All the King's Men (33 page)

Into this milieu stepped a young captain who had been a desk-bound officer in SOE’s Belgian Section. His name was Peter Belgeonne. In March 1946 he was involved in the liquidation of SOE matters in Brussels, in the course of which he was obliged to travel to Paris to liaise with certain French authorities. While in Paris he was put in touch with a Colonel in the Deuxième Bureau who engaged him in conversation about the armed communist groups. The Colonel suddenly leant forward and solemnly asked Belgeonne ‘to convey a message to the British authorities’. He then proceeded to lecture Belgeonne about the great threat to national security from the Communists and then pronounced, ‘Were the British prepared to give [us] the means to do so, right wing resistance “reseaux” are ready to make every endeavour to crush the communist organizations.’

Belgeonne was a little taken aback by the Colonel’s directness but said that he would convey the request to the relevant authority, though he cautioned the Colonel that he did not think the British Government would want to get involved in French domestic affairs. Belgeonne went down to the British Embassy and asked to see one of the officers of the MI6 station. He then repeated the French Colonel’s request to the sound of the MI6 officer’s ribald laughter.
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Within a week Henri Déricourt was contacted by someone by the name of Gaillot. Henri Gaillot had been a member of de Gaulle’s BCRA in London where he had met Déricourt and they had become friends. Since the liberation Gaillot had joined a somewhat sinister secret right-wing ‘reseaux’ largely made up of ex-BCRA men, which enjoyed a loose association with certain officers in the Deuxième Bureau. He asked Déricourt if he would be prepared to collect some money from London; there would be £100 in it for him. Déricourt was prepared. On 10 April he was scheduled to make two flights to London’s Croydon Airport. After the morning flight, he telephoned The Savoy Grill and asked for a Mr Robert Marshall (no relation to the author), but failed to make contact. He flew back to Paris, then returned to Croydon in the late evening and telephoned again. This time Marshall was there. A meeting was arranged for the following day, 11 April, at The Savoy.

Déricourt stayed overnight at Croydon, flew back to Paris first thing in the morning and made contact again with Gaillot. He was given a child’s handkerchief by which he would be identified, then he flew the midday flight to Croydon, took the train up to Victoria and a taxi to The Savoy. He made contact with his ‘Mr Marshall’, showed him the child’s handkerchief and a few minutes later stepped out into The Strand carrying nearly £6000 worth of gold and platinum.

At Croydon, he showed HM Customs a canvas bag, which he said contained cigarettes and coffee. As he walked down the corridor towards his aircraft, he was observed by another customs officer to pick up a briefcase that no one had seen before. He was approached and asked what it contained. Déricourt said a box of cigars. Inside, underneath a pair of pyjamas, were found 14 pieces of platinum and a gold nugget. In the canvas bag were 139 pieces of gold bullion and 1320 one-pound notes. In Déricourt’s jacket pocket they found another £100.
Detective Sergeant James removed Déricourt to the local station where he was charged.

Déricourt admitted the entire story in every detail and naturally the police didn’t believe a word of it. He was remanded before the local magistrate the following day where ‘another authority’ managed to convince them that the case should be adjourned until Déricourt could have the benefit of proper representation.
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Many years after the event, when Déricourt was questioned about the Croydon affair, he explained somewhat coyly, ‘I had simply let them know I was in an embarrassing situation and asked if they could do something to help me out and they did.’

On 23 April, Déricourt appeared again at the Croydon Magistrates’ Court, in the company of a formidable array of ‘silks’. He was represented by no less a figure than Mr Derek Curtis Bennett, a King’s Counsel, and two junior counsels. Déricourt repeated his story precisely as he had told it to the police and customs people, after which Mr Curtis Bennett rose to his feet and pronounced, ‘His story is true! The French resistance movement still existed to protect democracy should it again become necessary and the defendant, who was still a member of it, was doing a job for them.’ Then he described in lavish detail how Déricourt had been involved in espionage during the war, ‘…working for the British secret service in France…’ How he had been awarded the Croix de Guerre and recommended for the DSO. Mr Curtis Bennett then continued, ‘I suppose that for his work in France he would think nothing of carrying about two dozen fictional passports. He has spent most of his life doing unorthodox things for which he has had credit.’
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The message was perfectly clear. Déricourt had not been engaged in criminal activity, but
unorthodox activity
and had apparently done this sort of work before with complete impunity. The sheer presence of Déricourt’s eminent counsel convinced the suburban magistrates that they
were dealing with the secret workings of national governments. The prosecuting counsel acting for HM Customs pointed out that the standard fine for the offence was in the order of £18,000 plus imprisonment. The senior magistrate, Mr D. A. Lawrence, clearly impressed by Mr Curtis Bennett’s argument, fined Déricourt £500. The fine and Mr Curtis Bennett’s services were paid for by ‘another party’. In due course HM Customs returned the gold and platinum to Déricourt, though not the currency, and he departed under a deportation order on 2 May.

The loot had been part of de Gaulle’s secret service fund, an unorthodox stash that had been gleaned from every imaginable source and squirrelled away under various names over the course of the war. Much of it was inadvertently left under the benevolent eye of MI6, until long after the liberation. It was not MI6’s gold, but it was MI6 who had come to Déricourt’s aid when he fell foul of HM Customs. Contrary to requirements, there is no record of Mr Curtis Bennett’s instructing solicitors and HM Customs have no record of ever having prosecuted the case.

This was not the long arm of Claude Dansey at work, he had retired. But his legacy lingered on. The most disturbing element of the case was the fact that MI6 were in possession of a statement signed by Josef Kieffer which detailed Déricourt’s involvement with the SD. There was never any question of taking any action on it. (A copy of the statement now lies in Déricourt’s SOE personal file.) Despite the iniquities Dansey had perpetrated during the war the service still had its obligations to those he had employed. Menzies was still in charge and although it seems unlikely he knew about Déricourt from the beginning – and sanctioned the operation, he clearly felt Déricourt’s work deserved some reward and Curtis Bennett’s services were a down payment.

Three months after Déricourt finally delivered the gold to his contact in France, he was rewarded by a grateful
President with the Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur.
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Unfortunately, just as he received his French honour, his British award was withdrawn. Peter Belgeonne’s future wife returned from a trip to Paris in April 1946 with the news that the French DST were conducting a massive investigation into one Henri Déricourt. Belgeonne was outraged to learn that this same fellow was still in line for a DSO. (It had been frozen since April 1945.) He spoke to Phillip Rea (Lord Rea) who took it up with the Foreign Office. Any risk of embarrassment was neatly avoided because the DSO cannot be awarded to anyone with a criminal record, and the Croydon case had just been concluded.

The French were not governed by such sensibilities. It is typical of Gallic bureaucracy that they would present a man with a highly significant award – and then arrest him for treason. On 22 November 1946, just as he and Jeannot were having their evening meal, three men from the DST arrived at 58 Rue Pergolese. The search for traitors and collaborators had begun even before a government was in place. DST interrogations from as early as August and September 1944 were liberally sprinkled with references to a GILBERT who had worked with the Germans. A dossier on Henri Déricourt was opened even before de Gaulle made his triumphant march down the Champs-Elysées. Throughout 1945 and 1946, Commissaire Rene Gouillaud conducted a slow and thorough investigation, under the supervision of the Director of the DST and great Anglophobe, Roger Wybot.

The DST had already interrogated Hugo Bleicher, Roger Bardet, an aide to Colonel Reile named Commandant Shaefer, and one of Kieffer’s staff officers, Josef Placke. At the DST headquarters in Rue Saussaies, Gouillaud confronted Déricourt with a series of accusations. That he had passed information to the SD about when and where F Section agents would arrive at night; that he passed the SD secret documents and notes; and that the
Abwehr envied the SD’s relations with him, for through him they had ‘one of the most brilliant coups’.
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The French investigation had taken him completely by surprise, especially after the work he had done for them. Initially he denied everything, then as his thoughts gathered and imagination went back into gear, he drew upon the story of the ‘two German pilots’. This time he elaborated it by adding that these genial flyers introduced him to a Dr Götz. ‘In the course of their drive through the Bois de Boulogne, Götz had shown him that he knew all about his work for the British.’ Then Déricourt claimed Götz blackmailed him and forced him to give details of his operations. Déricourt claimed that he agreed to do this with the hope of exploiting the situation to his own ends; that is, he claimed he sent the Germans to the wrong fields while his flights came in safely elsewhere.
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Gouillaud continued:

It appears from his first interrogation that he was unable to deny the evidence and so tried to minimize the importance of his contacts and their value, particularly with reference to the number of arrests that could follow.
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On the basis of what he admitted in his initial interrogation, Déricourt was charged on 26 November with having had ‘Intelligence With the Enemy’ and the DST were instructed on 29 November to pursue their enquiries further, ‘to establish the consequence of Déricourt’s treason’.

The DST had also interviewed SS Standartenfuhrer Dr Helmut Knochen, the man who had overall command over Boemelburg and Kieffer; Ernest Vogt, who had been Kieffer’s secretary/interpreter; Richard Christmann and Dr Josef Götz. The quality of their testimony was excellent.

KNOCHEN:

Regarding the man in charge of the landing sites in France, and who Kieffer prided himself in controlling, Kieffer told me that he supplied the details of all his sites and the means necessary to decode BBC messages.
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PLACKE:

One day, Götz told me that Boemelburg had an agent named Gilbert Déricourt under his control and he gave me an address near the Place Malesherbes and a telephone number to contact him. I had a meeting with him in the company of Boemelburg at the abandoned apartment in Place Malesherbes. Déricourt told Boemelburg that there was an emergency landing that he had to deal with quickly at one of his fields down near Amboise. During a briefing with Dr Götz, before he went on holiday, he warned me of his suspicions of Déricourt, not to talk too much. Keep my mouth shut. One day, I heard Dr Götz say to some German functionaries that when it came to dealing with the ‘landings’ they had to take great care not to arrest Déricourt and not to arrest anyone in his presence. Great care must be taken in choosing the right people from the ranks of the Bony–LaFont gang to do the work. Those who were involved had to be shown Déricourt, so they would make sure he was not arrested.
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DR GÖTZ:

Since 29 June 1943, I had deduced that the massive arrests which had occurred in the Buckmaster network were due in part to information already previously supplied to Boemelburg by GILBERT or Déricourt. I took part in five or six meetings with Déricourt. We knew that he was in charge of the air
operations and the point of these meetings was to find out exactly when he was planning the Lysander, Hudson or Double Lysander operation. During these meetings, everything that concerned the operation was discussed. He told us the date, the moon, as well as indicating the number of agents. Sometimes even mentioning their names.

     He also handed over agents’ mail en route to London. Technical reports, political reports. If they seemed interesting they were photographed, otherwise they were simply copied or read.

     He had three colleagues whose activity was known to our service. They were MARC (Rémy Clément), his right-hand man who assisted him in his operations. I did not know him, but GILBERT told us about him. CLAIRE (JuJu) who was for a time the contact address for Déricourt and GEOFFROI (André Watt), his W/T who only worked for him for two months before his departure to London. To avoid his arrest, GILBERT had informed us of his existence and the areas in which he transmitted.

     By his information on his air operations, GILBERT enabled us to carry out arrests. It was agreed that these arrests would take place with utmost care, not to burn GILBERT.

     Finally, I believe this was Boemelburg’s grand dream – GILBERT was of great importance to him for the future. Boemelburg saw in him the possibility of knowing the exact date and definite place of the landing, which would have been vital to the German defences.
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VOGT (Translator used in many of the interrogations of Suttill and Norman):

For this interrogation Kieffer had given me a series of photographic documents containing copies of the
reports and letters sent to the London French Section by Suttill, Norman and other British agents of French Section. These photographic copies were all marked ‘from BOE/48’.