All the King's Men (24 page)

On the fourth day Kieffer removed from his safe a file marked BOE/48 and presented for Suttill’s gaze the photographic copies of his letters, reports, instructions – everything that he had sent as mail to London, or that had been sent from London to him. Probably the most devastating sight was a list of his ‘personal messages’, broadcast by the BBC since January.

Mes genets sont fleuris dans le jardin,
Après les fraises, les framboises,
Il faut compter les marches de la Tour Eiffel,
Quand les lilas refleuriront,
Archibald aura 10 ministres,
La morue est salée,
Halte-là qu’on vous rattrappe,
Ils seront toujours verts,
Prenez garde au lion perdu,
Congestion à la gare de Lyon,
On plombe la dent du midi
.
²

Out of the thousands of messages the BBC had broadcast to the agents in France, the SD knew precisely which were his – and more importantly, what they signified. It was a blow of devastating effectiveness, for all his worst nightmares had come true – there
had
been a traitor in Baker Street. Most of the material that was presented to Suttill, Norman, Culioli and others bore the stamp ‘
von BOE/48
’, which Suttill and a few others took to be this phantom German agent in Baker Street. No one presumed it was someone who lived just round the corner. The SD had other mail, also from BOE/48, that revealed a great deal of information about the forthcoming invasion, including other BBC messages that were to ‘alert’ the network that the invasion was imminent. Then there was a piece of correspondence brought by the Canadians from
London, in clear, which was a schedule of ‘arms drops’ leading up to D-Day. Suttill could see no point in prolonging his agony. He could neither stand nor speak, but he could just about hold a pen.

Kieffer had received an instruction from Kopkow in Berlin to offer Suttill a promise of clemency in return for information about the hidden arms dumps. It was Hitler’s personal wish that the entire network be eliminated as swiftly as possible, while Boemelburg insisted on pursuing the date for the invasion. Suttill considered Kieffer’s proposal carefully and then asked for a guarantee from the Reichssicherheitshauptamt in Berlin – from Kopkow
^c
or even Himmler himself, that in return for information about arms and equipment all captured agents would be treated as prisoners of war.

On the fifth day a document arrived bearing Himmler’s signature and the marque of the RSHA. After going over the document innumerable times and talking it over between them, Suttill and Norman agreed to accept the guarantees. Later that same day Josef Placke and some French agents of the SD called on George Darling out at Triechateau, and presented him with a letter in Suttill’s hand. The letter requested that Darling hand over all the arms in his care to the bearers of the letter. Darling mounted his motorcycle and led them, unsuspecting, to the Bois de l’Etoile where the arms were hidden. Once the arms were loaded onto the back of a truck, Darling climbed onto his bike again and kicked the motor into life. One of the Frenchmen, sensing that he might be trying to escape, took out his pistol and ordered him to stop. Darling swerved into the forest, a volley of shots cut through the clear air and Darling was found – a mangled heap beneath some thorny undergrowth. He died in hospital within the day.

On 1 July Gilbert Norman was led into Culioli’s cell to acquaint him with the details of the pact. They have known everything about us for so long. No one will be shot so long as they recover the material.’
³
Culioli eventually agreed to help the Germans uncover nearly a hundred containers: Roger Couffrant at Ramorantin, 30 Containers; André Gatignon at Noyers-sur-Cher, 20 Containers; August Cordelet at Chaumont-sur-Loire, 25 Containers; and Albert le Meur at Chambord, 14 Containers. Culioli was driven around to each location where he did his best to reassure the local Resistance of Suttill’s pact with the SD. Norman did the same. The scene was repeated in the Paris suburbs, in dozens of départements, in hundreds of villages and towns.
⁴

By the second week of July, both Suttill and Norman had divulged the date of the invasion. It seemed to be supported by the scraps of information in the mail, but Boemelburg wanted corroboration from other sources. On 14 July, Jacques Bureau, the radio specialist, was arrested, taken to Fresnes Prison and placed in a death cell. The previous occupant had been shot the day before. Bureau was there hardly any time before the door swung open again. He presumed he was about to be shot. Instead he was driven to the Avenue Foch, where he was confronted by Gilbert Norman. Despite the treatment to which he’d been subjected over the past fortnight, Norman seemed very relaxed. Bureau was impressed. Norman wasn’t cowed or beaten, indeed he projected a sense of pride – of rescued honour. ‘Don’t let them depress you,’ he said, ‘retain your dignity. We have made an arrangement with these gentlemen,’ he continued, ‘and Jacques, I want you to shed some light. Understand?’

Bureau believed there to have been a hidden message in Norman’s statement. He had employed an obvious grammatical error in his French which signalled that his meaning was to be interpreted as, ‘give them something, but not everything’. Bureau had understood. As Norman
moved to the door he repeated, ‘A little light, monsieur, and in return no one will be shot.’ Then, for the guard’s benefit as well as Bureau’s, ‘And you know it won’t be long now.’
⁵

Assigned to an interrogator, Bureau was escorted down a long corridor of small ‘torture’ rooms that were used for the less significant detainees. At each room his interrogator knocked, but found it occupied. They were all occupied. With a macabre shrug, the German told him, ‘We will have to wait.’

Bureau’s thoughts raced through all the information in his head regarding PROSPER, grading it from the insignificant to the critical. For a number of days he was able to satisfy them with information about the location of hidden radio sets and crystals. But he knew that couldn’t last. He knew the invasion was due in September and it was to that question the SD returned time and again. ‘Other people have told us the date, why don’t you?’ Finally he relented and decided to tell his little lie: ‘November.’
⁶

From all the interrogations and written material that had been gathered, Boemelburg was sufficiently confident to send a report during the third week of July to Kopkow in Berlin that stated the invasion would fall at the Pas-de-Calais during the first week of September. From this point Kopkow’s priorities would switch to the next stage of the SD’s operation against an invasion – the radio game.

Each morning Dr Josef Götz would step out of a small hotel in the Avenue Grand Armée and walk to the Avenue Foch, where he had an office on the second floor. On rare occasions he would wear his uniform but mostly he preferred civilian clothes, being as he felt more of a civilian, and though he always carried a concealed weapon, he was grateful he had never had cause to use it.
⁷

Josef Götz was born in Michelbach in 1910. He studied French and English to university level, graduated with a doctorate in philosophy and became an inspector of
schools in Karlsruhe before the war. He was transferred to Paris in June 1941 to work with the Abwehr but was commandeered by the SD on 21 November 1942. He initially baulked at the idea of working with the Nazis, but was quickly won over by the threat that if he refused to bring his linguistic talents to the Avenue Foch, he would be transferred to a punishment squad.
⁸

After the final arrests of the Red Orchestra, Götz had been briefly involved with playing back to Moscow a few of the captured Soviet radio sets. Since then he had been engaged on translations, interpreting documents and a bit of code-breaking. Most of his attention was focused on the product that had been coming out of the sophisticated radio listening station at Boulevard Suchet. There, the German technicians would listen in to all the transmissions to and from SOE’s agents in the field. It was Boulevard Suchet that had first given Boemelburg a clue, back in November, that a new network seemed to be developing in northern France. During all the months since, they had put together thick files on each of the radio operators they had monitored, with information on their call signals, wavelengths, strength of transmission and most significantly, the operator’s ‘signature’ – that is, the pattern of an operator’s individual ‘touch’ on the Morse key. Now all this scrupulously gathered information was going to be put to the test.

At the beginning of June Götz had returned to Germany on leave, but this was abruptly cancelled by a call from Kieffer. On 29 June he sat in Kieffer’s office and was told in the broadest terms about the recent arrests. His next engagement would be to begin playing the game with PROSPER’s radios. Boemelburg presumed that London would send in reinforcements to try and salvage something from the disaster before the invasion. He wanted to know who and where those agents would be, before they left London. He also wanted to ensure that any change in the Allies’ plans was not missed.

Götz began with Gilbert Norman’s transmitter, which had been captured with all the codes. He transmitted to London, as if from Norman, ‘There have been arrests. Am safe and gone to ground. Await instructions.’ London responded and Götz was ecstatic. He composed another message and awaited another reply. This time London signalled, ‘Where is PROSPER?’ Götz hesitated, then chose to ignore the question. The exchange continued.
⁹

While Dr Götz concentrated on his radio game, Kieffer concentrated on what he was best at. His priority was simple police work and the eventual eradication of every last vestige of PROSPER’s army from the field. The arrests continued throughout July. Armed with information from Suttill or Norman – and sometimes with Norman accompanying them, the SD swept through the countryside like a scythe through ripening wheat. At first scores and then hundreds of French men and women were delivered to the prisons around northern France. At Fresnes, people were crowded sometimes five or six to a cell.

Following the initial arrests, most of Suttill’s contacts went to ground or left the city. Many did not. Jean Worms and Armel Guerne were arrested on 1 July at the little black-market restaurant not twenty yards from Déricourt’s flat; the rest of Captain Darling’s staff at Grignon on 1 July; Dr Balachowsky on 2 July; Jacques Bureau on 14 July; Rowland Dowlen by radio direction finders on 31 July; Charles Grover Williams on 2 August; Robert Benoist on 5 August (but he escaped). Then there was Pierre Culioli, Yvonne Rudellat, Frank Pickersgill, John Macalister, Gilbert Norman, Andrée Borrel and Suttill himself. But these are only the names that have been recorded. The full account simply can’t be given. Francis Suttill had 144 full agents (classified P1) within his network, but when you count everyone officially connected to PROSPER – all the P2s and P3s, the number rises to 1015.
¹⁰

All over Paris and the surrounds, wireless sets signalled
the news to Baker Street. Noor Khan, Rowland Dowlen, Dubois, Cohen, Johnny Barrett, Ben Cowburn and others all sent the black tidings. The news crept around the corridors and began to sink into people’s hearts. Buckmaster found it very hard to believe at first. Suttill had been the best, the very best that they had sent in – or so he believed. Vera Atkins recalls her first concern was for all the people that had been associated with Suttill and what had become of them. Atkins was right. The loss of PROSPER was nothing compared with the devastation that rained down on the SOE’s networks in northern France as a consequence of those initial arrests. By August the SD would be in almost total control.

Across London, at Broadway Buildings, the young Patrick Reilly, Sir Stewart Menzies’ personal assistant, was at work in his office across the corridor from ‘C’s’ when Claude Dansey marched in, clapped his hands and declared, ‘Great news, Reilly. Great news.’ Reilly naturally presumed Dansey was about to tell him of some major intelligence coup against the Germans. ‘One of the big SOE networks in France has just blown up!’
¹¹

Dansey’s isolation within the service could not have been more acute. Reilly thought him ‘a wicked man, undoubtedly’. Indeed, one of Reilly’s contemporaries actually claimed ‘Dansey was the only truly evil man I ever met.’ Many of Dansey’s colleagues, however, never saw any evil. General Sir James Marshall-Cornwall, who admired Dansey and served under him for nearly two and a half years, never learnt the full details of any of his operations. And as for his agents, ‘Only Dansey knew anything about
his
agents, who remained very much his own.’ He would come and go from his office unannounced, ‘making for secret meetings elsewhere, conspiratorially wrapped in his long dark overcoat’. He was unashamedly ‘the most unpopular snake in the business’, as the author Charles Whiting described him. But like him or not, he was there for the duration.
¹²

One evening during the first week in July, around 9 pm, Karl Braun cruised one of his master’s Citroëns along the Boulevard de Beausejour, watching for GILBERT’s familiar shape loitering by the kerb. Braun was another who resented the special treatment this man seemed to receive. Their trips to the Château in Neuilly were always conducted in mutually contemptuous silence.

Boemelburg greeted Déricourt by the large circular table in the hall and led him across into the salon. Though Déricourt would be the very last to admit it, that visit – in substance no different from any other – rocked the great survivor to his very foundations.