The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish

by Noreen Riols

  The radio operator, being indispensable, was possibly the most important of the three agents, since it was through him that contact with London was made to request supplies or replacements, instructions and also calls for help. As far as was possible, considering the dangerous conditions under which he worked, the radio operator was kept hidden. But all the same he was the one member of the team the most exposed to risk. An organizer or a courier could ‘lie low’ if they suspected that they were being watched. A radio operator could not.

  Before leaving, every radio operator was given what was called a ‘sked’, a specific time during the day when he was to contact London, not to ask for news of Grandma or little Willie or the latest cricket scores, but so that the organizer, through the radio operator, could send details to HQ of enemy movements and report sabotage operations which the réseau had carried out, or which were scheduled for the days ahead, and also to request a drop of men, munitions, food, money or clothing. During the war, in France alone, as well as agents, SOE dropped arms to equip 425,000 résistants, plus hundreds of radio sets, pairs of combat boots and other items of clothing, all requested during the radio operator’s daily transmission.

  The time allotted to the pianist was personal. It could be midday, midnight, ten to five, half past eight, or a quarter to three. If the radio operator missed a ‘sked’ it wasn’t taken too seriously. He could have had a problem finding a ‘safe house’ from which to transmit, or he might think that the Gestapo had learned of, or suspected, his existence and were watching out for him. So we waited for his sked the following day. But if after six or seven days there was still no news, we knew that there was little chance that we would hear from him again. He was either dead or in hiding, or had been captured and probably would not return.

  And many of them did not return.

  The loss of life among radio operators was 25 per cent higher than with the other members of the team and it was estimated that they had a one in ten chance of surviving. Their missions were also the most stressful. They needed a cool head and nerves of steel in order to cope, since they were always ‘on the run’.

  They had orders from London never to transmit for more than fifteen minutes from the same place – because the Germans had a very sophisticated detection system and could tell after twenty minutes where a transmission was coming from anywhere in France, down to the very street and even to a specific house in that street – and never to transmit more than twice from the same safe house. So radio operators were continually seeking a safe house. This was not easy, because it put anyone who sheltered them, even for the short time it took to set up their material and transmit, in a difficult and dangerous situation. If ever the radio operator was discovered by the Gestapo while he was transmitting – and it was usually the Gestapo who did the tracking – it was not only the operator who was arrested, tortured and sent to a concentration camp but every member of the family that had sheltered him.

  Sometimes a householder agreed to take in a radio operator for the duration of a transmission, and then denounced him to the Gestapo. So the pianist was constantly on the qui vive, forever moving from place to place, often with the Gestapo on his heels. They had to live on their nerves. And they had to be very disciplined and have a strict routine because they not only had to transmit to London daily, often under great pressure, but had to code the organizer’s messages before transmitting, decode incoming messages, then burn any incriminating papers. All this as well as maintaining and carrying out repairs on their radio sets and, if necessary, dismantling and hiding their equipment, often in a barn or outhouse, and then assembling it again once the danger was past. It is not surprising that a radio operator’s training was two or three months longer than that for other agents selected for missions as organizers, couriers or saboteurs.

  Ideally, the radio’ had a ‘lookout’ when transmitting. But if that were not possible, they tried to operate behind a curtain, near a window, where they could watch for any suspicious person loitering in the street below or entering the building. They would never transmit with their backs to the door either.

  Although the pianists usually transmitted from a safe house, some preferred to work outside a town or village. One young radio operator, Henri Diacono, had a horror of transmitting inside a house since he was haunted by the idea that the Gestapo might burst through the door and surprise him. So he used to go out into the open country, throw his antennas over the branch of a tree and transmit from there, in what he considered to be relative safety. But he always took two armed résistants with him, who stationed themselves in strategic positions ready to warn him and, if necessary, open fire should the enemy suddenly appear.

  These precautions enabled Henri to continue transmitting when the people he was working closely with, a Frenchman and his son, were surrounded, together with other members of the group, taken away and shot, almost before his eyes. Henri, who had just celebrated his twenty-first birthday ‘in the field’, escaped to the countryside and continued transmitting despite the fact that the Germans were searching for him. At one point he was almost surrounded by a group of German soldiers, all firing in his direction, but he managed to shoot his way out and escape.

  I later asked him if he had been afraid when facing, alone, a battery of German guns.

  ‘When I was in training the mere thought of it happening terrified me,’ he replied. ‘But once I was actually faced with the situation, no, I didn’t feel at all afraid. It was more a feeling of exhilaration. It was their life or mine.’

  Henri and I met again after the SOE files were opened in 2000, and we discovered that we had been living in adjoining villages outside Paris for the previous forty years without either of us being aware of the other’s existence. Henri also told me that the training he had undergone was so intense that symphonies still rang in his head from morning to night: ‘We learned Morse code by listening to recordings of such classics as “The Wedding March”, da-da-di-da, and Beethoven’s Fifth, di-di-di-da. We even dreamt in Morse, and when we woke in the morning the birds outside the bedroom window were singing in Morse. It was in our interest to listen intently and cram as much knowledge into our heads as possible, considering the huge losses amongst radio operators.’

  The pianists weren’t always denounced by their so-called hosts. Sometimes, they were betrayed unwittingly. Young boys were occasionally used as intermediaries between the courier and the radio operator, because a youth rarely attracted suspicion. But it was through a boy of fifteen that Yvonne Baseden, codenamed ‘Odette’, was betrayed.

  She had been parachuted into France with ‘Etienne’(Gonzague de Saint-Geniès), organizer of the Scholar réseau near Lyons, in March 1944, to act as his pianist. Three months later, on 25 June, two days after receiving the first massive daylight parachutage (codenamed ‘Cadillac’) from a fleet of US Flying Fortress aircraft, Yvonne and Saint-Geniès went to a safe house they used, La Maison des Orphelins, a cheese factory outside Dole, to celebrate with a slap-up meal the safe receipt and storage of thirty-six consignments of arms. Yvonne had a locally recruited courier, Denise, but for some reason that day a subagent, a teenage boy, was entrusted with Yvonne’s radio set. He was carrying it to the Maison des Orphelins and had almost arrived at the factory when he was stopped by the local police, questioned and searched. When the gendarmes found the set, he was arrested and taken into custody. He was then interrogated, under torture, by the Gestapo. Terrified for his life, he told them where he was taking it.

  Yvonne and Saint-Geniès were in the middle of dinner when a lookout announced that a number of German soldiers were approaching the house. The group of résistants at the table scattered, most of them to the attics, and when the intruders arrived they found only the caretaker. They were about to leave when one of the soldiers noticed the table, set for eight, with the remains of a half-finished meal. An NCO, impressing on the terrified caretaker that he meant business, fired a shot in the air, unfortunately hitting both Saint-Geniès a
nd a member of his réseau, who were hiding in a false ceiling, which had been specially constructed for use in an emergency.

  The Germans made a cursory search but, discovering no one, were on the point of leaving when one of them noticed blood from Saint Geniès’s wound dripping through the ceiling’s thin partition. He alerted the others, who then made a thorough search and found the rest of the group hiding in the attics between the large wooden blocks used to separate the cheeses which were stored there. In order not to be taken alive and risk giving information under torture, Saint-Geniès, who had experienced the German treatment of prisoners before he had escaped from a Stalag and arrived in England for training, swallowed his L (suicide) pill and died immediately. The other members of his réseau were arrested and taken to the prison in Dole.

  Yvonne was later transferred to Dijon, where she was tortured, but did not give away any information, and then to Fresnes, near Paris. Luckily, the Gestapo thought she was just a young French girl romantically attached to the Resistance; they did not connect her with the radio set, and none of the fellow résistants arrested with her gave away her true identity. From Fresnes she was transferred to prison in Saarbrücken. Eventually, though, the Gestapo discovered their mistake. Realizing that Yvonne was not the starry-eyed girl they had believed her to be, but an SOE agent and the radio operator they had been searching for, she was transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she remained from September 1944 until the liberation of the camp in April 1945. In spite of her toes having been broken during torture, she was put to hard labour, probably hewing stones, and kept on a starvation diet. She developed tuberculosis and was not expected to live, which probably saved her life. She was not executed with the other women SOE agents in the camp before the Allies’ arrival. The camp commandant probably thought it was not worth wasting a bullet on someone who was about to die anyway. (Both Yvonne and her locally recruited courier, Denise, are still alive, Yvonne living in England and Denise in France.) A few years ago, at a commemoration ceremony at the F Section Memorial in Valençay, they were joyfully reunited for the first time since Yvonne’s arrest in 1944. Each had believed the other to be dead.

  In 2008 I was asked to lay the wreath on Remembrance Day at the SOE memorial in Westminster Abbey. There was already a crowd gathered in front of the plaque when suddenly Yvonne inched up next to me. ‘I heard it was you laying the wreath,’ she whispered, ‘so I asked my son to bring me to the ceremony.’ I was very touched, since she now rarely ventures out alone and never without her walking stick. Sometimes it is difficult to imagine the tremendous acts of bravery these now frail old ladies once performed.

  Apart from the chef de réseau and the pianist, the third member of the team was the courier. Until the beginning of 1942, women were not allowed ‘in the field’, nor to train as agents. Then the British authorities realized that a woman walking in a town or village during the day was far less conspicuous and therefore much more useful than a man, especially a young man, who ran the risk of being rounded up in a rafle. A rafle, or raid, was when the Gestapo would suddenly appear, usually in the middle of the day in a crowded place, arrest all the young men in sight and send them to work in Germany as forced labour, usually in a munitions factory, on the railways or on the land, regardless of the profession shown on their identity papers.

  The courier often accompanied escaped British airmen, who had been shot down and managed to evade German capture, and escaped prisoners of war, most of whom didn’t speak a word of French, from ‘safe house’ to ‘safe house’ until they were able to cross the frontier into relative safety, and hopefully make their way back to England. Her real mission, however, was as a messenger for the chef de réseau.

  Female couriers were also a great help to the radio operators since a young man, especially a young man carrying a heavy suitcase, risked being stopped and searched, whereas a woman carrying a shopping bag was able to move around more freely. In the beginning the transmitting set, or radio, weighed about twenty pounds and fitted into what could be mistaken for a small weekend case. So it was nearly always the courier who carried the radio from place to place, hiding it in the bottom of a basket and covering it with leeks and carrots and turnips, giving the impression that she was just another housewife on her way home from the market. As such, she was rarely questioned or searched.

  Maureen O’Sullivan was a courier who was stopped. One day Maureen had to carry the transmitter further than usual so she strapped it onto the back of her bicycle. But she was held up at a level crossing. While waiting for the train to pass through, a car full of Gestapo officers drew up beside her. One of them wound down his window, pointed and asked her what she had in her suitcase. She knew that if she hesitated or appeared flustered she was lost, so she gave a big smile – like most of the young couriers she was very pretty – and said: ‘I’ve got a radio transmitter and I’m going to contact London and tell them all about you.’ The officer’s eyes narrowed. The train whistled through and as the barrier was slowly raised she hesitated as to whether to risk making a run for it. But she knew she stood no chance of escaping, so she just continued to smile. Finally the officer smiled back and said: ‘You’re far too pretty to risk your neck with such stupidities,’ saluted and drove off. As she later said, ‘He could have asked me to open the case and I’d probably have been shot. But at least I’d have been shot for telling the truth!’

  The French called the agents sent from London les hommes de l’ombre – the men of the shadows – which was a very apt description. We, however, called them the Crosse and Blackwell Brigade. After being recruited, their uniform badges and buttons were changed. Their insignia was no longer that of their regiment, squadron or ship, but now read ‘By appointment to His Majesty the King’ – the logo on the Crosse and Blackwell pickle jars. More affectionately they were known as ‘Buck’s Boys’, in honour of F Section’s head, Maurice Buckmaster.

  Prospective agents were recruited from every branch of the Allied forces stationed in England. They were young, usually between twenty and thirty-five, although a few were approaching forty. But they were the exception rather than the rule. Yeo-Thomas was forty, and Lise de Baissac thirty-seven when they parachuted into France; Yvonne Rudellat, who went in by submarine, was forty-five. The recruits were courageous, motivated, often very idealistic and, glancing through old sepia photographs, mostly devastatingly handsome. And they were all volunteers. There were no special advantages or privileges given to those who joined SOE. They received the same pay as their comrades of the same rank working in a ministry or filing papers in a government office.

  SOE recruits were the elite, the cream of whatever country they represented. They became, in effect, lone commandos, often on the run with the Gestapo at their heels. They knew from the start that they had only a 50 per cent chance of survival. In the beginning a radio operator’s life expectancy was six weeks. Right up to the last minute before they left, they were told that they were free to withdraw, and no one would think any the worse of them. I don’t know how many, if any, changed their minds, but I personally never heard of anyone who did.

  Of course, if they elected not to go, they would have been sent to the ‘cooler’. And perhaps the idea of being sent to that remote castle, a fortress really, in the very northern tip of Scotland, nicknamed ‘purgatory’ by the agents, made the prospect of being hunted by the Gestapo a better option. And it was a straight choice between the two. Once trained, the prospective agent could not be returned to his unit: he knew too much. What happened at the ‘cooler’ is still shrouded in mystery, although rumour had it that, cut off from the world without a calendar, a watch, clocks or timepieces of any kind, the inmates lost all sense of time and place, becoming almost zombies in their isolation. Or perhaps they were ‘brainwashed’ to wipe out the memory of their intensive SOE training, so that when they were finally released they had forgotten all the secrets they had learned. Or what they had learned had become so ‘out of date’ that it w
ould no longer be relevant or useful to the enemy if revealed. I never actually met an agent who had spent time in the cooler. But that is hardly surprising. They would have been kept well away from Baker Street. It might even be that, because of the extremely tight security we all lived under, these prospective agents were not released until the war ended. How true any of these theories are I don’t know. But there must be some truth in the stories. And whatever happened in the cooler, if the general public had known about SOE at the time we would probably all have been locked away as either insane or a public danger.

  Once an agent was infiltrated behind enemy lines, by whatever means, it was as if an iron curtain had come down between him and London. He could neither send nor receive personal messages. The only news the family in England received, if there was a family, was an official card sent once a month by Vera Atkins, Buck’s assistant and a very prominent member of F Section, saying ‘We continue to have good news of your son/ your husband/your daughter. He or she is in good health.’ That’s all, nothing personal. But the agents working behind the lines did not even receive that. They were completely cut off from home, country and family. They arrived in the field in civilian clothes, without the protection of a uniform, so that if they were arrested they could not claim the status of prisoners of war. They were spies. And a spy’s fate awaited them. They had false papers giving a false name, false profession, false family, false birthplace, false education, false nationality. Everything about them was false. Before leaving they were obliged to absorb their cover story to the point where, even if they were dragged from bed at three o’clock in the morning, drugged with sleep, when questioned they automatically repeated the details of their false identity. They literally became another person.