A hangover does not make affairs look good, even in Toulouse. Langer later recalled, ‘we were put up in an attic of a very old building which was in a terrible state. It was guilty of the proverbial “French cleanliness”.’ Rejewski and Zygalski did not fare much better, their accommodation described as another ‘attic’ by Rejewski and a ‘hovel’ by Langer.16 There was no food. The evacuation plan, as explained by the agent in Toulouse, was a fantasy: they would go to Perpignan and then walk the 30km or so from there into Spain. How was Janina Paszkowska supposed to manage this? The proposal was another symptom of the disorder of the French secret service. Langer was beginning to realise, as were the others, that the smooth-running machines of the old Deuxième Bureau had utterly broken up. The French people they were dealing with had no connections and were improvising disorder out of chaos. Paszkowska began the minor contractions which sometimes accompany the last days of pregnancy. An ambulance was called and she was given some sort of sedative. Langer ordered the Paszkowskis to stay behind in Toulouse.
After a miserable night in Toulouse, Langer got into a car very early together with Ciężki and Fokczyński for the drive to Perpignan. The driver, the first of many dubious characters they were to meet who were cashing in on the border-crossing trade, gave bland reassurances about the walk into Spain. They’d set off right after breakfast. If they got tired – Langer was 47 years old, and weighing 80kg he did not look like much of a gymnast; Ciężki was 43 and a chainsmoker with a history of lung trouble – they could do it in two stages.
The eastern border of France with Spain.
The driver’s description of the walk was wholly incredible and nobody was surprised when it turned out not to be true. At Perpignan, there was at least a breakfast, but no early departure. They were told to wait in the café. After a while, they were introduced to a Monsieur Perez, then taken to an apartment, then introduced to the ‘vice-chief of the organisation’, then the chief, and then they were told to await the arrival of Gaca, Rejewski and Zygalski, and it was evident that nothing was going according to plan. On the next day, instead of Rejewski and Zygalski, Gaca had the Paszkowskis with him. There was a row: ‘you cannot play with human life,’ said Langer. ‘I think I have a say in the matter of my own life,’ said Paszkowska.
None of the Poles had much say in the next plan. According to this, they would take a bus to the village of Arles-sur-Tech, which is about 20km from Perpignan but only 5km from the border. Then they would walk about 1.5km, get on another bus to the border village of Prats-de-Mollo, then cross the mountains on foot. It was a plan that made no sense for Janina Paszkowska. Still, at 8 a.m. on Friday 15 January, Langer, Ciężki and Fokczyński, together with the Paszkowskis, got on the bus to Arles-sur-Tech, accompanied by the fixer M. Perez. At Ceret, mid-way to Arles, there was a routine ID check. The Paszkowskis, with their evident encumbrance, could not have been more innocent-looking and Perez vouched for them. So far so good. Next along on the bus was Langer.
‘Are you French?’ said the officer suspiciously. ‘From Lyon?’ The officer wanted to know where Langer was headed, noting his accent was not Lyonnais. ‘Off the bus.’ Now suspicions had been aroused, Ciężki, Gaca and Fokczyński were ordered off the bus too. This peculiar quartet ostensibly had different occupations and were carrying ID cards issued from all over France, but the IDs were in identical form and they all seemed to be going to the same place. All four were frog-marched to the police station. Heads down, the Paszkowskis stayed put and the bus went onward to Arles-sur-Tech. At least two of them might make it.17
• • •
Communicating with home was always tough for the code-breakers in exile. If the family was in Russian-occupied Poland, it was basically impossible. If the family was in the German-occupied half, Polish servicemen in France could transfer postcards in envelopes to friends in Romania or Hungary who would forward them on as if the Poles were actually in those countries.18 Later in the war, more subterfuge was needed. Sometimes sending an obscure, bland message to a friend or a distant relative who lived a long way from the immediate family might transmit the subtext ‘I’m still alive’ loudly enough to be passed on to those who most needed to know.
In Warsaw, Jadwiga Palluth had not been able to shake off the attentions of the Gestapo despite her adroit handling of the crisis with the illicit radio equipment in her flat. ‘Turn out your bag, please, madam,’ said the officer, on one of the Gestapo’s uninvited visits. Out from her bag tumbled a letter which was not addressed to Jadwiga Palluth. Fortunately the Gestapo did not recognise the clue, but it was a close call.
Some time later, another letter had arrived, this one summoning her to a meeting at a certain address on the Aleja Szucha. This kind of missive seemed innocuous but these letters were notorious and the implications unpleasant. The venue was the Gestapo headquarters and there were two choices. You could go to the meeting and you would either be sent to a camp or you would be shot. Or you could not go to the meeting and you would be shot. People who went to these meetings didn’t come back, but the only chance of survival came from going to the meeting. Mrs Palluth went to the meeting.
As always, the conversation was in steely German. But this one was not going on in Mrs Palluth’s hallway and she was not in charge this time. So, this time, the conversation was very much more direct.
‘You still say you do not know where your husband is. It is very simple. You have two options. Either you tell me, or I will shoot you and the children. You have two minutes to decide which it is.’
But the Gestapo officer had not come across someone like Mrs Palluth before. She didn’t quake or shake; she looked the officer in the eye and came straight back. She didn’t need two minutes. ‘Listen to me, Herr Oberst. I am the mother of two boys. As a mother, I choose the option to tell you where he is. But as I do not know where he is, I choose the option that you shoot us.’
The colonel was dumbstruck. Nobody had ever chosen the ‘you shoot us’ option before. Maybe, in truth, she did not know where her husband was. But if that was the case, Palluth might try to get in contact with his family; maybe further surveillance might be a better policy than reprisal. Whatever went on in the colonel’s head is unknown, but Mrs Palluth was released.
Mrs Palluth may have survived her visit to the Aleja Szucha, but that was not the same as being free. She was being closely monitored. For their next move, the Germans tried something more subtle. One visitor was a Mr Pilarski, who had previously worked in radio intelligence in the pre-war Polish General Staff. Having made himself at home in a visit to Mrs Palluth, Mr Pilarski tried his gamble. ‘I knew Antek very well, I just wondered how he is getting on?’ The smell of rat was overpowering. Antoni Palluth allowed only a tiny inner circle of friends to use the diminutive of his first name and Jadwiga knew exactly who was in that circle. Pilarski most certainly was not. ‘Haven’t heard a thing. What do you know?’ Pilarski wasn’t invited back again and Jadwiga learned from the underground that Pilarski had a certain notoriety as an Abwehr agent.19
In February 1943, Antoni Palluth sent another letter. This one wasn’t addressed to Poland; he was trying to contact Gustave Bertrand. He had been told to stay behind in occupied France, to help the new Ekspozytura F2 establish its wireless communications, but things had not gone well. ‘Je suis malade après avoir mangé des haricots verts. Prière prevenir Helène et George. Lenoir.’ [I am unwell after eating green beans. Please let Helene and George know. Lenoir.] What this meant was that Palluth had also fallen into the hands of the Germans. Across the note was a diagonal line, the colour of permanganate; clearly Palluth’s captors had been on the lookout for a hidden message in invisible ink.20
• • •
The second evacuation team, comprising only Rejewski and Zygalski now, was supposed to follow Gaca and the Paszkowskis to Perpignan. Two days after the arrest of Langer and his group, they learned the disheartening news. Clearly the evacuation plan was off. The pair of Poles left in Toulouse found
somewhere better to stay than their filthy attic. The only thing they could do to fill their time was use their cash supply to sample the local restaurants: the Tocque Blanche, the Bonas and the de la Paix. They liked the Bonas. But they’d also heard that the Paszkowskis had decided against the border crossing and were free in Perpignan. Zygalski and Rejewski went to visit them. Janina was in hospital, nursing a newborn son. The code-breakers stayed with one of the dubious contacts – Rejewski called him a smuggler – but it was better than the attic in Toulouse.
Perpignan, however, was not all unbounded joy. A female money-changer ran off with Rejewski’s cash and the pair of code-breakers spent a fruitless day chasing after her. None of this was going to help them get out of France; they would have to go back to Toulouse if anything positive was going to happen. The idea of returning to the attic was less than appealing; this time they’d do things differently. A pleasant night at the Hotel Terminus in Narbonne, to break their journey, a room at the Hotel Raymond IV in Toulouse. (The nice irony that the Germans had requisitioned much of the Raymond IV was not lost on them, nor on the porter, who was watching everything on behalf of the Resistance.) Dinner at the Bonas. Lunch, the next day, at the Bonas, then the cinema. A new attempt at crossing the border was scheduled for that evening.21
In the winter darkness, the two took the train from Toulouse to the village of Ax-les-Thermes, 10km from the border with Andorra in the Pyrenees. The hotel at Ax was a far cry from the elegance of the Terminus at Narbonne. The place was obviously a wormery of the underground, where the number one occupation was trafficking of people and contraband across the border. They decided to stay holed up in the hotel for the day, until it was time to catch the train for the short journey to the border at Latour-de-Carol.22 Yet an anticipated guide was not on the train and at Latour they were the only two people to get off the train. Their feeling of exposure went skywards when the gendarmes asked for their (forged) ID cards and asked pressing questions about their presence in the forbidden border zone in midwinter. Next it was the turn of some German guards. The two Poles were spies, out of uniform, in a foreign country under enemy occupation. By all reasonable reckoning they could expect to be taken away and shot.
Border patrol in France was a cushy posting if you could get it. Life in France was what all the Wehrmacht aspired to. After all, which was more palatable, that or the Russian front? What a question. France had cheap, fabulous food, booze, tobacco, girls, soft beds and you-name-it. At Stalingrad, General von Paulus’s army was surrounded and his last airfield, his last means of supply, had been captured by the Soviets on 24 January 1943, the day the code-breakers were in Perpignan admiring the latest recruit to the Paszkowski family. For the rank-and-file German soldier, there was no sense whatsoever in making a fuss. Keep focused on the main chance, do enough to show the brass that you took your soldiering seriously and do nothing to draw attention to yourself.
Perhaps Rejewski and Zygalski had deceptive skills of the highest order, or maybe it was that the winter mountain air reminded their German inquisitors about the risks of too great a display of zeal. The pair of fake tourists were allowed off to explore and to go back to a hotel at Latour-de-Carol for dinner. Zygalski soon realised that Latour was another nest of snakes, as his suitcase, cash and other belongings were missing. It was too late to fret. The guide who had missed the train turned up: he had got hold of a bike and cycled from Ax-les-Thermes. After dinner, they all said goodbye to France and headed back out, into the dark and into the snow.
• • •
Saturday 27 February 1943 was a bad day for the world of code-breaking. Since around the time of his breakthrough on the Abwehr machine, Dilly Knox had been taking increasingly long bouts of sick leave. He had been diagnosed with cancer early in the war and his illness was apparent to all by 1941, though the cause and prognosis were known to few. On that February day in 1943, the man who had broken the Spanish, Italian and Abwehr Enigmas died and with Knox’s death the classical era of code-breaking came to a close.
On the same day, another drama with dark significance for code-breaking was being played out in the mountains of south-western France. Louis Guillaume Rudolf Stallmann, aka Rex and now conveniently known as Rodolphe Lemoine, was about as retired as he was ever going to be. In 1943, he was over 70 years old, but ‘retirement’ did not come naturally to the old card-sharper who had long settled into the respectable trade of trafficking in code books and dodgy passports. Since the contretemps on the dockside during the chaos of 1940 had obliged him to remain in France, it had behoved Rex to take a more discreet lifestyle.23
Rex was always difficult to handle. You could accuse Rex of many things, but not of undying patriotism. Throughout the Vichy period, it was unclear, in particular to Paul Paillole, one of Louis Rivet’s staff, whose side Rex was really on. Paillole had met Rex on several occasions in connection with the informant inside the German Embassy in Paris, and Paillole knew that the Nazi authorities had long expressed interest in the so-called Rodolphe Lemoine. The Germans had kept a file on Rex since 1920; there had been unflattering press coverage of ‘Lemoine’ in the Volkische Beobachter in 1939 and the Germans had even arrested him on a trip to Berlin in 1938. That incident had put the wind up the French, who had only been partly reassured when Rex laughed it off by saying that he had offered his services to the Germans as a double agent.24
The fact was that the Germans were still trying to recruit Rex and early in 1942 had sent an intermediary to sound him out. Paillole’s antennae picked up on that soon enough and Rex was despatched to live in obscurity, confining himself to pastimes appropriate for a respectable, retired spy.
In the calm and invigorating air of the high Cerdagne, Lemoine’s health began to improve little by little. He played away rainy days in games of belote with the local country types, arranged several lucrative crossings into the [Spanish] enclave of Llivia, kept himself and his friends supplied in the black market, played pétanque with the police, took walks with his wife and his little dog, greeted all the way as a notable.25
To retire Rex to the clean mountain air of the high Cerdagne – in the eastern Pyrenees – may have been an error. The residence chosen for Rex to regenerate his health and practise his lob at pétanque was in the the village of Saillagouse, situated about halfway between the crossing points of Latour-de-Carol and Prats-de-Mollo, and not far from either of them. Since 1941, Saillagouse had become ‘the turntable of clandestine passages to Spain … the chief of police Bottet was the king-pin … Discreetly recommended to Bottet, [Lemoine] gauged the advantages of the region and the possibilities of trafficking of all descriptions across the border.’ Rex had not, in fact, retired at all.
Indeed no. There were cards still in play. On 31 October 1942, Gustave Bertrand wanted to know if the British were interested in buying an Italian code book that ‘someone’ was offering for sale. Rex had got access to the Italian Code Impero, and was trying to find a buyer. The British weren’t playing, but the Abwehr were, so it seemed. Who knows whether the Germans wanted to spy on their allies? But the intrigue and deception around the code book were what made life worth living for Rex. Rex had been approached by an old colleague, known to be a German collaborator, in June 1942. This was an invitation to play for the House and the House always wins. Rex was back at the table and the Code Impero was a chip to be wagered. So when the Germans occupied the Zone Libre, he was not minded to disappear to French North Africa in accordance with Paul Paillole’s instructions. Rex was staying and watching what was going on.26
One matter going on was that a case officer had been assigned by the Abwehr to look into the ‘affaire Lemoine’. This was Hauptmann Georg Wiegand, who had been studying Rex’s files for months. When the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, they had been able to add substantially to their collection of material. Documents had not been destroyed by the departing French. Even better for Wiegand, on 19 June 1940 the Germans had found an entire train-load of materials parked in a siding at La
Charité-sur-Loire, comprising the secret archive of the French General Staff. This contained not only copies of the Allied codes but a vast trove of material, including several files documenting the exploits of France’s very own Rodolphe Lemoine. Hauptmann Wiegand was very keen to have an encounter with Monsieur Lemoine.
There was also a joker in the pack. The Abwehr was not the only agency interested in the mysterious ex-Baron. The Nazi agencies, always at war with each other, were competing for this particular trophy. If Rex did not play his hand right, he could end up in the hands of the Gestapo, which would be a much less enjoyable game than playing with the Abwehr. He knew an arrest was imminent, but should he stay, or should he go? The Spanish border was close to hand, but the Code Impero gamble was not yet played out.
Thus, on 27 February 1943, as Dilly Knox breathed his last in his woodland home in Berkshire, it was with some relief that Rex greeted Wiegand, who had come to Saillagouse to arrest him. ‘I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow,’ said Rex, with the sangfroid which he customarily inflicted on his card-playing victims.27 Wiegand’s orders were to take the Lemoines to Paris. The Abwehr had plans for Rex.
• • •
After a night in custody, Langer, Ciężki, Gaca and Fokczyński were hauled before the prosecutor and charged with attempting to cross the border with false documents and attempting to take foreign currency out of the country. The standard sentence for illegal border crossing was one month and that is what they got. Despite assurances from Captain Louis, nobody seemed to have been told in advance about this group of evacuees. Either Louis was untrustworthy or the system was even more disorganised than they thought. Langer and the other three soon found themselves in another bus heading for the prison at Perpignan.
X, Y & Z Page 22