A Treachery of Spies
Page 48
‘It can’t have been hard to narrow down, surely. How many Germans emigrated to the US in 1957?’
‘Sixteen hundred.’ He laughs, dryly, at the look on her face. ‘Not in that year alone – but sixteen hundred Nazis were repatriated under Operation Paperclip in the years after the war and, Kramme being Kramme, he had set up his identity long before he had to run. There really was a John Lakoff, lone child of a widowed mother, who really did live in Missouri and really did join a tank regiment as a lance corporal and was then seconded to the army intelligence unit as a result of his linguistic capacity, later to parachute behind the front lines. We assume he died in Sachsenhausen, but have no proof. Certainly he died before the war’s end because Kramme took his place and worked his identity in the years from forty-five to fifty-seven, so that when he jumped ship, as it were, John Lakoff already had a strong and plausible legend.’
‘And Diem? Did you know it was JJ?’
‘Not then. That was our biggest failure in fifty-seven. We thought the Americans would trust Paul Rey enough to tell him Diem’s identity.’ Laurence pinches his nose. Fleetingly, he is discomfited. ‘We gambled everything on that one throw. We lost. Two of the very best people in the world paid for that mistake with their lives.’
‘So when did you find out who he was? And how?’
‘In the summer of 2014, when Conrad Lakoff first became SOD-JTARG, an article appeared in one of the online intelligence journals. One shot, taken from one particular angle, showed a distinct similarity to Kramme. They took it down within twenty-four hours, but Sophie had already seen it and brought it to Paul and me.’
‘That’s the image on the wall in the cabin?’
‘Indeed.’ He looks pleased that she recognized it.
‘You could have shot JJ then,’ Picaut says. ‘He’s not particularly well protected.’
‘Sixty years ago, we’d have done so, and not realized it was already too late. By waiting until now, we had a chance – not a great one, but one we thought worth the risk – to find the kinds of evidence that would bring down the entire family.’
‘Destroy Diem’s legacy.’
‘Exactly so.’
‘We needed something big enough to draw them out,’ Elodie says. ‘JJ always knew the ciné film from Kramme’s wedding had survived. We set up the film company and used it to leak rumours that Paul was going to release it and make it the centrepiece of a television series that would shed light on the Maquis.’
‘Sophie had killed John Lakoff by then?’
‘Yes, but that wasn’t … nobody planned that. Kramme was there when she went to visit Paul. They recognized each other. She—’
‘If you say she had no choice—’
‘By her lights, she didn’t.’ Laurence says this, leaning back with his arms folded across his chest. ‘We grew up in a different world, Captain. There were debts to be paid. What it did was to let the Lakoffs know that we were onto them. In many ways, it added to the film’s credibility; they could see it as an attempt to expose them.’
‘So you were goading the entire Lakoff family into action? Men who spent their lives in a world where death comes easy. Did you ever stop to consider the consequences?’
‘We knew this was a hard game. Admittedly, we didn’t expect that Pierre—’
‘You didn’t expect the immediate descendants of a Nazi war criminal and a lifelong traitor to kill to protect their secret? You’re lucky they didn’t blow up half of Orléans just to cover their tracks.’ Picaut is angry. The three opposite are silent.
‘We thought they would come for us,’ Laurence says, at length. He has lost his dry, so-English smile. ‘Me, Sophie, René. In our arrogance, we imagined ourselves still relevant. We failed in many things, and I regret Pierre’s death more deeply than I can say. But we have achieved a great deal that is valuable. The world knows, now, that there is something rotten at the heart of our body politic that stretches back to the war. We lost our moral direction and we need urgently to find it again before the patterns of the past repeat themselves on a greater scale than any we experienced.’
‘You think it’s possible to undo damage done sixty years ago?’
‘I sincerely hope so, Captain. We have done our best. Others, now, must take up the baton.’
An announcer calls a flight in French and then in English. Laurence angles his elbow. Elodie slides her hand into it. They look particularly British. He says, ‘We have a plane to catch. Goodbye, Captain. We may not return to Orléans, but should you travel to England, you will always be welcome at Ridgemount.’
They weave into the crowds, and are gone. Martin lifts his bag, one-handed. ‘I should be going, too.’
He steps towards the gate. Picaut steps in front of him, blocking the way. He could walk through her, or round her. He stops. She says, ‘Tell me why you killed Edward and Conrad Lakoff.’
‘What makes you think I did?’
‘If it wasn’t you, then it’s Elodie or Laurence, and I’m still trying to believe they are better than that.’
He laughs, dryly. ‘If it was Elodie, she’d have cut their tongues out. She inherited her mother’s tendency to dramatize.’
‘Thank you. I’ll sleep better knowing that.’
‘You’re welcome.’ They call his flight for the second, or perhaps the third time. ‘I have to go. My father’s funeral is at the end of the week and I wish to be there.’ He holds out his hand. ‘I didn’t kill them, Captain. Their deaths were as they seem. Each died by his own hand.’
‘But you made them do it.’
He thinks a moment, chewing his lip. ‘What did Elodie write in her cipher, the one that you read?’
‘Paul Rey’s son stop Diem’s legacy query. You are Paul Rey’s son. And you have stopped Diem’s legacy.’
‘Have I?’
‘The legacy was Conrad Lakoff. How much more power can you have than getting to be head of the NSA?’
‘That’s an interesting question. Some day, we might have an opportunity to debate it. But you are forgetting the new legacy that is on its way: Martha’s son.’
‘Laurence said Martha and her unborn child would be left alone.’
‘Laurence was speaking for himself. I have a … reputation and the Lakoffs know more of the reality behind the myths than most. I told them that if they wanted the child to live, there was a price. They believed me.’ He flashes her a look, appraising. ‘Did you ever work out who killed Pierre Fayette?’
‘Because it clearly wasn’t a man, and so the Lakoffs were lying?’ Her team has debated exactly this point for most of the morning. She says, ‘My money is on Martha. We have a partial fingerprint that matches hers and a woman’s footprint in his garden near where his gun was fired, but Ducat won’t let me arrest her without more evidence. He’s under pressure from above.’
‘Because Martha Lakoff was also not what she seemed.’
‘CIA?’
‘Far darker than that. We’re moving into a world where private enterprise calls the shots. Martha belongs in that world. As, I suppose, do I. It was Martha who killed Sophie.’
Blonde, pregnant, oh-so-helpful Martha. It’s surprisingly easy to imagine her dealing in murder. And yet: ‘I still struggle to imagine Sophie Destivelle going quietly to her death.’
‘I think if you’d met her … She had enormous courage. I learned a great deal from her.’ He looks down at the ground for a long moment, and then up again. ‘We were bred for this confrontation, Martha and I. Our lives have been shaped for it, our skills nurtured. It was always going to come to this. I am enormously sorry you became involved.’
His name is called one more time. She says, ‘Will they hold the flight for you for ever?’
He grins, and is young, and very like the pictures of his father. ‘Not for ever.’ His grip is as dry and firm as it was when she first met him. ‘Goodbye, Captain Picaut. For all kinds of reasons, I trust we never have to meet again, but you should know that I respect you highly. I
t’s the only gift I can give. Go well. Tread lightly in your world. Do not tread into mine.’
He is gone. After a while, Picaut walks back to where her team is waiting. ‘And?’
Patrice pulls a face. ‘No signal. He’s got some kind of white noise generator that screwed the recording. Even the CIA couldn’t get sound out of that.’
Sylvie says, ‘It came on when you started talking.’
And Rollo: ‘Whatever it was, he had it in his bag. He switched it on when he stood up.’
Oh, Martin. Clever, clever Martin.
Wary, Rollo asks, ‘What did he say?’
He said that Martha Lakoff and her unborn child are dead. And they will have died while the three most likely suspects were talking to me in an airport in full view of the CCTV cameras and with all of you as witnesses. There will be no threads, no ties, no way to connect them. You did warn me that this was how he worked.
Picaut slides her phone back into her pocket. ‘He said he didn’t do it.’
AFTERWORD
The experience of writing in a period of time that remains, for some, within their lifetime’s memory, has been an inspiring experience. The world was a different place in the Boudican era, in Imperial Rome, or the fifteenth-century France of Jeanne d’Arc. The language and the social mores were radically different from ours and the historical record was more gap than structure. My challenge in the past was always to find ways to stitch together the small concepts for which there was reasonable evidence, and to sift them from the accretions of later mythology.
The mythology surrounding the Second World War is no smaller, but the recorded detail of the time is many orders of magnitude greater, and where there are gaps, it is still possible – just – to ask those who were alive at the time for their recollections. Even with all the usual misgivings about the fallibility of human memory, this remains a treasure trove beyond expressing for the historical writer.
It also means, however, that it is possible to offend these same people or their immediate descendants. Thus, because much of the texture of this book is drawn from personal memoirs of people whose children and grandchildren are still alive, I have, for the first time, invented places and people to populate the narrative when there were perfectly viable locations and characters available in the historical record.
Thus, Saint-Cybard is a fiction. There is a French town of this name, but it’s down in the south-west and there is no counterpart that I know of in the Jura mountains; certainly not at the location of the one in the narrative. Similarly, while Max Kramme bears a strong resemblance to Klaus Barbie of the Lyon Gestapo, he is not that man. For those with an interest, there is good evidence that during and immediately after the war, Barbie was run as an agent of MI6 by men who believed that the Soviet Union was the greatest threat and who desired access to agents behind eastern lines. They kept him alive after the war when the French had sentenced him to death in absentia, and then passed him to the CIA, who, in due course, helped him escape to Bolivia, from where he was extradited to France in the early 1980s. He died in prison in 1991.
The women and men of the Special Operations Executive – Sophie, Céline, Patrick, Fabien, Daniel, René and the others – are each drawn piecemeal from the lives of those whose memoirs and biographies are filled on every page with acts of outstanding courage. For those with an interest I will append a bibliography, although it is worth noting that there are still lacunae in many of the accounts and it may well be that these are never filled. I spoke only last week to a woman whose late father told her only hours before he died, ‘I was in the SOE. We did some terrible things.’ He had lived over sixty years in silence and he will not be alone.
There is also the small matter of the fire at the SOE headquarters in Baker Street which (allegedly) destroyed many of its records; and of the complete dissolution of the SOE later at the hands of MI6. Claude Dansey really did loathe them, and although there is not the slightest shred of evidence that his death was in any way related to the SOE, its timing felt apt and I had no qualms about creating a fictional backstory linking the two.
Dansey was not alone in his dislike of the SOE: much of the Establishment disliked the ‘Firm’ when it was in action and were in a hurry to close it down as soon as the war was over. The shabby treatment of many of its agents, particularly the women, remains a source of national shame; in this, Sophie and Céline were unusually lucky to be able to continue with work that made the most of their skills after the war.
Like the SOE, the Jedburghs have been a source of myth and legend, and one of the sparks that ignited this book came from an exploration into the early days of the CIA and the discovery that many of its early operatives had been Jedburghs: men who had been parachuted behind enemy lines around D-Day and spent the summer of ’44 in the mountains of France living like demi-gods. They had broadly good weather. They could summon food, drink, cigarettes and armaments from the sky. They had trained to be as fit as any military group of their time and they were given free rein, more or less, to kill anything in a grey uniform. Most of all, they were indisputably on the right side of a relatively black-and-white moral argument and so could hunt the Nazis and their French collaborators with a clear conscience.
Reading Colin Beavan’s Operation Jedburgh, I came to understand that many of the global catastrophes of the late twentieth century – of Vietnam and Afghanistan, of the entire creation of Al-Qaeda and Isis/Daesh – could, in part, be explained by the fact that these men and their immediate successors spent their post-war careers trying to reproduce the heady days of that summer in France, without taking into account the fact that France was a Western industrialized nation whose political and religious foundations were broadly aligned with those of other Western industrialized nations.
One further piece of serendipity brought this book into being. I shared an agent with Nick Cook and so came to read his fascinating work, The Hunt for Zero Point. It was from this that I first learned of Operation Paperclip and the sixteen hundred high-ranking Nazis smuggled out of Germany under the noses of the Nuremberg prosecutors, and given new names and new identities in the United States. It was in Nick’s book, too, that I first read the question voiced by Céline in A Treachery of Spies: ‘What happens to the soul of a nation if into its body politic is injected the undiluted virus of Nazism?’ The implications of this, it seemed to me, were worth exploring, and a novel is an opportunity to tease things out and look at them from new angles.
I leave you with a quote from Colin Beavan’s book. It refers to the Jedburghs but I have no doubt that it applies equally to the agents of the Special Operations Executive with whom they often fought:
Some think of Operation Jedburgh as the bravest thing they had ever done. Some see it as the most terrifying nightmare. But all marvel that, when the green light blinked on in their black-painted bombers, they’d actually jumped.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
This bibliography is neither comprehensive nor exhaustive, but it is a good starting point for those interested in the SOE, the Jedburghs and the evolution of the CIA into the NSA.
Bailey, Roderick: Forgotten Voices of the Secret War: An Inside History of Special Operations during the Second World War (Ebury Press, 2008)
Bamford, James: The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America (Anchor Books, 2008)
Beavan, Colin: Operation Jedburgh: D-Day and America’s First Shadow War (Viking, 2006)
Binney, Marcus: Secret War Heroes: Men of the Special Operations Executive (Hodder & Stoughton, 2005)
Braddon, Russell: Nancy Wake: SOE’s Greatest Heroine (The History Press, 2005, first published 1956)
Buckmaster, Maurice: They Fought Alone: The True Story of SOE’s Agents in Wartime France (Biteback, 2014, first published 1958)
Cook, Nick: The Hunt for Zero Point (Century, 2001)
Cowburn, Benjamin: No Cloak, No Dagger: Allied Spycraft in Occupied France (Frontline Books, 2009, first published 1960)
> Cunningham, Cyril: Beaulieu: The Finishing School for Secret Agents (Pen & Sword, 1997)
Elliott, Geoffrey: The Shooting Star: Denis Rake, MC: A Clandestine Hero of the Second World War (Methuen, 2009)
Escott, Beryl E. (Squadron Leader): The Heroines of SOE: F Section: Britain’s Secret Women in France (The History Press, 2010)
Foot, M. R. D.: SOE: The Special Operations Executive 1940–1946 (Pimlico, 1999, first published 1984)
Fuller, Jean Overton: Déricourt: The Chequered Spy (Michael Russell, 1989)
Garfield, Simon: Private Battles: How the War Almost Defeated Us: Our Intimate Diaries (Ebury Press, 2006)
Goldsmith, John: Accidental Agent: Behind Enemy Lines with the French Resistance (Pen & Sword, 2016, first published 1971)
Harrison, David M.: SOE: Para-Military Training in Scotland During World War 2 (private publication)
Helm, Sarah: A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (Abacus, 2005)
Hue, André: The Next Moon: The Remarkable True Story of a British Agent Behind the Lines in Wartime France (Viking, 2004)
Irwin, Will (Lt. Col. Ret.): The Jedburghs: The Secret History of the Allied Special Forces, France 1944 (PublicAffairs, 2005)
Jacobs, Peter: Codenamed Dorset: The Wartime Exploits of Major Colin Ogden-Smith, Commando and SOE (Frontline Books, 2014)
Jacobsen, Annie: Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Little, Brown, 2014)
Jenkins, Ray: A Pacifist at War: The Life of Francis Cammaerts (Hutchinson, 2009)