by Nigel West
In considering this figure of 550 arrests, however, one must mention the fact that there were at least 500 agent-operated stations which were under observation and had been detected, but were never actually seized. There were at least twice as many suspected, unidentified agent-operated stations which had been intercepted at one time or another but whose exact number remained unknown.4
In the crucial period between 1943 and 1944 the Funkabwehr proved its efficiency by the sheer volume of its operations, monitoring thirty British circuits in Paris, twenty in western France and a further fifty in the south. It also kept a watch on two Polish sets in Paris, and on a further fifteen operated after D-Day by OSS behind the lines.
The degree of German control over much of F Section’s assets in the field, and its distribution of messages personnels in BBC broadcasts, gave Goetz good reason to suppose that these sources would supply advance, detailed notice of the widely expected invasion. Over the previous two years he had worked closely with his Abwehr III counterparts, such as the wily Hugo Bleicher, to identify and manipulate dozens of SOE reseaux, and had been so successful that only six survived from the 1942 vintage. They were: DONKEYMAN, which had experienced much attention from the Abwehr, and had been suspended while its leader, Henri Frager (code-named LOUBA), visited London. A former aide to General Henri Giraud, he was to return to France in February 1944 to revive his circuit and move it north from the Auxerre region. PIMENTO was Tony Brooks’ (ALPHONSE) impressive sabotage organisation composed mainly of railway workers in the region around Toulouse. Aged only 20 when he had been dropped by parachute on 1/2 July 1942, Brooks had gone on to develop a network that would paralyse much of the mainline rail traffic after D-Day. Always suspicious of what he regarded as SOE’s somewhat dysfunctional headquarters, he attributed his survival to maintaining his independence and never disclosing his address or exact whereabouts. Almost uniquely, PIMENTO maintained good security and accomplished spectacular results without attracting unwelcome attention before D-Day. Then there was SCIENTIST in southern Normandy, headed by Claude de Baissac (DAVID), a 35-year-old Mauritian who had been parachuted, without the support of a reception committee on the ground, near Nîmes on 30 July 1942. He had only narrowly avoided arrest when the PROSPER network in Paris collapsed in June 1943 following hostile penetration. Two missions later, Baissac returned in February 1944 to run SCIENTIST, a circuit formerly active in Bordeaux.
The German methodology was impressive and usually relied on the substitution of newly arrived SOE personnel by agents provocateurs, such as the former French Air Force NCO, Raoul Kiffer, who had worked for the Abwehr since his arrest in November 1942 in Cherbourg when, code-named KIKI, he had been a sub-agent of the INTERALLIÉ network. Thereafter he had acted as a highly plausible agent for Abt. IIIF and had been responsible for the entrapment and betrayal of dozens of résistants, a grim record usually achieved by masquerading as an evader seeking help.5
The SD was equally active, employing Karl Holdorf and Joseph Placke who, directed by Hans Kieffer, were sufficiently skilled impersonators to take over an entire circuit, as they did by manipulating John Macalister’s (VALENTIN) transmitter. That funkspiel led to the control of other sets, such as the one captured with Noor Inayat Khan (MADELEINE) in June 1943. Kieffer’s strategy, endorsed by his superior in Berlin, Horst Kopkow,6 was to win the co-operation of his captives by promising to treat prisoners captured on their information as legitimate PoWs, thereby guaranteeing their lives. Such unscrupulous tactics proved highly effective.
The other three surviving networks of 1942 were HEADMASTER, WHEELRIGHT and FARMER. The first was run by Brian Rafferty (code-named DOMINIQUE) after the arrest by the French police in October 1942 of its leader, Sydney ‘Soapy’ Hudson (ALBIN), just two weeks after he had landed in the Puy-de-Dôme. Imprisoned at Essaye, near Toulouse, Hudson escaped in February 1944 in a mass breakout and reached Gibraltar. His second mission, in May 1944, was to HEADMASTER in Le Mans, where he blew up the local telephone exchange. His network was overrun by the US Third Army in September, Rafferty having been arrested in May 1943 and imprisoned at Flossenburg concentration camp, where he perished.
WHEELRIGHT was quite the largest and most significant circuit of all, with some twenty SOE-trained agents under the command of George Starr (code-named HILAIRE) covering a huge territory in the south-west where the organisation hampered the progress of the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division from Toulouse to Normandy, and was eventually overrun by the Allies. Starr, who had been infiltrated into occupied territory by boat in the Mediterranean in November 1942, later joined SIS.
FARMER’s origins dated back to 18 November 1942, when Michael Trotobas (code-named SYLVESTRE) and his operator, Albert Staggs, had established a sabotage network in Lille. However, Trotobas had been killed during a Gestapo raid on his safe house in Lille in December 1943, and Staggs was arrested soon afterwards, but released because his cover was so good, and the circuit survived until it was overrun in September 1944.
These six 1942 reseaux formed the basis of almost a dozen more networks built during 1943: JOCKEY was established by Francis Cammaerts (ROGER) on his second mission in March in the Alpes Maritimes. A Cambridge-educated schoolmaster and former conscientious objector, Cammaerts was to be one of F Section’s most successful and resourceful organisers, and survived the war.
In April 1943 STOCKBROKER was formed by another schoolmaster, Harry Ree (CESAR) in Belfort, and a month later ACOLYTE was started when Robert Lyon arrived by Lysander on his second mission. In September AUTHOR, MARKSMAN and DETECTIVE also got under way. These were led, respectively, by Harry Peuleve, on his second mission, having walked to Spain on a shattered leg after a bad parachute landing the first time around; Richard Heslop (XAVIER), on his third, having been imprisoned in Vichy; and Henri Sevenet (RODOLPHE), also on his second, who had climbed the Pyrenees into Andorra in winter to get back to England. A month later Elaine Plewman’s brother, Albert Browne-Bartolli (TIBURCE), was landed by a Hudson aircraft in Burgundy to start DITCHER, together with a middle-aged parfumier, Joseph Marchand of NEWSAGENT, and a landowner, Robert Benoist of CLERGYMAN. DIPLOMAT’s young Yvan Dupond (ABELARD), originally from Paris, was dropped to Troyes, where he went to ground, ready to sabotage the locomotive yards when called upon to do so. The last circuit to be set up in 1943 that was to survive until D-Day was GONDOLIER, Paul Sarrette’s network around Nevers. Sarrette himself would be killed by a mortar in an accident during a live firing exercise in September.
As the Abwehr increased its knowledge of the French resistance, it manifested a growing sophistication in its manipulation of SOE’s wireless traffic, and Baker Street was slow to realise that some circuits were under control. Most disastrous of all perhaps was the arrest of Major Gilbert Norman (ARCHAMBAULT) in Paris in June 1943, while reportedly carrying no fewer than 250 messages personels in his wallet. His wireless, and another in the same circuit operated by a 22-year-old nurse, Andrée Borrel (DENISE), were controlled by the SD and led to the PROSPER disaster. As none of those involved survived the war, SOE was never able to fully investigate the loss of twelve SOE-trained agents and an estimated 1,500 other résistants.
Early in 1944, MUSGRAVE preparations for D-Day began slowly, but were jeopardised by a series of entirely new circuits, even though several were dropped ‘blind’ to isolate them from existing, potentially contaminated, personnel. FOOTMAN, consisting of George Hiller (MAXIME) and his wireless operator Cyril Watney (EUSTACHE), were dropped on 7 January in the Lot with a political objective, to contact and mobilise the Leftist guerrillas known to be in the area. However, instead of finding several hundred, as had been optimistically reported to London, there were fewer than fifty.
FOOTMAN’s great coup was the destruction of the Ratier factory in Figeac, which manufactured variable-pitch propellers for the Luftwaffe, but the operation attracted too much attention from the Germans so the network temporarily suspended its activities.
The arrest in the middl
e of January 1944 of Jean Meunier (MESNARD) temporarily removed his DIRECTOR circuit near Arles, but there was a delay in the news reaching SFHQ. Meunier, however, survived his imprisonment. MUSICIAN had been eliminated by the arrest in January in St Quentin of Gustave Biéler (GUY, later TELL) and his operator, Yolande Beekman (MARIETTE). Both were executed in concentration camps.
Early the following month René Dumont-Guillemet (ARMANDE), on his second mission, dropped blind close to his home in Chartres and organised SPIRITUALIST with his operator, Henry Diancono (BLAISE). This was the first operation to be mounted by SFHQ, and concentrated on rebuilding an organisation in Paris where the Germans had proved so efficient. Both men exercised considerable caution and completed their mission successfully, to be overrun by the US Army in Meaux in August 1944.
There was more activity during the March moon period, when Pierre Martinot (ULYSSES) was dropped to JOCKEY from Algiers on 2 March, and Henri Lausaucq (ARAMIS) accompanied Virginia Hall (DIANE) by boat to Brittany to form SAINT, the first entirely OSS circuit. Both of these operations were successful, but LIONTAMER proved to be the disaster that put all of F Section’s D-Day preparations at risk. LIONTAMER had been founded on MUSICIAN, which SOE headquarters in Baker Street did not know had fallen into enemy hands. The operation was a three-man team, consisting of Maurice Lanis (COLIN), Edmond Lesout (TRISTAN) from OSS, and an SOE wireless operator, David Finlayson (GUILLAUME). A fourth, Pilot Officer George McBain (CECIL), had accompanied them, but was due to join MUSICIAN. All four were intended to be received by Guy Biéler, supposedly MUSICIAN’s new leader, and were despatched on 2 March, but nothing was heard from them for three weeks, when Lanis signalled that he and Finlayson had arrived safely and had been met by Paul Tessier (THEODORE), who had recently replaced Biéler as the head of MUSICIAN. This news was received with some scepticism in London because of the omission of any mention of Lesout, and the growing suspicion that ARCHDEACON, of which MUSICIAN was a sub-group, had been penetrated by the enemy. Furthermore, Tessier was known to have been arrested, and a report from SPIRITUALIST that he had engineered his escape from the Gestapo had been disbelieved. In short, it seemed that Tessier was a funkspiel, operating under enemy control, and the LIONTAMER mission had been dropped straight into the hands of the enemy. Nonetheless, contact with Lanis was maintained in the vain hope that it might keep him alive. Lanis, Lesout, Finlayson and McBain were all executed. Belatedly it was realised that the fatal decision to use ARCHDEACON as a route for infiltrating new circuits into the field accounted for dozens of lives, including no fewer than seventeen SOE agents arriving by air, and Alphonse Defendini (JULES), who landed by boat on 9 February 1944 on the beach near Morlaix.
In March 1944 SOE escalated its commitment to OVERLORD and sent some of its most experienced men into the field. Robert Boiteux (NICHOLAS) was dropped near Marseilles on 6 March to form GARDENER, together with two other French Jews, both hardened F Section agents: Gaston Cohen (JUSTIN of JUGGLER) and Bernard Aptaker (ALERIC). During the rest of the month, the ACTOR, WIZARD, MINISTER, MASON, FIREMAN and SCHOLAR networks were built. Philippe de Vomecourt’s VENTRILOQUIST6 was revived by its leader’s return by Lysander on 16/17 April, and in May HISTORIAN, BEGGAR, TREASURER, CARVER, RACKETEER and FREELANCE were dropped. All these operations were undertaken without interference, the common denominator being that their reception committees had been arranged by Maurice Southgate of STATIONER. Highly prized by the Germans, Southgate was arrested by the Gestapo on 1 May in Montluçon and ended the war in Buchenwald. In his absence Pearl Witherington (MARIE), who had joined STATIONER as a wireless operator on 23 September 1943, took over as WRESTLER and accomplished all her circuit’s D-Day objectives.
LABOURER, a three-man team led by Marcel Leccia dropped to STATIONER on 5 April, was promptly betrayed and its members arrested in Paris. Their objective was to blow up a German installation near Angers, but all three were executed at Buchenwald. James Mayer (FRANC) was dropped near Angouleme on 11 February 1944 to organise ROVER, but he was betrayed and arrested, together with the French former policeman Charles Rechenmann, at the end of May. Mayer and Rechenmann were hanged at Buchenwald, and the only survivor was ROVER’s Canadian radio operator, Allyre Sirois (SINGLET), who was liberated in Paris and then returned home to Saskatchewan.
Much the same happened to LACKEY, consisting of a middle-aged French motor mechanic, Jules Lesage (COSMO), and his young Canadian operator from Quebec, Alcide Beauregard (CYRANO). They were flown to France by Lysander on 8/9 February but, upon their arrival, owing to Lesage’s ruthless reputation gained on a previous mission to Lyons, when he had worked as a taxi driver and assassinated several collaborators, they failed to find anyone willing to work with them. Beauregard was caught in July by an Abwehrfunk D/F unit and taken to Fort Montuc, where he was executed the following month. Lesage survived, and made his way to Paris for the liberation.
A journalist, Philippe Liewer (CLEMENT), on his second mission, having already been imprisoned in Vichy, and his operator, a fierce young French widow who was reputed to be F Section’s best shot, Violette Szabo (LOUISE), tried to start SALESMAN in Rouen in April but were exfiltrated by Lysander after three weeks because of lack of local support and pressure from the Germans.
As well as the experienced teams being reinserted into enemy territory, there were a few novices deployed as well. Roger R. Henquet (ROBERT) and his American radio operator Herbert Brucker (SACHA) of HERMIT went to St Viatre to organise a sub-group for VENTRILOQUIST on 27/28 May, and were subsequently joined on 7/8 June by their SOE weapons instructor, Dr Henri Fucs (ABEL), who was a physician born in Romania. HERMIT linked up with the US Third Army in Orleans at the end of August.
Also despatched into eastern France that night was George Millar (EMILE) of CHANCELLOR, a young French-speaking Scottish officer who had joined SOE after having been a PoW for twenty months in Italy. He had subsequently escaped and made his way to England, where he was trained as a saboteur for a mission in the Besancon area.
The problem for F Section was that its two key circuits in the area of most strategic importance, ARCHDEACON and MUSICIAN, had come under enemy control, and it would be months before Baker Street headquarters realised the degree of control exercised by the enemy.7 Indeed the funkspiel’s first victim, Francois Michel (DISPENSER), had disappeared in September 1943, yet five months after the first sign that something was wrong with ARCHDEACON, F Section was still sending agents to it.
By D-Day itself there were forty F Section circuits operational in France, of which all but five had wireless operators in direct contact with SFHQ, and they were intended to be SOE’s executive arm in fulfilling its OVERLORD mission. In addition to the SOE circuits, there were two other paramilitary groups operational on D-Day. The first, organised by SIS, was an intelligence collection project code-named SUSSEX conducted jointly with OSS that had no SOE participation whatever. The intention was to send sixty two-man teams of French volunteers into northern France in advance of D-Day, each to complete a short-term, tactical intelligence mission just behind the battle front, reporting on troop movements, and then wait to be overrun. The individual teams, consisting of an observer and a wireless operator, trained at Prae Wood House on Lord Verulam’s estate near St Albans, recently vacated by SIS’s Section V, were divided into OSSEX, the American element, and BRISSEX, SIS’s contingent, and managed by a trio of senior intelligence personnel: SIS’s Kenneth Cohen; Francis P. Miller for OSS and Gilbert Renault for the BCRA.
The first SUSSEX missions, code-named PATHFINDERS and consisting of Jeannette Guyot, Marcel Saubestre, Georges Lassale and Pierre Binet, were dropped into the Chateauroux area on 8/9 February 1944 to survey for suitable landing grounds, and on 9/10 April the first three teams, BERTHIER DROUOT and PLAINCHANT, were infiltrated into enemy-occupied territory. By D-Day a further fourteen were in position, but none were dropped between the insertion of JUSTICE on 6/7 June and 16/17 June. Of the PATHFINDERS, one of the wireless operators, Pierre Bine
t, was captured on 19 August in Villefargeau and shot, together with Etienne Ancergues of PATHFINDER II, which had arrived on 5 May.
By the end of August, fifty-two teams had been inserted, of which nineteen members eventually fell into enemy hands. The only agent to be captured before D-Day was Jacques Voyer of VITRAL, who had been dropped on 10/11 April, and he was arrested on D+2 and executed on 27 June.
While the SUSSEX teams operated covertly, wearing civilian clothes, SOE created a separate, but parallel organisation, code-named JEDBURGH, which would link up with local résistants and act in a co-ordinating capacity. To preserve OVERLORD security, the paramilitary Jeds, operating in uniform, would not be deployed until D-Day itself. The scheme, initially proposed by SOE’s Colin Gubbins as early as July 1942, was to infiltrate dozens of three-man teams into enemy-held territory. Each would have a multinational content, with an American, British and either French, Dutch or Belgian member, one of whom would be a fully trained wireless operator. Their individual missions would include some intelligence-gathering, but were principally intended to train the maquisards, co-ordinate with SFHQ’s supply of materiél and liaise with units of the SAS Brigade and their American counterparts, the Operational Groups (OG). With a high proportion of French-speakers, the OGs were controlled by SFHQ while the SAS had their own staff attached to 21st Army Group. A typical OG was composed of four officers, commanded by a captain, and thirty NCOs divided into two sections, with a wireless operator assigned to each. Altogether, the Allied paramilitaries amounted to some 2,200 men.