely, or to hide who they were or what they did. The two Englishmen were also taken aback at the right-wing views openly on display on all sides. The feeling was mutual. Andr? Maleyran, one of Grandcl?ment’s key lieutenants, was also present that day. He described Landes in words which mix disdain with the unmistakeable undertows of anti-Semitism: ‘At that time Landes was a little no-one – a tyke. He was the kind of person to whom you say “you stay there and keep quiet” – and he would do as he was told. He was just a small spoke in a big wheel. He was nothing.’ Landes responded to the event with alarm: ‘I left the meeting immediately and told de Baissac that I never wanted to have anything to do with Grandcl?ment again.’ De Baissac, who was now spending much of his time with Grandcl?ment, agreed that all future dealings with ‘Bernard’ and all liaison with the OCM would, in future, be handled by him. Landes and Hayes were given permission by London to team up with Dubou? and Paill?re and establish their own independent Resistance groups. There were ten of these in all, each with their own associated parachute drop sites, and all totally unconnected with Grandcl?ment. From this small precaution would come, in due course, deliverance; but from the fissure it created would also grow an unbridgeable and deadly chasm of rivalry, suspicion and betrayal. In fact, it may well have suited Claude de Baissac to be the sole point of contact with Grandcl?ment. For by this time, the two friends were involved not just in Resistance affairs, but in business ones too. Building up and arming the Resistance for the ‘coming invasion’ was an extremely expensive affair; Resistance leaders were regularly paid according to their responsibility. Even ordinary members of parachute reception parties received 500 francs every time they attended a drop. The guides across the Pyrenees received 5,000 francs for every escapee they delivered safely into Spain. To fund this expenditure, London provided huge sums of money to both Francis Suttill in Paris and Claude de Baissac in Bordeaux. When Landes dropped into the Loire valley in October 1942, he was carrying in his money belt 250,000 francs (about the equivalent of ?50,000 today) to be shared between de Baissac and Suttill. Regular sums followed by parachute during the last months of that year and the early months of 1943. Nevertheless, de Baissac was constantly short of ready cash and often had to resort to borrowing from local businessmen and bankers against promissory notes, or British government war bonds. These were to be paid back by the UK government after the war. One of these promissory notes was for 90,000 francs, lent to de Baissac by Grandcl?ment on 10 March 1943. Money, however, was not changing hands in only one direction. Grandcl?ment also received regular large subventions from de Baissac to cover the ‘expenses’ of his organisation, although in this case he showed a marked reluctance to provide either receipts or any account of his expenditure. One Resistance colleague complained that, quoting reasons of ‘security’, Grandcl?ment resolutely ‘refused to provide any monthly report accounting for his expenditure. He even refused to give the total numbers of people he was paying.’ Sadly, Grandcl?ment was not, in reality, being nearly as security-conscious as this might suggest. At the same time as claiming that keeping accounts was a security risk, he was meticulously recording the names and addresses of almost all his senior Resistance contacts, uncoded, in a special green file marked ‘insurance customers’, which he kept in an unlocked cupboard in his office at Cours de Verdun. The local OCM chief was also known to have a number of other commercial activities. Some of these were straightforward and above board – for example, an investment which Grandcl?ment had made in a local textile firm. Others were illegal – like a scam for creaming off the profits from the works canteen of a bank in Poitiers. Several more were closely connected with the black market. In February 1943, de Baissac, the former film publicist, began to indulge in some of his own extracurricular business with his new Resistance partner, setting up a small film distribution company, S?lections Cin?matographiques du Sud-Ouest, in a narrow backstreet of Bordeaux. The company secretary was one of Grandcl?ment’s close friends, whose mistress was the company clerk. In due course de Baissac and Grandcl?ment expanded their business by buying a cinema in Toulouse, no doubt making use of de Baissac’s pre-war experience – and probably contacts – in the French movie business. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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