A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  In The Goebbels Diaries, the Nazi Propaganda Minister unconsciously confirmed the success of Donovan’s mission when he blamed the Balkans bloodbath on “the notorious Colonel Donovan who later created the infamous OSS spy-ring. He brought disaster to Yugoslavia in order to pull other countries like Greece into the war. That was Donovan’s mission. All was ready for the pacification of the Balkans with our troops when the secret Presidential agent came on the scene.

  “Adolf Hitler ordered the swift and merciless destruction of Yugoslavia. He could do no less. ‘Operation Punishment’ was a lesson to the Balkans that nobody could defy our Fuehrer. The Wehrmacht conquered Yugoslavia in eleven days. The most vile canard of our enemies is that the Fuehrer is losing the Second World War because of personal rage and spite, delaying the attack on Russia to wreak vengeance on a small and harmless neighbor. The Fuehrer was simply impressing on his generals the need to exert themselves.”

  They had exerted themselves so well that Belgrade was a pile of rubble. President Roosevelt knew now the burdens of secret intelligence. He now had his own Coventry.

  “Roosevelt could no more calculate German terrorist reprisals against Yugoslavia than the Prime Minister,” Stephenson noted later. “Terrorism was a new weapon. We had to fight it with improvised weapons.”

  Nobody could foretell each consequence of BSC’s improvisations, and the pressures were too great for hesitation. Stephenson was bringing into operation a fake astrologer to help irritate Hitler still more. If Hitler thought himself to be the German Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Barbarossa, then his superstitions might as well be fed by fortunetellers and rumor mills. The Nazis would soon be locked in a titanic struggle with the Soviets, and new weapons of psychological and political warfare were being forged to demoralize the enemy or provoke him into still further folly. Stephenson recalled Alexander Pope’s poem in which someone might someday tamper with events and observe

  with equal eye, as God of all

  A hero perish, or a sparrow fall

  Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d

  And now a bubble burst, and now a world

  One sparrow was a young woman, one of the solitary agents whose work could result in harsh enemy reactions involving the lives of thousands. She was typical of those individual acts of self-sacrifice that could never be publicized then, but now help to explain what motivated the directors of secret intelligence, compelled to watch with equal eye the ruin of cities and of a single life. Her name was in the envelope carried by Lester Pearson when he served BSC as a King’s Messenger. German intelligence never did discover her identity. The most dangerous post in Nazi-occupied France would become associated with her cover name: MADELEINE.

  27

  MADELEINE was a young woman of haunting beauty, the center of cruel controversy after her death. “She should never have been sent to France,” declared a fellow agent, quoted in the official British history of these operations.* “She was a splendid, vague, dreamy creature, far too conspicuous—twice seen, never forgotten—and she had no sense of security. . . .” An attempt was made to stop her mission when spy-school instructors said nothing could hide her striking appearance. She would certainly attract German officers, which was not the idea.

  A writer of children’s books, she had lived in a fairy world that left no room for cynicism or distrust. Her cover name was taken from one of her stories—the last that she read over Radio Paris to French children in freedom.

  She was born in the Kremlin, incredibly enough, a descendant of the Tiger of Mysore, the last Muslim ruler in South India. Her father had been invited to teach Sufism to the Tsar in 1912. Her real name was Noor Inayat Khan, “Light of Womanhood.” Her American mother was the niece of the founder of Christian Science. She had been raised by her father, the leader of an Islamic religious movement, to believe that love and tolerance were the only weapons against inhumanity. This doctrine—Sufism, which was to become fashionable in the West during the 1970s—had been banned in Germany as “alien to German culture.” She still believed Sufism would overcome Nazism, just as nonviolence in India must overthrow British imperialism. Stephenson, who had met her in India before the war, sensed steel within her seemingly timid personality. At one time the family had moved to France, and Noor was working in Paris when the Germans invaded.

  After the invasion, Noor’s publisher in London helped her escape. She was then twenty-five years old, and intrigued by the pragmatism of the British in September of 1940, when they had a new medal struck to recognize the changed nature of war. It was the George Cross, valued above all orders of knighthood, awarded sparingly to civilians now drawn into front-line emergencies caused by German terror bombing, and given “for the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger.” The citation would become her epitaph.

  Noor volunteered for the RAF. She was quick, intelligent, and dependable. She would have made a good officer. Instead, she was groomed for something else. In early 1941, such women were needed as radio operators to work with small guerrilla groups. The radio war, symbolized by ULTRA, was not only defensive. There was a need to build up circuits of agents and networks of saboteurs and partisans, providing them with radio contacts that would integrate their efforts. Nothing like this had been attempted in the history of war. The system would be so extensive that it would obviously be vulnerable to German counterespionage. The British had experience in breaking enemy radio security. They knew that thousands of their own agents, reporting to a central control, risked the penetration of their circuits by their German counterparts. To escape detection, therefore, each network had its own transmitters, its own codes and controllers at Bletchley, and little or no contact with similar groups unless this was necessary.

  The radio war conducted from Bletchley swung onto the offensive in early 1941, when Noor was being trained in telegraphy. Her story ended in the darkest hour before Europe was liberated in 1944. To make her an example of the harsh decision forced upon BSC and the American secret-warfare chiefs, it is useful to detour around the chronology of INTREPID operations. What happened to Noor was typical, even in 1941, of heroism that placed heavy moral responsibilities on Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stephenson.

  Noor’s international background, her familiarity with strange places and foreign languages encouraged BSC’s attention—that and the girl’s frankness.

  She was recruited in London. There was no money for spies in wartime, and hiring an agent was a delicate affair. The French Section of the Baker Street Irregulars was wary of recruits with a taste for austerity; they were liable to be fanatics, dangerous to themselves and to their comrades. The French Section was also skeptical about romantics; secret dreams of glory could include martyrdom for the operator and also for the rest of the network. The first approach to a potential agent required finesse. If that person proved unsuitable, he or she must never know an interview had taken place; nor must he or she be in a position to recognize interviewing officers, or even the buildings that housed the secret agencies.

  One of Noor’s stories, “The Fairy and the Hare,” was broadcast by the BBC about the time that she was accepted by the RAF as a radio telegraphist. She completed her training and was offered a commission. But in April 1942, she was asked, unexpectedly, to report to a room at the Hotel Victoria, on Northumberland Avenue, a dreary corner of central London. There she met an Army captain who represented, she thought, the War Office. The conversation covered a lot of ground, and she said at one point she felt rootless, being in some ways an American, though a product of a Russian childhood and a French adolescence, and yet had strong emotional ties to India.

  The interviewing officer, Selwin Jepson, normally took his time in getting to the point. In Noor’s case, he decided at once to trust her. She told him that she would struggle for India’s freedom from British rule. It happened to be the right answer to his question about her loyalty, for she had demonstrated integrity, the most highly prized quality of all. He stressed that if she agre
ed to his proposal, she would not have the protection of a uniform, and that in the event of capture, she would be interrogated by the Gestapo—“something no human being could face with anything but terror.”

  Jepson was always reluctant to take on a girl who accepted such a prospect too readily. He suggested that, as a writer and broadcaster, she might be useful to humanity again after the war. She was in contact with the minds of children who would have to live in a partially destroyed world. “It might seem academic, considering our desperate situation right now, but you should consider if you might be better employed rebuilding society.”

  Noor rejected the idea. She would be more useful now, in Paris, the most dangerous part of Occupied Europe. Jepson agreed to let her start training, “with rather more of the bleak distress which I never failed to feel at this point in these interviews.”

  Noor knew more about the work ahead than Jepson could possibly guess. She had first met Bill Stephenson during one of her family journeys back to India. She was nineteen years old then, stunningly pretty, gifted with an innocence which he judged could never be corrupted. He was leading a mission of technical experts that in 1934 studied India’s resources and potential for self-development. He met her on a tiger shoot arranged by her father’s fellow Muslim Air Vice-Marshal Nawab Haji Khan, chief of the Chamber of Princes and Nawab of Bhopal. The pomp and ceremony of the jungle shikaris amused both the girl and Stephenson. They talked about a future India where the gap between rich and poor might be narrowed through love and compassion. The Nawab was a close friend of Stephenson’s and later, on active service with the RAF, he learned that the Canadian kept a fatherly eye on the girl. It was in this way that Noor entered the world of Baker Street armed with credentials. She could not remain in the RAF, however. The regular services had a regulation against women taking part in military operations.

  Women agents had to wear some kind of uniform during training. Plain clothes would excite curiosity. Curiosity led to questions. For women who did take part in military operations, therefore, the tiresome ban was circumvented by that antiquated organization, which oddly enough was not stuffy about these things, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, FANY. Women agents could wear its khaki uniform in training. They continued as FANYs after going into action with the secret armies, plus holding an honorary commission granted to women agents by the RAF. This was supposed to make the Germans think twice about executing a captured agent, since a woman could claim to be in the armed forces and entitled to treatment as a prisoner of war, an improvisation of legalities that did not impress the enemy.

  The two girls who went into final training with her were also doomed to die. One was Yolande Beekman. The last time they met before leaving for France was at a mock Gestapo interrogation. The next time they met was as real Gestapo prisoners on the dark journey to Dachau. The third girl, Cecily Lefort, was captured after distinguished work under the cover name ALICE.

  Noor was provided with a new identity that fitted her personality and resembled her true background. She became Jeanne-Marie Regnier, a children’s nurse, known henceforth to Baker Street as MADELEINE. She needed ration books and identity papers. These were manufactured by the forgery experts in Toronto. She required a wardrobe of essential clothing from Paris. This was assembled by a Jewish “manufacturer” who, having escaped himself from Europe, managed an establishment in Montreal of expert tailors and seamstresses, who worked for purely nominal wages, had been enrolled in the armed forces, and were sworn to secrecy. Their skill lay in doctoring refugee clothing. There were, for example, a half-dozen different ways that a button might be stitched onto a coat, depending on where it was tailored in Europe. A wrongly sewn button could dispatch agents to death.

  MADELEINE required pills. Some, slipped into an enemy’s coffee, induced sleep of up to six hours. Others, self-administered, would keep her awake in an emergency. A third group would make her sick if she wished to fake illness. The fourth was the L pill, if she chose death rather than face Gestapo interrogation. She also needed a compact transmitter. She was a small girl, five feet three inches, and weighed 108 pounds. As a telegraphist, or “pianist,” she needed lightweight equipment. There was a chronic shortage of transmitters, and each had to be ordered from U.S. manufacturers and then adapted for installation in a suitcase. Her job was central to the liaison team in a guerrilla group: an organizer, a courier, and the pianist. As the networks grew, the pianists suffered the highest casualties and had to be replaced most often.

  MADELEINE learned what was in store. She was destined to join the biggest, busiest, and most hazardous of the networks, PROSPER, covering a vast part of France, with headquarters in Paris. Its demands were insatiable. Its rural circuits were disrupting lines of communication by sabotage. Its guerrillas were arming for the day of liberation. It needed guns, explosives, booby traps, and money in an unending stream. PROSPER’s prosperity depended on intimate daily contact with Bletchley, which in turn passed the shopping lists to Baker Street and BSC. And what PROSPER needed urgently was a new pianist.

  The girl’s cover story was tested by her instructors in fake Gestapo interrogations under blazing lights, accompanied with snarled commands. Her reactions were noted by a FANY conducting officer whose job was to watch for slips and continually review the trainee’s mental fitness. The girl never deviated from her story, but her conducting officer reported later that the “Gestapo” found their task almost unbearable because of her terrified reactions.

  She learned that her transmitter would be tuned permanently to a particular reception station. She memorized the schedules and coded abbreviations for commonly used signals. Thus QRB meant “Your message regarding broadcast received and understood”; QRM: “Interference is bad”; QSLIMI: “Please acknowledge receipt of message number—”; IMI: “Note of interrogation”; GRIMI: “Repeat group indicated.” There were dozens of these groups, of which the least forgettable was QUO: “I am forced to stop transmitting because of imminent danger. If possible, I will try to make contact on next schedule.” The code letters were part of elaborate arrangements to reduce transmissions and diminish the period of exposure to detection gear or detectives. The methods of making contact with another agent, with circuits, with cutouts, or with home base were all governed by rules that she had to stick with, or chaos would ensue. The rules had to be memorized, like everything else. Memories were tested while the trainee agent was under stress. The girl would return from strenuous field exercises to be asked to list the many procedures for making radio contact, of which this is only one: “If both stations have a message to send as soon as contact is made, the OUT STATION will send its message first unless the HOME STATION sends QSP, when the HOME STATION will then transmit first.”

  She was taught that “a knife should be used delicately as a paint brush.” If unarmed, she should use the heel of her hand upward to smash an assailant’s jaw or “knee him in the groin.” She was taken to the pistol range every day, but warned not to carry arms except at vulnerable moments like dropping from a plane or during an emergency transmission in case she ran into a routine search.

  She was taught simple coding. Letters of a message were systematically interchanged by “key numbers.” Her own codes could be concealed in several ways. (The one-time pad printed on ultra-thin paper was not feasible in the field, and microdotted codes had obvious limitations.) She was taught to write the codes on her underwear or conceal them on her body. There were ways of conveying a new code by radio transmission which she must memorize.

  She was warned that interrogation was impossible to resist if the torturers knew their business and were willing to be patient. Agents, deprived of their L pills, sometimes broke down and revealed their security checks. These included meaningless questions from Bletchley to which should be given meaningless answers. Thus, to the challenge “Have you washed?” the correct answer would be “The trees blossom.” There was an additional and simple safety device. If the agent was in captivity and forced to
transmit under German supervision, she need only omit a meaningless letter or number that was regularly included in her transmissions while at liberty. MADELEINE might be given the group YB4, for instance, which she would insert after each five groups in a message. If YB4 was missing, the reception station would know something was wrong.

  The dangers were not minimized. The German radio direction-finding service could latch onto a transmission with remarkable speed. From all over Europe, two million words were processed every week in England. This meant that inevitably there must be foul-ups. Bletchley could not save agents from their own follies. If she became flustered or gave way to fatigue, she might make a mistake in transmission that would lead to greater and more tragic errors. There were cases of complete networks being “burned” or “blown.” But she would have a distant “godmother,” a FANY telegraphist back in England familiar with her Morse style, which was as unmistakable as her signature. It would be an additional safeguard against any German attempt to take over her transmissions.

  She was released officially from the RAF and then given the honorary commission that would guarantee an accumulation of salary while she was in enemy territory. As a FANY, she was a volunteer who received nothing but living expenses.

  Vera Atkins took over as her CO, or conducting officer. Vera, the heart and brain of the Baker Street Irregulars’ French Section, was a young and highly organized woman with a misleadingly innocent smile and an eagle eye for detail. She had an encyclopedic memory for local regulations in odd corners of Europe, and subtleties of behavior that a stranger might fatally ignore. She had private sources of “bits of theater” that reinforced an agent’s cover: tram tickets from the region where the agent was going, concert programs, crumpled French cigarette packs. She checked the agent in these last remaining days, at meals, in conversation, at work, and even while sleeping. A slip in the pouring of tea, the wrong use of jargon, a sudden reaction to the sound of the agent’s real name—these she caught. Like other COs, she nursed the agent through final briefings in a cozy apartment at Orchard Court, near Baker Street.