by Paul Kix
We have got to organize movements in enemy-occupied territory . . . This “democratic international” must use many different methods, including industrial and military sabotage, labour agitation and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist acts against traitors and German leaders, boycotts and riots . . . What is needed is a new organization to coordinate, inspire, control and assist the nationals of the oppressed countries who must themselves be the direct participants. We need absolute secrecy, a certain fanatical enthusiasm, willingness to work with people of different nationalities, complete political reliability . . . The organization should, in my view, be entirely independent of the War Office machine.
For two weeks the cabinet debated this secret organization. At last the outgoing prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, who had appeased Hitler in 1938 by giving him Czechoslovakia without a fight, signed a “most secret paper,” one of the last of his life, and one that would have begun to redeem his reputation had anyone known of it. Chamberlain said that, on the authority of the prime minister, “a new organization shall be established forthwith to coordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas . . . This organization will be known as Special Operations Executive.”
The document became SOE’s founding charter, and its passages—explicitly stated or implied—charged the agency with many responsibilities. First, SOE would train the foreign nationals flooding England’s shores in accepted and many unaccepted styles of war, and then parachute these fighters back to their occupied countries, where they would assassinate high-ranking Germans, sabotage the factories that made Nazi weaponry and the trains that transported it, and recruit other like-minded natives to the cause of liberation. Furthermore, inside enemy lines, SOE would drop tons of firearms, ammunition, explosives, and money near the camps of known Resistance groups, so that they might continue their anarchic efforts and draw out the men and women who wanted to fight but by dint of circumstance couldn’t get to London.
Really, the world had seen nothing like SOE. Yes, guerrilla warfare had been around for millennia, but it had been exercised locally, by small and often subjected bands of people, not administered by a foreign superpower that first trained and equipped and then sent back the rebel fighters who might free their countries from Nazi subjugation. For that reason alone, SOE was remarkable. But the agency had even greater ambitions, and here it’s important to return to T. E. Lawrence. While Lawrence served as SOE’s spiritual father, his actions in the Arabian desert in 1917 and ’18 were often of his own devising. Sometimes superiors had no idea what he was doing. SOE, by contrast, would develop and closely monitor the actions of thousands of Lawrences as they spread their ill-will across an entire nation—across an entire continent.
The scope of it was breathtaking. And Winston Churchill, who had become prime minister on the very day of the German blitzkrieg into France, loved it. It drew on his own history with irregular warfare.
Churchill lived to regale people with how, in 1895, under contract for London’s Daily Graphic, he’d traveled to Cuba and watched revolutionaries usurp their Spanish overlords, sabotaging train tracks that the Spanish general staff frequented, and raiding the Spaniards’ forts when they least expected it. The guerrillas, one Spanish officer told Churchill, with a quivering breath, were “everywhere and nowhere.” Churchill had seen the same thing in India, as a second lieutenant in the cavalry, fighting the rebels who’d revolted against Britain’s control of the Malakand Pass, and then again in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1899, where he’d gone to cover the Second Boer War for London’s Morning Post. At one point, the Boers derailed the train on which Churchill was traveling, and then opened fire. Churchill narrowly escaped, but was ultimately taken prisoner along with fifty other men in an officers’ camp in Pretoria. His subsequent tale, of fleeing the camp and trekking to the border of Portuguese East Africa some three hundred miles away, without a compass, food, or knowledge of Afrikaans, made his name back in London. But his conviction that greater military flexibility would be needed against Britain’s future enemies clung to him as closely as his political fame, and so over the next twenty years he traveled with T. E. Lawrence to Cairo, funneled millions of pounds to a tsarist morphine addict out to topple Lenin’s Communism, and even dined with Michael Collins, the guerrilla who led the fight for Irish independence.
Across all those years, he never lost his admiration for the saboteur. And by 1940, facing an enemy that threatened to overwhelm his tiny island, the newly sworn prime minister, who had spent three decades among insurgents from five countries, set out to create a force worthy of them to defend his own land. “And now, set Europe ablaze,” he said of SOE’s founding. SOE was more for Churchill than a last resort to repel Hitler’s domination. It was the lessons of his wars incarnate. It was his proof that any army, even one as great as Germany’s, could be defeated in part by small bands of rebels, trained like British commandos, striking hard against the Nazi underbelly, and blending back into the population. Everywhere and nowhere.
In his busy wartime schedule, Churchill would meet with visiting SOE agents. But like the codebreakers at Bletchley Park who intercepted German intelligence, Churchill could say nothing publicly of SOE or its ambition. When the war cabinet approved the organization, it insisted that no record of its formation appear on the “order paper” of the House of Commons. Secret funds covered some of SOE’s costs, and Parliament had no control over them.
It was an “eccentrically English organization . . . The sort of thing that looks odd at the time, and eminently sensible later,” wrote SOE historian M. R. D. Foot. First, agency oversight fell to a little-known bureaucracy, the Ministry of Economic Warfare. Any other leader would have placed it under his purview, as Franklin Roosevelt did when the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the CIA, formed in World War II. But Churchill wanted SOE free of the pressures to hew to a prime minister’s political necessities. So he wouldn’t oversee it, which also began to explain why the Ministry of Defense wouldn’t either. Churchill wanted nothing smelling of conventional warfare near SOE. In theory, one of the existing intelligence services could have provided support, but Churchill was unhappy with MI6’s oversight of a bungled Section D mission in Stockholm. Churchill held the affair as proof that existing intelligence services shouldn’t be allowed to manage the newly christened Special Operations Executive.
As a result, SOE wasn’t exactly beloved by other intelligence branches. Churchill created a coordinating committee between the groups, which met twice then never again, due to hostilities against SOE. Some of this was to be expected. MI6 depended on the discreet collection of foreign intelligence; SOE used some of that same intelligence to literally bomb its way across Europe. MI6 officers wondered if what Britain was really sabotaging was its own efforts. Still, some of the animus seemed little more than petty jealousy, rising from the belief that Churchill saw SOE as a favorite child. The discarded boys of MI6 grew petulant, celebrating any bad news. “SOE’s in the shit,” the assistant chief of the agency, Claude Dansey, gleefully told another agent after the Gestapo’s infiltration of a massive SOE-funded Resistance network. “The Germans are mopping them up all over the place.” MI6 tried to convince Churchill to disband SOE. But, as always, the prime minister stood by it.
This infuriated the air force, too. The RAF said throughout the war that it could spare few planes for SOE missions, which some RAF officers saw as inefficient if not pointless. “Your work is a gamble which may give us a valuable dividend or may produce nothing,” one RAF commander told an SOE staffer. “My bombing offensive is not a gamble.” But Desmond Morton, the MI6 officer who gave Churchill raw intelligence through the 1930s, said the prime minister always loved the great risk and greater reward of “funny operations.” Churchill drew constantly from his past, and let the softly lit sepia of his memory—the cosmopolitan saboteurs and fevered adventurers—inform his present-day decisions, sure that in the small corners of occupied Euro
pe ideologues like those from his youth lived on.
CHAPTER 7
Robert de La Rochefoucauld was enchanted by the little he’d learned of SOE, and the agency’s asymmetrical battlefields—a new kind of war—played to his youthful arrogance. He could make his mark as no La Rochefoucauld had, and have fun doing it. By the time Robert left his meeting at Carlton Gardens with de Gaulle, he had a sense that SOE carried a reputation the Free French could never equal—that no fighting force could. The agency, in fact, had already engineered two of the Allies’ biggest victories in the European theater. The first was the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Nazis’ plan to rid Europe of Jews, by two Czech agents who threw a contact-sensitive bomb onto Heydrich’s Mercedes as it took a hairpin turn on a Prague street. The second feat was the sabotage of the Norsk Hydro facility in Norway, where the Germans made heavy water, a key substance in the production of nuclear weapons. There, nine Norwegian SOE agents raided the heretofore impenetrable grounds high atop a mountain, found the heavy-water cells in the basement of one building, and set their timed bombs against them. The agents then took with them the Norwegian scientist who monitored the room, backtracked across the grounds they’d trespassed, and watched the explosion in awe—all without firing their weapons.
When Robert de La Rochefoucauld met again with Eric Piquet-Wicks, he said he wanted to join this secret organization, whose members had the temerity to go where no one dared. Piquet-Wicks smiled. Robert was a nobleman with an adventurous streak, and though all sorts of people joined SOE—its thirteen thousand worldwide agents ranged “from pimps to princesses,” wrote one historian—Piquet-Wicks said his agency required a certain type of commando in 1943. More important than Robert’s class, in fact, or even his sense of daring, was his nationality. SOE needed Frenchmen.
France’s geographic proximity, and its strategic, military, and political importance to Britain outweighed the considerations of other nations. SOE’s organizational chart reflected this: Most occupied countries were overseen by a single section of SOE. The agency’s brass thought France required six sections.
Two of these did the majority of the work in country and left the deepest impressions. The first was F Section. It launched in 1940, with bilingual British agents on the ground who organized French subversion. Some of SOE’s best people came from F Section, but the agency expanded beyond it because, early in the war, F Section made a mistake. It had the hubris to refuse to work with de Gaulle’s Free French forces in London. In fact, SOE called F Section the “independent French” section, and de Gaulle’s Free French staff were told it didn’t exist. When the Free French found out otherwise, they were furious, and this gave rise to another French section within SOE: R/F Section.
R/F worked closely with the Free French. SOE created it in May of 1941 out of political necessity—someone had to play nice with de Gaulle—but as the worldwide battle wore on, R/F arguably passed F Section in importance, especially as Frenchmen made their way to London and asked to meet with the general. De Gaulle melded the oversight of R/F with his own intelligence agency, the Bureau central de renseignements et d’action, or BCRA.
Eric Piquet-Wicks, with his goofy smile, was put in charge of R/F in the summer of 1941, his headquarters at 1 Dorset Square being a short walk from de Gaulle’s Free French headquarters at Carlton Gardens. Piquet-Wicks’s R/F and De Gaulle’s intelligence bureau worked so closely that many missions were shaded by Free French imperatives. Even Piquet-Wicks had a hard time separating the overlap.
R/F started “woefully small,” Piquet-Wicks wrote, but grew to perhaps five hundred agents; an exact figure is difficult to ascertain because of the porous loyalties of the men and women who worked within it. But it was R/F that convinced Churchill to provide massive arms and aircraft to the French Resistance; R/F that handled four times the number of parachute drops of F Section; and R/F that first interviewed and recruited Jean Moulin, the French résistant who built massive networks throughout the country, and the saboteur who, above all, the Germans wanted captured and killed.
Eric Piquet-Wicks blew life onto the kindling of his section until its flames billowed and clouded the sky. The effort exhausted the man. By the time Robert de La Rochefoucauld met him, Piquet-Wicks had developed tuberculosis. He had ceded his post and was on doctor’s orders to keep to a normal eight-hour schedule, but he loved the work too much, which was why he saw La Rochefoucauld now after the young’s résistant’s meeting with de Gaulle.
Piquet-Wicks told Robert he wanted the young man to work for the “action” division, the clandestine operations unit that the Free French oversaw in conjunction with the R/F Section. La Rochefoucauld would be a British agent, but because of the byzantine bureaucracy of R/F, Robert could also call himself a proper French saboteur, a résistant nonpareil.
If, the agency man stressed, Robert could make it through the training.
CHAPTER 8
The first thing they did was hike. Every morning, trainees like Robert who had passed SOE’s psychological and character assessments woke at 6 a.m. and headed out on two- to three-mile walks, which soon became fifteen to twenty, with full rucksacks strapped to their backs. This was in Inchmery, near Southampton, on the coast of the English Channel in southern England, the home of R/F agents’ basic training. But La Rochefoucauld wouldn’t have known that because SOE staff was adept at keeping certain details from its foreign trainees, for security purposes. (La Rochefoucauld thought the majority of his training took place in Manchester, some 225 miles north.) The secret organization kept many secrets. Agents after the war recalled being grouped during training by nationality or skill set—radio transmitters, industrial saboteurs—but never knowing a fellow trainee’s name. Only aliases were used. Any letter written home was censored by SOE officers. Even the daily hikes served an ulterior motive: The staff wanted to see which trainees were drunks or addicts and therefore unsuitable.
Basic training lasted around three weeks, at which point the real commando lessons began. Robert moved on to Scotland, to the wild and stunning western coast of Inverness-shire, and the massive country estates there, which SOE head Colin Gubbins knew well and which was, as one agency historian put it, “secure from inquisitive eyes.” Inverness-shire had few roads and, because of a nearby naval base, it had been declared a restricted area by the Admiralty. Not everyone found it as perfect as Gubbins did. In the fall, a Dutch agent described it as a “wretched, barren countryside, thinly populated; rain fell from a heavy sky that never cleared completely . . . a most depressing place.”
La Rochefoucauld and the roughly thirty prospective agents in his class learned the skills that hinted at the war awaiting them: how to jump from a train moving at thirty miles per hour and roll away unharmed; how to crawl on their bellies and grow accustomed to live rounds being fired above them. The staff encouraged them to try escaping without getting caught, to live in the wild, to read maps and compasses. SOE personnel gave trainees a number to call in case they got in trouble, but, naturally, no name to ask for.
They learned to sabotage almost anything. The main training explosive was a plastic detonator consisting of cyclonite mixed with a plasticizing medium, one of the safest explosives to practice on, because it wouldn’t ignite even if a rifle was fired at it. It needed a detonator in the mass of the explosive to set itself off. Plus, it could be molded into almost any shape, like dough. Perfect for a would-be saboteur.
The don of industrial sabotage was Lt. Col. George T. Rheam, and as the agents moved through their paramilitary courses, they split off into specialty schools like Rheam’s on demolition, an advanced class at Special Training School 17, in Brickendonbury Estate. Tall, somber, even forbidden-looking, Rheam was an inspiring teacher. Students not only learned to blow up trains and railways and bridges—the targets of saboteurs since T. E. Lawrence’s day—but gained a supple understanding of when to detonate what, with which means, and where. For instance, it was far better, after targeting a
train or bridge, to also sabotage the cranes that cleared the derailed locomotives; that could truly slow the Nazi war machine. One could blow up a row of electric poles stretching to the horizon, or one could target the single squat transformer from which the lines derived their power. Sabotaging the whole of a Nazi munitions factory might be good for the spirit of an occupied people, but it was far more efficient and destructive to target only a vital, difficult-to-replace component of the factory, which meant versing oneself in the architecture and engineering of industrial plants. As the SOE historian M. R. D. Foot wrote: “Anyone trained by [Rheam] could look at a factory with quite new eyes, spot the few essential machines in it, and understand how to stop them with a few well-placed ounces of explosive.” Rheam had personally instructed the Norwegians who went on to sabotage the heavy-water cells at Norsk.
Rheam taught that bombs could take on all shapes and could inflict damage that wasn’t always measured in material losses. SOE agents in the field once stuffed rat carcasses with plastic explosives; though the mission largely failed, German administrators still inundated local secret police with dead vermin that they thought held clues to the nationality of the saboteurs. In another instance, SOE operatives camouflaged explosive materiel as coal; when a German fed it into a furnace the tiny bombs not only totaled a plant but left many workers afraid to return to the job. Rheam loved that sort of ingenuity.
The art of hand-to-hand combat was just as inspired—and just as savage. SOE adopted the teachings of W. E. Fairbairn and E. A. Sykes, two former policemen from Shanghai, who patrolled the port city when it was possibly the most dangerous in the world. Fairbairn knew multiple forms of martial arts and had also picked up French savate, Cornish wrestling, and English boxing. Sykes was, simply put, the best marksman anyone had seen. La Rochefoucauld was stunned by what he learned.