Читать книгу Game of Spies: The Secret Agent, the Traitor and the Nazi, Bordeaux 1942-1944 - Paddy Ashdown, Paddy Ashdown - Страница 22

As his fellow Jews were travelling to Paris crowded into railway wagons, Roger Landes was being driven up the Great North Road to RAF Tempsford, eight miles from Bedford.

A few days earlier he had been instructed to leave all unnecessary belongings at his parents’ home and make his way to Orchard Court. Here, after being dressed in his French clothes, he was minutely searched for anything incriminating and closely cross-examined on his cover story. Then, equipped with his brown cardboard mock-leather suitcase containing everything he would need as a traveller in France, he was taken to an SOE holding unit – a substantial Georgian mansion in Huntingdonshire – where he stayed for a few days in the company of other SOE agents waiting to be parachuted into occupied Europe.

At Tempsford, Landes was given as good a meal – with wine – as the RAF could muster in wartime, before being escorted to a large farmhouse at the edge of the base. Another search for incriminating traces of British life – matches, receipts, theatre tickets etc. – ensued, together with a repeat examination of his cover story and a briefing on how to use his suicide ‘L’ tablets, which were handed to him in a small rubber box. Finally, he was equipped with French ration cards and documents made out in his new false name: René Pol, a quantity surveyor working for the German military construction operation, Organisation Todt.

An hour before departure, the RAF dispatcher, who would now escort Landes all the way to the moment he jumped, helped him into voluminous parachute overalls covered with pockets. These contained a folding shovel, a parachutist’s knife, a small flask of rum, a compass, a torch, a .38 Luger automatic, some Benzedrine tablets and a tin of emergency rations. On top of his overalls Landes wore a single-piece camouflaged parachute smock, buttoned up between the legs and closed by a zip at the front. On top of that came his parachute and harness, secured by two straps passed over his shoulders and two more under his buttocks. All four straps were clipped into a quick-release buckle on his chest.

Thus, trussed up like a chicken, and carrying his parachute helmet, Roger Landes was led to a converted Halifax and installed in the back, along with a sleeping bag, a flask of coffee laced with rum, a brown paper bag containing sandwiches and four metal cylinders packed with his radios, weapons and ammunition. The dispatcher checked that his charge was comfortably installed and advised him to get as much sleep as he could. There was a long cold night ahead.

Sadly, it was all in vain.

There was no sign of the promised reception committee at de Baissac’s new Moulin de Saquet site. Landes, remembering what had happened to de Baissac and Peulevé, declined the offer to drop blind and the aircraft turned for home. Three further attempts were made to parachute Landes into France, but all were frustrated. (One because the wrong Morse recognition letter was sent by the reception committee; one because an incautious owl flew into the engine of Landes’s Halifax; and one because of a signal miscommunication.)

Finally, at 1.40 a.m. on 1 November 1942, after yet another cancelled drop and an attempt to fly him to Gibraltar and send him by fishing vessel to the southern French coast, Roger Landes, codenamed ‘Actor’, alias ‘Stanislas’ and carrying the false identity of ‘René Pol’, landed at Bois Renard, near the village of Mer in the Loire valley. Parachuted in with him that night was Gilbert Norman, his colleague from the SOE wireless school at Thame.

Buffeted by strong winds, Landes and Norman had had an uncomfortable journey as their Halifax made its way south across France. To offset the wind, the Halifax pilot took his aircraft down to a spine-chilling 150 metres for the jump. Norman went first; then Landes.

As the dark bulk of the aircraft passed away over Landes’s head, he felt the sharp jerk of his parachute opening. A moment or so later, he was down – in the middle of a muddy field. Looking around, he found himself alone with the sound of the Halifax fading away into the darkness. No reception committee, no lights, no Gilbert Norman: no one and nothing in sight. He stripped off his jumpsuit and buried it – along with his parachute – and started to consider his options. Perhaps he would have to make his own way to Bordeaux?

He decided to hide in some bushes and wait to see what would happen next. Ten minutes later he heard the sound of Norman’s voice softly calling his alias: ‘Stanislas, Stanislas.’ He emerged to find Norman accompanied by a slender man with a slightly ridiculous Hitler moustache: it was Pierre Culioli. Raymond Flower, the head of the Monkeypuzzle reception team, should have been there, but he had become so frightened of almost anything that he could not be relied on and so Culioli had taken his place.

The real cause of Flower’s petrified condition, however, was far worse than Culioli knew. Flower had convinced himself that both Culioli and Rudellat were Gestapo agents, and had sent to London for cyanide tablets to kill them both. The lethal tablets to do the job were contained in a special unmarked package which Norman had been given that night, with firm instructions that they were to be delivered personally into Flower’s hands only. In the end, the killing never happened because the petrified Flower could neither bring himself to do the deed nor persuade anyone else to do it for him. In reality, Culioli and Rudellat’s supposed ‘treachery’ was no more than the product of Flower’s fevered imagination. Nevertheless, Culioli’s survival, whether justified or not, would cost Gilbert Norman, his colleagues in Paris and the whole of SOE, very dear in the months to come.

That night Culioli took Landes and Norman to the house of a local mayor, who also happened to be Culioli’s father-in-law.

The following morning there was a knock on Landes’s bedroom door. Suddenly wakened from a deep sleep, the new arrival from London sat bolt upright and shouted: ‘Come in!’ – in English. Fortunately, Landes’s early morning caller was not the Gestapo, but his host, come to collect him for the next stage of his journey to Bordeaux.

After breakfast, Norman left to take up the role of radio operator for the new Prosper network in Paris, headed by one of Landes’s ex-Wanborough colleagues – the young ‘Ivanhoe’, Francis Suttill. Norman took the morning train to Paris with his ‘guide’, Francis Suttill’s courier, Andrée Borrel. Small-boned, dark-complexioned and twenty-three years old, Borrel was an ex-Paris ‘street urchin’, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and worked in an escape line before fleeing to London in 1941, making her the most battle-experienced of any of the Prosper or Scientist agents. One of the first women to be dropped into France, she had arrived in late September, with orders to join Suttill in Paris.

As Borrel and Norman made their way to the station, Landes was loaded onto a cart which, with him at the reins, carried him in lonely state to a nearby farm. Neither SOE’s training, nor Landes’s city life in Paris and London had equipped him with the skills to drive a horse and cart. But luckily, as he explained afterwards, ‘the horse found its own way home. Though it was a very strange feeling being on a public road, full of uniformed Germans, when only the night before I had been in England …’

At the farm, Landes was surprised to find the jumpy Raymond Flower, together with Flower’s radio operator Marcel Clech and two of SOE’s most important women agents, waiting for them and a merry party in progress. Landes, who never relaxed his obsession with security, later complained that it was ‘more a social event than a business meeting’. He was of course right. If the farm had been raided that night the Gestapo would have netted Landes, Rudellat, Flower, Clech and Lise de Baissac, Claude de Baissac’s sister, who had been parachuted in a month previously and was on her way to establish a new SOE circuit in Poitiers.

At six o’clock the following morning, 2 November, Landes set off on foot for the local station, while Rudellat and Lise de Baissac followed separately on bicycles, each with a suitcase strapped to a carrier rack. Rudellat’s suitcase contained Landes’s radio and revolver, which she was to carry for him to Bordeaux. (It was not her first experience of carrying compromising articles. She had already become famous in Baker Street for cycling round Tours distributing sticks of dynamite to the Resistance from a stock hidden in her underclothes.)

The three secret agents took the train to Tours, the two women sitting together in one carriage and Landes separately in another. At Tours, Lise de Baissac caught a train south to the Charente, where she had contacts to meet. Rudellat had her own flat in the town, but decided that, as a single woman with an inquisitive landlord, it would attract too much attention if Landes stayed the night with her, so she directed him to a small hotel near the station. The two agreed to meet the following morning in the station buffet and catch the early train to Bordeaux, travelling as a married couple. In case the rendezvous failed, Rudellat gave her ‘husband’ the address of the Café des Chartrons, before they parted.

Checking in to the hotel that evening, Landes made a mess of writing his new name on one of the five forms he was required to complete in order to register. He amended it as best he could, hoping the manager wouldn’t notice.

The following day, 3 November, there was no sign of Yvonne Rudellat at Tours station. Landes had no option but to continue the journey to Bordeaux by himself. Now he was totally on his own. They had told him in training to invent a cover story for every journey, so as always to have a convincing explanation for what he was doing. Over time, this would become one of his cardinal rules for survival and one he would always impress on others who he trained. Now, however, with no previous experience in wartime France, he had to do the best he could with what little London had given him. He was returning to his job in Organisation Todt after a visit to Tours, where he had been seeing friends. But who were the friends? What were their names? What was their address? What was his address in Bordeaux? He had neither a past nor a future to draw on. If he survived, he would accumulate enough back history to create both. Looking out of the window as the train ground laboriously south through Poitiers, Angoulême and the Charente vineyards, where the leaves flamed with the gold and red of autumn, Landes felt alone, out of place and very vulnerable.

Finally, late in the morning, the train rattled over the iron girder bridge spanning the muddy waters of the Garonne and pulled into the glass and cast-iron cavern of Bordeaux’s Gare Saint-Jean, full of steam and noise and bustle. Safely through the German checkpoint at the end of the platform, he went to register at a local hotel which Yvonne Rudellat had recommended, and then set off for the Café des Chartrons.

In general, cities are the most congenial places to conduct the business of secrets. The advantages of anonymity, a facility for easy contact and the ability to vanish into the crowd make spying, like any impropriety, easier in an urban setting than anywhere else. In due course, Roger Landes would become a master of his trade in this environment. For the moment, though, it was enough to feel safer amongst the crowds in Bordeaux than he did being drawn around the Loire valley behind a horse with homing instincts.

That first day among the faceless throng filling the streets and squares of a foreign city must nevertheless have been a nerve-jangling one, even for someone trained to the task and used to living in France.

After the huddled coats of London in November, it would have been strange to see people sitting outside street cafés, soaking up the last warmth of summer. Stranger still to have to root his feet to the ground to stop them taking flight when the turn of a corner brought him face to face with a crowd of German soldiers coming in the opposite direction. He cut down onto the waterfront and, turning left, followed the crescent-shaped sweep of the quay north, towards the Pont de Pierre with its seventeen graceful arches, one for each letter in Napoléon Bonaparte’s name. He was passing through elegant Bordeaux now, with its magnificent eighteenth-century frontages, balconied apartments and spacious tree-lined parks. Turning briefly left into one of these, he found himself in the Place des Quinconces. Here, strolling idly through yellow drifts of fallen leaves from the park’s plane trees, he saw a little bistro, the Café des Colonnes, and noted it as a possible future meeting place. Back on the waterfront once more, he walked north, up the Quai des Chartrons, crowded with small merchant vessels and German warships and busy with the clatter of cranes, small goods trains and lorries. Here were quayside bars and chandleries and the imposing shop windows of great wine merchants. On the opposite side of the road a line of new warehouses marched along the quay, stretching north into the haze. It was there, in the Bacalan quarter – as he remembered from the map he had studied back in London – that he would find number 101: the Café des Chartrons, the rendezvous he had fixed with Yvonne Rudellat the previous day.

It was midi, the sacred French lunch hour, when he arrived at the café. The restaurant was crowded, smoky and full of the noise of shouted meal orders and the clatter of plates. Landes ordered himself a drink and settled into a corner to wait for the place to empty enough for him to call the patron over. Using Claude de Baissac’s alias in France, he began: ‘I have a letter for David,’

‘David? I don’t know any David.’

‘You are Monsieur Bertrand?’

‘Of course I am. But there is no David here. I don’t know what you are talking about.’

Landes asked him if he could leave a letter for his friend. Bertrand, not wishing to give any indication to this stranger that he knew de Baissac, shrugged and answered that of course he could. But since he didn’t know anyone called David, there was no guarantee it would be delivered. On a slip of paper Landes wrote:

My dear David,

I am briefly passing through Bordeaux and would love to see you. If you can make it I will be in the Café des Colonnes in Place des Quinconces from 11 in the morning and dining at around 7 in the evening in the Café Gambetta. I do hope we can meet,

Stanislas

Handing the note to Bertrand, Landes returned to his hotel near the station.

That evening, Landes entered the Café Gambetta at seven o’clock sharp and was reassured to see Yvonne Rudellat already installed at a corner table with a thick-set, dark-haired stranger, who she introduced as ‘Monsieur Jean Duboué’. She had had an accident while cycling to Tours railway station the previous day, she explained. She was only bruised, but her clothes had been badly torn. She didn’t want to attract attention on the train, so she had gone back to her flat, changed and caught a later connection. She had looked for Landes at the Café des Chartrons. Marcel Bertrand told her that a stranger had left a message. And so, here she was.

‘David is out of town waiting for your parachute drop,’ Rudellat continued. ‘If you missed each other, I was to tell you to go every morning to the Bar de Petit Louis, order a glass of wine and wait for him to arrive.’

The three of them went back to the Café des Chartrons, where Landes unpacked his radio and, relieved to find that it had not been damaged in Rudellat’s bicycle accident, tried to get through to Baker Street. He could hear London well enough. But they couldn’t hear him. He would have to find somewhere else to make his transmissions.

On that same day, 3 November 1942, while Landes was trying to radio London, Admiral Raoul Gaston Marie Grandclément, Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur, pillar of the French navy, head of the Grandclément family and pitiless mirror to his son’s failures, died at his home in Paris, with André Grandclément at his bedside.

In Bordeaux, two days later, Claude de Baissac finally met Roger Landes. They discussed where the newly arrived radio operator should live and decided that he should move in with de Baissac that evening until somewhere more permanent could be found. That afternoon, trying to kill time, Landes went to the cinema and nearly gave himself away again by lighting a cigarette. The cinema manager rushed over and warned him in an urgent whisper that, under the Germans, smoking in cinemas was strictly forbidden.

Although Friedrich Dohse in Bouscat knew nothing of the new arrivals in his city, he knew something was going on. Luftwaffe reports sent to his office highlighted a substantial increase in clandestine night flights into the Bordeaux region. They were probably, he was told, parachuting in arms and agents. Dohse ordered daily updates and persuaded local Wehrmacht commanders to provide roving raiding parties to intercept the new threat.

Up to now, Bordeaux had been, for Friedrich Dohse, quiet, pleasant and comfortable. All this was about to change.