Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  Such people, Cammaerts said later, were the heart of the resistance. Most of them won no medals or honors after the war, nor were books written about them, unlike the top resistance leaders and various SOE agents, including Cammaerts himself. “What has continuously irritated me has been the talk about the resistance as if it was created by a few heroes and heroines,” he remarked. “And they’ve tried to make me a hero, whereas the most important thing was the heroism of the people we were living with….They were sacrificing everything—children, partners, elderly relations, their land.”

  As Cammaerts and others repeatedly asserted, there could have been no resistance movement without these unheralded French supporters. “The resistance in France was born of the French themselves,” said Philippe de Vomécourt. “The French people would have been less effective had it not been for the arms and materials, the instructors and organizers, sent from London. But there would still have been a resistance. The agents from London, on the other hand, would have been helpless without the never-failing help and courage of the ordinary people of France. There were many, many more in the resistance than have ever been counted.”

  Cammaerts’s insistence on tight security stemmed in no small part from the heavy responsibility he felt for putting so many people’s lives in danger. While unusual in his caution, he was not alone; several other SOE organizers were just as vigilant. Not surprisingly, their operations turned out to be the most effective when the Allied invasion finally took place.

  Among them was twenty-nine-year-old Pearl Witherington, who headed the 1,500-man Wrestler network in central France—the only female SOE agent to take on such a leading role. “I was very much awake to what was going on around me because you never knew, wherever you were, if anybody was watching or listening,” Witherington observed after the war. “You had to be careful of everything.” Even the slightest gesture or movement, such as instinctively looking right before crossing a street, could bring disaster to an English agent who momentarily forgot the French rules of the road.

  For her, as for Cammaerts, wariness and suspicion were constant companions.

  —

  OBSESSIVE ATTENTION TO SAFETY, however, was the exception, not only in SOE but also among the Free French and the French underground as a whole (with the prominent exception of communist cells). There was, for example, widespread disregard for the need to have as little contact as possible with other groups or individuals in the movement. The bustling city of Lyon, in southeast France, for example, was known as the capital of French resistance because so many of its leaders, including Jean Moulin, tended to congregate there. “You couldn’t go ten meters without running into an underground comrade whom you had to pretend not to know,” one leader noted. Clandestine meetings in Lyon were held in only a few familiar places, making detection considerably easier for the French police and Gestapo.

  Indiscretion was endemic, too, among the resistance rank and file, most of whom were young men and women who had joined this clandestine world with little idea of the tactics required for simple survival. “At the start, it must be confessed, we thought of the whole business as a game,” Philippe de Vomécourt said of himself and his movement counterparts. “A serious, deadly one, but a game, nevertheless, [filled with] amusement, excitement, and adventure. The Germans, however, never thought of it as a game.”

  In organizing these inexperienced resisters, SOE agents were supposed to instill a sense of discipline and security. Many, however, lacked both the training and temperament to do so. Included in that group was a thirty-two-year-old barrister named Francis Suttill, who parachuted into France in October 1942. The son of a British father and French mother, Suttill had been given the task of forming a new network based near Paris and covering a wide swath of central France. Called Prosper, which was Suttill’s code name, the network was to replace Carte as F Section’s leading operation.

  For several months, Suttill traveled throughout the region, inviting local resistance leaders to join his circuit and form one huge organization. By June 1943, Prosper was by far the largest SOE network in the country, boasting more than sixty local groups in an area that included Chartres, Orléans, and Compiègne.

  Prosper, however, turned out to be too vast and unwieldy for its own good. Unlike Cammaerts, Suttill did not insist on a policy of strict compartmentalization among the groups within his network. Instead of remaining isolated from one another, members of the various subcircuits often gathered together in the same safe houses, restaurants, and cafés in Paris and its environs—the most Gestapo-ridden area of the country. As Cammaerts later put it, “the Prosper folks [were] living a fantasy life.”

  That fantasy life, such as it was, ended in June 1943, the worst month of the war for the French underground. On June 21, Jean Moulin, the movement’s most important and powerful figure, was captured by the Gestapo, along with six key resistance leaders with whom he was meeting at a safe house in a Lyon suburb. Less than two weeks later, Francis Suttill and two close SOE associates—his courier and radio operator—were arrested in Paris. Within days, the Gestapo had slashed through the Prosper network like a giant scythe, arresting hundreds of local resistance members and seizing dozens of arms caches throughout central and northern France. They also acquired two wireless sets, one of them belonging to Gilbert Norman, Suttill’s radio operator.

  A local operative in Paris immediately informed London of the mass arrests. A few days later, Maurice Buckmaster received a message that said, “The entire Prosper organization is destroyed. No element of it should be touched.” Yet on June 27, three days after Suttill’s capture, F Section received a message from Gilbert Norman’s wireless set declaring that he was still free.

  The message, however, came with a major flaw, which Leo Marks identified as soon as he read it: Norman had omitted his security check. Marks immediately informed Buckmaster of the missing check, stressing that Norman was probably transmitting under Gestapo control, but Buckmaster refused to believe it. Without telling Marks, the F Section chief ordered the following reply to be sent to Norman: “You have forgotten your double security check. Be more careful next time.” He then instructed his staff to continue sending messages to Norman.

  Thus began France’s version of das Englandspiel, a ten-month operation run by Josef Kieffer, the SS chief of counterintelligence in Paris. A highly competitive man, Kieffer was determined to equal or surpass the extraordinary success of the deception campaign run by Hermann Giskes, Kieffer’s Abwehr counterpart in the Netherlands. And SOE unwittingly did its best to help Kieffer achieve his ambition.

  Amazingly, no one in F Section knew anything about the doubts and suspicions long swirling around N Section and its agents. For all of SOE’s general lack of security in London and the field, its headquarters was highly secure in at least one regard: the agency’s country sections worked in almost complete isolation, sharing neither information about their operations nor warnings about possible blown networks with one another.

  Although Leo Marks knew more about the Netherlands disaster than anyone else in SOE, he had been sworn to secrecy by Colin Gubbins and couldn’t warn Buckmaster about the looming threat to his section. Nonetheless, Marks and staffers from the signals department continued to insist that something was very wrong with Gilbert Norman and the messages he was exchanging with London.

  More than a month after Norman supposedly returned to the air, Buckmaster finally accepted the fact that the wireless operator was in German custody. But he insisted that the section continue sending messages to him, in the hope that doing so would save Norman’s life. Buckmaster, who cared deeply about the fate of his agents, “never wanted to believe anyone was captured,” a colleague said. To him, “all his geese were swans.”

  But there was another reason for behaving as if Norman were still at liberty. The RAF had been lobbying hard to stop all SOE supply flights to France, using the collapse of the Prosper network as its rationale. Halting the flights would have been calamit
ous for SOE’s campaign to prove itself as an important instrument of war. In the view of Colin Gubbins and other top agency officials, it was vital to act as if the Prosper disaster were a thing of the past and to flood France with even more agents and weapons.

  “Strategically France is by far the most important country in the Western Theatre of War,” Gubbins noted in a memo. “I think therefore that SOE should regard this theatre as one in which the suffering of heavy casualties is inevitable. But it will yield the highest possible dividends. I would therefore increase to the maximum…SOE aid to the French field from now on and maintain it until D-Day.”

  As a result, many more agents were sent to central and northern France—and ended up in German custody within a few days of their arrival. They included two French-speaking Canadians dispatched to the Ardennes Forest to form an important new network called Archdeacon. Once they landed, however, the agents—an organizer and radio operator—disappeared from view for more than a month. “No one has the slightest knowledge of the Ardennes group, which must be considered lost,” an F Section staffer wrote.

  But in early August 1943, Archdeacon’s wireless operator finally sent a message saying that the network was up and running. Although he, like Norman, left out his security check, F Section chided him for doing so and plunged ahead. From that point on, SOE agents and arms descended on that German-controlled circuit, as well as on other new networks that were blown even before they were created.

  A collateral victim of the Archdeacon sting was Noor Inayat Khan, the ethereal, absentminded WAAF officer who had been judged temperamentally unsuitable for clandestine work by her SOE instructors. With an increasingly acute shortage of radio operators in France trumping any thought of caution, Buckmaster ordered that Khan’s training be cut short and that she be sent to France as soon as possible. When the commander of the training school protested that she was “not overburdened with brains,” Buckmaster replied, “We don’t want them overburdened with brains,” thereby establishing his own deficiency in that department.

  Khan arrived in Paris on June 16, 1943, less than two weeks before the collapse of Prosper. She escaped the German dragnet and, as one of the few SOE agents still free, became virtually overnight one of F Section’s foremost operatives and the Gestapo’s most wanted British agent in Paris. Even though her sense of security had not noticeably improved, she managed to remain free throughout the summer and early fall, transmitting regularly to London. Then, in early October, F Section instructed her to link up with Archdeacon. When she did, she was promptly arrested by Gestapo agents, who acquired not only her transmitter but a notebook on her bedside table in which she had recorded every message she had received and sent since arriving in France.

  Like Khan, almost all the hundred-plus SOE operatives who ended up in Gestapo custody in France were eventually sent to German concentration camps, where most suffered horrific deaths. Among them were fourteen women, including Khan and twenty-four-year-old Andrée Borrel, Francis Suttill’s courier. Khan, who was held in chains for months after her capture, was shot in the back of the neck at Dachau. Borrel, one of four SOE female agents injected with poison at Natzweiler concentration camp in western Germany, was still alive when pushed into a cremation oven, according to eyewitnesses. Before she succumbed, she reportedly scratched one of the guards and shouted, “Vive la France!”

  Ever since the war, the work and tragic fates of these agents have been recounted in countless magazine articles, books, and films. Left in the shadows were the thousands of French citizens who also lost their lives, thanks to their cooperation with the British-trained operatives, whether as couriers, operators of safe houses, saboteurs, or in other capacities. In the Prosper debacle alone, it’s estimated that more than a thousand French men and women were arrested, the majority of whom were killed by the Germans.

  Brian Stonehouse, one of the few F Section operatives to survive the hell of a concentration camp, blamed the huge casualty list in France on the lethal carelessness of London. Yet the SOE disaster there was not solely the result of British ineptness or of German counterintelligence skills, although both were considerable. Even before the Prosper roundup, suspicions were circulating of a traitor in SOE itself. Before his arrest, Francis Suttill, who was hanged at Sachsenhausen, told a friend, “The Germans seem to have known all our movements for some time now.”

  The target of Suttill’s distrust was a dark, curly-haired Frenchman who controlled all SOE air traffic in and out of the Paris region—an operative who happened to be a particular favorite of Maurice Buckmaster’s.

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  EVERYONE AGREED THAT HENRI DÉRICOURT was astonishingly good at what he did. In the Paris area, most agents were not parachuted in; instead, they arrived in small, light RAF planes that could take off and land on very small fields. It was Déricourt’s responsibility to find those landing areas and to organize the safe arrivals of incoming agents and the departures of operatives returning to London. A delicate and perilous job, it also was an amazing feat of logistics—controlling the landings and takeoffs of RAF aircraft within twenty-five miles of German-occupied Paris. So much could go wrong. Yet with Déricourt in charge, nothing ever did.

  Even the ever-wary Francis Cammaerts was impressed by the thirty-three-year-old Déricourt, who greeted him in March 1943, when Cammaerts first arrived from London. “Déricourt’s operation was smooth, quiet, unfussy, and absolutely on time,” he recalled. “[It] took place without interference. The security was perfect—which was not surprising when you knew the facts.”

  Before 1939, Déricourt had had a checkered flying career, working at various times as a barnstormer, mail pilot, and test pilot. After the war broke out, he flew for a small Vichy airline while moonlighting as a black marketeer and a part-time intelligence agent for the U.S. embassy in Vichy. When he expressed an interest in working full-time for the Allies, U.S. embassy staffers helped smuggle him to London.

  Officials in MI5, Britain’s domestic counterintelligence and security agency, who questioned Déricourt when he arrived were suspicious of him from the start. For one thing, he freely admitted that before the war he had been acquainted with a high-ranking German intelligence officer in Paris. In fact, he frequently socialized with the officer, General Karl Bömelburg, the SS chief of counterespionage for all of France, even after the war began. MI5 was unaware of how close Déricourt’s relationship with Bömelburg actually was, but it knew enough about him to deny him clearance for secret service work.

  Nonetheless, he was immediately taken on by Maurice Buckmaster, who badly needed an experienced air transport officer in northern France now that preparations for D-Day were heating up. Sent back to France in January 1943, Déricourt was an immediate success, handling with unruffled ease the arrivals and departures of agents from Prosper and other networks, as well as the dropping of more than two hundred containers of arms and explosives.

  Most of the agents who encountered Déricourt liked and trusted him, so much so that many gave him top secret reports to be carried back to London by plane, including descriptions of upcoming sabotage operations, lists of operatives’ addresses, and photographs of potential targets. Others, however, were skeptical, noting Déricourt’s persistent questioning of virtually every operative he happened to meet. Shortly before Tony Brooks, the twenty-year-old head of a major network in southeastern France, departed for a brief stint in London, Déricourt asked him, “Aren’t you the organizer of Pimento?” When Brooks insisted that he was just a courier, Déricourt kept up a barrage of questions: “Where are you staying? When did you arrive? When do you expect to return from London?” Brooks refused to say anything more.

  “You’re not supposed to be interrogated by people who are just supposed to receive you,” said Harry Despaigne, another agent who was badgered by Déricourt to tell him where and what his mission was in France. “I wouldn’t talk to him, and I left Paris the same day.”

  A few months after Déricourt arrived in France
, doubts about him blossomed into denunciations. Henri Frager, the head of a network in northwestern France, told SOE he believed that Déricourt had been copying the contents of agents’ reports to London and passing them on to the Germans. At the same time, MI5 sent F Section a report from the Free French security service saying that “since the armistice, Déricourt had started to frequent German circles in France.”

  Nicholas Bodington, Buckmaster’s deputy in F Section, swiftly came to Déricourt’s defense. As it happened, Bodington, a former Reuters correspondent in Paris, had been friends with Déricourt before the war; according to some accounts, he had known General Bömelburg as well. Bodington insisted to Buckmaster that the allegations against Déricourt were untrue, calling them “typical French backbiting.”

  It didn’t take much to convince the F Section head that Déricourt had been wrongly accused. It was unthinkable for him even to consider the possibility that this man, who had done such a brilliant job in ferrying his agents to and from France, could be a traitor. After the war, Buckmaster, who could never bring himself to believe that Déricourt could have been a German operative, claimed that the allegations had been motivated by simple jealousy: “[Déricourt’s] efficiency…was staggering, and it was his very success that raised the ugly idea that he was controlled.”

  In fact, every accusation made against Déricourt was true. Within three days of his arrival in Paris in January 1943, he had made contact with Bömelburg, who arranged for him to stay at the Bristol, a luxury hotel in Paris where prominent German officials were quartered. Not long afterward, Déricourt officially became an agent for the SS general, identified in German records as BOE/48. Bömelburg in turn introduced him to his immediate subordinate, Josef Kieffer, with whom Déricourt also worked.