The example which I have given here is a simple one. Often the messages were so garbled that you might think sense could never be made of them. Yet we became so adept at unravelling their meanings that we would be able to read off jumbles of letters at sight, much to the astonished admiration of any top brass that might be in the office at the time, for the unpractised eye was quite unable to make anything of them at all.
On occasions, when an operator was, for instance, on the run or could not keep to exact sked times owing to increased German control or detector-van activity, the ‘godmother’ would work, alternating with another operator, on a non-stop, twenty-four-hour basis, so that the agent would be able to come on the air at a moment’s notice when the coast was clear, knowing that his message would be received.
Speed was essential in the relaying of agents’ messages to us at headquarters. If I was particularly worried about a certain agent I would ring through to the commanding officer of our wireless station and tell him that any news from that agent was to be phoned through direct to me. On other occasions, a decoding officer might sense from what he had deciphered that something was very urgent, in which case he would go to his CO and tell him that he thought it should be phoned through. We hesitated to use the phone too much for fear that an enemy agent (if any existed) might get wind of something or even through the accident of a crossed line hear of some secret information.
Further, we feared the possibility of distortions and misunderstandings; when you had something in front of you in black and white it was much easier to make sense of jumbles and detect the point of a message.
Sometimes the urgency of a message would be alarming. I remember on one occasion receiving a warning that the Germans had suddenly moved a large number of troops to the vicinity of a factory which our men were due to attack that very evening. The report was put on my desk at 7.10. It read: ‘GERMAN TROOPS GESTAPO REINFORCING CAMBRAI ALSO SOME TANKS’. The report came from one group in the area who did not know that another in the same district was due to attack a plant in Cambrai upon the receipt of a BBC message: PIERRE EMBRASSE YVETTE. That sentence was in the script of the French service announcer and was due to be broadcast at 7.30. If the message went out our men would probably walk straight into a trap. There was no time to be lost.
I tried to get through to our liaison officer’s room. He was not there. He had already left for the studio. I tried to get through there. I could not be put through. It was too late.
I rushed out of my office and down the stairs into Baker Street. Luckily, a FANY driver was waiting.
‘Bush House,’ I yelled. ‘And drive as fast as you can go,’ I added once I was in the car.
She did. I leapt out of the car at 7.25 and ran up the imposing steps to the front door. A commissionaire barred the way. ‘Out of the light,’ I cried, barging past him and flinging my pass at him as I did so.
I dashed into the lift and demanded to be taken to the studio floor. Luckily I knew where the broadcasts were made and I was able to run along the passage and into the studio just as the announcer was starting the messages personnels. As I entered the studio and scampered across the floor to him, I heard him say in his measured, quiet way: ‘Pierre Embrasse Yvette.’
It was among the very first messages. I grabbed him by the shoulder and shook my head fiercely. ‘No,’ I mouthed. ‘No.’ There was an endless pause as he tried to make out what I was attempting to convey. Then, to my immense relief, he got the point. In his firm, unruffled voice he said: ‘J’annule (I deny or retract) Pierre Embrasse Yvette. Je repète J’annule Pierre Embrasse Yvette.’
I sank into an armchair and thanked God. If I had been a minute later it would have been certain that our men would already have switched off their set, for they would not listen to the BBC a moment longer than was absolutely necessary, for fear of detection. Even as it was I could not be sure that they would have heard or realised the import of the announcer’s denial of Pierre Embrasse Yvette.
We waited nervously for the next sked from that particular section. It came the next day – all was well. The message had been fully understood and the operation called off. This was the closest call we had, but there were several other occasions on which the Bush House liaison officer had to cross off a message just as the announcer was about to read it. The latter’s voice never wavered.
Sometimes it was not the BBC messages which had to be cancelled but a flight which we had to stop because there would not be a reception committee waiting for an agent who was going to be dropped. Then there would be frantic calls to the air station and midnight rushes down the runway to halt aircraft whose engines were already warming up.
There were other unpredictable factors that might come into play at a moment’s notice: perhaps the RAF would be unable to fly a sortie owing to bad weather or a new flak battery and we would have to warn the reception not to assemble; perhaps a double agent was suspected and an outgoing agent prevented from falling into a trap. We had continually to be alert and ready to change our plans at the very last second.
German espionage was not, it need hardly be said, anything like on the same scale as our own in the occupied countries, for they had no friendly civilian population on whom to base it. We could never have functioned at all had it not been for the brave and unflinching support which the ordinary French civilians rendered to us. The Germans had no one on whom they could rely. As a result, I was never the victim of any assassination attempt nor were any of my staff. Though the Germans did in fact know my name they never sought me out.
It may be wondered how the Germans found out my name. The truth probably is that someone told it under interrogation, for to give my name would endanger no one and that was precisely the sort of information which, under agonising torture, a man would give to stave off further pain. Though it was against strict orders, I do not think that anyone could be blamed for giving the name of a CO who was beyond the reach of the Gestapo. Certainly it was preferable to giving the name of a local Réseau leader. I myself discovered that the Germans knew my name through a piece of information which reached us through Spain. This consisted of a secret document spirited out of Gestapo HQ which purported to give the British Secret Service set-up. The plan was highly fanciful and contained almost every famous name the Germans could think of as well as those, like my own, which were really associated with secret work. My name became known to Hitler himself and he is reported to have said: ‘When I get to London I do not know who I shall hang first – Churchill or this man Buckmaster!’ No enemy agent ever tried to walk into my office, though several did try, without success, to come over to this country through our escape lines and join our organisation. These attempts somewhat underrated the efficiency of our security arrangements and they were frustrated without much trouble.
Our office in Baker Street was not known to many people and even my wife never discovered it until one day in 1943 when she was on her way to visit a friend in the company of our bull terrier bitch, Misty. It so happened that I had taken Misty to the office with me several times so that she should not be left alone during the raids when my wife was on duty at a First Aid Post and her intelligence led her to remember the place. Accordingly as she passed the door of the building she turned in. My wife called her but she paid no attention and, wagging her tail agreeably, she led the way up to the commissionaire. She got no farther, but it was not too difficult for my wife to deduce the reason for the dog’s sudden detour and the secret was out.
I think that was the biggest breach of security which ever occurred in our office, though there was another time when a friend of my wife’s happened to hear a FANY saying to one of her colleagues that she had come to Baker Street to drive Colonel Buckmaster, for whom she was now waiting. This friend was later able to tell my wife that she knew where I worked, but she sensibly refused to share the information until Misty’s misdemeanour unmasked me.
My own working day was determined by what was going on during any particular pha
se of our operations. In general, I would arrive early at the office, either by bus, in a taxi or in the car of one of our FANY drivers. To avoid my being seen leaving in her car I would usually meet the FANY at South Kensington Station or at a bus stop. I avoided routine, though, to be quite frank, I never considered very seriously the possibility of anyone on the enemy side trailing me or wanting to kill me. Nor did anything even vaguely disquieting ever happen to me.
If things were reasonably quiet at Baker Street around supper time, I would go home to Chelsea for dinner with my wife and then perhaps leave again around eight o’clock and cycle (on her bicycle – one of those high-seated angular ones) back to Baker Street where I might stay till four in the morning, or, quite frequently, all night.
My average working day was one of about eighteen hours. Even when I had managed to get away from the office, messages would follow me. Often the phone rang in the middle of the night and a coy voice would say: ‘Two umbrellas have been seen in Hyde Park.’ This conveyed to me that two parachute drops had been made in the Jura. If one was a bit fuzzy from tiredness these things took a bit of working out. The conversation might proceed:
‘Red umbrellas or blue ones?’ (Was it men or material we had succeeded in dropping?)
‘Two blue ones – with handles.’ (Two agents with their wireless sets and equipment.)
‘Well, I hope they’ve rolled them up and taken a nice stroll down the Mall.’ (I hope they have got rid of their chutes and moved off to their rendezvous.)
This kind of conversation might seem a little arch and it may be thought that any enemy agent could decipher its import without much trouble, but actually the idea was not to hide anything from the enemy but rather to prevent that kind of careless talk which might lead an inquisitive telephone operator to listen in so that later he could show off to his friends how much he knew about the secret war. He could not possibly know where ‘Hyde Park’ was.
Another time I might be told that ‘Two frogs are croaking in the lily pond.’ From this I could divine that two wireless operators had made contact with us from the Lille area. If their messages were urgent I would get up and cycle over to Baker Street to see them. (Incidentally this nocturnal cycling enabled me to discover that you can freewheel nearly all the way from Marble Arch to Chelsea, something for which, after the exhaustion of an all-night session, I was often not ungrateful.)
While I was out, the phone might ring again and my sleepy wife would be informed that ‘Three redskins have touched wood.’ Blearily she would take down the message and when I got home I would know that three members of the Resistance had crossed a neutral border to safety.
At the office we did not, of course, use this abstruse terminology and the progress of each agent and each Réseau was plotted with the greatest care. We did not, however, keep elaborate records, for the more there was on paper, the greater the chance of something going astray. It was therefore our policy to destroy all records after an appropriate time had elapsed. Until then, not one message was thrown away, and that included the jumbled versions as well as the finally deciphered editions. So we were able to check up on the style and value of the information each operator had sent us. Thus we could determine whether any of our men or those they had recruited was being suspiciously unforthcoming or whether he seemed (by the falseness of any messages he had sent) to be responsible for the frustration or destruction of others.
To decide whether a man was working for the Germans was not easy from London. Yet, at times, we had to make that decision, for we were in the best – though not the ideal – position in which to judge. We could not afford to risk our men being betrayed and we severed contact with all wireless operators and section heads who seemed to us to be suspect. When this happened we warned all interested parties.
How could we test the loyalty of an operator? The easiest way was to check first whether he was who he said he was. To do this we might send him a message asking: ‘HAVE YOU CONTACTED NICOLE AS ORDERED?’ where Nicole was a fictitious person and no such order had been given. The tone of the reply would give us a clue, ‘WHO THE HELL IS NICOLE AND WHAT ORDER?’ would suggest that our man was genuine, but such replies as ‘WHERE SHALL I MEET HER?’ or ‘AM ARRANGING IT SEND FURTHER DETAILS’ or simply ‘WILL DO’ made us more doubtful and we would then continue to ply the man with trap messages, knowing well that any genuine agent would soon ask us to explain ourselves or shut up.
One had to be careful about jumping to conclusions, for it might be that a newly recruited operator’s inexperience would look like deceit and we had to beware against being too subtle and Sherlock Holmes-like in the detection of minute sins of omission and commission. It is tempting to suggest that we should have been able to detect false agents by their ‘fist’, since the experts told us that they could distinguish one fist from another as certainly as a handwriting expert can distinguish one script from another; but we knew that agents often had to send their messages in the most difficult conditions – it might be in a central-heating plant in a loft or in the freezing cold of an outbuilding – and cramp or other afflictions could radically alter their methods of keying.
We at home had to be flexible and one cannot hide the fact that at times this flexibility led us to give the benefit of the doubt, at least for a while, to an operator who later turned out to be false. That was the fortune of war. We were not so rich in operators that we could afford to ditch them for the tiniest indiscretion; had we done so, the confidence of the agents in the field in our competence and our common sense would have been speedily destroyed. War is no exact science.
SOE’s activities grew in scope as the war progressed and in 1942 we added a psychological side to them. This took the form of spreading ‘sibs’. A man now prominent in the world of literature and broadcasting had an office in our building where he sat all day inventing dangerous rumours. These rumours or ‘sibs’ were designed for circulation among the people of France and, in particular, among the German occupying forces. Lawrence would try to think up what a service man likes least to believe about conditions at home and about his own status.
One day Lawrence came into my office and in a conversational tone asked me: ‘Have you heard they’ve discovered you can have VD for several months without knowing it?’
‘I can’t say I have.’
‘No, don’t suppose you would. Still, it might make some of the Boches in the garrison towns a bit nervy, eh?’
It did. By simultaneously spreading the rumour that all the prostitutes in a certain town had VD we succeeded in having all the Germans there confined to barracks for several weeks. The troops grew disgruntled and practically mutinous.
Other ‘sibs’ would concern such things as the virtue of wives left too long alone in distant Germany with only Nazi party officials for company. Other rumours concerned German food supplies. Lawrence would try this one on the office staff: ‘Well, chaps, it’s dehydrated mules’ brains for lunch.’ If enough of us looked sick, the word would go out that the sausage supplied to German cook-houses was made from the quoted recipe. We attacked morale from every possible angle and nothing was too low if it hurt the Germans.
Immediately before D-Day we spread the message that animals’ blood was to be used for transfusions in German military hospitals in the event of an invasion. We also put it out that two train loads of German ammunition had had to be returned to Germany because it was found to be the wrong size. It was suggested that ammunition was desperately short in France because the High Command did not really intend to put up any resistance to the British and American forces.
The important thing was to surrender as quickly as possible before the Russians arrived.
These rumours were heard at garden parties in neutral countries where the Swiss chargé d’affaires would hear them from a British consular official and pass them on, quite innocently, to the Germans. The reports would get back to Germany through the letters written by the German embassy officials to their families and their r
elatives in the forces. Merchant seamen in Lisbon would pick them up from our agents in dockside cafés. Collaborators would repeat them at official receptions in Paris. The word would go round in a thousand different ways.
† The French name for a Resistance group’s base, literally a ‘nest’.
† George Hiller. Field name Maxime. Code name FOOTMAN.
‡ Cyril Watney. Field name Eustache. Code name FORGER.
Chapter 4
The Match
I think I ought to say before I go any further that from the beginning of 1942 onwards our activities were greatly increased, so much so that I shall be quite unable to recount more than a handful of the personal adventures and successes of our men in the field. We were getting men into France now with much greater confidence, for we were better able to gauge the staunchness of the co-operation we were likely to receive there; this knowledge was gained from the researches of our earlier and exploratory agents, like Harry Morgan and Pierre de Vomécourt, and the groups they had formed. From their reports, we were able to piece together a picture of conditions in the field which, as the months passed grew increasingly, though never sufficiently, comprehensive. Some agents felt that we did not give them adequate briefing before their departure, but in the main we were able to give them enough detailed information to prevent them committing small acts so anachronistic (for instance asking for cigarettes that were no longer obtainable) that they would give themselves away before they had time to find their feet at all.
‘Still no sign of anything from Harry Morgan,’ I observed to Major Bourne-Paterson, our planning officer.
‘Looks as if he’s had it,’ B-P agreed unhappily.
‘We haven’t been using Marseilles at all, have we?’ ‘Nobody’s been given the address since Harry left.’ ‘Good. If the Boches are using our man there I should think they’ll soon get tired of waiting. I don’t think we need give up hope of Harry. He’s got his wits about him—’
They Fought Alone Page 7
