Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (54 page)

It was obvious to Vera that Dr. Goetz was now referring to the decision to send out Nicholas Bodington to Paris to investigate the extent of the Prosper disaster. Bodington had insisted on going and took with him the radio operator Jack Agazarian. Dr. Goetz was now confirming what Vera had known since the end of the war: that the rendezvous was made directly with the enemy. On arriving, Bodington suddenly decided not to go himself to the meeting, sending Agazarian along instead. Bodington said on his return to England that he and Agazarian had tossed a coin over who was to go, and Agazarian lost. Vera had traced Agazarian to Flossenbürg, where he was hanged.

“But even that explanation never made any sense, however you look at it,” the SOE agent Tony Brooks told me. “Even if they did toss a coin, everyone knows in those circumstances what you do: you arrange for a signal at the window, like placing a pot of flowers in a certain position to show the rendezvous is safe, and if the signal isn't there, don't go. Or else before you go up there, you give a small boy a coin and say: run and give a message to my girlfriend on the third floor. If he comes back and says, ‘There is no girl but a couple of men,' you scarper.”

What was Bodington like? I asked.

“A crook,” said Brooks, but neither he nor anyone else knew what sort of crook. SOE colleagues all said he was profoundly dislikeable—“a shifty little cove”—and never had any money on him. His former Reuters colleagues called him something of a “romancer,” or fantasist, who was always asking for pay rises.

When the new files appeared in the National Archives, I hoped they
would throw light on the affair of Déricourt, as well as the question of Bodington. The files spilled over with evidence showing Déricourt s various dealings with the Germans. They also revealed that at one point investigators seriously considered whether both Déricourt and Bodington were traitors, in part because the two men seemed to be protecting each other. The various episodes led the MI5 man handling the case to say: “This leads one to wonder whether Bodington was himself an agent in the pay of the Germans.”

Particular suspicions arose directly out of Bodington's trip to Paris in the summer of 1943, during which several puzzling things had happened, including the capture of Agazarian and Colonel Heinrich's startling claim at the time to the SOE agent called Henri Frager that the Gestapo knew all along of Bodington's presence in Paris. Frager had taken the German's claim most seriously, he said, because he believed Colonel Heinrich to be an anti-Nazi who could be trusted. This same Colonel Heinrich, as Vera discovered, was the Abwehr's lethal counterin-telligence sleuth, Hugo Bleicher.

The MI5 interrogations of Bleicher, now released for public view, ran to several pages, revealing, in mind-boggling complexity, his early penetration of British networks, including the story of how he turned a young Frenchwoman named Mathilde Carré, known as the Cat, who had worked for one of the earliest spy networks in France, run jointly by MI6 and Polish exiles. Carré became Bleicher's mistress, and by early 1942 she had betrayed every member of the British organisation, also putting Bleicher in touch with SOE circuits. When Carré was finally brought to London for investigation in February 1942, Vera was entrusted by MI6 with the task of watching over the Frenchwoman, which gave her a very direct and early insight into German methods of penetration.

Bleicher was particularly closely questioned by MI5 about events in Paris in the summer of 1943. By that time, Bleicher explained, it was Hans Kieffer of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) who was largely responsible for rounding up British agents, with the Abwehr now forced to take a secondary role. Kieffer nevertheless still found his old adversary Bleicher useful, and they spoke from time to time. On one occasion Kieffer let Bleicher know that Bodington was in Paris. It happened like this, according
to the MI5 interrogation report: “He [Bleicher] was informed of Bodington's arrival by Kieffer who personally told Bleicher that he had been informed of it by Gilbert.” The interrogator wrote: “According to Bleicher, Gilbert handed over many of our officers to the SD … he had, however, some scruple in regard to Bodington, and although he gave away his arrival said he did not know his address. Kieffer telephoned Bleicher in the hope he might know the address. And it was then that Bleicher warned Frager.” During the same interrogation Bleicher said he had also warned Frager in the summer of 1943 that several British wirelesses were being run by Kieffer, telling him that “ultimately there were about a dozen.”

Within MI5 Bleicher s account obviously provoked intense suspicion, both of Déricourt and, by implication, of Bodington. What precisely Bleicher's own motives were in the affair, especially regarding giving information to SOE's Henri Frager, was, of course, far from clear. Dr. Goetz, speaking after the war, suggested that Bleicher was simply shopping Gilbert out of jealousy that such a valuable agent should be working for the Sicherheitsdienst and not for him. Certainly Frager's claim that Bleicher could be trusted—simply because he was an anti-Nazi—was just another example of F Section's tragic wishful thinking: in June 1944 Bleicher personally arrested Frager, who was later shot at Buchenwald.

In their interrogation of Bleicher, MI5 then tackled the odd circumstances surrounding the arrest of Jack Agazarian, who attended the fatal rendezvous set up, supposedly, with Gilbert Norman. The interrogator asked Bodington the important question: why had he sent Agazarian, his wireless operator, to the rendezvous and not gone himself? Bodington's standard answer—that they tossed a coin—was not deemed satisfactory, but he offered no other.

Why then did either go, if there was thought to be a risk? Bodington was asked.

He told his interrogator: “They had, after all, to take some chances, otherwise they would have got nowhere with their mission.”

One possibility MI5 evidently then considered was that Bodington had been warned by Déricourt that the Germans would be there, but
Bodington could not possibly say he had been warned as that would disclose his source. So he sent Agazarian along instead.

Suspicions of Bodington deepened when it emerged that among his many peculiar prewar acquaintances was Henri Déricourt.

When MI5 asked Bodington why it was that Déricourt always seemed to have so much money, Bodington replied that Déricourt had been a highly paid “trick aviator” before the war. In fact, as soon emerged, the two men regularly met at flying shows and dirt-track racing near Paris in the 1930s, when Bodington worked in Paris as a journalist.

Even more suspicion was aroused when Bodington was asked how he thought the Germans knew of his presence in Paris in the summer of 1943. The unexpected and dismissive reply was that the German secret police had known about him since 1934, “when owing to certain journalistic activities of his, he had come to their notice.”

One of the German secret policemen Bodington was referring to was almost certainly Karl Boemelburg. British intelligence had long held a file on Boemelburg. He had been the most senior Sicherheitsdienst officer in Paris for much of the war, based at the German embassy in Paris in the early 1930s as a quasi-diplomat. “Appearance of a Prussian officer. Speaks good French; homosexual,” said a note in the Boemelburg file. Boemelburg also met Déricourt and Bodington at the dirt-track racing, as Déricourt himself would later reveal.

Rather than reach any conclusion from this plethora of incriminating evidence, MI5 appeared simply to give up and brought no charges against Déricourt or Bodington. So interwoven were the allegations of treachery involving SOE that the British security service men simply could not decide whom or what to believe—a state of affairs that may well have suited the former staff officers of SOE.

All these years later it was still hard to know what to believe, not least because of the “weeding” of the files. What was clear, however, was first that Henri Déricourt was not only a traitor but also a brilliant con man. No sooner had the British acquitted him of treachery for a second time than he was arrested at Croydon airport in 1946, on his way to pilot a plane carrying a large amount of gold and platinum to France. The
magistrate, in view of his “excellent war record,” let him off with a £500 fine.

Second, it was clear that Bodington went out of his way to protect Déricourt. Déricourt had some sort of hold over Bodington, perhaps dating back to their prewar liaison, though what that hold was—financial, sexual, or something else—was anyone's guess.

What was also clear from the files was Vera's own deafening silence on the question of Déricourt. She appeared not to have given her views— or her evidence—on him to the British inquiries at any stage, yet she had gathered more incriminating evidence against him than any other investigator. This reticence to speak out officially was in stark contrast to the way Vera made her abhorrence and distrust of Déricourt known unofficially. Anyone who broached the subject of Déricourt privately with Vera after the war was given a rundown on his treachery.

“She had a feminine intuition he was a rotten apple. I was completely conned by him,” said Hugh Verity, the head of Lysander operations.

Vera herself even told me when I met her at Winchelsea; “I knew he was rotten from the very start,” and as she spoke she suddenly raised her voice a little as if the very mention of the name had stirred long-buried anger. “When he came to us, the men were all thrilled to bits with the fellow, but I gave him one look and said I would not trust him across the road. They were furious with me. He seemed to do a very good job for a while. But he was motivated by money and intrigue.”

“How did you know?” I asked, surprised by these forthright observations.

“Instinct,” she said, and blew one of those chimneys of smoke above her head. “Some people's instincts serve them well. Mine have always served me well.”

Continuing her interrogation of Dr. Goetz, Vera now asked about the deception that was carried out in the north of France. Dr. Goetz said that Kieffer had instructed a second officer, Joseph Placke, to operate a captured wireless near Sedan, in the Ardennes, and by August 1943 the second deception scheme was successful.

As Vera knew, Dr. Goetz was referring to the radio of John Macalis-ter, Frank Pickersgill's wireless operator. Vera had traced the victims of this fiasco to several concentration camps. Bodington had warned Buck-master that the Ardennes circuit “should be considered lost” in his report about the Prosper disaster, on his return from Paris in August 1943. But the Ardennes circuit then began to work well, so the warning was ignored.

Dr. Goetz explained that the Ardennes circuit had been created from scratch by Kieffer. The French resistance in that area did not know the two new arrivals from London, so when the Canadians, captured just after landing, were impersonated by Kieffer's men, nobody knew the difference. Arms poured in from London to the new circuit, as did agents. Placke and Kieffer then drew up all sorts of plans for sabotage, which were approved by London.

It was evident that by this time the German double-cross system had become a highly complex affair, as phoney plans were developed for each phoney circuit, all coordinated and planned so that London did not guess what was happening. Dr. Goetz even developed his own set of code words and radio plans to mirror the real ones. He would send messages asking for arms or arranging a landing, and London would reply with the details. The message on the BBC would come over signalling that all was ready to go ahead. Kieffer's men then charged off to the landing fields and formed reception committees. Dr. Goetz even set up his own letterboxes for his “agents” and sent the details to London. On occasion Dr. Goetz and Placke were asked by London to fix up meetings with agents who were still operating freely in the field.

In August 1943 they received a message from Buckmaster telling the two Canadians, Pickersgill and Macalister, to meet up with Nora Inayat Khan (Madeleine) in Paris at the Café Colisée in the Champs-Elysées.

Kieffer had been keen to locate Madeleine for some time, said Dr. Goetz, but although his men had been closely on her trail, she always got away. Now there was a chance for Kieffer to lure her right into the hands of two of his best men. Placke, whose English was fluent, was to be Macalister. To pose as Pickersgill, Kieffer chose another Gestapo officer, Karl Holdorf, who had a transatlantic accent from his time working on
an ocean liner. It was assumed that Madeleine had never met Pickersgill or Macalister before and so would not guess the two men who met her were Gestapo officers.