Dawn was breaking in the remaining glitter of moonlight when the navigator called out that they were coming up to the drop zone. The dispatcher returned to Maria, helped her to her feet, and fastened the straps on her parachute over the jumpsuit and attached them to the static line hooked to the rear fuselage. As he lifted the trapdoor, bitter cold air blew into the fuselage.
Ten minutes to go before the container drop, Kurylowicz began the descent of the aircraft. The bomb-aimer peered down through the bombsight, a finger poised over the button that would release the containers. There was a crackling sound as the bomb doors opened. He called out his instructions to the pilot.
“Left” was always said twice. “Steady” was a way of telling the pilot he only needed one touch on his rudder pedal. In minutes came the call that all containers had been dropped.
The Halifax rose as if relieved of the weight it had carried. The pilot eased the aircraft down to nine hundred feet and switched on the light that would turn from red to green over the trapdoor. Red for prepare to jump. Green to jump. The copilot continued to peer out the window at the ground and shouted that he could see the light from below, flashing the Morse signal.
The dispatcher checked that Maria’s parachute was secure on the static line. He gently moved her so that her feet dangled in the airflow coming into the fuselage. He kept his eyes on the red light. It suddenly changed to green. The dispatcher pushed between her shoulders. Hands crossed across her chest, she jumped into the darkness. The static line pulled at her parachute as she cleared the Halifax tail wheel, opening her canopy, and she began to fall through the sky into the dawn. The dispatcher closed the trapdoor.
In the cockpit the two pilots looked at each other and agreed it was time to go home. On the ground below, the light from the drop zone had gone out. The bomb-aimer checked through the clear-view panel into the bomb bay that it was empty and its doors locked.
The Halifax began the long flight back to Tempsford.
After they received their end-of-training reports in Scotland, the NKVD agents were escorted by an SOE conducting officer to travel to Sandy, Bedfordshire, ready to be sent on their first mission into occupied Europe. They were told that they were being taken to Gaynes Hall, Station 61, the starting point of their journeys. An hour later the Rolls-Royce limousines with blacked-out windows and FANY drivers arrived at the three-story brick mansion.
Just like these luxury cars—obtained from people who could no longer afford to run them—Gaynes Hall had found itself in unfamiliar hands for the duration of the war. It had been requisitioned by the SOE because of its size, seclusion, and, most significantly, its proximity to Tempsford. The airfield was less than half an hour’s drive away.
The agents were assigned bedrooms and given medical examinations. The hall was staffed with FANYs who had been specially chosen to be hostesses and housekeepers.
Once the agents were settled in, the conducting officer briefed them that the hall stood in twenty-four acres of land, which they were invited to explore, though the perimeter was heavily guarded. At meals they would dine together; a chef with knowledge of Russian cooking would prepare the food. In the evenings they would do their physical exercises. Afterward there was a range of options for them: table-tennis with the FANYs, the piano in the ballroom for anyone with musical skill, and an assortment of card games, some of which were Russian. While there was no room service, the kitchen was open all night to serve them. Housekeepers provided laundry service. The library had been well stocked with books in Russian from Foyle’s, the London book depository.
The conducting officer ended his briefing by reminding them they had all signed the Official Secrets Act and must never tell anyone they were Soviet agents.
Over the next days the Russians enjoyed the hall’s facilities and grounds, and the building echoed with their voices.
Meanwhile, in the office at the back of the hall, an SOE team continued to communicate with the Baker Street Air Movement Office and the Operations Room in Gibraltar Farm at Tempsford. Routes to drop zones were chosen, weather reports prepared, air crew selected, take-offs listed, and Morse signals sent. Finally, the Order of Departure of Agents, the ODA, was settled. The conducting officer would deliver each agent to the departure lounge at Gibraltar Farm.
Francine Fromont arrived at Gaynes Hall on March 3, 1942. Like all agents of the SOE-NKVD pact, she was treated as an officer student and was fed and lodged separately from the others so as to avoid them discovering that Britain was training Soviet agents. Fromont was even more tight-lipped about her history than her comrades. Only an SOE document showed she had given birth to a baby boy just before the war had begun.
She was top of the departure list, and her child may well have been on her mind as she and her two male companions waited one evening for their flight. They were taken to a dressing hut and given a meal of braised ham and vegetables. A WAAF then ensured they were not wearing anything that would give them away in France, and double-checked the contents of their suitcases. They were then transferred by car to another building, where their parachutes were harnessed, before being driven to the runway where a Whitley of 138 Squadron was waiting.
Their Czech pilot, Pilot Officer Anderle, gave them a nod and waved them on board. As he opened the throttle and the aircraft rose into the darkness, Fromont exchanged glances with her companions. Daniel Georges had been a political commissar during the Spanish Civil War and was the brother of the French Resistance leader Pierre Georges, known as Colonel Fabien, who had carried out the killing of a German officer at the Barbès-Rochechouart Métro station in Paris in August 1941. The other man was a prominent French Communist, Raymond Guyot, who had been elected to the French National Assembly in 1937 before fleeing to Moscow in 1940.
The Whitley crossed the French coast at Port-en-Bessin and rose to sixty-five hundred feet above the mountains of central France. Using the lights of Agde on the edge of the lake at Thau on the Mediterranean coast as a guide, Anderle swung north again and found the drop zone near Montpellier.
Their missions were to be political leaders for the French Communist Resistance. Fromont would be Guyot’s wireless operator. Between them they would organize the French Communist Resistance in southern France. They set about their task with fervor, and with the help of the 6,000 French francs and US$1,050 they carried with them. Guyot became a significant Resistance leader in the area around Lyon.
Fromont’s luck ran out after more than a year in the field when, in July 1943, the Germans tracked down her radio transmissions and she was arrested.
The German-born journalist Else Noffke followed the same routine from Tempsford. The SOE again knew little about her overall mission but noted, “Towns in which she was interested were Cologne and Berlin and, amongst other things, she asked to be provided with a wedding ring and a crucifix. For most of the men with whom she came into contact, she appeared to exude an ineffable sex appeal, a characteristic which was certainly not based on any misconception of belonging to the weaker sex.”
Noffke and her colleague, Georg Tietze, had suffered a series of delays to their mission. They had been due to fly out before Christmas of 1942 until the SOE pointed out that the five Reichsmarks notes they had been issued by Moscow had long been withdrawn from circulation.
Eventually they were ready to go, and Noffke amused the FANY officer preparing her for the flight by insisting on wearing the entire contents of her wardrobe, layer upon layer.
The flight into southern Germany took several hours, and Noffke was slightly airsick, but both she and Tietze were successfully dropped about ten miles northwest of Freiburg, close to the border with Switzerland.
Nothing more was heard from them for more than five months, until the report of a Polish Austrian informer in Switzerland arrived in Baker Street. He reported a conversation he had overheard between German soldiers on a Munich-bound train in which they had mentioned two “English” parachutists, dropped near Kaiserstuhl in early 1943, who had bee
n captured by police in late June. One had been a woman, and she had been arrested at Freiburg.
In fact, the mission had been blown before it had begun and, immediately after their arrival, the two Soviet agents had quickly become the subjects of a massive manhunt.
The Gestapo had been reading Moscow directives since turning an agent, Heinrich Koenen. The unsuspecting NKVD had told Koenen to prepare for the arrival of the two agents so the Gestapo knew the time and location of the drop, and had laid a trap. However, Noffke and Tietze became separated on landing and, although the Germans found a parachute with their wireless set and a suitcase full of clothes, the agents seized the chance to escape.
That same night that Else Noffke had flown from Tempsford, another aircraft had delivered Emilie Boretzky and her comrade Hermann Köhler, both Austrian Communists, into the open countryside near Eisenstadt, about fifty miles south of Vienna.
Described by the SOE as a “somewhat nervous type,” Boretzky had originally arrived in Britain with Noffke but lacked her German-born colleague’s poise and confidence. She was, however, the SOE noted, a very good wireless operator, and it was in this role that the thirty-two-year-old was to work with Köhler. His mission was to infiltrate a number of factories in the area, but the Gestapo’s control over Moscow radio messages ensured that they knew a drop was going to take place.
Köhler was caught after a bottle of cognac he had stored in a pocket of his jumpsuit broke on landing, allowing bloodhounds to pick up his trail. Boretzky was arrested trying to find a building from which to transmit in Vienna. To the Germans’ delight she was carrying the latest British wireless set, a thirty-pound, state-of-the-art device with a fifteen-hundred-mile range, which far exceeded the Soviets’ own models. Boretzky and Köhler were threatened with execution and chose to cooperate with the Gestapo.
The Gestapo was now fully aware of the SOE-NKVD collaboration, and Boretzky agreed to pretend she had not been captured and to use her own radio to deceive her Moscow handlers, a betrayal that would lead to the arrest of other agents.
Either she or Köhler was also believed to have revealed the address of an elderly couple who were their NKVD contacts in Freiburg.
Else Noffke had instructions for what to do if the mission turned sour. In Freiburg she tracked down another NKVD contact, Hans Müller, who coded a message to his sister in Basel stating that Noffke was safe but had lost her radio set. On landing she had been unable to rescue it from a field as the Germans had closed in. The English-born Soviet spy Allan Foote, part of the “Red Orchestra” of agents, contacted Moscow, who then contacted Koenen to prepare for the arrival of a new wireless set for Noffke. However, with Koenen’s wireless under Gestapo control, the Germans closed in.
Deciding the couple in Freiburg could lead to other agents, the Gestapo chose not to arrest them but to keep their house under surveillance.
In April 1943 Gestapo officers arrived at the house in Freiburg and a young woman answered the door. It was Noffke. The moment she saw them, she swallowed her cyanide capsule. The Germans rushed her to the hospital to have her stomach pumped.
Noffke was confronted with notes and documents relating to Koenen and quickly realized it was impossible for her to deny her role as a spy. She confessed, hoping for more lenient treatment, and said that she was an NKVD agent who had been told to stay in Germany even if American soldiers eventually fought their way into the country.
The failure of the mission became absolute when the Freiburg Gestapo lured Müller’s sister Anna, a key Soviet agent in Switzerland, over the border and arrested her. She was saved from death by her Swiss passport. Her brother and his wife were executed.
Under interrogation, Boretzky and Köhler had told the Germans everything about their training, right down to their farewell drinks at Gaynes Hall and the departure lounge at Gibraltar Farm.
In the summer of 1942, the duty intruder controller in the RAF Operations Room in London reported that a solitary Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft had followed the railway line past Tempsford and had fled home. Tempsford went to high alert for weeks, but no Luftwaffe attack came.
A third female NKVD agent had also fallen into Nazi hands. Polish-born Szyfra Lypszyc, a former member of the French Communist Party and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, had been deemed physically unfit for parachute training.
On the night of January 10–11, 1942, Lypszyc was transported from the Devonshire coast by boat and landed at a secluded bay in Brittany. Despite the SOE’s doubts about her, Lypszyc successfully reached Paris, made contact with two other Soviet agents, and began to report back on German troop movements. She went on to take part in a number of acts of sabotage that led to a crackdown by German police. She and a number of agents in the Paris network were arrested and executed.
By the spring of 1944, the Red Army had made such territorial gains from the Germans that their airplanes could drop agents into any theater of the European war without British help. In all, there were nineteen missions under the SOE-NKVD pact, although not all got as far as actually delivering agents behind enemy lines. It had been, in general, an unhappy arrangement.
The SOE felt that the Russian NKVD agents had been poorly trained before they arrived in Britain. Because of their extra training by the SOE, there were delays in procuring RAF aircraft to transport them, which had angered Moscow. Even before the full extent of the failure of the MI6-SOE-NKVD pact was known, the SIS had described British intelligence’s own performance in the operations as “disastrous.”
Some of the missions had led to success, most notably the work Raymond Guyot had carried out in the south of France, and Lypszyc, Fromont, and Noffke had undoubtedly displayed great courage. But most of the missions, thanks to the Gestapo radio deception, ended in capture and death.
The German technique of using a captured radio to make a blown agent appear free and active would spell disaster for other Allied female agents, too.
9
Betrayed!
MADELEINE DAMERMENT’S RETURN TO France had been delayed for weeks due to bad weather. The twenty-six-year-old with the round babyish cheeks and dark curly hair had received a briefer period of training than many other SOE agents, most likely because of her previous experience.
She had grown up in the Pas-de-Calais, where her father was head postmaster of Lille. After the German occupation her whole family was drawn into the Resistance, and she quickly became involved with the “Pat” evasion line, which ferried escaped prisoners of war and downed airmen through France and out through Marseille. Damerment had been credited with helping seventy-five British and American airmen by the time, late in 1942, the Gestapo closed in and she herself used the escape line to leave France. She quickly found herself being recruited by F Section and, on the night of February 28, 1944, she boarded a bomber to be dropped into northern France. She was code-named Solange.
Brave and intelligent, Damerment had a difficult task ahead. She and three others were being dropped east of Chartres, into an area known to be insecure, to find out what was happening to local networks and to establish a new safe network—a réseau—which would be key to the eventual invasion of France.
With her were France Antelme and a radio operator, Lionel Lee. All three dropped safely into the French countryside and began to gather up their parachutes. They could see figures coming across the field and guessed they were the reception committee from Phono, one of a number of subcircuits of the huge Prosper circuit, which centerd around Paris. Too late, they realized they were not. The shadowy figures were Gestapo men who had been waiting for their arrival. Damerment’s mission was over before it had begun.
A few weeks later, F Section received a message from another agent, whose code name was Madeleine. It stated that Antelme had been injured in the drop but all were safe. Madeleine was Noor Inayat Khan who, as a Russian-born princess of Indian and British descent, had one of the most exotic backgrounds of any SOE agent.
But it was not Khan at the controls of
her radio transmitter that night. She had been captured in October 1943, a full four months before. The SOE’s networks in France were in shambles, but London did not know it. Or rather, it had refused to believe it.
In fact, the exceptionally courageous Khan had put a warning into the very first message she had sent under duress, a key phrase that signaled to code master Leo Marks that she had been captured. Marks told Buckmaster, but he refused to believe that his agent had been caught. Khan tried to alert London again in her next message, leaving out one of two regular security checks; the warning was dismissed as an oversight on behalf of Khan.
From then on there had been no more warnings: a Gestapo officer, Dr. Josef Goetz, had taken over her radio, allowing the Germans to arrange for Damerment, Antelme, and Lee to be delivered right into their hands.
After the three agents were arrested, the SOE was given a further opportunity to realize its networks were in danger. Like Khan, Lionel Lee was forced to send a message to London, and again the brave operator left out a security check in an effort to alert the SOE. Once more, the warning was ignored, until an uneasy SOE operations officer requested that the messages be reexamined. Finally, the missing security checks were noted and the SOE agreed to believe that Khan, Damerment, Antelme, and Lee were in German hands.
The web of deception that had unfolded over the previous twelve months had been simple in its execution but intricate in its effect on the agent network. It was the story not only of a double agent’s coldhearted deceit but also of missed opportunities for the SOE to see when its plans for a large and powerful network were imploding.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 20