A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  “You know the first time as a child that you suspect the man behind the Father Christmas beard is your father? That’s how I felt that wet afternoon as darkness fell. I began to tease a little. When he said my work had been appreciated, I asked if that was his opinion—or the Chief’s. ‘Oh, the Chief,’ he said, twinkling. ‘What’s he like, the Chief?’ ‘Terrible chap.’

  “And you know how, for a while after you’ve guessed who Father Christmas really is, you go on playing the game. Well . . . he knew that I knew that he guessed that I had guessed ‘Mister Williams’ was Bill Stephenson. But part of the game is never to verbalize delicate matters. If it hasn’t been said, the pretense can be maintained. This may sound kindergarten stuff. But it has real value, psychologically. For instance, most agents are highly motivated and honest. It makes their lives easier if they can to some extent deceive themselves.

  “He was a master at this avoidance of embarrassing you with too much knowledge. And yet, when he did tell you something, you knew it was for a purpose—and, perhaps more important, it was a token of confidence in you.

  “He said he had an extremely difficult job for me. . . . The New York office needs certain things’ was the way he put it. And I knew he meant London, Churchill, the secret armies needed them. And what they needed was all correspondence, personal letters, and plain-text cables between the Vichy French and Europe.

  “He acknowledged the impossibility while he made it seem possible. This is a quality in him, I realize now, which frightens the timid and challenges the bold. It filters out the recruits who would never make it. You either respond to him, or you sense the dangers implicit in pursuing the conversation and you back off. He gives you that option. No melodramatic statement of mission and a call for volunteers—none of that stuff. Just a quiet, calm voice talking so indirectly that if anyone listens, they have nothing concrete to quote in court. And you let him know if you’re willing to go ahead by simply continuing the conversation. And if you’re scared and want out—you have a dozen opportunities to pick up a thread that leads you out of the conversational maze.”

  Stephenson had come to satisfy himself that CYNTHIA could pursue a prolonged assignment in gossip-ridden Washington. He found a young American matron who had developed her talents. Her personal standards were above reproach. She was what is known as a self-starter, able to drive herself without orders from above, willing to risk sudden improvisations, resourceful and ingenious. She had none of the hangups usual among intelligent young women in a male-dominated city. Her critics, scornful of her promiscuity, would have been surprised by her personal code of honor. She had a powerful devotion to the cause, and she needed it. In May 1941, when she began to work on the Vichy French, the hazards were many. She was an American. Her homeland was not at war. She could hardly claim police protection if her enemies tried to kill her.

  The two critical issues on which she would have to focus were the fate of the Vichy fleet, which could drastically change the balance of naval power, and secret French funds that helped finance Nazi operations in the Americas. She began by requesting an interview with Ambassador Henry-Haye. His press officer was a former naval fighter pilot, Captain Charles Brousse, who suggested a preliminary meeting. Obviously, this was to screen CYNTHIA. She found Brousse amiable and simpático. He told her straight away, almost in self-defense, that he had served on the joint Anglo-French Air Intelligence Board prior to the German conquest.

  She had the perception to pick out this item from the odds and ends Brousse revealed about himself, and on her next weekly “shopping trip” to New York, passed the information through MARION to Stephenson. Within twenty-four hours, it was established that Brousse had been with Air Intelligence in Paris. It would be useful to learn if he retained his old friendliness for British airmen.

  CYNTHIA got her interview with the Ambassador when he returned from an interview with Cordell Hull at the State Department. “Hull had torn a monumental strip off Ambassador Henry-Haye for carrying out Vichy’s pro-German policies,” CYNTHIA reported to BSC. “He was still smarting when he saw me. He was full of contempt for American vulgarity and lack of civilized manners. Americans did not comprehend the subtleties of European politics. How dare they judge France when they themselves had never suffered invasion?”

  Henry-Haye thought his visitor disarmingly sweet. She was American, without doubt, but she had been exposed to French culture in France itself. She would understand the sophistication of Vichy policy. It was not collaboration. It was survival. “If your car is in the ditch, you turn to the person who can help you put it back on the road. Our future requires that sort of co-operation with Germany.” Henry-Haye warmed to his theme. France, after all, was a nation governed by intellect, not by crude emotions. Her accommodation with Germany was not surrender. A great consolidation of Europe was in progress. Naturally, some of the baser elements would suffer. Of course, the British were jealous. They continued the war to spite France and to protect their empire.

  He continued in this vein for two and a half hours. When CYNTHIA left, this incautious diplomat expressed a desire to see her again. She flirted a little. With elegant courtesy he escorted her through the courtyard. Captain Brousse became competitive, lingered on the Embassy steps, and outdid his ambassador in flattery.

  The next day CYNTHIA received red roses from Brousse and a discreet little card from the Ambassador. The flowers paved the way for lunch. The card was an invitation to an Embassy party.

  Lunch was a long affair and ended in the house on O Street. Charles Brousse had been married three times, and the proximity of his latest wife gave piquancy to the affair—and protective secrecy for CYNTHIA. She played the role of mistress so well that Brousse paid her the highest compliment. She would have been the ideal wife of an ambassador, provided he was the ambassador. He had social and cultural attributes far superior to Ambassador Henry-Haye’s, did she not agree? CYNTHIA agreed.

  * David Kahn, who describes himself as an “amateur cryptologist,” holds a Ph.D. degree from Oxford, was a newspaperman, and is an associate professor of journalism at New York University. He is a past president of the American Cryptogram Association and of the New York Cipher Society. He has written numerous articles and a celebrated book. “Kahn’s The Codebreakers is indispensable to the serious student of cryptology,” INTREPID wrote in 1975.

  36

  Captain Brousse was understandably bitter about the British preventive attack on the French fleet at Oran in 1940. Admiral Sir James Somerville, commanding Force H, which sank the French warships, wrote later: “It was the biggest political blunder of modern times. . . . The French were furious that we did not trust them to prevent the ships falling into German hands. . . . I’d sooner that happened than we should have to kill a lot of our former allies. We all feel thoroughly dirty and ashamed. . . .”

  What had led to this drastic action? CYNTHIA, trying to coax Brousse into co-operation, felt she needed some answers and asked for a briefing. In her personal notes, which became part of the BSC Papers, she wrote:

  “I had been in South America when France fell. Naturally I knew the general course of events. I never understood, until BSC briefed me, how desperately hard Churchill struggled to keep the French fighting. He had just become Prime Minister when the Germans swarmed across the French frontiers. In War Cabinet sessions on May 27 and 28, 1940, he learned that Lord Halifax, then still foreign minister, was exploring the possibilities of peace through Italian mediation.* This persistent stupidity terrified Churchill and Stephenson more than anything. This had been their chief enemy for so long—this pathetic belief that somehow you could negotiate peace with Hitler. A puppet French state would deceive Britishers and Americans into thinking you could collaborate with a German empire.

  “There was a frantic period when Churchill tried everything to stop France making a separate peace, even to manipulating President Roosevelt and presenting his statements as evidence of imminent American intervention.

&n
bsp; “There was one exchange, when Stephenson got from the President a guarded message that he was impressed by the French declarations of their intent to continue fighting (this was just before Premier Paul Reynaud packed in). Churchill seized on this, wanted to publish it, called the French and said it was close to an American declaration of war. He signalled Roosevelt his belief that ‘this magnificent message might play a decisive part in turning the course of history.’

  “The President backed off, knowing Churchill’s impetuosity could ruin everything—unseat the President, fuel up the isolationists. He wired Churchill specifically refusing to grant him the right to publish anything with regard to his private communications. This caused consternation in the War Cabinet. Stephenson had to explain the complexities of American politics while Europe fell around British ears. It can’t have been easy.

  “It didn’t help to have the American Ambassador in France, Bill Bullitt, reporting to Washington that the British were holding back help in order to improve their own bargaining position [and after the armistice that] ‘the physical and moral defeat of the new French leaders is so complete that they accept the fate of becoming a province of Nazi Germany. . . . They hope England will be rapidly and completely defeated.’

  “This inside knowledge of Vichy French hatred was what powered Bill Stephenson, of course. He had heard Churchill imploring Marshal Pétain not to hand over the French fleet to the Germans. It was the most violent conversation Churchill ever conducted. Defeated, he told Stephenson ‘We are faced with total French collapse. The total collapse of civilization is inevitable unless we put up a successful defense of these islands.’

  “But that defense could be undermined by appeasement. This was what he wanted to make Americans understand. The Vichy French could destroy us all by encouraging the peace-chasers—what Churchill called the damned benighted bishops and Quakers, capitalists and communists, cowards and cranks, peers and plain dyspeptics. . . .”

  Captain Brousse seemed convinced by the skillful arguments of his new mistress—yes, he agreed, the British did have justification for attacking the French warships. Even now, the French fleet could become a German instrument of war. It was no coincidence that a French admiral, Georges Robert, governed the island of Martinique in Vichy’s name. The island lay off the northeast shoulder of Latin America, on the outer perimeter of the Caribbean. Quite apart from its usefulness to German U-boats, and as a relay station for German intelligence, it served agents of the Foreign Organization of the German National Socialist Party (Ausland Organization NSDAP) under Gauleiter Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, whose principal work was conducted now among Germans in South America.

  And Brousse revealed another reason why Martinique was so handy: there were fifty million ounces of French gold hidden in an old fort there, gold that belonged rightfully to the French people but could be spent, if Vichy continued to dictate what was right for the people, to promote pro-Nazi interests in the Americas.

  The gold could also buy the necessary raw materials for war weapons. If Gauleiter Bohle got his hands on it, he would have the means to tap the rich mineral resources of South America. The secret armies and their suppliers needed large sums of foreign currency. Often it had to be delivered in small-denomination American dollars. These had to be purchased in the United States. But with what? Martinique’s gold offered an obvious solution to the bankrupt British.

  A coded signal left New York for London:

  OPPORTUNITY ARISES OF ORGANIZING REVISED SCHEME TO RELEASE VICHY GOLD. OKAY?

  The reply was equally terse:

  PROCEED PROVIDED BRITISH CONNECTION DISAVOWED.

  Goldfinger told James Bond about his plans to rob Fort Knox:

  Mr. Bond, all my life I have been in love. I have been in love with gold. I love its color, its brilliance, its divine heaviness. I love the texture of gold, that soft slimness that I have learned to gauge so accurately by touch that I can estimate the fineness of a bar within one karat. And I love the warm tang it exudes when I melt it down into a true golden syrup. But above all, Mr. Bond, I love the power that gold alone gives to its owner—the magic of controlling energy, exacting labor, fulfilling one’s every wish and whim and, when need be, purchasing bodies, minds, even souls.

  Goldfinger, like much of Ian Fleming’s writing, was not pure invention. It was inspired by Stephenson’s plan to rob Martinique of the gold that could give BSC the power to energize the revolution in Europe.

  A loyal Frenchman swam the channel, thick with barracuda, between Martinique and the British-held island of St. Lucia with the intention of eventually joining the Free French of General de Gaulle. He gave an astonishing account of how the gold had been delivered by the French naval cruiser Emile Bertin to the capital, Fort-de-France, was loaded onto the ammunition hoists of the old fort nearby and lowered into vaults for storing shells. The stronghold was familiar to the British, who had fought back and forth with the French for control of these islands, so strategically located, in earlier wars for America’s riches.

  A scheme was devised for stealing the gold. A Martiniquais, Jacques Vauzanges, of the French Deuxième Bureau (Military Intelligence) had joined BSC in New York. He was a swashbuckling figure who proposed that he return to Martinique and lead a rebellion against Vichy. The British equipped him with radio and codes. The Vichy French issued him with travel papers on the strength of his past loyalties and his present claim to have become a businessman.

  Stephenson had strong arguments for backing a coup. The island harbored a squadron of the French fleet, the aircraft carrier Béarn and some 120 planes—a dangerously unknown quantity and the largest combined fighting force in the region. Even without help from these Vichy units, the Germans made good use of Martinique. In a single month, twenty British-run ships were sunk by U-boats around the island. If Germany took over completely, there was also the gold waiting to finance Nazi operations and buy strategic goods in South America.

  Vauzanges had some support among French naval commanders in Martinique. He persuaded other Frenchmen to join them in escaping with naval units to the Canadian port of Halifax. The gold would be carried in one of the warships. But the fall in British fortunes, coupled with resentment over the British attack on French warships at Oran, sapped the plotters’ resolve. By mid-1941, Martinique was firmly committed to Vichy French policies, and Vauzanges abandoned his schemes after a row with the potential rebels, who feared that they might be guilty of betrayal and desertion.

  Churchill queried BSC: Was the whole fifty million ounces of gold still there?

  One of Stephenson’s experts made an assessment. He was Colonel Louis Franck, one of the world’s leading specialists in bullion and arbitrage, and descended from a long line of Belgian government bankers. From New York he followed every financial transaction that might benefit his enemies. He could see no proof that the Martinique gold was yet infiltrating the open markets. But he also reckoned it had the purchasing power of something like one hundred times the fixed price that kept the book value down to $3 billion, an unreal figure.

  Was there some way of getting the gold out? It alone was enough to finance the secret armies that would some day overthrow the occupiers of his homeland.

  Franck suggested an alternative: “Take custody of it, then use it against loans to buy American arms.”

  “That’s the general idea,” said Stephenson. “There’s a small problem of taking custody.”

  They were sitting in his office high above Manhattan. In that remote setting, any idea seemed possible.

  “Neutralize the governor of the French West Indies,” said Franck. “Then prevent any movement out of Martinique. In effect, that puts the gold under our control.” He ended reasonably, “You don’t ask to see each bar of gold in Fort Knox each time you buy U.S. dollars.”

  Stephenson leaned forward suddenly. “I think you’ve got something. We make sure the gold stays in Martinique, but demonstrate we’ve got the power to take it. In those circumstances they might
even pay us in the State Department not to take it. . . .” He pressed a buzzer. “Slip out the back,” he told Franck. “I’ve someone I can use for this—best you don’t meet.”

  The newcomer was the astrologer Louis de Wohl, shipped over from London to become a BSC “magician” in the Jasper Maskelyne world of illusions. Built up in the press by news stories and a “Stars Foretell” column, he was fed enough accurate information so that his prophecies about the course of the war were validated. An ever-growing audience was becoming convinced of his supernatural powers. He had been touring American cities as “the famous Hungarian astrologer” and was now back in New York.

  “Cancel further engagements,” Stephenson told this stout little man with the high-domed head and heavy-frame glasses. “Do a bit of honest fortunetelling. We’ll be in touch.”

  CYNTHIA’s reports from Washington were examined with renewed care, especially those in which Ambassador Henry-Haye commented on the West Indies. Then Wohl wrote in his syndicated column that a prominent Vichy collaborator serving in some ramshackle tropical island would shortly suffer a “stroke of the sun” and go maboul.

  A week later, a senior French naval officer escaped from Martinique and told reporters in Miami that Admiral Robert had gone mad. The French Governor was indeed ill with sunstroke. Wohl’s credibility rose; the BSC rumor factories found a receptive audience for gossip that the Free French might take over the island. These hints and rumors unnerved the garrison. Policy became less pro-German. The gold was as good as in British custody, because the island was now under constant British naval and BSC surveillance. Adding to the pressure, U.S. Admiral John W. Greenslade flew over to see Robert. While the United States would never dream of interfering, Washington was watching the fate of the base and its warships and warplanes. Back at the White House, Greenslade reported that even if the Bank of England went “bust,” the British could pay their debts “one way or another.”