Читать книгу Game of Spies: The Secret Agent, the Traitor and the Nazi, Bordeaux 1942-1944 - Paddy Ashdown, Paddy Ashdown - Страница 24

Eight days after Roger Landes’s arrival in Bordeaux, German tanks smashed through the flimsy barriers which marked the demarcation line and occupied Vichy France.

Operation Attila was triggered by the Allied landings in North Africa and the German realisation that they were now vulnerable to invasion, not just on France’s northern Channel coastline, but on its southern Mediterranean one as well. From this moment, Pétain and his government, who had enjoyed a measure of genuine autonomy up to now, became little more than German puppets.

The German invasion of Vichy France also marked the beginning of a new phase in the French Resistance and in the activities of SOE. Now there was no need for squeamishness in unleashing what Baker Street euphemistically referred to as ‘crackers and bangs’ (i.e. sabotage) wherever and whenever London wished. On 13 November 1942 Baker Street sent out a message to circuits across France calling for ‘sabotage immediately and on as large a scale as possible’. These were accompanied by specific instructions to de Baissac to take ‘action against all shipping that used the port of Bordeaux’.

Events immediately started to move at an increasing pace.

On 18 November, a week after the German invasion of the zone non-occupée, Victor Charles Hayes, a pharmacist and dental mechanic whom SOE had turned into an explosives expert, was parachuted into a site just south of Tours with instructions to make his way to Bordeaux. Thirty-four years old, balding, short in stature (five foot four), with a tendency to plumpness, Hayes (known to all as Vic) looked like a comfortable country lawyer or bank manager of the day. After the armistice he had fled France for Spain, where he had taken a boat to Liverpool, leaving his wife, Raymonde, and their baby daughter to follow him on a later ship. On his SOE training course, he heard that both had been drowned when their ship was torpedoed in the Bay of Biscay.

Vic Hayes arrived in Bordeaux on 28 November to find his explosives already waiting for him. They had been parachuted in a week before when, at the third attempt, a Whitley bomber dropped four containers to the Coirac reception committee. They were packed with sixty pounds of explosives, twelve Sten guns, twelve revolvers, sixty-six hand grenades and fifteen small clam mines, suitable for attacking coastal craft and cutting railway lines.

Around the same date, a Slade School of Art graduate, fluent in French, Italian, Spanish and German, cycled into Tarbes and made her way to Gaston Hèches’s restaurant. Mary Herbert, alias ‘Claudine’, known to her friends as ‘Maureen’ and travelling under the identity of ‘Marie Louise Vernier’, was, at thirty-nine, the oldest of the Scientist team. A woman of pronounced Catholic views and a trusting character, she was pretty rather than striking, with a tall, willowy figure, blue eyes, a face enlivened by a winning smile and hair so fine that it had a natural aptitude for disorder. Mary Herbert had been stranded in Plymouth earlier in the month with Landes, waiting for a flying boat to take them to Gibraltar. In the end, she and four other agents had been infiltrated into France by submarine and fishing boat, landing fifteen kilometres southeast of Marseille on the same night that Landes was parachuted into Bois Renard. Her orders were to join the Scientist network as Claude de Baissac’s courier.

Gaston Hèches installed Mary Herbert in one of the third-floor bedrooms above his restaurant, where she passed the time waiting to hear from Bordeaux by embroidering handkerchiefs and table linen for the Hèches family. On 22 November, Robert Leroy, now demoted to courier and rechristened ‘Robert the Tipsy’ by his Resistance colleagues, arrived in Tarbes with orders to smuggle Herbert over the demarcation line. She left her expensive leather handbag with one of Hèches’s daughters (‘too sophisticated for my new life’) and accompanied Leroy to a village near Bordeaux, where de Baissac was waiting for her.

Yvonne Rudellat, sent down from Tours to warn de Baissac of his courier’s impending arrival, now busied herself with finding accommodation for her newly arrived colleague, eventually settling on an apartment in the same road as de Baissac’s flat.

As Scientist’s courier, Mary Herbert was responsible for arranging de Baissac’s meetings, carrying his messages (often in a matchbox, hidden beneath the matches, or between the pages of a novel) and transporting Landes’s radios around the city. On one occasion in Bordeaux, struggling off a Paris train with a hefty case containing a wireless set, a German naval officer stopped her and demanded to know what was inside. She was moving flats, she replied. It looked heavy, the German suggested – and offered to carry it for her to the tram. He was rewarded with a charming smile and a mildly flirtatious ‘thank you’ for his trouble.

It was in the nature of Mary Herbert’s job that she and Claude de Baissac spent a lot of time together, often late at night when she picked up or delivered the day’s messages. Sometime around December 1942, the two became lovers.

Roger Landes spent the first weeks of November 1942 making further attempts to get through to London. He tried several locations in the city, but always with the same result; he could hear London, but they could not hear him. Eventually Marcel Bertrand suggested an empty villa which he owned, in the Bordeaux suburb of Cenon, a middle-class district situated on an escarpment above the city, on the east bank of the Garonne. The house, which was located in a sunny spot and had four bedrooms, was what the French call a pavillon and the English refer to as a bungalow. It was perfect for Landes’s needs. The front-door lock could only be opened in a certain way, so that it was detectable if a stranger who did not know the lock’s eccentricities attempted entry in the owner’s absence. There was a sizeable urban garden surrounded by high walls in which were set two doors, each giving access onto a different street. Best of all (and in what would become Landes’s trademark habit of hiding ‘in plain sight’), the house lay almost in the shadow of a powerful medium-wave radio mast serving the nearby headquarters of the German anti-aircraft batteries in Bordeaux. Landes knew that the tiny sliver of a signal from his little short-wave radio would be completely hidden from Gestapo detector vans among the forest of powerful German transmissions from the much larger station next door.

Landes moved into the villa in the second week of November 1942, spreading the word amongst his neighbours, most of whom were billeted Germans, that he needed an airy house because he was recuperating from tuberculosis (an impression reinforced by his hacking smoker’s cough). This cover story had a double advantage. It explained why he lived by himself, while at the same time discouraging neighbourly inquisitiveness. He transmitted to London from the kitchen table and kept his radio set, when not in use, under his bed. His transmission schedules and ciphers were hidden in the garden shed, while six spare crystals, each on a different frequency, were buried in a tin box in the kitchen garden.

On 15 November, after some aerial adjustments, Landes finally succeeded in getting through to SOE headquarters, ‘strength 3 to 4’. Scientist was, at long last, in direct touch with Baker Street. There would be no need for Rudellat to make any more hazardous journeys from Tours, or for Suzanne Duboué to travel to Tarbes with de Baissac’s reports hidden under the shopping in her basket.

Aware that the Germans knew that an irregular lifestyle was a tell-tale sign of a secret agent, Landes always followed the same daily routine. He left his house at 9 a.m. and went for a long walk. When he was sure he was not being followed, he collected his messages and cleared his letterboxes. The afternoons were spent in a local cinema, sleeping. Returning home around 5 p.m., he would have an early meal and then, after dark and with all the blinds pulled down, he began his transmissions to London, often continuing until late into the night.

With his radio operating, Landes now needed to find himself a courier to carry messages to and from Claude de Baissac. He chose Ginette Corbin, the pretty cousin of young Henri Labit, who had died in agony in Langon rather than be taken prisoner. What Ginette did not know at the time was that Roger Landes had fallen for her at their first meeting, but kept his feelings secret. After the death of Labit, he would explain to her later, he did not wish to involve her and her family in more pain. But there was another reason for his reticence. He regarded serious long-term emotional involvements as dangerous to security. They were for after the war, not during it.

The Scientist network was now complete. With five British SOE officers in Bordeaux and Claude de Baissac’s sister, Lise, running a support network in the Charente, east of the city, Scientist was now the largest and best-resourced SOE network in all of occupied France.

Unusual cold gripped the whole of Europe in the last week of November 1942. Temperatures of minus eight degrees were recorded in Bordeaux and Toulouse. It was the advance guard of winter – the winter of Stalingrad. The parasols and tables outside Bordeaux cafés retreated out of the cold, and summer strollers in the Parc Bordelais gave way to muffled stragglers taking shortcuts past frost-scorched flower beds and the leafless skeletons of trees. In the first week of December, a light dusting of snow fell across the whole of France.

Sometime during these weeks, a tall and handsome man with an air of authority, startlingly blue eyes and a markedly retroussé nose, knocked at the door of 34 Cours de Verdun. It was Charles Corbin, the father of Ginette, Roger Landes’s new courier. He was calling on Grandclément, ostensibly in his capacity as a policeman investigating some minor infraction of economic law (Grandclément’s cavalier attitude to finance and the law was a persistent feature of his life, both public and secret). What exactly happened during this encounter is not known, but by the end of it – in a move which would be full of consequence for both men – Corbin accepted Grandclément’s invitation to join him in the OCM. Perhaps one of the things which brought the two men together was the fact that both had expressed strong anti-communist views and had close contact with the proto-fascist Croix-de-Feu.

By now de Baissac, comfortably installed in the Café des Chartrons, had both the expertise and the materials to mount his attack on the blockade-runners he could see from the café’s front windows. A small team of saboteurs, under Jean Duboué and Vic Hayes, began to prepare the explosive charges. The attack was set for 12 December when the explosive, timed to go off that night, would be taken on board in dockers’ haversacks while the ships were being loaded.

Of this impending sabotage attack right in the heart of his area of responsibility, Dohse, in his office at KdS headquarters in Bouscat, just three kilometres from the Café des Chartrons, knew nothing. Indeed, the Germans had only recently woken up to the fact that they had a substantial armed Resistance, supported by London, planted in their midst.

But Friedrich Dohse was not the only person who would be surprised by what happened next.

When Vic Hayes’s demolition team arrived at the Quai des Chartrons a little before dawn on the morning of 12 December, they found the dock area swarming with German troops against a background of general pandemonium and chaos. Someone said that bombs had gone off on one of the blockade-runners. Suddenly, as if to confirm the fact, there was a dull thud and a tall column of water shot up the flank of a ship moored almost precisely opposite the Café des Chartrons. Already one of the other ships was leaning over, threatening, in the words of a German officer on the quayside that morning, ‘to capsize, but for her hawsers, stretched like violin strings, which are still able to hold her’.

Throughout the morning and into the early evening the explosions continued, not only on ships alongside the Quai des Chartrons, but also on those tied up along the quays on the opposite bank of the Garonne. Fire broke out on a small oil tanker, the Cap Hadid, sending a pall of smoke over Bacalan. The Bordeaux port fire brigade were called in. What the Germans didn’t know was that Raymond Brard, the man directing the port firemen, was himself the leader of a local Resistance group. When the Germans weren’t looking, Brard ordered his men to reverse the direction of the pumps so that they sucked water into the stricken vessel instead of pumping it out, causing the Cap Hadid to settle gently on the Garonne mud, half submerged, alongside the quay.

At first the Germans, mystified, suspected local sabotage. But Italian divers called in during the morning confirmed that the explosions had come from the outside. As the day wore on, the true story began to emerge. It had been a daring commando raid carried out by ten Royal Marines in five canoes, who had disembarked near the mouth of the Gironde from a submarine five days previously. On the first night, two of the raiders had perished in treacherous tidal rips at the entrance of the Gironde and two more were wrecked, swiftly falling into German hands. The captured Marines were interrogated, using, Berlin insisted, ‘all means necessary’.

From the information gathered and the materials found in the captured canoe, the Germans were quickly able to piece together the details of the operation and the fact that the target was shipping in Bordeaux harbour. Nevertheless, through overconfidence, complacency, or perhaps just in the belief that no one could make it in fragile canoes down the dangerous, heavily patrolled, densely defended 110 kilometres from the mouth of the Gironde to Bordeaux harbour, the German admiral in charge of the defence of the area concluded that the raid was over and the danger had passed. But it hadn’t. Two of the raiders’ canoes had managed to slip past the German defences undetected and reach the port, as planned. On the night before the final attack, as their colleagues lay hidden in the reeds outside the port observing their targets, the two captured Marines were taken to Souge and, under Hitler’s infamous and illegal Commando Order, executed by firing squad.

Of the remaining six Marines on Operation Frankton (more famously known as the Cockleshell Heroes raid), four were captured afterwards. They were interrogated by, among others, Friedrich Dohse, who tried to find out the names of French people who had helped them. But the Marines gave nothing. They were eventually transferred to Paris where they too were subsequently shot. With the help of the French Resistance, the final pair, the raid commander Major Blondie Hasler and his canoe partner Marine Bill Sparks, made it home over the Pyrenees.

Hitler was furious, and sent a message through Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the commander-in-chief of the German army, scolding local commanders for failures which were ‘difficult to comprehend’, and warning that ‘the Führer expects [an end to] this carelessness which still appears to be widespread’.

De Baissac was furious too – and with almost equally good reason. Operation Frankton had been masterminded by Combined Operations, whose headquarters in Whitehall were closer to SOE in Baker Street than Dohse’s office in Bouscat was to the Café des Chartrons. Yet neither had told the other what they were doing. ‘At the critical moment … the unfortunate Commando attack took place,’ de Baissac commented sourly, ‘charges were laid on seven ships, but the only result was that the ships, which were empty, settled one metre into the water and were immediately raised … the Bordeaux Docks are now in a state of continuous alert … the dock guards were increased to 200 men … armed with grenades and automatic weapons [who] … open fire at sight. As a result, Scientist has had to give up these targets.’

But this did not mean that the Scientist team was idle when it came to the business of ‘crackers and bangs’. Vic Hayes (who soon earned the soubriquet ‘Charles le Démolisseur’ amongst his colleagues) and Jean Duboué assembled a team of forty or so saboteurs who they trained and led on a series of raids across southwestern France. This began just a few days after the Frankton raid with an attack on the rail network southeast of Bordeaux. Not long afterwards, railway lines were blown up at Dax, high-level pylons attacked at Facture and junction boxes demolished at Bayonne. The attacks caused a complete collapse of the electricity supply across the entire regional rail system. Following the sabotage, de Baissac’s men (no doubt with technical advice from the ardently pro-British cheminots) took advantage of the disconnections to short-circuit the railway’s electricity supply systems. The result was that, when the Germans turned on the supply again, there were more violent explosions and more serious damage. Rail traffic across the region was disrupted for days. Taken aback by the scale of the attacks coming so soon after the Frankton raid, the German authorities concluded that this was the prelude to an invasion. Panicky alerts were issued to all units, and trucks rushed to main headquarters, where they were swiftly loaded with the military archives and sent to dispersed locations outside the city.

This spate of attacks was followed over succeeding months by raids on Bordeaux’s main power station at Pessac on the eastern outskirts of the city, on an electricity substation at Quatre Pavillons just 200 metres from the bungalow in Cenon where Roger Landes operated his wireless (Landes himself drew the sketch map for this raid), and on several small steamships in Pauillac harbour. Although Vic Hayes’s demolition teams could not gain access to the Bordeaux dock area, they did manage to contaminate a consignment of battery acid with a special chemical sent out from London, causing serious damage to the accumulators on German and Italian U-boats operating from the Bordeaux pens.

On 22 November 1942, Landes signalled London informing them that de Baissac intended to appoint Léo Paillère (who had by now been released from jail) as Scientist’s ‘organiser-in-chief’. This meant that Scientist was now intimately connected, through Duboué and Paillère, with Grandclément’s Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCM) – though de Baissac had not as yet met the head of the OCM in Bordeaux (probably because André Grandclément had been in Paris, at the bedside of his ailing father.)

Things were also now moving on the wider scale, as the balance of the war began to change in the Allies’ favour. Following Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa in November 1942, German, British and French minds turned to what everyone knew would happen next – the attempt by the Allies to gain a foothold on the mainland of occupied Europe. Torch had opened the way to the era of large-scale invasions, rather than small commando raids such as Operation Frankton. As 1942 drew to a close the idea began to take root in some circles in London (including Baker Street), in the high command in Berlin and amongst the people of France, that the long anticipated Allied landing on the French coast would take place sometime in the summer or early autumn of 1943.

SOE, meanwhile, were still under some criticism in London for how little they were delivering to the main war effort, measured against the resources they were employing – especially Halifax bombers which could, the RAF strenuously argued, be more gainfully deployed attacking German cities than dropping secret agents and arms into France. In an attempt to boost their record of success, Baker Street claimed in their December 1942 report to Churchill that the blockade-runners in Bordeaux harbour had been sunk by them (de Baissac’s team), not Hasler’s Royal Marines. Churchill, however, knew the truth from German signals, decrypted by Bletchley, which told him of Hasler’s success little more than twenty-four hours after his limpet mines had exploded. It was now politically vital that SOE showed that it had a major role to play in the coming invasion – minor, random pinprick acts of sabotage would no longer do.

It was in this context that, in the second half of November 1942, de Baissac and Duboué travelled north to Poitiers for a meeting with the Paris-based leaders of the OCM. Among those present were André Grandclément’s uncle, General Paul Jouffrault, and the overall OCM head, Colonel Touny. The main task of what would come to be known as the conférence de Poitiers, was to reorganise the entire underground OCM structure in Bordeaux and the Gironde, rather grandiosely, along the lines of a conventional division of the French army. But the secondary purpose was to reach an ‘agreement’ with de Baissac that Scientist would henceforth act as the channel through which SOE would arm the entire OCM network across occupied France, estimated by de Baissac to number 15,000–20,000 fighters. This was a huge logistic undertaking which would, over time, involve de Baissac having control of sixty parachute sites and a dozen or so Lysander landing grounds spread from Brittany in the north, to Paris and northern Burgundy in the east, to the foothills of the Pyrenees in the south.

When de Baissac put the Poitiers compact to London for approval, Baker Street agreed.

It was a crucial moment in Britain’s secret war in France. For political reasons, which had more to do with increasing SOE’s influence in London than having secure and effective networks in France, SOE ditched its policy of small self-contained networks in favour of the more tempting prospect of having a whole underground army under its control in the case of an invasion. From now on Scientist, which had been tightly targeted and secure in Bordeaux, would be vulnerable to infiltration and destruction through any weakness in the vast rambling, rickety structure of the OCM, which sprawled across the whole of northern and western France.

The OCM leaders in Paris wanted even more centralisation. At the end of 1942, Colonel Touny proposed to de Gaulle that he should have the command of the French Resistance in all of northern France. Although the OCM was clearly the largest Resistance organisation in the country, and despite the fact that the London French were at the time supporting it with a subvention of 1.5 million francs a month, the proposal was rejected by London on the grounds that the OCM was seen as too right-wing, too elitist and ‘too’ anti-Semitic.

At some point during the Christmas holiday period, de Baissac went to Paris where, over lunch, he met André Grandclément for the first time.

No doubt much of Grandclément’s two months in Paris had been spent clearing up the old admiral’s affairs and taking on his duties as the new head of the Grandclément family. But he had also been busy with politics – especially right-wing politics. At one meeting during this period he described his personal aims and those of the OCM in markedly ambitious terms: to create a force which would maintain internal order after the liberation of France so as ‘[to] establish a new system of civil, administrative and political government for the France of the future [which would be] anti-communist, anti-socialist … and strongly opposed to further Jewish infiltration’.

Despite Grandclément’s clear anti-Semitic leanings (and notwithstanding the fact that one of the key members of Scientist – Landes – was himself a Jew), the first meeting between the head of the most important British network in southwest France and the largest French Resistance organisation in the region was a success. A firm partnership – and friendship – were established between the two men, who agreed a merger between Scientist and the OCM in the southwest, with de Baissac in overall command and Grandclément (who was now equipped with the alias ‘Bernard’) acting as his deputy. De Baissac later assured Baker Street that he considered his new colleague ‘very able and trustworthy’ and suggested that Grandclément should be given ‘an official status in the hierarchy of the organisation’. Baker Street gave their approval to the relationship and opened an SOE file for Grandclément – who would later claim that this moment had also been marked by SOE making him ‘a major in the British Army’.

The scene was set for a new phase in the war against France’s occupiers in the southwest.

For Dohse in his office in Bouscat a picture was beginning to emerge which he could no longer ignore. ‘In the course of 1942 we knew the Resistance was forming, but we could not work out in what form,’ he wrote later. ‘Our local intelligence services were unable to give us a detailed picture of what was going on … my job was to try to stick as close to the [newly forming] Resistance organisations as I could, so as to infiltrate my agents into the enemy networks … but we lacked French agents capable of doing this.’

Meanwhile, sabotage attacks in the region were increasing, as was the frequency of the mysterious night flights over the Bordeaux area by British bombers. The threat against German lives and interests was growing. An invasion looked more and more likely. It would not be long before Berlin would be calling for action.