Читать книгу Game of Spies: The Secret Agent, the Traitor and the Nazi, Bordeaux 1942-1944 - Paddy Ashdown, Paddy Ashdown - Страница 17

André Grandclément was born with everything – except steadfastness of purpose, good judgement, and a father who loved him.

Captain Raoul Gaston Marie Grandclément, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, was serving as a staff officer to the French Second Naval Squadron in Rochefort-sur-Mer, 150 kilometres northwest of Bordeaux, when his son, André Marie Hubert François, was born in the local hospital on 28 July 1909.

In his father’s absence (the future admiral was posted to Morocco two years after André’s birth), the boy was brought up by his mother, Amélia, the daughter of a colonel of infantry. When André was seven, Amélia died and his father married again. Care of the young boy passed to his stepmother, Jeanne, who he loved greatly. The couple lived in a grand house in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris, an area famously known as ‘the invisible ghetto’ because of the many members of the French establishment who lived there. Often criticised as being immune and insensible to the social upheavals that rocked France in the 1930s, the prevailing culture of the invisible ghetto during André’s early years was one of conservatism, a firm belief that national order depended on the preservation of the national hierarchy, and a fierce and unshakeable belief, come what may, in La gloire française.

André, like many of the sons of France’s military, was sent to the Franklin Jesuit College just a few hundred metres from his home. Here the values of the invisible ghetto were as much part of the curriculum as the rote learning of mathematics, foreign languages, French history and literature. It was at Franklin that the young Grandclément met and befriended a fellow student, Marc O’Neill. Descended from one of the ‘Wild Swans’ who had fled an oppressed Ireland in 1688 and subsequently fought for revolutionary France in the eighteenth century, O’Neill would, in the years to come, show that the family instinct for fighting oppression had not diminished in the intervening centuries.

In what was to become something of a pattern in André Grandclément’s young life, he failed to finish his studies at Franklin College, leaving at the age of twelve to join his father, now an admiral and Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur, who had been posted to command a French naval division in Syria in 1921. Admiral Grandclément had won acclaim in the First World War, including two terms as naval attaché to President Raymond Poincaré, and in action at the battle of Verdun, where he was wounded while ‘showing the greatest dynamism and a superb disregard for danger’. Grandclément senior spent his time in Syria, adorned with medals and a feathered hat, saluting everything military that moved as they passed him in review. Grandclément junior, meanwhile, looked on in distant admiration from first Beirut and then Tunis, where he continued his studies under the Jesuits. Finally, in his late teens André changed schools for the fourth time and returned to Paris to take his Baccalauréat.

Grandclément senior, whose brother and cousin were also admirals, had long made it clear that he expected his son to follow the family tradition and join the navy. It was now time for André to do his duty and prepare for the entrance exams for France’s naval college, the École Navale, at Brest. But something seems to have snapped in young André during his period of preparation for the great naval school. One day, he peremptorily resigned his place and joined up as an ordinary soldier in a Senegalese rifle regiment in Sfax, North Africa. Writing to a friend he said: ‘So now I am going to be with the negroes, with whom, if truth be told, I find a greater affinity than with the whites.’ André Grandclément had become – and would remain for the rest of his life – the outsider who longed to be inside.

Explaining his sudden and perplexing flight from a naval career, Grandclément junior later wrote: ‘At eighteen, I rejected my father as a result of a foolish row. If that had not happened I would have maintained the family tradition … [but then] I would have ended up less human – like my father.’

A little later, on a weekend visit to the Bizerta home of one of his father’s friends, the twenty-year-old André, ever romantic, ever impetuous, fell in love with the colonel’s daughter, Geneviève Toussaint, known as ‘Myssett’. Almost immediately he announced his intention to marry his new sweetheart. The admiral was predictably furious, but his son was adamant.

The couple married in Bizerta on 6 November 1929. Though he did it with bad grace and complained of the expense, the old admiral made the journey from Paris to join a small flotilla of senior naval Grandcléments who sailed into the cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-France in Bizerta for the ceremony, complete with clanking swords, heavy encrustations of medals, elegantly trimmed naval beards and, of course, the inevitable feather-festooned cocked hats.

André and Myssett had five children in quick succession. Three died young, leaving two daughters: Ghislaine, paralysed as a result of brain damage at birth, and Francine, four years her junior.

A year after the wedding, André suddenly announced yet another change of course: he was thinking of leaving the army. The young Grandclément family, now feeling the pinch financially (another regular feature of André Grandclément’s life), transhipped to Toulon. Here, in 1932, André declared that he was not after all leaving the army, but would instead attend the officer school at Saint-Maixent in the Somme valley. As ever, full of hope and resolution, he wrote to his wife: ‘I am very happy … and well aware of the value of two years of engagement once again in the business of learning and study.’

All seemed set fair once more. But then, fate again intervened – this time in the form of a serious riding accident which left him unfit for military service as a result of a damaged lung and, according to his doctor, tuberculosis as well. A short period of work in the wine business on the Côte d’Or followed. Then thanks to the patronage of a cousin, he was offered a job as a salesman with the insurance company Mutuelle Vie in Bordeaux. He and his family moved into a cramped first-floor apartment above a garage on the Rue Basse, a narrow street set back from the Pont de Pierre. It was all a long, long way from the pomp, gilt and glitter of the Bizerta cathedral wedding, just six years previously.

The twenty-six-year-old Grandclément who arrived in Bordeaux in 1935 was tall, slim, elegant, suntanned and clean cut. Though he had a curiously expressionless face, he was considered handsome, with blue eyes, a slightly hooked nose, a prominent chin and meticulously coiffured hair. Many who knew him commented on his verbal dexterity and his ability to carry an audience, albeit with a tendency, on occasion, to sound pompous. This together with a certain grace made him impressive – even beguiling – on first acquaintance: ‘intelligent, amiable, sensitive, good looking and with considerable presence,’ said one contemporary. Others were less enamoured. ‘He greatly overestimated his own importance. He was a kind of [ideological] gigolo,’ remembered one close colleague, while another described him as carrying ‘himself badly with a stooping head and shoulders as a result of some chest affliction. He has a pale face and a prominent nose.’

André Grandclément’s early opinions were those of his class and upbringing: Catholic and conservative, but not active in either cause. Later, preparing for the navy, he apparently shared the royalist sympathies of his classmates. After his marriage to Myssett the couple affected a bohemian lifestyle; there are even some suggestions of left-wing views during André’s time with the Senegalese rifle regiment. By the mid-1930s, however, he was close to the Croix-de-Feu, a right-wing political organisation, subsequently banned for its fascist leanings. Later police reports reflect these internal ambivalences, one noting him as a ‘dangerously militant communist’, suspected of hiding arms, while another described him as ‘a faithful partisan’ of the Vichy government. In reality, in these immediate pre-war years, André Grandclément, the perennially restless optimist who was always certain that the next chance was the best one, was still seeking a safe harbour for his views, just as he was looking for a secure financial future for his young family and a fitting purpose for his life.

The truth was that behind what was, at first sight, an imposing front, there lay a weak man in everything except his attachment to his daughters – especially little Ghislaine. The chief drivers of his personality were vanity, a hunger for recognition and the certainty that, despite the low opinion of his father and the moderate opinions of his contemporaries, there was nevertheless some important purpose to his life to match his hitherto unrecognised talents.

On 24 September 1939, just days after war broke out, Grandclément met a pretty young divorcée who worked in the same office building in Bordeaux. Not long after, the two became lovers and in due course he declared Lucette Tartas – vivacious, intelligent, firm in her views, and in many ways much stronger than her lover – his ‘official mistress’. In this capacity, according to the curious French custom of the time, Lucette was recognised by the family and his wife. Myssett, her heart broken, took to the country with the two girls and began an official separation from her husband.

The love affair between Grandclément and Lucette Tartas was deep, genuine and endearing. ‘Their love for each other dazzled … like a couple straight out of one of those pre-war musical comedies,’ one contemporary observed.

Weeks after meeting Lucette, and despite his physical incapacity, Grandclément managed to pull enough strings to be declared ‘fit for service’. He joined the battle for France, fighting with an infantry regiment engaged in the frantic attempts to stop German armour breaking through the Ardennes forest. Here he showed considerable military ability and was mentioned in dispatches for bravery. But this too did not last. When France surrendered, he was demobilised and returned to the role of a humble insurance agent in Bordeaux.

By 1940, with burgeoning medical expenses for the treatment of Ghislaine, the Grandcléments were once again in difficult financial straits. It was all too much for Myssett, who now sued for divorce. But by early 1941 the insurance business started looking up again – so much so that in September of that year André and Lucette were able to move house. They rented an elegant and spacious apartment at 34 Cours de Verdun, in a fashionable neighbourhood of central Bordeaux and just opposite the main headquarters of the special French police brigade under Pierre Poinsot.

By now, the public face of André Grandclément was hiding a deeper and much more dangerous life. The war had finally provided him with a secure political anchorage. He was, he decided, conservative, republican and, like many of his class (especially the fascist-leaning revolutionary group known as the ‘Cagoule militaire’ in the army, with whom he had both connections and sympathy), intensely patriotic, right-wing and nationalist. To start with he was a fervent supporter of Pétain’s Vichy administration. But, though he remained loyal to Pétain himself, he became disenchanted with the armistice and the Vichy government and began looking elsewhere for an organisation which would give him the opportunity to resist the German occupation, whilst remaining true to the right-wing authoritarian France in which he believed.

Sometime in 1941 Grandclément began to get involved in Resistance activities, working at a senior level in two relatively minor covert organisations. It was the beginning of a new enthusiasm in his life. But it was not enough. He needed something larger to match his talents.

In September 1941, a school teacher from Bordeaux set up a local branch of an underground organisation called the Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCM). The OCM’s roots lay in a group of eight French ex-army officers who had set up a minor escape line to London in August 1940. By 1942 the organisation had expanded from these small beginnings into a vast, hierarchical, rambling movement made up chiefly of ex-army officers, intellectuals and government servants, covering the western half of the German occupied zone. Its activities included gathering intelligence, organising arms depots, managing escape routes, minor sabotage, setting up Maquisard units and hunting down collaborators.

This was the kind of secret network that immediately appealed to André Grandclément’s sense of scale, romance and adventure – and these were his kind of people, too: ex-military, Catholic, conservative, strongly anti-communist and in many cases anti-Semitic as well.

Jean Duboué and Léo Paillère, the neighbours from the Quai des Chartrons who were by this time sending regular secret intelligence reports to London, were also early members of the OCM. Indeed from late 1941 Paillère was its chief of staff in southwest France. But in 1942 he was arrested and imprisoned for six months for black-market offences involving no less than 1.5 million francs’ worth of Armagnac and illegally distilled eau de vie. The regional OCM was left without a leader. OCM’s national head in Paris, Colonel Alfred Touny, sought a replacement and solicited the advice of two key southwest OCM members, both of whom just happened to be close to André Grandclément. One was his old Jesuit College friend, Marc O’Neill; the other, his uncle, General Paul Jouffrault (who was already head of the OCM in the Vendée). Both agreed that André would be perfect as the new head of the southwest chapter, which covered a vast swathe of France, from the Loire valley to the Pyrenees.

This was a fateful and extraordinary decision. For, apart from high-level family connections and an ex-school friend in the right place at the right time, André Grandclément, though a good organiser and a patriot, was temperamentally completely unsuitable for the task with which he was now entrusted. For Grandclément, however, his moment had arrived at last. Here was a role worthy of his talents as a mover of men and a shaper of events: a position of truly national importance. And if the Allies landed in 1943, as everyone believed they would – possibly even nearby, in the Gulf of Aquitaine – then here was a role which would assure him a place in history, too. What would his father, the admiral, think of that!

In the spring of 1942, as Roger Landes was busy training as a spy, and Friedrich Dohse was setting up his counter-espionage department in Bouscat, André Grandclément, the thirty-three-year-old insurance salesman, was given the leadership of the largest and most powerful Resistance organisation in southwest France. The change in him was immediate and dramatic. ‘With Lucette on his arm, André Grandclément was now a man who was utterly content and sure of himself,’ wrote one close observer. ‘He was no longer the insurance agent always complaining about life’s unfairness and injustices … Now he was living another life, with entirely new aims. Now he was fighting for his country and need no longer concern himself with such petty matters as finances and money. The transformation in him was complete – both morally and physically.’