Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  Thirteen years later, family connections helped him secure a place in a training class for fledgling Bletchley Park code breakers. Although undeniably brilliant, Marks was too quirky and independent even for Bletchley Park. In the early spring of 1942, he was assigned instead to SOE as head of its coding department. His primary job, he was told, was to monitor the security of agents’ traffic.

  Marks’s first impression of SOE was its total disorganization. “No matter which country section I visited,” he later wrote, “everything was in short supply except confusion.” He also was struck by how poorly informed SOE officials seemed to be about the dangers facing agents in occupied Europe, especially those working as wireless operators, the agency’s most important and perilous job.

  Colin Gubbins, SOE’s head of planning and operations, described the operators as “the most valuable link in our chain of operations….Without these links, we would have been groping in the dark.” Through the radio connection between London and the occupied countries, agents sent and received messages in Morse code about the status of resistance operations, upcoming sabotage targets, and plans for the dropping of operatives and weapons to resistance groups. For both the field and home office, it was an essential lifeline.

  It was also highly vulnerable to detection. The early wireless sets were big and heavy. To work, they needed an outside aerial, which usually involved several dozen feet of wire, well spread out and often visible to passersby. In attics, cellars, and other hiding places throughout captive Europe, SOE operators furtively tapped out their messages on those bulky machines, trying to finish their work as quickly as possible; if they remained on the air for more than a few minutes, their signals were likely to be picked up by the Germans.

  In Paris and other European cities, clerks in Gestapo headquarters worked around the clock to keep track of radio frequencies in the area. When they found signals they considered suspicious, they alerted agents cruising the city in unmarked vans containing sophisticated direction-finding equipment. The vans would then close in on the target. As Leo Marks quickly discovered, SOE officials had no idea how difficult it was to operate a wireless set when under such pressure, even for fully trained operators with considerable experience. That did not include most operators in SOE, whose training had been rudimentary at best.

  Soon after joining the agency, Marks set out to lessen the danger. His first step was to get rid of the codes that the agency had been using to communicate with its people in the field. They had come from MI6, which, for the first two years of SOE’s existence, had controlled its wireless circuits and provided its sets and coding. Marks was dismayed by the simplicity of the codes, which were based on classic English poems by Shakespeare and others that were “so familiar that an educated German was quite capable of recognizing them and guessing the cipher.”

  To replace them, he wrote poems of his own, ranging from ribald verses to tender love poems. He gave one of the latter, entitled “The Life That I Have,” to a twenty-one-year-old agent named Violette Szabo, who, after being parachuted into France in 1942, was eventually captured, tortured, and killed by the Gestapo. It read:

  The life that I have

  Is all that I have

  And the life that I have

  Is yours.

  The love that I have

  Of the life that I have

  Is yours and yours and yours.

  A sleep I shall have

  A rest I shall have

  Yet death will be but a pause

  For the peace of my years

  In the long green grass

  Will be yours and yours and yours.

  Since then, the poem has developed a life of its own. It has been used in a movie about Szabo’s life, found in poetry anthologies, reprinted on a 9/11 victims’ website, and recited by Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky at their wedding in 2010. “Every code,” Marks would later say, “has a human face.”

  Although his poem codes did improve security to some extent, Marks was still not satisfied. He moved on to a more sophisticated method: providing agents with a number of onetime code pads imprinted on easily concealed squares of silk that could be cut off and destroyed after each use. Marks’s code pad proved to be highly successful and was used by both SOE and OSS until the end of the war.

  He also turned his attention and abundant energy to an even greater problem: wireless messages, called “indecipherables,” that could not be read because of coding errors or mistakes in transmission. Before he arrived, wireless operators had been instructed by London to repeat any unreadable messages, thus greatly increasing their chances of detection and capture. Appalled by the order, Marks observed, “If some shit-scared wireless operator, surrounded by direction-finding cars which were after him like sniffer dogs, who lacked electric light to code by or squared paper to code on—if that agent hadn’t the right to make mistakes in his coding without being ordered to do the whole job again at the risk of his life, then we hadn’t the right to call ourselves a coding department.” To solve the problem, he hired dozens of clerks, mostly young women, who were specially trained to tease out the meaning of indecipherables. According to Marks, the neophyte code breakers were soon “performing with the precision of relay racers and, by passing the baton of indecipherables from one eager shift to another, had succeeded in breaking 80 per cent of them within a few hours.”

  From his first days at SOE, the quick-witted, outspoken Marks felt considerably closer to the agents with whom he worked than to his bosses and fellow bureaucrats. Still in his early twenties, he was decades younger than most of his colleagues, and as a Jew, he felt like an outsider in SOE’s old-boys-club milieu. Those running the agency, he believed, had no real sense of what their operatives faced in the field or the courage, skill, and steely nerves it took to outwit the Germans.

  Marks himself took great pains to get to know each agent before he or she was dispatched to Europe. All agents, even those who were not assigned as wireless operators, had to take a basic course in Morse code so they could double as operators in an emergency. Marks wanted to make sure they understood whatever coding method they had been assigned. But he also wanted to get a sense of their personalities, which might help him and his staff decipher any future indecipherables they sent.

  His deep interest in individual agents only added to his worry when things were not going well in the countries to which they were assigned. In his first year at SOE, he was most concerned about the Netherlands. And as it turned out, he had every right to be.

  —

  ALL COUNTRY SECTIONS OF SOE experienced problems in sending their first agents into the field, but the Netherlands section had a particularly difficult time. One reason was the country’s geography. As the crow flies, the Netherlands is less than two hundred miles from Britain, but in many ways, it was the most isolated nation in western Europe and the most difficult for a resistance movement to operate in.

  Squeezed between Germany and the stormy North Sea, the Netherlands was a virtual prison. Unlike France, it had no common borders with neutral nations like Spain or Switzerland, which were used by the British government as avenues for the smuggling of agents and others into and out of occupied territory. Its land was flat and highly cultivated, with few natural hiding places, such as forests and mountains, or large unobserved areas that could serve as improvised drop areas for weapons and agents.

  Landing agents by submarine or boat was equally difficult. The Dutch coast stretched straight and bare, with no hidden coves or harbors. The beaches, meanwhile, were littered with land mines, barbed wire, huge, cross-shaped concrete blocks, and hordes of German sentries.

  Holland was also the most densely populated nation in Europe; to move around unobserved was extremely difficult. Its excellent railway and road systems meant that German troops and police agents could reach anywhere, even its smallest villages, in a couple of hours. It was no accident that of all the occupied countries in Europe, Holland was second only to Poland in the
high percentage of its citizens shot or deported to German concentration and death camps.

  But the officials in SOE’s Dutch unit, known as N Section, didn’t seem to appreciate the geographical difficulties facing their agents and members of the Dutch resistance. Nor did they seem very knowledgeable about anything else to do with clandestine warfare. Richard Laming, the section’s first head, had worked for MI6 in the Netherlands before the war—not exactly the most sterling qualification, considering his MI6 colleagues’ abysmal behavior during the 1939 Venlo affair. Seemingly as clueless as they, he had little understanding about what was happening in the wartime Netherlands.

  To fill their many gaps in knowledge about the country’s geography, history, and political and social conditions, Laming and his coworkers could easily have consulted the Dutch intelligence service in London. They never did. The only role assigned to the Dutch was as a recruitment agency, identifying prospective operatives for SOE officers, who then made the final selections and supervised the agents’ training. Informed only a couple of days before an agent’s departure, the chief of Dutch intelligence was given no opportunity to study the agent’s orders or object to anything he might disagree with.

  With all its difficulties, N Section found itself months behind SOE’s other country departments in infiltrating its first agents. Initially, several operatives had been scheduled to leave in the summer of 1941; at the last minute they staged a mutiny, writing to top SOE officials that they were prepared to work in the Netherlands but not under Laming’s command. In their letter, the agents noted that they weren’t supposed to know one another’s true identity, yet N Section officials had addressed them by their real names. They also observed that the clothing they were to wear in Holland had been bought in British shops and that, although Dutch labels had been sewn in, the clothes were of a style that might as well have had “England” written all over them. The final straw, however, was that the agents had not been given a list of contacts and safe houses in the Netherlands and were told they would have to find them on their own.

  Worried that the agents’ insubordination might become public knowledge, SOE shipped them off to a house in a remote part of Scotland, where they were denied contact with the outside world. After a complaint was lodged by the Dutch government in exile, they were released in December 1941, but only after signing a paper promising to keep quiet about what had happened to them.

  In September 1941, two new operatives finally made it to the Netherlands, with orders to recruit Dutch citizens for future resistance work. They were supposed to be picked up by boat several weeks later and taken back to England. But the prearranged rendezvous never took place, and the agents had no choice but to stay where they were. Having no wireless to communicate with London, they soon disappeared.

  In November, SOE tried again, sending two more young Dutch émigrés—Hubertus Lauwers and Thijs Taconis—to The Hague. At the time of the German invasion of the Netherlands, Lauwers had been working as a journalist in the Philippines; he immediately left there to go to Britain. In London, he and Taconis, a university student who had escaped from Holland by fishing boat, were recruited by SOE. Trained as a wireless operator, Lauwers was to establish a radio link between the Netherlands and London, while Taconis was assigned to set up new resistance networks and train their members in sabotage techniques.

  After Lauwers and Taconis departed, SOE heard nothing from them for two months. Finally, in January 1942, Lauwers made contact and from then on sent regular reports about the work he and Taconis were doing. In March, however, Leo Marks discovered what appeared to be a major flaw in this seemingly successful operation. In his transmissions, Lauwers had begun omitting his security check, a signal he was supposed to use to verify that he had not been captured. Before he and other operators were sent into the field, they were repeatedly told that failure to insert the check would let London know that they were working under German control.

  But when Marks brought the lack of a security check to N Section’s attention, its staffers told him there was nothing to worry about. “The whole thing has been looked into,” they assured him. “The agent’s all right.”

  —

  ACTUALLY, AT THAT MOMENT, the agent was sitting in a Gestapo prison in The Hague. For Lauwers and Taconis, nothing had gone right since their departure from Britain. In their final SOE briefing, they had discovered that N Section did not have a list of up-to-date safe houses and contacts for them. When Lauwers had asked to try out the transmitter he was to take, he was told it had already been tested and that, in any case, it was untraceable by the Germans. The false identity documents given to the agents were unmistakable forgeries: the paper they were printed on was much darker than that used for genuine documents. Admitting that the two had been poorly prepared, Richard Laming had told them that “no one will blame you if you don’t go.” Although rightly concerned about their prospects, they decided to proceed.

  On their arrival, both men were wearing almost identical clothing that clearly was not Dutch in origin, and when they went to a café for their first meal, they tried to pay in silver coins, which they soon learned had been taken out of circulation years before. Astonishingly, they managed to escape German scrutiny and began their job of organizing what was then a comparatively weak resistance movement.

  Like Norway, the Netherlands had not been invaded or occupied by a foreign power for more than a century. Its citizens had no experience with underground activities, nor were most of them inclined to engage in such actions, at least early in the occupation when German treatment of the country was relatively mild. Nonetheless, even at the start, there were scattered outbreaks of rebellion, including large gatherings in support of Queen Wilhelmina and protests by student and workers against German persecution of Dutch Jews.

  As the harshness of the occupation increased, so did Dutch anger and unrest. Would-be resisters began coming together in small, disorganized groups as they had in France, using underground newspapers and leaflets to recruit new members. But, lacking discipline, resources, and a central command, many of them were soon caught and executed by the Germans or sent to concentration camps.

  It was Taconis’s job—and that of the SOE agents who would follow him—to bring the fragmented organizations together and meld them into a fighting force the Allies could count on to stifle the Germans in the Netherlands before and during the invasion of Europe. A daunting and highly dangerous task, it would take months, if not years, to accomplish. But Taconis and Lauwers were not able to inform London of that until ten weeks after they’d arrived. The wireless transmitter SOE officials claimed to have tested failed to work when Lauwers first tried it. After dismantling it, he discovered that the problem was a manufacturing flaw—one that took weeks to repair.

  When Lauwers finally managed to contact London, he explained that fixing the transmitter, finding adequate safe houses, and assessing the state of Dutch resistance had taken up almost all of his and Taconis’s time. No resistance groups were yet ready to go into action. None had yet received the weapons and explosives training they needed. And no arrangements had been made to hide and distribute the military supplies that SOE was so eager to provide.

  N Section was not happy with this news. Thanks in part to the mutiny of the first batch of Dutch agents, the hapless Richard Laming had been replaced. His successor was Major Charles Blizzard, a career army officer with no experience in clandestine work, who had never met the two agents in Holland. Anxious to improve N Section’s standing with SOE higher-ups and the military brass, Blizzard ignored Lauwers’s pessimistic status report and ordered him and Taconis to prepare a drop zone for the parachuting of explosives and arms.

  Blizzard’s order was just one of several problems facing Lauwers in the winter of 1942. Another was the security of his radio transmissions to London. No one in England had informed him that he would need a long, extremely conspicuous outside aerial to send his messages. He was also concerned about the lengthy transmis
sion times the messages required. SOE officials, who had expressed nothing but contempt for German counterintelligence efforts, had repeatedly told him that the Germans did not have the technology to trace his wireless set. After spending several months in Holland, Lauwers was not so sure.

  In the early evening of March 6, 1942, Lauwer sat in an apartment in The Hague, waiting to begin his scheduled biweekly transmission to London, which was always broadcast at the same time and on one of two predetermined frequencies. Glancing over the three messages he was to send, he turned on his set and prepared to begin. Just then, the apartment’s leaseholder, a Dutch lawyer who had been secretly sheltering him, flung open the front door and announced that four police vans were parked outside.

  Stuffing his codes into his pocket, Lauwers hurriedly left the building and, trying to appear as calm as possible, strolled down the snow-covered street. In seconds, he was cornered by a dozen men waving pistols. “I cursed my stupidity,” he later wrote. “The game was up.”

  —

  ON THE SIDEWALK, a tall man with penetrating blue eyes, a sharp nose, and a thin mustache watched as Lauwers was quickly hustled into a car. Major Hermann Giskes, the forty-five-year-old head of Abwehr counterintelligence in the Netherlands, had been on Lauwers’s trail for weeks. A protégé of Admiral Canaris’s, Giskes had already shown an exceptional talent for tracking down Allied secret agents during his previous posting in Paris. Contrary to what SOE thought of Giskes and his colleagues, they were, in the words of the Dutch historian Louis de Jong, “extremely skilled and dangerous opponents.”