All the King's Men (35 page)

XVIII
Afterwards

Vera Atkins recalls that soon after she had carefully sorted out SOE’s files and handed them over to MI6, she was told that most of the records of agents’ messages and de-briefings had been accidentally destroyed. Atkins and a team of FANYs (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) had spent some time organizing the archives into box-files, grading everything in order of importance A, B and C. Only category C, she was told, seemed to have survived. Atkins had no way of checking this, took her colleague at his word and it became yet another incident to arouse suspicion amongst SOE veterans that MI6 had something to hide about those five years of war. It has been speculated, however, that the files were never destroyed at all. After all, once they were in MI6 custody, why bother to burn them? No one would ever be allowed to see them.

The accidental fire, the lack of space, the over-zealous secretary – stories proliferated for years. Despite those stories, research by various parties has elicited a great deal of information from Century House (MI6 Headquarters), material that was originally in those category A and B files, but without raising any hope that the full extent of the archives would ever be made public. Atkins was told the files were destroyed after she had made a request for some papers to assist her enquiries with the War Crimes Commission. After all, how could they refuse SOE papers to someone who had just sorted them out and handed them over?

Locking the files away rarely proves to be the end of a
story. People and their recollections live on and, inevitably, an account of these events relies a great deal upon those recollections. It has been my experience that in amongst the memories of those who were there at the time, lies an overwhelming determination to discover the truth. All that remains now is to give an account of those people who played a part in these events, and lived on.

Maurice Buckmaster returns each year to France for a reunion of agents connected with F Section. It is an annual event steeped in good champagne and vintage anecdotes. Memories of 1943, however, have a bitter taste and the name ‘Déricourt’ is almost too painful to utter, especially as he had meant so much to F Section. In December 1945, Buckmaster wrote a memo denouncing those who doubted Déricourt.

It is indelicate to say what I think about this officer, as long as his case is
sub judice
. But when – if ever – the clouds are blown away, I am prepared to bet a large sum that we shall find him entirely innocent of any voluntary dealing with the enemy. His efficiency in Hudson and Lysander work was staggering and it was his very success that raised the ugly idea that he was controlled. People who did not know him and judged him on the results of his work said ‘It’s too good to be true – he MUST be a bad hat.’ That kind of reasoning would be scoffed at by any country section officer who has to judge his man far more closely than an outsider.

     Suffice it to say that he never once let any of our boys down and that he has by far the finest record of operations completed of any member of SOE.
¹

That memo was written before the trial in Paris and all the revelations that followed. Buckmaster is a man still haunted by the knowledge that he has been betrayed.

Rémy Clément still lives in the same little artist’s apartment in the Rue Fontaine, up in Montmartre. His wife,
now dead, was a remarkable painter in the style of the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. Rémy’s home is a shrine to her work, embellished here and there with photographs of old friends now departed. Clément and André Watt meet regularly and chat about everything that has been. Watt still has an old wireless set which works as well today as it did in 1943 and he still feels a tinge of fear whenever he carries it down the street.

Julienne and Charles Besnard are both dead as is Roger Bardet, who died as this book was being written. Nicholas Bodington moved to Strasbourg to work for UNESCO, then returned to Britain and took up journalism again. He died in Plymouth in July 1974 somewhat bereft of friends from the SOE. He and Déricourt did not meet again after the party at the Rue Pergolese.

Déricourt’s two controllers died within months of each other, though in greatly differing circumstances. Sir Claude Dansey retired from MI6 at the end of 1945. He had finally collected his ‘K’ and added to it Chevalier of the Order Leopold from Belgium, Commander of the Legion d’Honneur from France, and Officer of the Legion of Merit from the United States of America. He married for the second time and moved to the village of Bathampton, near Bath. He and his wife lived together happily, though briefly, until his death on 11 June 1947.

Karl Boemelburg had been head of the SD in Vichy as the war was drawing to its conclusion. As the Allies advanced, he was ordered to escort Maréchal Phillipe Pétain to the Austrian castle of Sigmaringen. In April 1944, Pétain was granted permission to enter Swiss territory. But in the chaos of defeat, Boemelburg could not even find enough petrol to get the party to the border and had to sell his watch and ring to scrape together the money for the fuel. With Pétain safely handed over, it was time to disappear. Boemelburg managed to contact his wife and get her to come to Austria, bringing as much cash as she could find. With that he was able to purchase a new
identity, that of a recently deceased ‘Sergeant Bergman’. (There was a thriving black market in dead men’s papers for those who might wish to avoid retribution.) As Sergeant Bergman, Boemelburg finally settled in a small village near Munich and his family moved nearby. They would meet secretly, at night or at weekends. Boemelburg obtained work as a gardener with a wealthy family in the village. Eventually he convinced them he had some education and offered to sort out the extensive family library. Boemelburg settled down to this quiet rural existence, content with the way fate had treated him. Then on New Year’s Eve in 1947, he was out with his family celebrating when he slipped on the ice, cracked his skull – and died. He was buried in the little village cemetery under the name Bergman. Recently his son altered the headstone to read Karl Boemelburg.

Dr Götz returned to being an inspector of schools and is currently writing his memoirs about the ‘radio game’. Dr Helmut Knochen spent twenty years in prison for his part in the SAS murders and other crimes and now lives near Munich. SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Horst Kopkow is also still with us. His original field of intelligence was communist espionage and consequently he was of great assistance to the Gehlen Organization, the post-war German Intelligence service that was sponsored by MI6 and the CIA. He lives today under the name of Codes, in the little village of Gelschen-Kirchen, near Essen. He still regrets the fact that no one would listen to their intelligence about D-Day. When pressed on the matter of PROSPER and the ‘pact’ that was made with Suttill and Norman, this is what Mr Kopkow-Codes had to say:

It was well known the British just emptied all their prisons of murderers and criminal types, and offered them clemency if they would parachute into France. We only did what the British would have done to them.
²

Immediately after his trial Henri Déricourt found employment a little hard to come by. He got some part-time work in 1949 with a flying club, and then in 1950 with a company that manufactured beds. He returned to flying again in January 1951 for a company called Aigle Azur which operated cargo routes to the Lebanon and Algeria. Later that year he began to fly a route to Hanoi and Saigon. It was while he was flying for Aigle Azur Indochine, that he won yet another award, the
Croix de Guerre – Etoile Argent
. It was the time of the colonial wars in French Indochina.

From 1953 to 1954 he lived in Beirut working for the Lebanese airline Air Liban. He returned to France in 1954 and joined a new airline,
Société Auxiliare de Gerance et de Transports Aeriens
(SAGETA) which had been created to fly cargo and troops out to French Indochina. On 29 January 1957, Déricourt was trying to land a large four-engined passenger aircraft, an ‘Armagnac’, in thick fog at Orly Airport when the plane crashed, flipped upside down and spilt 2000 gallons of fuel on the runway. There were a number of injuries but Déricourt escaped with just a pair of badly burnt hands.
³

Following the accident he was dogged for the next few years by an interminable official enquiry that pursued him from Paris to Vientiane, in Laos. He managed to get official Laotian papers that claimed he worked for the government airline Air Laos, though in fact he worked for private enterprise.
⁴
Also in Laos at the time was Rémy Clément, now retired from Air France. Unlike Déricourt, Clément really did work for Air Laos. Déricourt had returned to the sort of work he knew made the best return. The Marseilles-based heroin trade, the so-called ‘French connection’, received its supplies from Thailand, Laos and Cambodia where the trade was controlled by the ubiquitous Corsican Mafia. The man at the centre of that trade was Bonavanture ‘Rock’ Francisci who operated an infamous charter airline he called ‘Air Opium’. Francisci’s
airline, officially known as Air Laos Commerciale, consisted of a fleet of three twin-engined Beechcrafts.
⁵
One was flown by René ‘Babal’ Enjabal, who had run his own opium airline a few years before; the others by Roger Zoile and Déricourt.
⁶
Henri preferred the title ‘Air Confiture’ to ‘Air Opium’, explaining that raw opium looked justlike jam.

His route was a triangular course from Wattay Airport in Vientiane up to any one of the little dirt strips in the highlands, Sam Neua, Phong Saly, Muong Sing Nam Tha or Sayaboury, his cargo – gold bars. There he would collect anything from three to six hundred kilos of raw opium and fly it to drop points in Vietnam or Cambodia. ‘Rock’ Francisci had good relations with all the government authorities, especially Ngo Dinh Nhu, the brother and chief adviser to the President of South Vietnam, who allowed Francisci’s aircraft in and out of Saigon unmolested. Nhu then used these aircraft to fly his own intelligence agents secretly into Laos and Cambodia on the return trip.

Déricourt earned a great deal of money doing this work, money which he claimed was for a special day. An arrangement had been made with Air Laos, the government airline, to pay Déricourt a standard salary which went into his Credit Lyonnaise account as though he were an ordinary employee. Each month he would virtually empty that account, telegraphing the money to Jeannot in Paris.
⁷
His earnings from ‘Air Opium’ he took separately – and in cash – to Hong Kong, where it was transferred into sterling and sent to a bank account in London. Jeannot never knew about the London account, nor about the Vietnamese ‘wife’ and child Henri lived with at the Hotel Constellation.
⁸

In August 1962, he wrote to a colleague in Paris, ‘…everything must come to an end and everything has its way. It’s time for me to go.’

On 21 November 1962, he took off from Vientiane for Sayaboury with a quantity of gold and four passengers.
Given the load he was carrying, he had only just enough fuel to reach the little mountain strip by changing-over to his emergency tank, an operation normally conducted with the help of the engineer. Déricourt neglected to take an engineer that day and had to make the change-over himself.

The engine stalled a few kilometres from the village strip. On this occasion the aircraft failed to glide the rest of the way in and came down amongst the tree stumps at the edge of the strip where it burst into flames. There were no survivors. The following day Rémy Clément flew over the wreckage to view the spot where they said his old friend had perished. All the remains were charred beyond recognition, even the gold bars had melted. On 23 November the press agencies Agence France and Reuters dispatched this report:

Funeral of French pilot Henri Déricourt

Vientienne, 23. This morning at the Christian cemetery at Vientienne the funeral took place of Henri Déricourt, French pilot distinguished for his heroism during World War Two. Representatives of the French Embassy and the British Embassy, as well as military representatives of the air and land forces of those countries attended the funeral of Henri Déricourt.

     Pilot with the Free French Forces, Henri Déricourt had flown in Royal Air Force operations during the war and had been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC).

     He died when his plane crashed on landing at Sayaboury, in Laos. According to a spokesman of the company, the causes of the accident are unknown.
⁹

It seems a fitting tribute to Déricourt, that the last item of
news he generated was a testimony riddled with lies. Alongside the British and French Embassy officials who attended the ceremony was the CIA station chief for Laos.

In February 1963, Clément arranged to ship Déricourt’s ‘remains’ back to France, where they were buried at the little village of Vitry-aux-Loges, in the Loiret. Jeannot lived for another twenty-two years at 58 Rue Pergolese, slipping steadily into an alcoholic decline. She died alone, in October 1985, surrounded by mounting debts and the memorabilia of her life with Henri. She was buried in the grave containing her husband’s remains. There wasn’t even enough money to add her name to the headstone.
¹⁰

Not long before he died, Harry Sporborg described what he had learnt as Deputy Head of SOE about Déricourt’s involvement with MI6. When he was asked why these facts did not appear in the official record, he explained the rules of the game.

In this world you must understand one thing: if you’re going to become involved in these things, you must never, never admit anything afterwards. Anything. You have to go into it determined that, no matter what happens, you will never reveal what you have done. You must resolve to go to your grave still resolutely denying that it ever happened.
¹¹