Messages sent by the operators were now received directly in Grendon, where 400 FANY women operators manned the radio sets. Before they left for the field all operators would be given their daily schedules or ‘skeds’ – details of the frequency and time they should come on air to transmit back home.
In Grendon, the ‘skeds’ were posted on big boards in the transmission room, along with the agents’ code names. Noor’s first transmission came in on Norman’s radio and his frequency. Knowing that the agent was transmitting under very difficult circumstances, in hiding and with D/F vans circling around while he was on air, the operator taking down the message in Grendon wanted to be as fast as possible and try to get it down without asking the agent to repeat themselves too much.
Sometimes the operators would add a small personal line to the agent just to let them know there were people back home thinking about them. Noor was informed about Vilayat’s commission by Vera Atkins while she was in Paris. Once the operator sent her a message and ended with the words: ‘May God Keep You.’ It moved her greatly knowing they thought of her as someone more than just an operator on the other end of a wireless line.23
When the signallers had taken down the code, they would then send it to the building next door where coders sat on long pine tables working in pairs to break the code. Once these messages were deciphered they would be passed to the section office at Baker Street. Sometimes the codes arrived badly garbled and it was the job of the coders’ office to try and crack them. Because the agent in the field could be put at great risk if asked to repeat the code again the next day, Leo Marks had a policy that no code would go unbroken before the agent came on the air on his or her next ‘sked’, which could be in the next 48 hours. There was no greater failure for the code-breakers than to know that an agent had risked his life to come on the air and they had not been able to read his message. Marks developed a personal relationship with the wireless operators, meeting each one before they left so he would get to know the personal style of the operator and see if there was a certain pattern of errors from their training files. This would help him to crack the code accordingly. So if there was a person who spelt badly, or an agent who was particularly nervous or slow, he would know what had gone wrong in the message.
Marks made a rule: ‘There shall be no such thing as an in-decipherable message’ and he got a team of operators to work round the clock if necessary to break an agent’s muddled code and get it ready for the next ‘sked’.24
The messages from the field needed to be brief, accurate and as watertight as possible. It was also important for the receivers in England to watch out for the security checks being sent by the agents. If caught, the agent was supposed to alert London by dropping their security check. However, this did not always work as there were many lapses in the London listening room, with disastrous consequences.
Agents also worked through ‘safe houses’ and ‘cut-outs’. A safe house was a place the agents could stay as the owner was known to the circuit. They could also use the house as a letter box to receive messages from other agents. Safe houses were also used by escapees who could be hidden in twos or threes as they made their journey back to England. The cut-out was a means of communication between two agents which could effectively delude the enemy. So one agent would pass a message in code to a cut-out. He could be a bookseller and the message would be ‘Have you any Anatole France in stock?’ The cut-out might reply, ‘Yes, two volumes have just come in.’ The agent would gather from that that two escapees had to be collected from the safe house in Boulevard Anatole France. If the reply was ‘Sorry Mademoiselle, we are out of stock’ it meant there was no one to collect. Cut-outs were always called from public call boxes so the calls would take longer to be traced. After the call the agent had to walk away from the call box very quickly.
Passwords were always kept simple so they could be memorised and dropped casually into the conversation. There were also strict instructions for carrying messages. It was forbidden to carry notes, or details with contact addresses on it. Verbal messages were always given in veiled language which the courier could not understand. If a message could not be memorised it had to be written on thin tissue paper and inserted into a cigarette or carried in such a way that it could be easily eaten or dropped. People in safe houses were forbidden to go out. Anyone calling on a safe house had to first check the security of the house by telephone. Agents were strictly forbidden to meet in certain places. These included certain Metro stations, black-market restaurants or bars and cinemas.25
The instruction given at Beaulieu to all agents was that, if caught, they were to hold on and say nothing to the Gestapo for the first 48 hours. During this time all the people in their circuit would move house and cover their tracks. When the two days were over, and if the pressure became unbearable, they could say what they wanted.
Agents were also discouraged from communicating with agents from other circuits. Again, in the field, this rule was not strictly adhered to. The Prosper circuit in particular grew too large. It had many sub-circuits and a potential disaster was waiting to happen as it could be easily infiltrated.
Noor herself was taken to Grignon within two days to meet the sub-agents. As she was a friendly person by nature, she got on well with everyone and felt quite at home. She even went to the kitchen to help the women make tea and carried it back on a tray. But her colleagues observed her make a crucial mistake. Noor poured out the tea for everyone and began to toast some slices of bread by the fire. One of the women noticed that she poured the milk into the cups before the tea and pointed this out to Madame Balachowsky. It was a particularly English way of making tea.
Madame Balachowsky immediately warned Noor that in France they always put the milk in last while making tea and told her that this mistake could betray her in front of Vichy sympathisers. Noor thanked her for the information but was to be ticked off for another indiscretion soon afterwards. She had carelessly left her portfolio containing all her security codes lying in the entrance hall. It was brought in by Professor Balachowsky.26 The professor told her that it could easily have fallen into the wrong hands. It was obvious that Noor had little idea about the reality of life in Gestapo-occupied France. She was now told that she must learn not to trust anybody but the closest in her circuit, and to be aware that the Gestapo were everywhere and had infiltrated the tightest of Resistance circuits. The Professor told Noor to conduct herself as if she were always surrounded by spies and gave her a few tips to ensure her safety in her daily life.
Noor would work at Grignon till her transmitter arrived. At the school, she would pass herself off as one of the students. Dr Vanderwynckt lived in the school with his wife and two daughters and his son-in-law, Robert Douillet, who helped with parachute receptions. The Balachowskys lived in Viroflay, a suburb of Paris, but they spent a lot of time in Grignon. Noor told them about her family: her mother and her brother who was in the Navy. She told them that her real name was Nora Baker. They already knew her code name was Madeleine and that her cover name was Jeanne-Marie. Vera Atkins had often asked Noor to use the name Nora Baker in Beaulieu as a cover name in order to hide her Indian origins. Baker was her mother’s maiden name. Noor continued to use the same practice cover name from Beaulieu, not disclosing her identity even to close circuit members. Probably she was being extra cautious as she did not want anyone to know her second name was Inayat Khan, as she was afraid the Germans could trace her brother Hidayat who was still in France and torture him or his children if she was arrested. The Balachowskys could sense that Noor missed her mother very much and knew that it had hurt her terribly to have left without telling her where she was really going. They felt she was too young and inexperienced for such a dangerous job.
Noor was still clearly getting to grips with life in occupied France, which was so different from the France she had lived in. She began to realise the extent of the occupation and the effect it had had on the everyday lives of the people. From the outside,
Paris still looked the same: the cafés were full of people, and the locals went to work as usual. The Paris fashion houses were still catering for the Parisian elite. They now also supplied the Germans as the wives of the German officers wanted to indulge in Dior and Chanel. Though food and clothes were rationed and there were fewer cars on the roads because of the scarcity of petrol, there was no dearth of black-market shops for the rich. People rode around on vélo-taxis, which were something like rickshaws. There were plenty of black-market restaurants and the Metros ran on time until the curfew began at midnight. But the Mercedes zooming round the streets carrying Nazi officials told the story of a city that had been occupied. By evening the streets would be empty as most people preferred to get home well before the curfew fell.
Paris had fallen without a struggle. The pre-war talk of sales Boches (dirty Germans) was quickly replaced by the German propaganda of sales Anglais (dirty English). Paris was also emptied of Jews. From June 1942, all Jews above the age of six were required to wear the yellow stars and were initially imprisoned in France, then sent to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Their vacated apartments were seized by the Germans and locals at bargain prices. Many French people were quick to collude with the Germans. The Vichy government was so eager to please the occupiers that it began handing over Jewish children even before the Germans had asked for them. Collaborators pointed out Jewish families. By the end of the war, about 75,000 Jews including 10,000 children had been sent by the French to their deaths in concentration camps.27 There was an atmosphere of fear and mistrust. The swastikas flying from government-occupied buildings and the German signs on the roads brought home the reality of the situation. It was very different from London or Beaulieu.
The same day that she went to Grignon, Noor finally met Suttill in person. He had been touring arms dumps in Normandy between 15 and 18 June and been working on preparing the new identity cards for arriving agents. He’d only spoken briefly to Noor before that. Suttill arrived at Grignon at lunchtime. It was a merry Sunday lunch since nearly all the members of the circuit and sub-circuit were present: the Balachowskys, Norman, Borrel, the Vanderwynckts and their son-in-law Robert Douillet, and the son-in-law of the Belgian minister. None of the people gathered there, including a happy and relaxed Noor, sensed that danger was just around the corner.
EIGHT
The Fall of Prosper
Noor had still not received her own wireless set so she continued to use the transmitter at Grignon. She worked side by side with Norman, who helped her get on her feet. Norman told her to be very careful of her security, to memorise her plans and then burn them, as the Germans were always on the lookout for wireless operators. They worked from the greenhouse while the gardener, Marius Maillard, kept guard. Maillard also helped with the reception of parachute equipment. Noor took Garry’s messages to transmit from Grignon. She was also introduced by Antelme to Robert Gieules, an administrator at the Compagnie Générale des Conserves, who had been recruited to help F-section, and to Paul Arrighi, an advocate, who helped the French Resistance, with whom she would work closely later. She got on well with her colleagues and soon settled into her new role.
On the morning of 21 June, Suttill met Déricourt and Rémy Clément at Gare d’Austerlitz to plan the handover of SOE agent Richard Heslop of the Marksman circuit and an airman, Taylor, for return to England. He then waited with Norman, Borrel, the Guernes and Marcel Charbonnier at a café in the station for two agents from the Sologne, Pierre Culioli and Yvonne Rudellat, who were supposed to bring with them two recently arrived Canadian agents, John Macalister and Frank Pickersgill. None of them arrived, as they had fallen into the hands of the Germans. Later, Suttill lunched with Armel Guerne unaware that the destruction of the Prosper circuit had been set in motion.
That same night (21/22 June), Suttill, Professor Balachowsky and members of the reception committee had to go to a farmhouse at Roncey-aux-Alluets near Grignon to receive some parachute drops. One of these contained Noor’s transmitter and a suitcase with her personal effects. Unfortunately the parachute came down on a tree, and the suitcase burst open spilling all her clothes on the branches. It was crucial to remove all the evidence, so the men had to work into the early hours carefully retrieving each item and repacking it in her suitcase. Several of the other containers had also been scattered around and could not be traced. The reception committee were also worried because they had not seen F-section agent George Connerade (Jacquot), who was to be dropped that night. Armel Guerne was left in charge of the committee to carry out further searches the next day and Norman returned to Grignon to receive an early morning transmission from London.1
Norman received the message giving him the number of parcels and confirming that Connerade had been parachuted. The reception committee set out immediately to search the grounds and at 10 a.m. Guerne found Connerade’s parachute neatly folded on the ground and some distance from it, his suitcase. By noon Norman had also found two of Noor’s radio sets. Everything was quickly removed and hidden at Grignon.
On the evening of 22 June Norman, Antelme, Borrel and Suttill gathered at Guerne’s flat at 12 rue Lalande to discuss the final results of the parachute drop. Suttill asked Norman to inform London that Connerade had not been found and to ask for his contact address. He also asked Antelme to make arrangements for Noor’s wireless sets to be picked up and brought to Le Mans. Antelme arranged with Guerne that on 29 June he would send a man by car at a road intersection (which Antelme would mark on a road map) near Grignon at 2.30 p.m. A password was arranged and it was decided that Yves, a French youth who worked with them, would be there with the sets. Later that evening Suttill called at Antelme’s flat and collected one million francs from him. It was the last time they would meet.
Unknown to the circuit, the two Canadian agents John Macalister (Valentin) and Frank Pickersgill (Bertrand) had been arrested by the Gestapo the day after the Prosper circuit members had met for lunch in Paris. The two agents had been parachuted into the Cher valley on the night of 15/16 June to set up a sub-circuit called Archdeacon. Five days earlier – on the night of 10/11 June – a parachute drop in this area had gone wrong as the containers had exploded. This led the Germans to set up roadblocks in the area. Pierre Culioli, who lived in the region and received the parachute drops, had warned Suttill and asked him to tell London not to make any more drops there. But Suttill refused to stop the arms drops, possibly thinking the Allied invasion would soon be under way and all supplies were essential.2
Macalister and Pickersgill were consequently dropped and spent the night with Culioli. On 21 June the two men, along with Pierre Culioli and Yvonne Rudellat, were on their way to Paris when they ran into a roadblock and were taken to the town hall for interrogation. Culioli and Rudellat cleared the interrogation and went outside to wait in the car, but the Canadians were having trouble persuading the Germans that they were innocent Frenchmen. Pickersgill’s French was excellent but Macalister spoke French with a marked Canadian accent. It was enough to arouse suspicion, and the SS officer shouted for Rudellat and Culioli to be brought back. Culioli decided to step on the accelerator and make a dash for it. A car chase followed, Rudellat was shot and injured, and eventually all four were arrested.
The arrest of the Canadians was a terrific coup for the Gestapo. In the boot of the car was Macalister’s wireless set. Besides this, the Canadians were carrying several messages from London for other agents in Paris which had been sent without coding. They were clearly addressed to each agent by his field name including ‘Prosper’ and ‘Archambaud’. There were also some new crystals and detailed instructions for their use by Gilbert Norman (Archambaud). All the letters had been put in a brown paper parcel addressed to a fictitious prisoner of war in Germany and left in the glove compartment of the car. In Gestapo hands they now proved fatal. Culioli’s briefcase contained the addresses of Norman, Borrel, Amps, and the letter box at Avenue Suffren.3 The Germans had been trying to smash the Prosper network and
now they had been supplied with the contact details. They started to close in.
On the night of 23 June, two days after the Paris lunch, Norman and Borrel dined with Armel Guerne and his wife, in their flat in rue Lalande. They left separately – Norman by bike and Borrel by Metro – but reached the address near the Porte de la Muette at the edge of the 16th arrondissement where Norman had moved in recently as a lodger with Nicholas Laurent, his old schoolfriend from Paris, and his wife Maud, local members of the sub-circuit. Borrel joined him at the flat and they settled down, perhaps to prepare fresh bogus identity cards for their circuit. Identity cards had been changed at this time to include profile photos rather than full face and were attached to the ID cards with rivets instead of staples, so they all had to be changed. On the desk was a huge pile of ID cards. It may have contained a card for François Desprez, cover name for Suttill. It would have had his photograph and address.4 Just after midnight, in the early hours of 24 June, there was a knock on the door. It was the Gestapo and the whole household was arrested.
Suttill was out of Paris that night. He had a meeting with a Normandy sub-organiser, George Darling, and had gone to Gisors by the 7.10 p.m. train. He spent the night at Trie-Château in the safe house of Madame Guépin, and she saw him off next morning on the 7 a.m. train for Paris. Between 9 and 9.30 a.m. Suttill had a meeting with Marc O’Neil, leader of a Giraudist faction of the Resistance called OCM (Organisation Civile et Militaire), at Gare St Lazare and then returned to his hotel room in the working-class area of Porte St Denis. But in the middle of the night, the Germans had entered his hotel room at 18 rue de Mazagran where he had booked under his cover name of François Desprez, an engineer. There they waited for him all night and arrested him between 10 and 11 a.m. on 24 June as he returned from Gisors. Since he had moved recently, his address was known to nobody apart from Norman and Borrel. They would not have given it to the Gestapo but it was probably printed on one of the new identity cards they were preparing. Nicholas Laurent said later that he was shown two identity photos by the Germans at Avenue Foch and asked which one was ‘François’.5
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