Burn After Reading (33 page)

Like any other army, this guerrilla force had an insatiable appetite for information. It was supplied by thousands of spies. Vladimir Morosov was a small cog in this service. His importance lay in the fact that he was typical, the average Soviet spy of
World War II. He was thirty-three years old when the Germans came, an accountant by profession, who went to the commandant of the Red Army garrison in his town and volunteered. They sent him to a school in Krasnodar, in the Caucasus, to learn the ropes, and he was graduated with twenty-eight other students in his class after only twenty days. His was one of the extended courses. In the pressure of those days, some spies were sent into the field with as little as a three-day education.

On February 18, 1942, he was taken to Kerch and delivered to the partisans with whom he was to work. Hardly was he settled when he was ordered to go behind the German lines and find out the number of Germans in the Islam-Terek area and the location of a certain ammunition and fuel dump at Itchky. The partisans smuggled him across the Sivash and then, on his own, he made his way to the German rear.

The average spy met an average end. His name and mission are today known because the Germans caught him and shot him, leaving a brief memento of his memory in a two-page document. Thousands like Morosov lost their lives in missions like this; but thousands managed to go and return, bringing back the vital intelligence they were supposed to procure.

Fully half of the partisan spies were women, some pretty girls who performed in the world's oldest profession, both catering to the German soldiers and coaxing information from them; others, elderly matrons doing various manual jobs. They came in all forms and shapes, and in all age groups.

On February 14, 1942, at Kush, a young man was seen slipping a scrap of paper to an older man on a street corner. A member of the German Field Secret Police happened to be passing by and stopped to inquire. When the Russians tried to run away, the German shot them both. Papers found on the man showed he was a fifty-four-year-old Russian railroad worker who served as a courier for the Kush partisans. The young man was a spy whose information the courier came to collect. He turned out to be a girl. She was fourteen years old.

In the spy business, youth was regarded as an advantage.
One of Ponomarenko's directives required that “children must play an important part as scouts and secret agents.” An intelligence officer who believed in the directive was Lieutenant Ivan Brusenko, billeted in the house of a certain Derechenko in Poltava. The lieutenant became very friendly with the family, especially with Pavel, Comrade Derechenko's twelve-year-old son. Brusenko's room became an improvised spy school where he taught the boy the tricks of the trade.

Brusenko thought up a plausible cover for Pavel. The boy was to go to Lichovka, on the right bank of the Dnieper, pretending to be a war orphan, begging for something to eat and engage German soldiers in purposeful conversations. He was to return to a rendezvous on the left bank of the river every two to four days to deliver his intelligence and to receive new instructions.

Brusenko impressed on the boy that he was not to make any notes, but had to keep everything he found out in his mind. Furthermore, he was to operate as a lone wolf, taking care of his own needs and maintaining his own lines of communications. It was quite a job for a child, but Pavel was up to it.

A few weeks later, Pavel vanished from home and made his way alone to a prearranged spot on the river where one of Brusenko's assistants was awaiting him. It was a cold night and the barefoot boy, appropriately dressed for the mission, was shivering, as the Red Army sergeant ferried him across the river in a small boat.

Next morning he approached his first German soldier, asked for some bread, and found that the soldier talked freely to the timid questions he posed, camouflaged as the innocent curiosity of an urchin, and so did others. Two nights later Pavel made his way back to the river. Lieutenant Brusenko was waiting for him. He was well satisfied with the information Pavel brought back and ordered the boy to return at once.

Returning from this mission, Pavel ran into a German patrol whose leader refused to accept the little beggar at face value. He took the boy back to Lichovka and handed him over
to the Secret Field Police. Under the strain of the interrogation, the lad started to contradict himself. He was turned over to the tough guy of the unit, and, within an hour, Pavel talked. His adventures were over.

I reconstructed Pavel Derechenko's story from a report of Group 626 of the Secret Field Police. It was a relatively short report, written in awkward official German. It concluded with the three words :

“Derechenko was shot.”

There was hardly a teen-ager in the Soviet Union who kept aloof from the war. The official account of the partisans abounds with their stories and shows that they distinguished themselves in all phases of the guerrilla war.

“A group of children,” the account related, “under the leadership of two twelve-year-old boys, recently carried a charge of dynamite to a bridge and placed it in position, taking advantage of the dark night and of a dozing sentry. They then lit the fuse and made off into the woods. The bridge was blown to atoms.”

While this immense partisan effort was run almost exclusively from inside Russia, the underground armies elsewhere in Europe had outside assistance, from the British S.O.E., the American O.S.S. and the various governments-in-exile in London. The agents of the S.O.E. came from many countries and all walks of life. A man named Chastellaine had been a director of an oil company in Rumania, but during the war he plotted the sabotage of some of his own old firm's installations. Denis J. Rake was a famous circus artist who lived in Belgium and became one of the British heroes of the Belgian underground. Yeo-Thomas—the famous White Rabbit—was manager of a celebrated Parisian fashion house and became a leader of the Maquis. Odette Sansom was the pretty French wife of an Englishman and the mother of three beautiful daughters, but she became one of the most effective spies of all, and survived to receive the coveted George Cross, the only one among the ladies of the underground to do so.

Among the shadowy figures of S.O.E. was a little, raven-haired French woman remembered only by her wartime nickname,
La Souris,
The Mouse. There was nothing really mousy about her except the recognition signal she used on her missions. It was a delicate scratching on a window pane, like the sound of a mouse. She furnished Britain with the first information about the absolute weapon with which the Germans hoped to win the war, the famous guided missile called V-l.

In order to describe the manner in which these agents worked, I will tell a composite story woven around
La Souris.

The Mouse was a school teacher in Paris and a native of Normandy. When the Germans reached the capital in June, 1940, she returned to her relatives in Lyons-la-Forêt, to sit out the occupation. She could not endure the idleness, however, and she inquired for someone who would take her to England. One night a delivery truck drove up to the farmhouse where she was staying and a man came in, asking for her. She asked no questions, but took her old-fashioned, school-marmish hat and her coat, and followed the man to the truck. He instructed her to climb in and lie down behind some sacks of potatoes. He drove her to a hut near an open field where three men squatted, talking in low tones. She sat down and kept quiet.

Half an hour later she heard a buzzing sound in the air. The three men ran out to the field, lighted torches and attached them to sticks which formed the shape of an L. A small aircraft landed and taxied to the shorter branch of the L. It was a black-painted plane without any insignia on it, one of the little Lysanders of the S.O.E.'s air ferry service.

She climbed in. One of the men followed her into the plane. It taxied and took off, circled the field once, and, when she looked down, she saw only darkness beneath. The torches were gone.

Next morning she was in London, sitting before the desk of Colonel Kenwick who headed the Western Europe Directorate of the S.O.E. in Norgeby House on Baker Street. The colonel had her file; she had been screened while she was still in France.
A short while later, she was interviewed further by a captain named Piquet-Wicks and then driven to 10 Duke Street to meet Colonel Passy, the head of General de Gaulle's secret service.

After her training, she returned to Duke Street and was told what she was supposed to do, and she was asked to memorize the symbols by which members of her small team were known. Then she was given her papers; a
carte d'identité,
a
permis de conduire
and current ration cards, all forged by the S.O.E. That same evening she was taken to a camouflaged airfield somewhere in the Midlands, and given a cup of hot tea, a little box of benzedrine to keep her awake if necessary and a cyanide tablet to put her to sleep quickly and lethally should the necessity arise. There was a special garment waiting for her, a suit, rubber helmet and spine pad, all somewhat oversized, but useful in cushioning her landing by parachute. She was given a revolver, a knife and a compass, and then escorted to the field and put aboard a Lancaster bomber.

At 3 a.m., she dropped into France. When she hit the ground, a man came over to help her up. “Is that you, Marie?” he asked. She said, “Yes,” although nobody had bothered to tell her that she would be called Marie. The man drove her to Lyons-la-Forêt and next morning she took the morning train to Paris and went to an address where others were waiting for her. The Mouse had arrived.

The man she had come to see was an engineer who worked in an aircraft factory in Paris, but who lived in a suburb called Vaucresson. He had just returned from Germany, where he worked in a place called Peenemuende and where he had seen some strange experiments with flying bombs that were guided to their targets from the ground. He needed someone to whom he could relay the information. The Mouse went to Vaucresson that same night, found the man's apartment and stepped up to a window on the ground floor behind which a light was burning. She scratched out her signal on the pane and then walked into a dark kitchen through the unlocked back door. She groped her way to a table and picked up an envelope. A man's voice
whispered an invitation to come into another room. She followed the sound of the voice into the dark room and heard the man say, “I'm not ready for you yet. That is only part of your information. We will have to meet again next Wednesday.”

“Where?” the Mouse asked.

“In a
bistro
called the
Floridore
. It's on Quai Voltaire. At six o'clock?”

“The plans,” the man continued, talking about the contents of the envelope she held in her hand, “they are dangerous. If they catch you with them, we will all be in trouble.”

“They won't,” she said, but she wasn't certain. “Are they making spot checks on the train to Paris?”

“Not as a rule,” the man said, “but you can never tell. The
Boche
is inscrutable.”

“Adieu,
then,” she said. “Till next Wednesday.”

“The Mouse, are you the Mouse?” the man asked, but she left through the dark kitchen without answering the question. She heard steps on the cobblestoned street and waited until two soldiers strolled by, a German patrol. They passed and she walked out, turned a corner, walked down the hill to the railroad station and caught the last train back to Paris.

The Mouse was worried. Her assignment was to pick up the papers, return them to Lyons-la-Forêt, and take them back to England on a Lysander. Now she would have to stay on for five more perilous days, with some of the plans in her hands. What to do with the plans in the meantime? Where to go? She was supposed to spend but a single day at the first address.

She decided to return to Lyons-la-Forêt. She went to Pont de l'Arche, then on to Fleury-sur-Andelle and asked a courier of the underground to take her home. That night a Lysander came and she gave her envelope to the pilot.

Next morning she went back to Paris. She had a second address and even the key to a flat, but when she called at the house, the
concierge
rudely refused to let her enter. Later she learned that the
concierge's
rudeness was calculated to warn her that the flat was “hot,” and was under Gestapo surveillance.

She had to make one of her emergency contacts, a woman named Maud, who had a glove shop on rue de la Boétie. She walked into the shop and asked for a pair of green suede gloves, size 6¼, and was conducted to the back of the shop, to a desk behind which sat a plump woman of about sixty. “The lady is looking for green suede gloves, size 6¼,” the salesgirl said, and the plump woman stretched out her hand: “I'm glad to see you,” she said.

The Mouse stayed in her flat until Wednesday afternoon, then walked to the
Floridore
on Quai Voltaire and entered the bistro at six o'clock sharp. She was looking for a man who would be reading a copy of the
Journal Officiel,
but the bistro was empty.

Her instructions were never to wait for an appointment, so she left at once, but returned fifteen minutes later, sat down on the terrace and ordered a St. Raphaël with soda water. When the waiter put the
siphon
on her table, she absent-mindedly scratched the bottle and the waiter gave her an evening paper in a thin bamboo holder. On the third page, where the last-minute news was printed, the word
Tronchet
was underscored in an ad. Also underlined were the numbers
8
and 5, and in another column 2 and 7. She paid and took a cab to rue Tronchet, got out at the corner and walked to No. eighty-five. She went to the second floor and rang the bell of Apartment seven. A man opened the door and the Mouse stood there absent-mindedly scratching the glass pane of the tall door. The man opened the door wide and allowed her to enter.