All the King's Men (11 page)

Jacques Bureau was not a major figure in the network, but he does provide an excellent illustration of the way Suttill’s charisma drew hundreds of French men and women under his influence. Bureau’s attraction for Suttill was his expertise in radio technology. He had been a committed jazz fan since his university days, which led him eventually to become a broadcaster on French radio, then a technician – and so developed a unique marriage of jazz and electronics. In 1940 he was attached to a branch of French Military Intelligence based in the Middle East, where he was employed as a wireless expert to eavesdrop
on Italian military signals. After the Armistice he returned to Metropolitan France and finally arrived back in his native Paris at the end of 1941. He became loosely associated with the CARTE organization, but was greatly disheartened by endless meetings and interminable talk. Bureau was a great lion of a man, bursting with enthusiasm and courage, and, like thousands of others, he had been waiting for Suttill’s irresistible message.

CARTE was a group of amateurs, we didn’t believe anything he told us. With PROSPER’s arrival we felt we would at last be of some use and this was so exciting. We were not just working for the Resistance, we now worked for a purpose, for a date, for a reason – for a military goal.
The invasion
.
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PROSPER’s mission was to establish a network that would have but one goal, to be a fundamental part of the invasion and the liberation of France. All operations would be carefully planned to form part of some greater strategic objective. The immediate priority would be slowly to build a secret army, disciplined, well trained, well armed and supplied to do the job, which would rise up on the eve of D-Day. PROSPER would be the avant-garde of the invasion.

London was not prepared for the response that followed PROSPER’s call. It was something that surprised not only the SOE but also the Allied commanders, de Gaulle and Claude Dansey. Somehow the mood in France had been miscalculated. The anti-British feeling that had erupted after May 1940 was presumed to be still there. But that was not the case. Two years of occupation had changed a great many hearts in France. The fact that Britain had not capitulated in the autumn of 1940 had given many people hope of defeating the invader. But mostly it was to do with the realities of the occupation. When the Vichy Government agreed to send vast numbers of Frenchmen to the east
to work in German factories in return for French POWs, the tide began to change. Obligatory Work Service was one telling fact that led to the growth of the Resistance, but it wasn’t the only reason.

Since May 1941 French police had agreed to assist in the internment of foreign Jews. Then, at the turn of the year, Hitler decided to proceed with what became known as the ‘final solution’. From May 1942 all Jews were required to wear a yellow star and with the assistance of the French police, systematic deportations became a reality. On 11 June Himmler presented the French with a quota of 100,000 Jews to be deported by the end of the year. On 16 June, ‘
La Grande Rafle
’, the big round-up by the Paris gendarmes of 13,000 Jews into the Velodrome d’Hiver, resulted in over 100 suicides in the first few days.

The gendarmes took their captives to a large unfinished housing estate in the suburb of Dransey, and from there they were driven in convoy to the railway station at Bobigny and there herded into cattle trucks for the journey to the east. The almost daily sight of the deportation of fellow Frenchmen brought home to the masses the reality of collaboration.
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The invader was a tyrant of unspeakable brutality. However close anti-Semitism floated under the surface of French society, it was not part of the French character to contemplate genocide. To a growing number of Frenchmen, Britain and the Allies seemed to offer the promise of liberation, and for those who were prepared to take up arms PROSPER had arrived with what they wanted to hear. Here was the true Messiah.

Within three months Suttill had established control over a single network of some sixty sub-circuits that stretched from the Ardennes to the Atlantic coast, from as far north as the Belgian border down to the Loire. As 1942 drew to a close, Buckmaster and his colleagues could stare at the map and only marvel at the extent of their influence in France, concentrated in the person of one man in Paris.

Suttill’s Paris organization had grown to cope with the
business of communication and supply. His deputy and radio operator, Gilbert Norman (codenamed ARCHAMBAUD), had arrived exactly one month after Suttill; and at the end of December another radio operator, Jack Agazarian (MARCEL), joined them too.

As lines of communication improved with the groups in the country, Suttill began to receive emissaries to be taught the skills of guerilla warfare. Bureau’s connections with the famous centre of French jazz, the Hot Club de France, provided the ideal sanctuary for some of these meetings. Upstairs in a tiny room, above the ear-splitting cacophony produced by the bands, Suttill or Norman would demonstrate the use of the Sten gun – how to strip it, clean it, load it and so on. It was a perfect location, noisy, central and – most importantly – never discovered.
⁷
Suttill was extremely security conscious. Very few contacts knew more than two or three others: Bureau knew Suttill, Gilbert Norman and Madelaine Tambour. As the network grew it became more difficult to maintain these standards, but it was a subject Suttill laboured again and again.

The PROSPER network attracted a certain amount of apprehension in London. There was particular anxiety about Suttill’s success in recruiting a large number of the communist groups in the industrial towns and in the northern suburbs of Paris, the so-called ‘Red Belt’. By the end of November, Moscow’s influence in France had been largely expunged and many of the French communist groups that existed at the fringes of the Red Orchestra were more than happy to accept support from London. De Gaulle was particularly enraged that communist guerilla armies were being armed and trained by London. He saw it as a blatantly devious British act to thwart his own political ambitions and ‘plant Albion in France again’. SOE’s priorities were more straightforward; as far as they were concerned they would arm anyone who was prepared to kill Germans. Antelme, one of PROSPER’s
colleagues, wrote in a report to London in early 1943, ‘Germans are killed daily in the streets of Paris, and ninety per cent of these are made with arms provided by us, e.g. to the Communists.’

Suttill’s relationship with the Communists was a strictly personal one. No one in the network knew much about them and no one had any idea of the quantity of arms and equipment that was delivered to them. The Foreign Office was concerned about the lack of any political guidance at SOE and there were many within MI6 who worried about the post-war legacy of this policy. Claude Dansey was more worried about the inevitable increase in German counter-espionage activity and the consequences for his own networks in a country where SOE seemed to be giving a weapon to anyone who would fire it.

Dansey was right. PROSPER could not have gone unnoticed for very long. The SD had begun to put together a vague outline of something significant from about the middle of October. During November and December a number of radio operators were ‘identified’ by the German radio detection centre in the Boulevard Suchet.
⁸
Gradually intelligence had begun to come in to Boemelburg of a lot of movement by certain key figures around the country. There was nothing specific they could pinpoint, except that the status quo had recently altered.

The Abwehr, who were also conducting counterespionage work, were not so well served as the SD. They were still pursuing CARTE long after Suttill had arrived. In November, André Marsac, a courier in the CARTE organization, was followed onto a train in Marseilles by an Abwehr agent. Marsac carried with him a comprehensive list of agents connected with CARTE. During the journey he fell asleep and awoke to discover that the contents of his briefcase had been stolen. Most of the names on that list were redundant. However, a few might lead to some people on the fringes of PROSPER’s network. Though the Abwehr and the SD were on the same side,
there was precious little active co-operation between the military and Nazi Party intelligence services.

The arrival of PROSPER couldn’t have come at a better time for Boemelburg. He was coming to the end of a long campaign against the ‘Red Orchestra’ and was about to cap it off with something of a coup. On 7 November the Allies landed in French North Africa; on the 11th Germany responded by occupying the rest of Metropolitan France down to the Riviera coast. On the same day Boemelburg and his colleague Kieffer drove down to Marseilles in the armour-plated Cadillac to arrest the Petit-Chef of the Red Orchestra. Boemelburg even stopped to have his photograph taken along the way.
⁹
It marked the end of a long campaign and the beginning of a new one. From that day he turned his full attention from the Soviets to the British.

VII
The Trojan Horse

The autumn and winter months of 1942–3 were unexpectedly lonely for Léon Doulet, the Air France pilot who had travelled to Britain with Déricourt. In September, after a week in a scruffy hotel near Victoria Station, he and Déricourt were separated from each other. Doulet was moved to an even scruffier bed-and-breakfast establishment, where he lived on his own in the strange city for the next four months. He had no idea of Déricourt’s whereabouts. Doulet had presumed they were both under the authority of the Air Ministry, but neither they nor anyone else could or would tell him anything about Déricourt. Doulet found British indifference very depressing. Having come all this way to fly he couldn’t fathom why he was being ignored.
¹
On three occasions, twice in October and again in November, Déricourt contacted Doulet by telephone and arranged a rendezvous at Piccadilly Circus. At their first meeting they had a drink at a nearby pub and Doulet railed about his abandoned state. Déricourt listened to him sympathetically but there was nothing he could do. In contrast to Doulet, Déricourt seemed to have found some occupation, though he wouldn’t reveal what that was or where he was staying. Finally, when Doulet pressed him on this, Déricourt hinted that he was staying with an ex-girlfriend. There was, of course, no girlfriend and Doulet knew it, but he left it at that. He mentioned that no one at BOAC seemed to know anything about Déricourt, but Henri made no comment.
²

It was remarkable that Déricourt was able to walk the
streets with impunity, when everything that was known about him at the time should have been sufficient to ensure he was interned for the duration.
³
He was a known black-marketeer with associates in the so-called Corsican mafia (Doulet at least knew that, as did the Americans in Marseilles); MI5 received reports by the end of the year that Déricourt had been seen in the company of Germans in the occupied zone
⁴
(this too would have come to Dansey’s attention); and, as Dansey knew himself after his own enquiries, Déricourt was not the person he claimed to be, and was in fact a most accomplished liar. To put it simply, he had all the hallmarks of the kind of person the Germans would have slipped onto the Pat Line for espionage purposes. (It has been speculated that this was actually the case. But German archives contradict that view.
⁵
) Far from being interned, however, Déricourt was already gainfully employed.

The next time Doulet met Déricourt, Henri led him to a luxurious flat that was shared by the two Belgians with whom they had sailed on board the
Tarana
. They were joined by ‘an English intelligence officer called FRANCIS, who was very brilliant’. FRANCIS asked Doulet if he had ever been up to Paris since the occupation. ‘Of course,’ he replied, ‘many times.’ He was then asked if he was prepared to do some secret work. Doulet declined. He had come to Britain to fly and that was all he wanted to do. The meeting ended amicably and Doulet departed. It was immediately obvious to him that Déricourt was somehow involved with ‘British intelligence’, and was probably going to return to France. They met on one other occasion, at which Déricourt warned him to keep silent about the meeting with FRANCIS and his return to France.
⁶

Déricourt had been working with MI6 for nearly a month. Once he had emerged from the Royal Patriotic School and been separated from Doulet, he was taken to MI6 Section IV – the Air Intelligence branch, where he answered questions about the aircraft he’d flown as a test
pilot in Marseilles, gave what information he knew concerning the French aircraft industry’s involvement with German manufactures, made detailed lists of the names of French pilots and their current employment (Déricourt had been a minor official of the French airline pilots’ union), and described the intelligence he had passed to the Americans during the summer.
⁷
Déricourt also repeated the somewhat startling revelation that he was acquainted with a high-ranking officer in German intelligence, based in Paris.
⁸

That kind of information was of little interest to Section IV, but it was something that interested Dansey. Once again, this important piece of intelligence was not communicated to MI5. Déricourt had been put up at a secret address in London, known only to Dansey or one of his contacts, and kept there in isolation until the right opportunity arose to use him.

Everything that Dansey did was cloaked in impenetrable secrecy, the whys and the wherefores often unfathomable at the time, but later revealing a cold logic. As the Deputy Head of MI6, he had the freedom to run his own private operations, answering to no one but Stewart Menzies, and then not always with complete frankness. His manner, both charming and terrifyingly vitriolic, ensured there were no prying enquiries into the precise nature of his work. He garnered new agents at an alarming rate and was reputed in the more mundane levels of the service to be running his own private army – at least, judging by his legendary expenses claims.
⁹
Dansey enjoyed a singularly close relationship with all his agents, which was another thing that set him apart from his colleagues. ‘Uncle Claude’ made his agents feel that they belonged to an extremely exclusive community, which was deeply appreciative of their invaluable work. Dansey had a deep and genuine affection for his agents.
¹⁰