Under interrogation at 84 Avenue Foch, the SD’s Paris headquarters, Leigh stuck to her cover story, that she was a milliner’s assistant named Suzanne Chavanne. But the Germans already knew the truth. Inventor had been created under their gaze. All its members had been arrested by the end of December.
Despite their close connections to the Prosper network and to Déricourt, three agents managed to slip the net.
Claude de Baissac was in Bordeaux, where his Scientist network was not only gathering vital information on German activity in the area but also carrying out many audacious acts of sabotage. His courier, Mary Herbert, had been considered by some to be almost too fragile for the rigors of the clandestine life, but she had thrived, using her bicycle and the train to liaise with agents and résistants over a wide area, and to meet up with the third agent in their group, Lise de Baissac, Claude’s sister.
Mary and Claude organized a series of sabotage attacks on Bordeaux docks, a port packed with submarines and cargo ships bringing supplies for the German war effort. They helped mastermind the destruction of a key radio station for Admiral Dönitz’s Atlantic U-boat fleet, a power station supplying Luftwaffe airfields near Marignac, and transformers powering antiaircraft batteries in the area.
When the Germans’ tightened security made further sabotage virtually impossible, they concentrated on reporting on the Reich’s naval movements.
Herbert was a shy and quiet but fiercely intelligent thirty-nine-year-old. De Baissac was abrasive, proud, and determined. Their burgeoning love affair had been an attraction of opposites.
In spring, news began to trickle through from Paris about the Prosper arrests. De Baissac had met a number of the agents on visits to the capital—trips on which he had taken Herbert with him. Meantime Lise, holed up alone in Poitiers, remained the first point of contact for many Prosper agents arriving in France. It was on a visit to Lise that Mary revealed she was pregnant. Herbert changed her identity and moved house. Already members of her network had been arrested.
The danger was creeping closer. And, even without Déricourt’s betrayal, the Germans had found another way to infiltrate the Scientist network: they had a local informer. A right-wing Resistance leader named André Grandclément had been persuaded by a German officer that only by working with the Nazis could he save France from the Communists. Suddenly, the SD were finding carefully hidden arms dumps and agents were being arrested.
In August 1943 London recalled Claude de Baissac. It is not clear if he knew Herbert was pregnant. He decided to take his sister, Lise, and not Mary with him, reasoning that Lise was in greater danger.
When London sent a replacement leader, Roger Landes, Mary realized Claude would not return. When she confided to Landes that she was pregnant, he wanted her to return to London. She refused and continued to work as a courier.
Landes realized that Grandclément’s betrayal was already devastating; he had turned in an estimated three hundred résistants to the Germans. The network could not recover from such a loss.
Toward the end of November, Landes took the now heavily pregnant Herbert to a small private nursing home in a suburb of Bordeaux and left her money for her survival. She must cut all links with the Resistance to ensure the safety of her and her baby, he told her. Then he brought together a group of surviving Resistance fighters and headed for the Spanish border.
The following month Herbert’s baby was born by Cesarean. With thoughts for her lover, she called the girl Claudine. Now, with the intuition of a trained spy and the protective instinct of a mother, she set about creating a new and safe life for her and her child. Deliberately neglecting to give the nursing home a forwarding address, she went to one of the flats formerly used by Lise de Baissac in Poitiers. She took on a new identity and bought ration books and papers for her child from the black market.
Then, in February 1944, the Gestapo arrested and questioned everyone in the apartment block. They kept Herbert in custody, believing she was Lise de Baissac. Herbert stuck to her new cover story, that she was visiting from Alexandria in Egypt—she spoke Arabic, one of the languages in which she was fluent—and that she did not know Lise. Her insistence—and the fact that the Germans found it hard to believe that a British agent would have a baby—convinced her interrogators.
After two months, Herbert was released. She rescued Claudine from an orphanage and went to live with friends in a country house, no longer an agent but an anonymous young mother concentrating on bringing up a baby in an occupied country.
The women who arrived together on June 16 included Diana Rowden, the daughter of a British army major, who had spent a great deal of her life in France and Italy. She had attended schools in Sanremo, Italy, and Cannes on the French Riviera, and continued her education at Manor House School in Surrey. She had become a soft-spoken teenager, retiring and rather stocky, with reddish hair and a pale complexion.
In 1933 she returned with her mother to France and enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris. After graduating, she embarked on a career in journalism. On the outbreak of the war she joined the French Red Cross. When France fell she was separated from her mother, who had fled to Britain. Rowden remained in France until the summer of 1941, when she finally escaped through Spain and Portugal to England, where she joined the WAAF. Her language skills—French, Portugese, and Spanish—resulted in her being assigned to the Intelligence Branch. From there was but a small step for the headhunters to recommend she should be enlisted in the SOE. Her training reports spoke of “high intelligence,” “well motivated,” and “strong hatred of the Nazis.” More than one instructor’s reports spoke of her leadership qualities.
Always a tomboy when she was a child, she was now in her late twenties, fit and athletic. After her arrival in France, she set off for the Jura and a hotel in Lons-le-Saunier.
Baker Street had high hopes for Acrobat, the network she was joining. The Resistance in the area was strong. But Déricourt’s betrayal had ensured the SD followed her all the way to her new home.
However, when members of the network were arrested, Rowden escaped and moved east to act as a courier for another network. Together with her comrades she came up with a new development in Resistance sabotage: blackmail. The family of the Peugeot car factory in Sochaux, which was being used to make tank and aircraft parts, was approached and persuaded to create an explosion to put the facility out of action.
While Rowden appeared to have given the SD the slip, the continuing betrayal of Déricourt meant that the Germans were confident they could locate her again. In November the double agent had supervised the arrival of five agents on a Hudson aircraft. One of the men was assigned to work for Rowden. He was apprehended and persuaded to give details of where he was to meet her.
The house where Rowden was staying resembled a Swiss chalet with a wooden balcony and a cobbled road outside. She met the “new agent” in the village of Clairvaux and began to walk him up the hill to the house. As they walked he flashed a flashlight behind his back. They went inside and, a short while later, a résistant standing on the balcony saw three cars rushing up the hill.
Rowden managed to hide wireless crystals in a cot where a baby was sleeping, but the game was up. She had become another victim of Déricourt, although by giving the SD the runaround for three months, she had carried out valuable Resistance work.
After months in captivity and torture at the SD headquarters on Avenue Foch, she was sentenced under the “Nacht-und-Nebel-Erlass,” the Night and Fog Decree. It was the code name to an order of December 7, 1941, issued by Hitler.
The decree directed that persons in occupied territories engaging in activities intended to undermine the security of German troops were, upon capture, to be brought to Germany by “night and fog” for trial by special courts. To friends and relatives they simply disappeared; no official information about the prisoners would be released.
On July 6, 1944, Diana Rowden was transferred to the men’s Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. With he
r were Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, and Sonia Olschanezky, a twenty-one-year-old Jewish woman who had worked for the French Resistance and been recruited in France by the SOE. Olschanezky, who had refused a chance to escape to Switzerland when Prosper began to collapse, had also been betrayed.
The four were taken one by one to an isolated hut, ordered to lie down on a bed, and told they were to be injected against typhus. Instead they were given a lethal injection of phenol. Their bodies were then dragged to an oven for cremation.
Vera Atkins investigated their deaths immediately after the war and concluded, “It appears that at least one of them was still alive when she was pushed in the furnace.” It is possible it was twenty-four-year-old Andrée Borrel; a Polish prisoner who witnessed the scene at the furnace said the woman scratched the face of the camp executioner and screamed, “Vive la France!”
Cecily Lefort had traveled south to act as courier to agent Francis Cammaerts. Lefort was London-born, forty-three years old, and of Irish descent. Before the war, she had married a wealthy French doctor and settled on the Brittany coast. She had loved sports and sailing in the couple’s yacht. When the occupation came, British nationals had had to leave France.
When she returned by Lysander for the SOE, she headed south to where Cammaerts had developed Jockey, a large network of independent groups stretching through the Rhône valley and along the Riviera.
In July 1943 the Allies invaded Sicily in preparation for moving into Italy. The SOE decided to increase the amount of arms being dropped into the southeast of France, and Lefort organized a reception party for a massive drop of supplies on August 13.
Working with Pierre Reynaud, a sabotage instructor, Lefort took part in a number of operations to damage railway lines, power stations, and industrial targets.
The Resistance activity drew a corresponding increase in German retaliation. Cammaerts, one of the most security-conscious of all SOE agents in France, warned the network to stay away from particular places, including Montélimar, where they had their former headquarters. Reynaud and Lefort ignored the warning, and on September 15, 1943, they visited a local Resistance leader at his home in Montélimar.
The SD had received a tip-off from an unknown source and surrounded the house. Reynaud and the résistant escaped, but Lefort was found hiding in the cellar. Her Gestapo interrogators broke her alibis, but she refused to give away any of her comrades. Thanks to her courage and to Cammaerts’s own security measures, Jockey survived.
Lefort did not. She arrived at Ravensbrück toward the end of 1943. During a routine medical examination in the hospital block, a doctor diagnosed stomach cancer. He operated and put her on a diet of porridge and vegetable soup. She was monitored, seemed to improve, and was returned to the main camp.
In February 1945 she was moved to a subcamp called the Jugendlager, the “youth camp,” which in fact was the extermination annex created to increase the number of gassings. One prisoner later testified that the desperately ill Lefort had volunteered to move to the camp as she thought it was a rest place where she would be spared roll call. Lefort was so sick that she was picked out for extermination almost immediately on arrival.
With her Asian lineage and background as a musician and author of children’s stories, Noor Inayat Khan was an unlikely agent to be chosen for SOE work in France. But she was keen, brave, and fluent in French, and Buckmaster believed in her. Most of all, she volunteered at a time when F Section had desperately needed more wireless operators. She was assigned the code name Madeleine and the cover of being a children’s nurse. She would work in the network known as Phono in an area to the southwest of Paris, centerd around Le Mans.
She made her first transmission on June 20, 1943, from the grounds of the Agricultural Institute at Grignon, using Gilbert Norman’s radio. She did not receive her own radio until the following month.
Within a week of her arrival, the Resistance network Prosper began to disintegrate around her. And Suttill, whom she had just met, had been arrested. So too were Norman and Borrel. Khan headed to the institute and found the Germans making more arrests. She and her leader, Emile Garry, laid low. In the middle of September, having moved house again for safety, Khan radioed London to try to tell them Prosper was collapsing. She was the only radio operator at work in Paris.
But the Germans were picking up her signal loud and clear. At first their detection finders could not locate her, but they could tell from her “fist”—the way she tapped out her Morse code—that this was a single operator handling a large amount of material.
Twice Khan’s courage and quick thinking helped her escape capture. Once, two Germans on the Métro became suspicious of her heavy suitcase and challenged her. She explained it contained a cinema projector, and they believed her. Soon after, she was asked to help two Canadian airmen, of whom she immediately became suspicious. She abandoned them. Her intuition was right: they were German agents.
The Germans let it be known, through the network of criminal gangs they used as thugs and informants, that they would pay 100,000 francs for information leading to Khan’s arrest. Senior SD officers said they were willing to pay out ten times as much. SD headquarters received a phone call, a woman’s voice telling them she could give them the radio operator’s address in return for the reward. SD agent Ernest Vogt headed to the address and was shown around Khan’s apartment. He flicked through her notebooks and found her wireless. One man was left in the apartment; others stood around in the street outside, trying to appear inconspicuous.
On her return Khan saw them immediately and melted back in the crowd. Alone, without her codes and wireless, she agonized over what to do. She waited until she thought enough time had passed for those watching the building to leave, and slipped inside.
Inside her apartment the SD man arrested her. She fought back so violently that he had to call reinforcements. She was taken to the fifth floor of the building at 84 Avenue Foch where, to calm her, Vogt agreed to her request for a bath. Once inside the bathroom she scrambled out of the window onto a ledge and onto the roof. But there was nowhere to go.
And so her interrogation began. SOE instructors had noted that she was not a good liar. Now she admitted she was a WAAF officer named Nora Baker but refused to say anything else at all. One SD officer reported, “She is impossible. I have never met a woman like her.” Sturmbannführer Josef Kieffer, the man in charge of SD investigations into SOE agents in France, told Vera Atkins after the war: “We got absolutely no new information out of her at all.”
Déricourt had already told the SD what they needed to know. Now they had Khan’s wireless and code books too, which they could use in their radio game of pretense—the Englandspiel, the “English game.” The Germans had been playing a similar game to devastating effect in the Netherlands, forcing a captured agent of the SOE’s Dutch section to continue to transmit as if he were still free. More than fifty SOE agents would be captured during the deception.
The SD played the game with Khan’s set for two months, by the end of which time she had tried another escape and been sent by train to Germany.
Suspecting that Khan might be in German hands, the SOE devised a series of personal questions for whoever was operating her radio. It took some time for the replies to come, and they seemed correct. Somehow, during hours of interrogation, Khan must have given away enough personal information to allow the Germans to fool the SOE.
The SOE checked the responses with France Antelme, who knew Khan. He agreed the responses appeared to have come from her and that she appeared to be operating freely. This miscalculation led the SOE to believe Phono was still operating, and it resulted in Madeleine Damerment, Lionel Lee, and Antelme himself dropping straight into the hands of Josef Kieffer and Ernest Vogt on the night of February 28, 1944.
10
They Serve Alone
ON MARCH 21, 1944, a Royal Navy torpedo boat cautiously made its way along the coast of Brittany, near the port of Brest, and let down a dinghy. Within a
few minutes a thirty-seven-year-old woman clambered up onto the dark beach. The papers in her pocket described her as a social worker named Marcelle Montegerie, but to her handlers in London she was code-named Diane. They had ensured anyone watching her making her way inland would not have noticed a distinct limp in her left leg. She was the “limping lady” the Gestapo had been hunting in Lyon. Virginia Hall was back in France.
During her first week in F Section working with Buckmaster, Virginia Hall had seen that the OSS was determined to take its place alongside the SOE. David Bruce had confirmed that to her when she met him. She told Buckmaster she was going to apply for an interview with the OSS. He gave her a name to contact. Army Major Paul van der Stricht was head of the OSS legal department.
She met him in his office in Grosvenor Square. A stocky man with piercing eyes, he carefully questioned her about her family background, her work in France, and her duties in F Section. He asked her why she wanted to transfer to the OSS, and her response was brusque: “I am an American. I want to go back into France as American.”
Nodding, he reached across his desk and handed her a document. “Agreement to Serve in OSS.” He told her to read it. Her salary would be $336 per month. She would serve for a year on signature, and in any place ordered. Any information she obtained would be secret. She would accept the personal risk to her life. She read carefully, then spoke. There was one clause she wanted to insert. Reaching for her fountain pen she wrote, “All I will earn will be transferred to my mother,” and signed the document. With Major Stricht’s signature on behalf of the OSS, Hall was accepted as a new member of the Special Operations group.
The rest of her day at OSS headquarters was spent meeting her new colleagues and visiting the tailoring department to be fitted with clothes that would turn her into a plump, elderly woman. Later she left the building with a suitcase filled with her wardrobe of disguises and a transceiver, which could transmit and receive.
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