Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  Next morning she was in London, sitting before the desk of Colonel Kenwick who headed the Western Europe Directorate of the S.O.E. in Norgeby House on Baker Street. The colonel had her file; she had been screened while she was still in France. A short while later, she was interviewed further by a captain named Piquet-Wicks and then driven to 10 Duke Street to meet Colonel Passy, the head of General de Gaulle’s secret service.

  After her training, she returned to Duke Street and was told what she was supposed to do, and she was asked to memorize the symbols by which members of her small team were known. Then she was given her papers; a carte d’identité, a permis de conduire and current ration cards, all forged by the S.O.E. That same evening she was taken to a camouflaged airfield somewhere in the Midlands, and given a cup of hot tea, a little box of benzedrine to keep her awake if necessary and a cyanide tablet to put her to sleep quickly and lethally should the necessity arise. There was a special garment waiting for her, a suit, rubber helmet and spine pad, all somewhat oversized, but useful in cushioning her landing by parachute. She was given a revolver, a knife and a compass, and then escorted to the field and put aboard a Lancaster bomber.

  At 3 a.m., she dropped into France. When she hit the ground, a man came over to help her up. “Is that you, Marie?” he asked. She said, “Yes,” although nobody had bothered to tell her that she would be called Marie. The man drove her to Lyons-la-Forêt and next morning she took the morning train to Paris and went to an address where others were waiting for her. The Mouse had arrived.

  The man she had come to see was an engineer who worked in an aircraft factory in Paris, but who lived in a suburb called Vaucresson. He had just returned from Germany, where he worked in a place called Peenemuende and where he had seen some strange experiments with flying bombs that were guided to their targets from the ground. He needed someone to whom he could relay the information. The Mouse went to Vaucresson that same night, found the man’s apartment and stepped up to a window on the ground floor behind which a light was burning. She scratched out her signal on the pane and then walked into a dark kitchen through the unlocked back door. She groped her way to a table and picked up an envelope. A man’s voice whispered an invitation to come into another room. She followed the sound of the voice into the dark room and heard the man say, “I’m not ready for you yet. That is only part of your information. We will have to meet again next Wednesday.”

  “Where?” the Mouse asked.

  “In a bistro called the Floridore. It’s on Quai Voltaire. At six o’clock?”

  “The plans,” the man continued, talking about the contents of the envelope she held in her hand, “they are dangerous. If they catch you with them, we will all be in trouble.”

  “They won’t,” she said, but she wasn’t certain. “Are they making spot checks on the train to Paris?”

  “Not as a rule,” the man said, “but you can never tell. The Boche is inscrutable.”

  “Adieu, then,” she said. “Till next Wednesday.”

  “The Mouse, are you the Mouse?” the man asked, but she left through the dark kitchen without answering the question. She heard steps on the cobblestoned street and waited until two soldiers strolled by, a German patrol. They passed and she walked out, turned a corner, walked down the hill to the railroad station and caught the last train back to Paris.

  The Mouse was worried. Her assignment was to pick up the papers, return them to Lyons-la-Forêt, and take them back to England on a Lysander. Now she would have to stay on for five more perilous days, with some of the plans in her hands. What to do with the plans in the meantime? Where to go? She was supposed to spend but a single day at the first address.

  She decided to return to Lyons-la-Forêt. She went to Pont de l’Arche, then on to Fleury-sur-Andelle and asked a courier of the underground to take her home. That night a Lysander came and she gave her envelope to the pilot.

  Next morning she went back to Paris. She had a second address and even the key to a flat, but when she called at the house, the concierge rudely refused to let her enter. Later she learned that the concierge’s rudeness was calculated to warn her that the flat was “hot,” and was under Gestapo surveillance.

  She had to make one of her emergency contacts, a woman named Maud, who had a glove shop on rue de la Boétie. She walked into the shop and asked for a pair of green suede gloves, size 6¼, and was conducted to the back of the shop, to a desk behind which sat a plump woman of about sixty. “The lady is looking for green suede gloves, size 6¼,” the salesgirl said, and the plump woman stretched out her hand: “I’m glad to see you,” she said.

  The Mouse stayed in her flat until Wednesday afternoon, then walked to the Floridore on Quai Voltaire and entered the bistro at six o’clock sharp. She was looking for a man who would be reading a copy of the Journal Officiel, but the bistro was empty.

  Her instructions were never to wait for an appointment, so she left at once, but returned fifteen minutes later, sat down on the terrace and ordered a St. Raphaël with soda water. When the waiter put the siphon on her table, she absent-mindedly scratched the bottle and the waiter gave her an evening paper in a thin bamboo holder. On the third page, where the last-minute news was printed, the word Tronchet was underscored in an ad. Also underlined were the numbers 8 and 5, and in another column 2 and 7. She paid and took a cab to rue Tronchet, got out at the corner and walked to No. eighty-five. She went to the second floor and rang the bell of Apartment seven. A man opened the door and the Mouse stood there absent-mindedly scratching the glass pane of the tall door. The man opened the door wide and allowed her to enter.

  “The engineer had to go back to Germany,” he said. “We will put you up until he returns.” That same evening he drove the Mouse to a house in Neuilly where she was given the job of tutoring a little girl of nine. “We don’t know how long it might take the man to return from Germany,” he explained. “You will be safer here.”

  She waited two months, then a man came to drive her to Vaucresson. He deposited her in front of the post office, then drove away, and she walked to the engineer’s house on the hill. She scratched the lighted window, walked to the back door, went into the kitchen and picked up an envelope. At that moment a car drove up in front of the house. A man stepped out of it, while another stayed at the wheel. The man walked up to the main entrance and rang the bell. The Mouse made her way quietly to the end of the garden in the back of the house, scaled the low fence into another garden, then into a third, then a fourth. She walked out into the street and saw the car driving away from the engineer’s house. She never found out what its mission was. She never saw the engineer again.

  The Mouse was ready to return to England. From Vaucresson she took a train south and then came north again to Fleury-sur-Andelle. Two nights later she wets in the familiar field near Lyons-la-Forêt, waiting for the Lysander to pick her up. There was the buzzing sound in the air and two men came to light the torches. An hour later the Mouse was in Tangmere and the British had the blueprints of the V-1.

  On her next mission she scratched the window pane of a window in a house in Chartres. It was a Gestapo man who opened the door. Her contact had been picked up an hour before and he talked when they were drowning him in his own bathtub filled with ice cold water. That was the last time the Mouse could scratch her signal on any pane anywhere.

  This was the frightful flaw in the S.O.E. setup. The Germans knew far too much about it. Some of the best and most intrepid agents of conquered Europe fell into Nazi hands because, after a while, the Germans had planted their spies in virtually every one of the resistance groups.

  In Slovakia, they captured a whole O.S.S. team flown in too late to aid a badly prepared and thoroughly corrupted rebellion actually led by a German agent provocateur. The members of the mission were later put to death, in violation of international law, in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

  In Hungary, His Serene Highness, the Regent himself, was trapped when he started an anti-German plot with
two Yugoslav generals, who were in reality agents of the German secret service operating under a brilliant spy named Wilhelm Hoettl.

  In France, the most brilliant leaders of the resistance movement were caught one after another: Jean Moulin, the heroic mayor of Chartres who was slated to become France’s first Prime Minister after the liberation; General Delestraint; Larat; Bollaert, leaving the leadership of the movement in mediocre hands until the Communists got hold of it. Diana Hope Rowden, a twenty-eight-year-old beauty, was caught, tortured and killed, her limp body dropped into the incinerator at the Natzweiler concentration camp. Violette Szabo, courageous wife of a Free French officer, was put to death in the Ravensbrueck concentration camp when she refused to confess. Even those who survived had to go through hell before the Allies could liberate them. Christopher Burney, who was dubbed “the king of saboteurs” before he, too, was caught, spent eighteen horrible months in the Gestapo prison in Paris and fifteen months in Buchenwald. Scores of Norwegians were kept in the Nazi dungeons on Oslo’s Victoria Terrace, as were Belgians and Poles, Italians and Hungarians elsewhere.

  Even the imperishable French Commandant Pierre Brossolette, fell and so did the White Rabbit himself, Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas.

  Some of the Allied agents fell because the Germans had scored a scoop of their own, the Englandspiel, or the Carillon of England. This carillon began to ring out its misleading theme in September, 1940, after the chance capture of a British agent near Leeuwarden in the Netherlands. The arrest of this pioneer agent was reported at once to Inspector Joseph Schreider, a quiet criminologist not addicted to the perverse methods of Nazi interrogations. It was the first definite proof he had that British agents were coming to Holland and that a Dutch underground war was in the making.

  Schreider consulted a Major Giskes, head of the Abwehr’s counter-espionage in Holland. They decided to check this network by infiltrating it, then turn the tables and gain control of it. They had a couple of “V-men”—informers who posed as Dutch patriots in contact with the budding underground. One was named Anton van der Waals, the other was George Ridderhof, called Sweat Brow because he always perspired profusely, even on the coldest winter nights. Schreider and Giskes used their decoys to bring in genuine members of the underground. Anton and George did their best, but for a full year none of the men they guided in fitted the bill.

  At last Sweat Brow reported to Giskes that two agents had just arrived from England. One came as a saboteur, the other as his radioman. He even supplied their real names: the saboteur was Thijs Taconis, a Eurasian born in the Netherlands East Indies; the radioman was Hubertus Lauwers, a young spark of the Dutch merchant marine.

  A few weeks later, the German Radio Control Station in Holland reported a clandestine sender going in The Hague and located the very house in which it operated. “Next transmission is scheduled for March 6, 1942,” Radio Control announced. That day, a delivery van rolled into the street where the radio operated. In the van was Inspector Schreider and a young lieutenant of Radio Control, listening in on the clandestine radio going full blast only a few yards from them. When it was finished, Schreider saw two men come out of the house. A few minutes later both were in the car, handcuffed, being driven at great speed through the icy streets to the Binnenhof, where Schreider had his office. The Germans searched the house and found the radio and the codes. Nobody in Britain knew anything of this misfortune.

  Schreider had a method of his own in handling his prisoners. When Lauwers was brought to his office, Schreider got up and greeted him with a handshake. And when Lauwers revealed to him that he was a lieutenant in the British Army, he addressed his prisoner as Lieutenant Lauwers and seemed to be respecting his rank. But in the midst of this kindness, he turned suddenly to the agent:

  “How about working for us?”

  “What do you mean?” Lauwers shot back.

  “You could get a lot of consideration for yourself,” Schreider said in a quiet voice, “and save your friend’s life if you would agree to continue your radio work as if nothing had happened.”

  He heard Lauwers say, “All right.” Schreider tried to climb into the skull of this young Dutchman. Was he on the level? Secret services prepare their radiomen for just such an eventuality. They provide them with a set of security checks, tricky code symbols within the basic code, and also with a number of apparently innocuous danger signals, which they can send out without being detected even when operating under duress.

  Schreider hesitated to let Lauwers operate the Englandspiel but he had no German aide who could do it. And the next transmission was scheduled for March 12, 1942. Lauwers could not miss it, lest he alert the British by his silence.

  So on March 12, Lauwers was sent to his place again, prepared by Schreider. London responded: “We are planning to send Arbor. Please make arrangements for his reception.” Lauwers paled; he had given the danger signal, and London had not recognized it. A hapless British agent, a major named Bingham who headed the Dutch section of S.O.E. in London, had made a blunder that delivered his whole organization to the Gestapo.

  On March 27, 1942, “Arbor” dropped by parachute into the waiting arms of the Gestapo. And the carillon sang out: “Arbor arrived safely at 11:23 p.m. [2323] as planned.” The Englandspiel was bringing them in.

  If in August, 1943, exactly a year and five months after the first transmission of the Englandspiel, Major Bingham had taken stock of his organization in the Netherlands, he must have been well satisfied with the way it was going. He had managed to get fifty-four agents across to Holland and he knew of only three casualties. He had eighteen senders going, sixteen of which were operating with gratifying regularity. A sabotage organization, organized by his agent George Jambroes in preparation for D-Day, had one thousand and sixty-seven men and women. Substantial amounts of supplies had been flown in for them. An underground with at least one thousand one hundred men and women stood behind the Jambroes Group to aid it at Zero Hour.

  Major Bingham seemed to have good reasons to be satisfied with this achievement, except for one thing. His organization existed only on paper. Of the fifty-four agents Bingham sent in, one was dead and the others were all in the hands of the Gestapo. Jambroes himself sat in a cell and his group didn’t have a single man. The underground was but a figment of Inspector Schreider’s imagination.

  Then it seemed that the Englandspiel would come to an abrupt end. During the night of August 29, 1943, two of Schreider’s prisoners, Johan Bernard Ubbink and Piet Dourlein, broke out of jail and made their way to Switzerland, where they reported to General van Tricht of Dutch Military Intelligence. But Schreider still did not despair. He used one of his eighteen radios to smear the two heroes. “Ubbink and Dourlein escaped with German aid,” he radioed to London, “to infiltrate the Dutch service. We urge appropriate measures against them.” So when the two agents reached London, they were returned to jail and kept there for months, even though they had the true story of the carillon.

  On November 23, 1943, in the pitch darkness of a stormy autumn, three more agents broke out of jail. They made their way to England and reported to their headquarters in Chester Square with the precious secret of Inspector Schreider.

  There was nothing more Schreider could do but to send a last message to Messrs. Blunt, Bingham & Co., the Old Firm on Baker Street.

  “We have known for some time,” the message read, “that you have been doing business in the Netherlands without our help. Having been, as it were, your sole representative for quite some time, we regard this as a breach of confidence. Yet this will not prevent us, should you ever decide to visit us on a far greater scale, from receiving your emissaries with the same hospitality that we have shown your agents in the recent past.”

  After this message, the eighteen transmitters closed down for good. While it lasted, for two years and five months in all, this modern Lorelei lured more than fifty agents and saboteurs onto the rocks. It made arrangements for one hundred and ninety drops and actually recei
ved ninety-five of them. It received five hundred and seventy containers and one hundred and fifty parcels, with almost thirty thousand pounds of explosives, three thousand Sten guns, five thousand revolvers, three hundred Bren guns, two thousand hand grenades, seventy-five radio transmitters, one hundred special signal lamps, five hundred thousand cartridges, five hundred thousand Dutch guilders in cash and a substantial sum in other currencies.

  It was the worst Allied defeat of the secret war.

  20

  On the Eve of D-Day

  A stinging blow that Eisenhower suffered in North Africa in 1943 became partly responsible for the remarkably smooth invasion of France in 1944. It brought Kenneth Strong into his staff and assured superb efficiency in the intelligence preparations of Overlord.

  In February, 1943, during the campaign for Tunisia, front line units sent back to Ike’s headquarters reports about ominous stirrings of the enemy around Fandouk, Faïd, and Gafsa. They had all the characteristics of an imminent and massive counterattack. The front-line observers expected the thrust to come from the direction of Faïd. However, Ike’s own intelligence brass, after first dismissing the warnings as the pipedreams of green troops, finally decided that if and when a counter-attack came, it would come from the direction of Fandouk. The counterattack came from Faïd. The Germans gained enormous headway before the Allied high command could properly comprehend what was hitting them. The Germans moved through the Kas-serine Pass and pushed the Allies back some eighty miles at the point of the deepest German penetration on February 23.

  “The G-2 error was serious,” Eisenhower later wrote. “After the battle I replaced the head of my intelligence organization at AFHQ.”

  The replacement was Brigadier Kenneth William Dobson Strong of the Royal Scots Fusilliers. He was then forty-three years old, an ascetic-looking, wiry, intellectual soldier who had specialized in intelligence throughout his adult life. He was so utterly devoted to his specialty that he had not married, in the belief that only a bachelor, unencumbered by wife and children, could do justice to the all-absorbing demands of his chosen profession.