At that time, an important communist leader called Andre Marty, a leading figure in the famous ‘Black Sea Mutiny' and a member of the National Assembly, decided to look at what had happened in the decapitation of the CMZ. It is likely that Marty, who was extremely ambitious, wanted to build up compromising files on certain party executives. He naturally wanted to protect himself in case of any disturbances and he was well-placed to understand that during the war, many messy events took place. After all, many militants were arbitrarily shot, but it was not always traitors who were executed.
Naturally, the former Black Sea mutineer first addressed Georges Beyer, the man responsible for the meteoric rise of Boulanger within the FTP. Beyer was a former leader of ‘Service B' and held a high position in the PCF.16 He also became a senior official in the Ministry of War, an appointment no doubt due to his brother-in-law, Charles Tillon, who was the head of the FTP and a communist minister who worked for de Gaulle's resistance. Beyer also spoke to one of the former executives of ‘Service B', Andre Teulery, who was asked to go to one of the French barracks situated near Lake Constance, where he was told he would find Boulanger. It is odd that Beyer clearly knew where Boulanger was hiding. This was a man who was suspected of being a traitor and supposedly responsible for the collapse of the CMZ! However, if Beyer had this information, then it is likely that those in the higher echelons of the party knew it too. Yet without Marty's curiosity, nothing would have been done. The former mutineer also understood that if Beyer had not voluntarily shone a light on what had happened in Lyons, it is certain that he would have been ordered to.
Teulery went to Germany to meet Boulanger and hold him to account. Before this happened however, Beyer was involved in a car accident while travelling to Lyons in what looked like an attempted murder. It is strange that this should have happened in Lyons, precisely where the CMZ had been decimated by Klaus Barbie.
Roger Faligot and Remi Kauffer17
BEYER, Georges, alias Bernard (1905-1976) was a chemical engineer. He was a union representative of the Federation de la chimie de la CGT and official representative to the International Labour Office in Geneva. Demobilised in 1940, he joined Charles Tillon in Paris and became technical commissioner for the FTP and in this role worked as the coordinator for Service B. He was responsible for security issues from 1945 until he was ousted from the Communist Party Central Committee in 1950.
[The same authors also write]
In 1945 Georges Beyer was a member of the Communist Party’s central committee, while at the same time working for the war department as assistant to General Alfred Malleret-Joinville. Assisted by men like Bob Guimpel and Jean-Pierre Vigier, Beyer was responsible for the military members, meaning that he closely followed the pro-communist elements within the army, as well as more general security matters that affected the army. Contrary to popular belief, he never stopped looking for information and all known witnesses have testified to this fact.
Many of Beyer’s relatives would not have hesitated to confirm that he would never have accepted the inquiry that Marty entrusted him with. Whatever the case, in spite of Beyer’s car accident, Teulery went to Germany and had no difficulty in locating the Alsatian, ‘Boulanger’, which it turns out was one of his many pseudonyms. He was also called General Bermann, which clearly proves that this strange man was not just a clandestine subordinate militant. However, it was under his real name, Ilits, that Boulanger was enlisted as a warrant officer in an infantry regiment, a role that he also combined with being on the auxiliary staff of the French civil police in Germany. Teulery informed Boulanger of the suspicions against him, accusations to which he strongly denied. The envoy was not fooled, although after all, he was not investigating the subject officially. He was therefore happy to report accurately to Marty what ‘Boulanger’ had told him.
It is clear that the PCF leaders had no wish to find out more and the case was closed. However, in November 1946, the DST arrested a former Gestapo man called Johannes Leber, who was not only a former criminal inspector, but also specialised in intelligence. Leber soon revealed some very enlightening information about Boulanger, who according to him, was actually a Nazi agent. He stated that Boulanger had been arrested by the Wehrmacht in 1940 and then drafted into the French Army. However, as he was an Alsatian, he was quickly released and had afterwards returned to Strasbourg. The Germans kept an eye on him and soon discovered that Boulanger was a leading communist official, in fact, he was a Comintern agent. He was immediately re-arrested and transferred to Berlin, where he was asked to become a Gestapo double agent, a proposal Boulanger was quick to accept. He was tasked with infiltrating the Resistance in the south-eastern zone and Johannes Leber was to act as his contact.
Boulanger's role as a Comintern agent clearly helped him to infiltrate the Resistance. He was known at the highest levels of the communist party and came recommended by Moscow, so had no difficulty in reaching and being accepted by the clandestine movement. As a result, he was propelled on to the southern zone's staff of the FTP, while at the same time, remaining in contact with his soviet correspondents.
There is one question that arises from this: if Iltis/Boulanger joined the CMZ in 1943 and its subsequent collapse did not happen until 1944, why did it take so long? Surely it would have been relatively simple for him to denounce all the FTP leaders to his German masters in a shorter space of time?
After Leber's confession, Boulanger was quickly arrested in December 1946. The surviving members of the CMZ were now in no doubt as to who had betrayed their comrades. One of the survivors, Manon Guimpel, who had returned from exile eighteen months earlier, immediately wrote to the military court in Lyons to accuse Boulanger of obvious treason. What is even more surprising is the deafening silence from the Communist Party and its press. If Leber was to be believed, Boulanger was responsible for the arrest and execution of around forty high-ranking FTP officials.
At the time, the quest for ‘purification' was in full flow. Column after column in the communist newspapers continued to demand exemplary punishment for all traitors and collaborators. If the party was not going after Boulanger, then surely it was because they had been given higher orders not to. Yet this did not prevent certain former FTP members from loudly calling for justice, although even though the most level-headed of them were surprised at the silence of their communist friends. However, they were not about to accuse the party and instead turned their anger towards the authorities. After all, had not Boulanger been a member of the French police?
Now in prison, Boulanger became the subject of an investigation into his activities and the act of betrayal that he was deemed guilty of. The Alsatian fought back fiercely and eventually adopted a new form of defence: he no longer denied what he had done, but instead turned to the subject of his nationality. As he was born in Germany, to a German mother, he must therefore be considered a German national. This meant that he could not be accused of treason or collaborating with the enemy, even though he had deported or executed dozens of resistors. He instead claimed to have acted as a German agent in real police operations. According to the Hague Convention, a spy is nothing more than an army field agent. Rather hollow reasoning, it is true, but the result was that after a long legal battle, the case was dismissed in 1955. Boulanger declared innocent and released after serving nine years in prison. The FCP made no objection or comment and their indifference was significant, not to mention suspicious, especially if Boulanger has supposedly embarrassed the party.
He returned to Germany and continued to be surrounded in mystery. He was seen in Frankfurt and then disappeared, with everything suggesting that the former General Bermann moved to the GDR, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and where he had formally begun his career as a Comintern agent. It would appear that he never stopped working for them, even when he was pretending to work for the Gestapo, which if true, is rather astounding!
It would seem that ‘Boulanger' was really a double agent, whose real masters were to be f
ound in the east, both before and during the war. This therefore means that when he betrayed the FTP, he was still acting as a communist agent.This is the great secret behind the whole story and one that was to prove very costly to those who tried to reveal it.
Remi Kauffer18
Born in Mannheim in 1903 of an Alsatian father and German mother, Lucien Wilhelm Boulanger worked as a labourer and had been a communist from 1918. He was technical secretary of the KDP (German Communist Party) and in 1929 enrolled as an officer in the Red Army at the Lenin Academy in Moscow. In October 1932 he began his clandestine life as Lucien Boulanger. As head of M-Aparat, the military wing of the German Communist Party, he was responsible for fighting the Nazi storm troopers. In September 1933, after his plot to kidnap Hitler was discovered (members of a communist cell had planned to do this during a visit to the barracks), he had to flee the Soviet Union and headed for Austria. Two years later, Boulanger moved to Strasbourg and like his father, who lived in Altkirch, he was reinstated as a French national. And voila! On the one side he was the editor-in-chief of L’Humanite d’Alsace et de Lorraine, and on the other side, the man who organised secret Comintern networks to and from Germany.
So, who were those who tried to reveal the truth and had paid so dearly for their curiosity? The first to have tried to unravel the case was Andre Marty, no doubt in the hope for his own personal gain in the struggle for power within the Communist Party. Marty immediately understood the secrets surrounding the Boulanger case and possibly tried to use this against the party leaders. Unfortunately, his popularity did not prevent him from being the subject of his own trial that took place in Prague in 1951, as part of the witch trials, of which Stalin was so fond. Marty, the ’hero’, was not only accused of being divisive, but was derided further and even accused of being a cop. There was nothing too bad they could not accuse him of, even if it was true that he was hardly a saint to begin with.Yet he was not the only one to be sacrificed.As he went down, another member of the legendry Black Sea Munity was brought down with him; Charles Tillon, the head of the FTP. Tillon was another of those who had not appreciated the passivity of the communist press when Boulanger was arrested. No doubt for good reason, as he probably knew the real truth behind what had happened.
This holding back of information was not just a coincidence. The PCF leaders certainly wanted to get rid of all those in the FTP who had fought heroically with the Maquis, while Thorez19 had spent the war in the USSR. These men were consequently pushed into the background, like the other leaders who had not already got their hands dirty.
The Marty-Tillon affair had its roots in the terrible secret of the double agent, Boulanger. Proof of this can be found in a number of troubling coincidences. Who was it, for example, who first accused Marty and Tillon? Georges Beyer, who was nevertheless, Tillon's brother-in-law. After having investigated Boulanger, Beyer agreed to play the role of accuser because his hands were tied. It was he who had allowed Boulanger to join the FTP staff, clearly on Moscow's orders. As head of ‘Service B', he had to obey orders, but that did not matter. As far as the party was concerned, Beyer was the one responsible and he was at risk of being accused at any time. The only course of action
to take in order to keep his place in the party was to do what they asked and act as a witness for the prosecution. However, the party leaders were hardly grateful to him for his efforts. Shortly after the Marty-Tillon case, Beyer was removed from the party's central committee and lost any authority he had previously owned. Once more, it was clear that knowing the truth about Boulanger was not a good thing.
But that is not all. Remember that when Marty had asked Beyer to investigate Boulanger, he had sent Teulery to Germany to find him. He also might have known the truth and so needed to be kept quiet. Curiously, this was first tentatively attempted by the DST. At the instigation of the Communist Party security service, a plot was devised against him. Like many other members of the FTP, Teulery had a great admiration for Tito's partisans. When Stalin condemned the Yugoslav leader, the French Communist Party naturally aligned itself totally with the Soviets. Teulery had trouble accepting this position and publically declared his sympathy for Tito. The party decided to take advantage of his confession and used it as an excuse to get rid of the man who also knew too much about the Boulanger case. Informed by the French Communist Party that he was maintaining discrete relationships with Yugoslav communists on French soil, Teulery was arrested. He was convicted of sharing intelligence with Yugoslav agents and sentenced to five years in prison. Yet again, a man who knew the truth behind the Boulanger case was taken down.
To understand why this was such a sour subject, the events must be understood in the context of 1944. When the Allies landed in June, the Resistance and the FTP were desperate to stir up a national uprising to expel the German occupiers as quickly as possible. Yet this is not what Stalin wanted. He knew that any future division of Europe would depend on the extent of the military advances of the various armies: the Red Army to the east and the Anglo-Saxons to the west. It was therefore essential that his troops advanced as far as possible in order to reap the most benefit. The main target was Berlin, as well as other eastern European capital cities.
From Stalin's point of view, any delay suffered by the Allies would be a welcome occurrence. Similarly, anything that could be done to promote the Soviet advance must be achieved. Stalin did not want the communist resistance fighters involved in the struggle against the Nazis to help trigger the uprising in France, as that might have helped the Allied armies advance quicker and further than they otherwise should. In fact, in certain areas the Resistance helped the Allies a great deal, in spite of official orders from the party, who were keen to obey Stalin. Men such as Tillon or Guingouin in the Limousin region, rebelled and joined in the fighting. However, in doing so they were acting against orders from Moscow, orders which were of course relayed by communist leaders. It was these same leaders who would later lead the prosecution against Marty and Tillon.
One of the main historians of the Communist Party, Philippe Robrieux, confirms that Moscow had asked Jacques Duclos, the real leader of the party during Thorez' absence, not to engage the party at the start of the uprising. He also notes that at the beginning of August 1944, Duclos left an unanswered message for Charles Tillon, urging him to encourage the uprising.
Charles Tillon20
Finally, I must say that as the great planned events approached [the Liberation], we
had difficulty in the southern zone due to the resistance of the main Communist Party leaders, Mauvais and Guyot, in carrying out the guidelines laid out by the FTP leaders for the national uprising. The commander of the CMZ, the feeble Jacquot, declared his agreement with both parties. I knew that Guyot was parachuted into France in late 1943, but how could I have imaged the serious mission that he was charged with, such as carrying a message for Duclos, which justified the importance of the trip. Stalin’s advice was to minimise the military role of the party in the national uprising, leaving the Allies to take on the majority of the struggle to free the country. A concern that I would only be able to explain much later on.
We know that despite Boulanger’s links with the Gestapo and with Klaus Barbie, he continued to work as a Comintern agent. However, in May 1944, three weeks before the Normandy Invasion, he slavishly obeyed orders from Moscow by denouncing his comrades and eliminating the entire staff of the FTP in the southern zone. While the fact that he did not hesitate to betray his own communist comrades can be seen as abominable, it has to be understood that it was deemed necessary in order to preserve his sinister secret.
Chapter 4
The Red Fox
Truth or fiction... when it comes to espionage; nothing is certain. What may seem clear at first instead belies another more tortuous truth underneath. In the secret world of intelligence there exist covert operations, underhand dealings, in short, a world beyond the mirror. Yet is it not some fantastical wonderland that one discovers there.
> However, before discussing the career of the mysterious Dr Fuchs, we need some historical background. A few years ago, a master spy for Mossad,Yehuda Gil, was arrested in Israel. He was considered to be one of the best connoisseurs of Arab nations, particularly Syria, where for many years he had been responsible for a mole within President Hafez el-Assad's government. He also instructed young recruits in the Israeli intelligence services, teaching them the art of lying convincingly. After all, in the world of espionage, deceiving your enemy is just as important as uncovering his secrets.
Yehuda Gil was an expert. Indeed, his mole (a Syrian general), never actually existed: Gil invented all the top secret information that this superior officer was supposed to have told him. The pretence lasted for years, without Mossad ever suspecting that it was a hoax.
This is all the more surprising as it was this deception that nearly caused a war between Israel and Syria. In 1996, Yehuda Gil revealed that Damascus was massing troops at the border and that a surprise attack on Golan was imminent. The IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) would have to be mobilised immediately in response. Fortunately, the defence minister kept his cool, despite the opinions of some senior Mossad members. This was the beginning of the end for Yehuda Gil and it would soon be discovered that the information he had provided was completely false. Had he been drugged? Had his mole lied? After repeated questioning, he finally confessed: he had made the whole thing up and his ‘agent' had never existed.
This case clearly shows the limits of the confidences that can be placed on a ‘contact'. In this instance, he was more of a puppeteer; manipulating his creatures and inventing new ones at any moment, in case one should happen to fail. For security reasons, it is much easier if there is only one point of contact for the spy, or in this case, the puppet...
Great Spies of the 20th Century Page 4