From there, small groups of three or four were taken by train to Paris, where Dédée and her team took over. She was helped by Jean-François Nothomb, another young Belgian, and Jeanine de Greef, whose mother Elvire was the linchpin of the operation in the south-west. Madame de Greef, also Belgian, was as remarkable in her way as Dédée. She was small and endlessly resourceful, hard-wired to resist fear and gifted with an uncanny ability to bluff. She and her husband, Fernand, had left Belgium after the German invasion, ending up in the town of Anglet, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department, ten miles from the Spanish border. Fernand was employed as an interpreter at the local German administrative headquarters and was well placed to gather information and documentation. They were helped by an Englishman, Albert Johnson, who had worked as a chauffeur in Brussels before the war and somehow ended up joining the de Greefs’ circle at Anglet.
The Paris trio would escort their charges on the overnight train to Bayonne. From there they were in the hands of ‘Tante Go’, as Madame de Greef was known, who directed them to a safe house on the border, ready for the crossing. The psychological stress of the journey was now replaced by the physical ordeal of the climb. Neave painted a picture of how at nightfall they would set out from some remote farmhouse, led by Florentino Goïcoechea, a man of the mountains who, sustained by frequent pulls on a bottle of cognac, powered up the rocky tracks, deaf to entreaties to slow down. Further impetus was provided by Dédée, who, as the vice consul at Bilbao, Arthur Dean, described in a report to London, ‘with her own haversack on her shoulders, literally drives the men through the eight hour struggle’.25
It was hard enough in summer, when the unavoidable barrier of the Bidassoa river was on its ribs, but in winter the journey was potentially lethal. The river became a frothing torrent and one Belgian courier, Count Antoine d’Ursel, Jean Greindl’s successor in Brussels, was swept to his death in December 1943.
Neave’s devotion to Dédée is not hard to understand. Who could not be moved by her character and qualities? In some ways they were an exalted manifestation of those that he would admire in Margaret Thatcher. Certainly, Dédée’s example persuaded him that women were at least as valuable as men in the work of Room 900. In January 1944, when he was finding it difficult to identify candidates with the strength of character and qualities needed to operate as IS9 agents behind enemy lines, he contacted his colleague in the London-based Belgian Security Service, Captain Delloye, with a suggestion. ‘It seems to me that we can make use of the opposite sex,’ he wrote. ‘Women make good guides.’26 Soon women were being trained in parachuting, coding and all the other arts of the trade to the satisfaction of their male supervisors. ‘She is in my opinion a very good type of guide and will be very useful as such,’ was the verdict on one trainee. There was no one, though, to touch Dédée in Neave’s esteem. She was a pioneer who had begun her adult life making her way in the very male world of Belgium’s biggest business enterprise. She was quick-thinking, arriving at decisions and acting on them in a way that contrasted completely with the dithering female of stereotype. But for all that, she remained very much a woman.
Comet’s successes brightened the summer of 1942. They were reinforced by some coups pulled off by the Pat Line. At the April 1942 meeting in Gibraltar between O’Leary, Darling and Langley, it had been agreed to try a more direct method of exfiltrating servicemen from the south than the arduous mountain route. Between July and October, O’Leary’s team pulled off three well-executed seaborne operations. By now the escape line’s activities had caught the attention of the Air Ministry, who began requesting help to get specific airmen back into the fray. The first concerned an RAF celebrity, Whitney Straight, an American by birth and a Grand Prix racing driver before the war, who flew fighters in the Battle of Britain. After being shot down near Le Havre on 31 July 1941, he made his way south but was captured within sight of the Spanish frontier. He gave a false name and claimed to be a soldier. According to Neave, ‘Had his true identity become known, the chances of getting him back would have been remote.’27 Room 900 was under pressure from the Air Ministry for action and in June O’Leary engineered his delivery, along with another thirty-four airmen, to a beach where a British trawler was waiting to take them to Gibraltar. There was another sea evacuation in September following a mass breakout from the internment camp at Fort de la Revère, near Nice, and one more a month later.
Though there was much good news that summer to boost the standing of Room 900, the winter brought a crop of disasters. In November, a concerted attack by German intelligence on the escape networks began. On the 18th, a trusted courier turned up at the home of the Maréchal family in Brussels with two men in civilian clothes, who he introduced as American airmen. Georges Maréchal, his English wife, Elsie, and their daughter, also Elsie, were all Comet members and had given shelter to fourteen Allied airmen.28 Though the guide did not know it, the ‘airmen’ were Abwehr agents. The Maréchals were arrested and, according to Neave, ended up in the hands of the Gestapo. The ‘bastards beat eighteen-year-old Elsie until she was covered in bruises’.29 In two days, nearly a hundred people connected to Comet were in German hands.
The line was hopelessly compromised. In early January 1943, after her twenty-fourth trip from Paris to Bilbao, Dédée returned to Paris, where she persuaded her father that it was time to leave the country. They set off for Bayonne on the 13th, with two other helpers and three RAF aircrew. The Bidassoa was in flood and it was decided it would be too dangerous for Frédéric de Jongh to make the crossing. He was to stay with ‘Tante Go’ in her villa in Anglet and Dédée would return for him after delivering the airmen. The party struggled through a torrent of mud, up a stony track, to a remote house in the mountains near the village of Urrugne. It was the farm of Françoise Usandizaga, who lived there with her three children and had often fed and sheltered Dédée’s parties before they began the trek across the frontier. Even Florentino felt the night was too wild to make an attempt. He left for his home, saying they would try again tomorrow. At noon on 15 January, according to Neave, they heard the sound of a car grinding up the track. Minutes later, German police were at the door.30 Dédée, Françoise and the airmen were arrested. The evaders were taken off to a series of prisons, where they were subjected to brutal Gestapo interrogations. Françoise ended up in Ravensbrück, where she died on 12 April 1945. After a long calvary, Dédée spent the remainder of the war in Ravensbrück and Mauthausen, but survived. Her father returned to Paris, where he was betrayed in June 1943 and executed with two other resisters on 28 March 1944.
Despite these blows, Comet staggered on. Within a fortnight of Dédée’s departure, Johnson and Nothomb led another party over the Pyrenees. On the same day, far away in Brussels, Jean Greindl was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death. An accident of war pre-empted the execution when he was killed in an American bombing raid on Brussels-Evere aerodrome seven months later.
The Pat Line was collapsing too. In February 1943, Louis Nouveau was picked up, betrayed by French Gestapo agent Roger le Neveu, who passed himself off as a patriot. The number of his victims is unknown. His biggest scalp was Pat O’Leary himself, arrested in Toulouse on 2 March. Despite passing through the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau, both Nouveau and O’Leary survived the war. Hundreds of others did not.
For all that the escape lines suffered that winter, the damage done to SOE by German counter-intelligence operations was even worse. In June 1942, the Abwehr captured an SOE agent equipped with a radio transmitter. Armed with the correct codes, they conducted a long dialogue with the unsuspecting organisation in London, in an exercise known as Operation North Pole. More than fifty Dutch agents were parachuted into Holland and into the arms of the waiting Germans. Forty-seven of them are thought to have been killed.
The men and women who operated the Pat and Comet lines suffered greatly for their heroism. From the outset, it was known that there would be no mercy from the Germans and even a spontaneous act of humanity towa
rds their enemies could bring death. The MI9 files are full of grim messages that filtered back concerning the fate of humble helpers. Neither age nor sex gave any protection. ‘Emile Fraipont, Celeste Fraipont and Lucie Vis, all from Liège, were condemned to death for having given hospitality to a British airman whose aircraft was shot down on Belgian soil,’ reads one report passed on by Belgian security. ‘Emile Fraipont was 70, his wife 68.’31
The resisters were fighting an unequal struggle and it was inevitable that what successes they had should come at a high price. They were facing an enemy that was lavishly funded and resourced and intelligently directed, and which acknowledged no constraints on its behaviour. The German secret and police services were clever and manipulative, operating from a standpoint of utter misanthropy and cynicism. They could draw on the scum of the countries they conquered – the criminals, misfits and sociopaths for whom German occupation had provided a playground for their malignity. Dédée and O’Leary and the hundreds who helped them understood the need for guile and ruthlessness. But their motives were noble and their functioning depended ultimately on trust and faith in human decency.
There were other factors that handicapped them, some self-inflicted. The Pat Line did not receive a radio and operator to link it to London until April 1942, relying instead on a slow and laborious system of couriers and ‘messages personnels’ broadcast on the BBC. As Neave reflected, had a radio been provided, Cole’s treachery might have been uncovered sooner. Dédée refused a radio operator on principle, fearing that Comet would then come under increasing London control and its independence would be curtailed. Neave did send an agent and transmitter to Belgium in February 1943, but a month later he was found dead in unexplained circumstances.
Despite the dangers, Comet members could show abysmal ignorance of basic security procedures. Their fatal amateurism was revealed in the Maréchal disaster. In Neave’s account, Jean Greindl was alerted by young Elsie Maréchal to the arrival of the suspicious ‘American’ visitors. He told her to return home and ‘stop these men from leaving at all costs. Interrogate them carefully.’32 When she got to the house, the Germans were waiting. Having heard no more, Greindl sent another member of the team, twenty-five-year-old Victor Michiels, with instructions to watch the house but not to approach it unless he was certain there was no danger. He observed the house for half an hour, then knocked on the door, whereupon German Field Police emerged from the shadows. When he ran off, they shot him dead.
The following day, one of the Paris team, Elvire Morelle, arrived by train in Brussels and, having received no warning of the disaster, went straight to the house, where she was arrested and hauled off to the Gestapo.33 The losses angered Neave and Langley’s overlords. Neave claimed that ‘the very existence of Room 900 and its contacts with underground escape lines was threatened.’34 They were ‘subjected to violent criticism of the potential dangers of escape work to military information and sabotage’ – that is, to MI6 and SOE operations. Crockatt, as head of MI9, defended them, arguing that without some degree of direction from London, the dangers to security would be even greater. He also pointed out that despite the casualties the lines had sustained, their efforts had resulted in the return of a large number of airmen to carry on the fight. Crockatt enlisted the help of the Air Ministry to press the point. With this intervention, survival was secured. By May 1943, even Dansey, ‘destructive at first, and determined to put up the shutters at Room 900, was … appeased’.35
Despite Neave’s indignation, the attitude of Dansey and others does not seem entirely unreasonable. Even when hindsight and the harsh demands of warfare are taken into account, some of Room 900’s actions seem misjudged. Neave himself placed inordinate faith in a woman whose behaviour and manner set alarm bells clanging elsewhere. Mary Lindell appealed to his sense of the romantic. She was an Englishwoman in her mid-forties, married to the French Comte de Milleville and living in Paris when the war started. She was arrested by the Gestapo for helping escapers in 1941 and sent into solitary confinement at Fresnes prison, but was later released. In July 1942, she turned up in London, having reached there via Barcelona. She offered her services to Room 900, saying she was prepared to go back to start a new escape line.
To modern ears, Mary Lindell sounds like nothing but trouble. Neave’s first impression of her was of ‘fearlessness, independence and not a little arrogance’.36 To that could be added wilfulness, egomania and obstinacy, and a recklessness that endangered not just herself but others. He noted admiringly that ‘her contempt and disdain for the Germans was enormous.’ But that was surely a serious disadvantage if she was pitting her wits and her life against them.37 Lindell was to be the first woman agent Room 900 specially trained and Neave was put in charge of her. The decision to send her back seems extraordinarily rash. She told Neave that after receiving her nine-month prison sentence from the Germans in late 1940, she told the court martial that this was ‘just sufficient time for me to have a baby with Adolf’.38 After her release, she came to the notice of the German security services, who started hunting her and she was forced to go to ground. Nonetheless, her argument that if she stayed out of Paris she would be relatively safe was accepted. Not everyone was happy about it or her. Neave admitted that ‘she did not endear herself to the Establishment in London by her outspoken behaviour.’ Even he was concerned that her return ‘might endanger her own life and those of others’.39
In the third week of October 1942, she was flown in a black-painted Lysander to a landing site in the countryside near the town of Ussel, sixty miles south-east of Limoges. Neave went with her to Tangmere, the fighter station in Sussex from where operations were launched in full moon periods. She left without a radio operator. She had fallen out with the one she had been assigned, Tom Groome, and remarkably, given how vital wireless communications were to their work, Room 900 had no one else trained and available at the time. It was decided to try and parachute one in later.
She was landed without incident and arrived safely at Ruffec, near Angoulême, from where she was planning to set up a new route to Spain, as there were believed to be a number of stranded Allied airmen in the area. Her efforts to find reliable guides failed. Some time towards the end of the year, she was knocked down by a car while riding a tandem and almost killed. This meant that she was recuperating in Lyons, hundreds of miles away, when her first customers called. On 18 December, two men arrived at Ruffec looking for help. Major Herbert ‘Blondie’ Hasler and Corporal Bill Sparks were survivors of Operation Frankton, an audacious commando raid on shipping at Bordeaux docks. In breach of security procedures, they had been told to head for the town, where they might find friends. By chance they turned up at the Hôtel de la Toque Blanche, a haunt of Mary Lindell’s. She was still recovering from her injuries in Lyons but word reached her of their arrival. Despite her condition, she managed to arrange for her eldest son, Maurice, to escort them to Lyons. She went to see Cartwright in Switzerland to try and arrange for them to be moved there, but this would mean a delay to their return and London wanted the ‘Cockleshell Heroes’ back fast. Eventually, Lindell found a guide to take them to Spain. At the end of March, the pair arrived safely in Madrid, along with two RAF airmen. Her efforts had saved their lives. Under the Hitler ‘commando order’, if caught, they would undoubtedly have been shot like their comrades, six of whom were executed. But it had been more by luck than efficiency, and in November 1943 Lindell was arrested again, ending up in Ravensbrück, with no further successes to record.
Neave maintained that the old guard at MI9 were ‘unfairly critical’ of Mary’s exploits in France, but ‘being young’, he ‘was delighted with her unconventional ways’. They stayed friends in the years after the war.40
Lindell was one of two women agents handled by Neave. The other, Beatrix Terwindt, was a Dutch former KLM air hostess who volunteered for SOE. Room 900 had virtually no presence in Holland, over which Allied bombers were frequently shot down. When Neave came across ‘Trix’,
he was impressed by her quiet determination and fluent French and English and decided that she was the ideal recruit to set up an escape line. SOE were willing to let her go, and on the night of 13/14 February 1943, she parachuted straight into the custody of German agents who, thanks to the success of Operation North Pole, knew all about her mission. Once again Neave had gone to see her off, helping her into her parachute harness before she climbed into a Halifax bomber at Tempsford, the special operations base in Bedfordshire. It would have been strange if he had not felt uneasy at the incongruity of a soldier in uniform sending women civilians to a destination that held every prospect of pain and death. There were occasions when the chance arose to share at least some of the perils. It had been suggested that Neave accompany Mary Lindell when she was flown to France, to make sure she was safely delivered. This would have been a breach of the standing rule that staff officers directing secret operations from London and who knew the names of agents should not risk capture by the enemy, but he and Langley did not like the idea of her going unescorted. In the end, the idea came to nothing as SOE decided to send another agent on the same flight and there were only two passenger seats in a Lysander. Years later, Neave wrote that he had ‘no hesitation in recalling my deep sense of relief’ when he heard the news.41
The Man Who Was Saturday Page 14