All the King's Men (6 page)

During July and August, as France began to collect herself round the comforting figure of Maréchal Pétain, the Germans built up a massive invasion force for an operation they called Sea Lion. Thousands of landing craft, tanks and men were gathered at the port of Calais; their objective was the island of Britain and they were scheduled to embark no later than the first week of September.

As France looked on, fed on a growing diet of Nazi propaganda, she waited for the news that Britain had capitulated, and that the Pax Germanica had been extended to the Irish Sea. As every Briton knows, what was expected abroad was never delivered. The RAF’s finest hour, specifically the last two weeks of August and the first week of September 1940, effectively extinguished Hitler’s ambitions in the west. By the end of September, intelligence could report that the massive invasion force was being dismantled. The psychological effect that was left in its train had far greater significance for both sides than anyone could have imagined at the time. The month of September and the port of Calais became lodged together in the collective sub-conscious.

Occasionally, while Déricourt was aloft in the bomber, he was caught up short by the sight of roads choked with human misery, of the refugees heading south. Everyone, it
seemed, was going south. These, he told others afterwards, were ‘the little people’. Landing at the Marseilles airfield at Marignon had become far more difficult, littered as it was with hundreds of aircraft that had been part of the exodus.

At the end of September Déricourt took up a prototype Autogyro called the C301. The Autogyro was a strange craft which the local manufacturers had seen as their great white hope. It had a fuselage like an aircraft, but had no wings. Instead there was a set of rotor blades, like a helicopter’s, mounted just behind the cockpit. In front was a straightforward engine and propeller, which dragged the craft forward, and this movement in turn forced the overhead blades to rotate; the faster forward the machine moved, the faster the rotation of the blades, until the craft lifted almost vertically into the air. The concept was not original, but the French manufacturers had made a number of important design advances which made the craft particularly fast.

In October, Déricourt demonstrated the C301 to a number of representatives of the German Armaments Commission. The demonstration took place on precisely the same day as Maréchal Pétain shook hands with Adolph Hitler at Montoire and later announced to the French public that he would take France down the road of collaboration. At the end of that day, 24 October, Déricourt brought his flight log up to date at 3518 hours and 38 minutes and did not fly for SNCASE again.
¹⁵
He was paid up to the end of November and then joined a massive army of unemployed Frenchmen and -women, whose industries had been closed down or were being re-harnessed to the German war effort.

The winter of 1940–1 was one of the hardest in living memory. German demands for food and fuel created chronic shortages and great hardship. Petrol became a currency in itself. Soup kitchens appeared in the streets of all the major towns and cities, homes were rarely heated, queues formed at
boulangeries
for rationed bread while
the conquerors turned Paris into a ‘German Babylon’. Henri and Jeannot survived on what she earned as a telephonist, but even this dried up in November. They discovered Jeannot had been pregnant for three months, but the embryo was extra-uterine and had to be aborted. There were complications and Jeannot was ill for some time. Déricourt needed to earn some money.

Many enterprising individuals took advantage of the situation to make a living from the black market. The Germans, while not actually encouraging it, did little to prevent it from flourishing. For the black market was food and drink to the established criminal organizations and these were important allies of the Gestapo and the SD. Déricourt occasionally earned some money in the employ of the notorious Corsican gangsters Paul Carbone and François Spirito,
¹⁶
whose fortune had been made in narcotics traffic with America. But there was more money to be made where the Germans were in greater numbers, and so, very soon after Jeannot’s abortion, Déricourt got permission to travel into the occupied zone.

Déricourt was devoted to Jeannot, but never faithful. During this and other trips to Paris, he invariably stayed with a woman who was separated from her husband, Mme Julienne Aisner. They had known each other for a good many years and for some of that time had been lovers, but by 1940 they were what Henri described as ‘comfortable friends’. Julienne, or ‘JuJu’ as Henri called her, was at that time beginning to see someone else, a young lawyer by the name of Charles Besnard. But JuJu and Henri had known each other so long that Besnard was no obstacle to their friendship.
¹⁷

Déricourt’s business was with one of the great Paris black-marketeers, Bladier. This enterprising gentleman was making his fortune by supplying the occupying forces, and anyone else who could afford it, with whatever they needed. Abandoned or confiscated apartments, vehicles scattered all across the city and petrol were the mainstays
of his trade. Bladier not only did well out of the wealthy Parisians, but also out of his special relationship with the local office of the SD.
¹⁸

The Sicherheitsdienst were establishing themselves with great efficiency at an extremely luxurious set of apartments between numbers 78 and 84 Avenue Foch, near the Port Maillot Metro station. (By the end of the year, the Avenue Foch had become known as Avenue Boch.) Among the very first to arrive was of course Sturmbann-fuhrer Karl Boemelburg, who was for some time the highest-ranking SD man in France. He was formally head of Desk IV a2, Counter-Sabotage, and was senior to Heinrich Reiser, Desk IVa, Counter-Espionage.
¹⁹
Following Boemelburg’s self-gratifying confrontation with the Director General of the Ministry of the Interior, his men laid hands on the most comprehensive secret police records outside Nazi Germany. Every criminal, every terrorist, every foreign intelligence operative whom the French had kept under surveillance was listed here – it was a treasure-house of French low life. Once Berlin heard of the discovery,
all
the files were sent to Heidrich’s headquarters at the Reichssicherheitshauptamt – RSHA (Reich Central Security Office) – and incorporated into their own files.
²⁰

It was Bladier who informed Déricourt that someone by the name of Karl Boemelburg was the head of the SD in Paris. The date of their reunion is uncertain, but it was sometime before the end of 1940. Karl Braun, Boemelburg’s driver, recalled that Déricourt had been sitting in a café one morning when Boemelburg, himself and one other had turned up for coffee; Déricourt had noticed a large American limousine pull up outside and seemed to recognize Boemelburg as he stepped out. When they entered the restaurant, Déricourt stood up to greet him. There was a moment’s hesitation from Boemelburg and then a smile of recognition. He greeted Déricourt politely but not warmly. He was, after all, the head of counter-sabotage and counter-subversion for all France.

With Boemelburg and Braun on this occasion was SS-Untersturmfuhrer Josef Kieffer, Boemelburg’s immediate subordinate. Kieffer took no interest in the conversation and went to his table. Boemelburg and Déricourt reminisced about the summer of 1938 and then the SD man got very excited about showing off his new car. It was the armour-plated Cadillac that had belonged to the head of the French Communist Party. Braun watched as his chief went over the controls for Déricourt’s benefit, then rapped the armour-plating with his knuckles as though he were a salesman for Cadillac. Braun was a simple man who found his chief’s enthusiasms childish.
²¹

Following this encounter, Déricourt met with Boemelburg on a number of occasions, but there is no evidence that he was involved in any work for the Germans at that stage. Although he became relatively well known in black-market circles, Déricourt had no particular cachet; there was nothing about him or his situation that might have been of any use or value to someone like Boemelburg, who was at that time engaged in a massive operation against the Russians.

It is often forgotten that during the 1940s the Germans in effect fought two wars at the same time, and that the one in the west was by far the smaller of the two. Just as German military commanders’ careers were often split between the eastern and western fronts, so too were those of counter-intelligence operatives. Boemelburg’s career is a perfect example of an SD officer who began by pursuing Russian agents in Germany and concluded by pursuing British agents in France.

By the end of 1940, the Nazis had learnt of an extensive Soviet intelligence network (the
Rote Kapelle
or Red Orchestra), that was operating deep in the heart of Germany and which, by 1941, extended into Western Europe. The man responsible for the campaign against the Communists was Reichskriminaldirektor Heinrich Muller, or Gestapo Muller, as he became known. Around him,
Muller had collected a number of like-minded souls, like Horst Kopkow, who was head of counter-intelligence and counter-sabotage and who also had responsibility for the forging of political documents. Kopkow’s representative in France was Boemelburg. For the better part of 1941 and early 1942, Boemelburg’s preoccupation would be the hunting down and arrest of leaders of the Red Orchestra in France, the so-called ‘
Grand Chef
’ and ‘
Petit Chef
’.
²²

In July 1941 Boemelburg sent word to Déricourt that a new airline was starting up and was looking for experienced pilots. Pétain’s government had set up shop in the little spa town of Vichy, in what was hoped would be temporary accommodation. A year later, this arrangement still existed, and the Vichy government decided to put together an airline that would ease their communications problem. The
Service Civil des Liaison Aeriennes de la Métrople
(SCLAM) was essentially an airline for government use only, and although it had ‘Civil’ in its title there were rarely any fare-paying passengers. It flew to the large towns in the unoccupied zone, to the colonies in North Africa and to a few cities in Italy. Déricourt flew the old Goeland, a standard transport aircraft that could take up to six passengers. These tended to be Vichy government or military officials and sometimes German representatives.
²³
Although he was flying again, Déricourt didn’t feel comfortable with the Vichy authorities and he made his feelings known to many of the pilots at Marignon. As the occupation and the war began to take on a look of permanence, Déricourt started to look for ways out.

IV
Organization

Nicholas Bodington arrived in London just as the Germans were entering Paris. He had found a post with a semi-clandestine organization at Electra House, called the Political Intelligence Department.
¹
Its function at that stage was to monitor and collect foreign radio and press reports, produce a digest and circulate it within interested government departments. It was also responsible for the first tentative steps in the production of subversive propaganda aimed at the enemy. It was not MI6, but it would do for the present.

The summer of 1940 saw many radical changes in Britain’s attitude to the war, and much of that change of heart was due to one man. Unlike France, which in times of crises seemed always to turn to heroes from its past, Britain turned to a man who was, to most people, an unknown quantity. When Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and Minister of Defence on 7 May he brought a wholly new and aggressive approach to the prosecution of the war – and at a time when the opportunity for aggression was extremely limited. The most significant change Churchill brought about was an obsessive interest in the work of the secret services. From his youthful days in Britain’s late colonial wars, he had developed a fascination for the work of spies and continued that fascination when in government. Even when he was not in government, Churchill maintained secret contacts with MI6 and MI5, which provided him with invaluable material with which to attack the Labour Government. He saw the secret services
as a legitimate means by which influence might be exercised.

The secret services, however, viewed Churchill in 1940 as something of a double-edged sword. While on the one hand he secured for them more money than they had ever seen before, at the same time he tried to involve himself as much as possible with what they were up to. This degree of interest was something quite new to the men at Broadway Buildings, for here was a man who wanted to sit up with the engine driver, not with the guard. He criticized them for giving him digests or break-downs of reports. ‘Authentic documents … in their original form,’
²
he demanded – and received. Even then his voracious appetite for paperwork remained remarkably unsatisfied. Churchill also cherished a childlike fascination for the secret agents themselves and often insisted on meeting them before they departed on a mission, causing all kinds of headaches.

In the middle of May, just as Churchill was forming his wartime Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff were preparing a report drawn up in the light of what seemed like the inevitable collapse of France. This report suggested that in the event of German victory in Western Europe, ‘The creation of widespread revolt in Germany’s conquered territories would become a major British strategic objective. For this a special organization would be needed, and in [our] view ought to be set up promptly.’
³

Lord Hankey, operating on Churchill’s instructions, looked into this report and concluded that, ‘…the burden of propaganda and subversion activities at Electra House should be joined with a special section within MI6, devoted to sabotage behind enemy lines, called Section D, led by Colonel Grand.’
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