by Max Ciampoli
I went to the bathroom to take a shower before going to bed, but it was so cold that I decided just to go to sleep instead. I needed to catch up on all the sleep I had lost during my trip. I put on my pajamas and gratefully got under the warm blankets. Before I knew it, I fell asleep.
When I awoke, it was still dark. I went to the bathroom to take a shower. The water was nice and hot and felt wonderful. I hadn’t had a shower for three days. I dressed in my uniform, my hat, and coat and went out on the terrace. It was just before dawn. I saw the gardener. When he saw me, he picked up a bundle of wood and brought it to my room. As he lit the fire, there was a knock on the door. I opened it to a man who spoke to me in Italian.
“Buongiorno, Lieutenant. It’s a pleasure to meet you. My name is Hughes. Mr. Churchill and I have just arrived from London. He has gone to his room to get some sleep and has asked me to show you around. Would you like to have your breakfast first?”
“Nice meeting you, Hughes. I ate well last night, so breakfast can wait awhile. I would love to see the property.”
Though his Italian was broken, I understood him well. Before leaving the room, he said, “You can only receive two stations on this old radio: one in English and the other from the Belgium Congo. So, I’m sure you’ll be tuning in to Radio Brazzaville from Africa because it’s in French. Would you like to start our tour at the stables? I’ve heard you’re quite a horseman.”
“I’d love to see the stables.”
“After breakfast, Mr. Churchill will be up to receiving you, I am sure.”
There were four horses, and he introduced me to each one by name. They looked like cavalry horses to me. We took a short walk around the property and returned to the house.
“I’ll have breakfast sent to your room,” he told me as he left.
I turned the radio on and found the French-speaking station. About twenty minutes later, there was a knock on the door. I opened it and the younger servant placed my meal on the table. It smelled so good. There was a large pot of hot chocolate. Under one bell was an omelette with mushrooms and lamb brains accompanied by lyonnaise potatoes. Under another was toast with fresh butter, and under the third was a baked apple with whipped cream.
I finished breakfast and went out on the terrace. The view was superb in spite of the light fog. There was a forest in the distance, and in front of me white swans were playing together on the pond. On the far side, a couple of black swans elegantly floated together. This was the first time I had ever been to England, and I was enchanted.
Hughes came to get me. “It’s too early to see the prime minister. Let me take you for a ride in the buggy.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
We went to the stables, and he hooked two horses to the carriage. We left the property to take a look at the surrounding area. It was lovely. We returned about an hour later. He summoned the gardener and had him take care of the horses as he escorted me to the secretary’s office, where he left us alone.
“Mr. Churchill is on the telephone right now, but he suggested you wait in his office while he finishes the call,” she said. “Please, follow me.” We went into his office, right next to hers. “Have a seat,” she offered. As I sat down, he looked up. He was just as I remembered him, though, of course, a little older. I don’t know what he said to the person on the line because he spoke in English, but he hung up almost immediately.
He addressed the secretary. “We can forget about the dictation for now,” he said in French, obviously to be polite for my benefit. As she turned to leave, Mr. Churchill got up slowly from his desk, slightly hunched, his arm raised to shake my hand as he approached me in what looked like slow motion. He didn’t grasp my hand, but rather just placed his palm on mine. He began in a natural joking manner, “Lieutenant, you have gotten taller since I saw you last in Cap d’Antibes. Let me think. You must have been five or six years old. You didn’t have a beard back then. Your godfather warned me that you now had a beard and were no longer wearing short pants.”
He chuckled, then continued, “Welcome to England. This is your new home for now. While you’re here, I want you to enjoy our magnificent countryside. Please ride the horses. I know you’ll enjoy them. I’m sorry that I must excuse myself right away. I have important meetings in London to prepare for, one at the Admiralty and another at Scotland Yard. I’ll be back in a few days, but in the meantime, I’ll arrange to send you to our special forces training school. You’ll be kept quite occupied, I assure you.”
We talked for a short while. Then he said, “À bientôt, I’ll see you again soon. I leave you in the good hands of my trusted secretary. Ask her for anything you need.”
Biding my time at the delightful property, I began a ritual of riding every day. Hughes or the gardener would have my horse saddled and ready to go each morning. One day, on my return, the secretary was waiting to talk to me.
“We’re going to send you to a camp for some specialized training,” she announced. “We have your first mission waiting for you, Lieutenant, but it has certain requirements you must be prepared for. So, pack your bag. The driver will be here in two hours.”
Precisely two hours later, one of the women military drivers was waiting in front of the house. I climbed into the small car. We drove for hours to a camp located near a Royal Air Force base. This training camp was totally secret, the entire circumference protected by guard dogs. To enter, the imprint of an individual’s right hand needed to be on record. In addition, a special identification card was required in order to gain access. Once on file, a person only had to put his or her right hand into a machine to be immediately identified. Only then were they permitted to enter. This method was much more secure than individual fingerprints. My hand imprint was taken, and I was issued an identification card to be kept on file.
After a rigorous week’s training, I received a message that Mr. Churchill was sending a car to pick me up. When I arrived back at his estate, he greeted me with great enthusiasm. “Now we’re going to get some work done. In the morning, an officer will give you the details of the task at hand, but I’ll give you the general parameters right now. The day after tomorrow, you have an appointment to see the dentist.”
“But my teeth are fine. I don’t need to see a dentist, monsieur.”
“Yes, you do. You’ll return to camp. A nurse will come to pick you up at your quarters. The dentist will take an imprint of your teeth. He will then drill a hole in one of your molars and make a cap in gold to put on the tooth. There will be space for a pill inside. At camp you’ll be trained how to chew to avoid knocking the cap off, as well as how to take it off with the tip of your tongue should the need arise. If you are captured and think you might talk, remove the pill and chew it. I warn you that if you accidentally knock it off, you’ll be dead in seconds. The pill is pure cyanide, mon petit.”
The next day I took it easy, taking leisurely walks around the property. Late in the afternoon, a driver came to take me back to camp. When I arrived, I went to dinner with a French-speaking officer who explained the process I would be going through and the subsequent training required. He then accompanied me to my room. The next morning, a driver dressed in the typical gray uniform of the English women auxiliaries (the French called them “little mice” because of this gray attire) came to get me at my quarters and brought me to the dentist’s office located on the far side of the camp. She was very nice, as they all were, but she didn’t communicate much. How could she? Very few of them spoke other languages, so we had no way to really talk.
I went directly into the dentist’s office. He pointed to a chair and I sat down. He didn’t speak French, Italian, or German, so things were very quiet until he turned the drill on. He gestured that I should open my mouth and then gave me a shot. When my mouth was deadened, he began drilling out the third molar from the back on the top right side of my mouth. When he finished, he put in a temporary filling and then indicated that I should leave.
The following morning, I was
picked up and taken to his office, again escorted by a “little mouse.” This time the dentist gave me several shots to deaden the area and then removed the nerve. The following day, the nurse came for me yet again. The dentist worked for a very long time and finished by taking an imprint of my teeth.
I didn’t return to see him for about a week. Then, once again, a lady in gray picked me up and drove me back to his office. More drilling. Finally, the day of my last scheduled visit, the dentist placed a pill inside the tooth, though not a cyanide pill, and put the gold cap in place. A liaison officer picked me up at his office and took me to the officers’ mess hall where we began our new training—how to keep the pill in place, yet accessible, should I need to use it. Breakfast was being served. This was the only time of day that I enjoyed English food. Every other meal at the camp was tasteless.
Basically, that was my life for a couple of weeks. The only times I was allowed out of my quarters were the trips to the dentist and the forays into the mess hall. To entertain myself, I listened to the radio: the BBC in French and Radio Brazzaville.
The lesson I learned in the dining room was vitally important: how to eat without knocking against the tooth so hard as to lose the cap. The cap needed to be loose enough to remove at will with my tongue but tight enough to stay in place.
I had never thought my tongue would be in training for dexterity when I came to England. The absurdity of this thought had me laughing within myself.
I returned to the dentist several times during my tongue-training period to either loosen or tighten the cap. Obviously, it was critical that it fit just right. Three times a day, I was escorted to the mess hall to practice. No one from the outside went anywhere in this camp without an escort.
One Saturday, I was interrupted during breakfast. A soldier beckoned that I come with him. We arrived at an office, and the soldier said, “Mr. Churchill,” as he handed me the receiver.
“Allo,” I said.
“Hello, my boy. I hear you’re making excellent progress. If it’s not too foggy tomorrow, I’ll send a driver to pick you up at four thirty in the morning to bring you to my country home. I want to go hunting, and I have no one to go with. We’ll shoot pheasant.”
Not waiting for an answer, he hung up.
TWO
The Hunt
There was just a hint of fog when the car picked me up in the morning. When we arrived at the estate, Mr. Churchill was ready to go. We spent the entire day together. He shot two pheasant, and I brought down one.
“We’ll sample the day’s ‘profits’ this evening,” he said. “The cook prepares the pheasant stuffed with a chestnut, plum, and bitter orange-peel dressing.” That evening, the two of us finished all three pheasant. It was a memorable meal.
Sunday, Churchill’s private game warden accompanied us on the hunt. We left before the sun came up. Two hunting dogs accompanied us, a beautiful Irish setter and a Brittany from France. We relied mostly on the Brittany, as the setter got overanxious when he smelled the pheasant in the brush. We walked at a very slow pace so as to sneak up on them, but the setter, in his anxiety, often moved too early and scared the pheasant away before they were in shooting range. The law specified that one had to wait until the bird was airborne before shooting. When the birds took flight, they took off in a zigzag pattern, so it was best to shoot immediately after they took to the air. This setter would rarely fail to set them to flight before the right time, but I loved him anyway. He was simply gorgeous.
I was so taken by this dog that I later bought myself one at the completion of one of my missions and left him at my father’s property in Drap, France. He was stunning, his long reddish coat falling almost to the ground. Marcello, the caretaker, called him “Knick” for Knickerbocker, one of my father’s clubs in Monaco where he had worked as a dishwasher. When I next visited the property, Marcello recounted a sad tale: “I decided to give Knick a bath, not long after he came to live here. He was still very nervous about the change of environment, so nervous that he had a heart attack while I was bathing him and died. I am so sorry, Monsieur Marc.” I was saddened by the loss, but Marcello was deeply affected. Knick had filled the emptiness of his solitary life on the isolated property.
While we were on our Sunday hunt, Mr. Churchill shared some interesting information with me. “There are rumors circulating that General Catroux, the governor of Indonesia, has arrived in London and wants me to consider his case that since he outranks Charles de Gaulle, he should take the leadership of the Free French in England. This should be an interesting conversation.”
After a couple of days, I returned to the special forces camp to continue my training. Now that the tooth was in place, the next part of the training program began. It was varied, and I loved it. Much of the content was how to avoid being detected by the enemy. Like a ninja, I dressed in black and learned how to blend in with nature and with the night, to adopt the forms of my surroundings. “Become the tree, the bush, the hill,” I learned. “Take any form except that of a human being.”
I worked alone with the instructor. He gave me phosphorus pills so that I would have better night vision. There were electronic dummies that shot infrared rays as soon as they detected a human presence. “You’re dead,” the instructor said to me over and over again. I worked at this until I was able to move about undetected.
There were dummies of plywood, camouflaged according to the color of what ground material they were in, whether sand, moss or dirt. These dummies lay flat on the ground and when stepped upon would suddenly bounce up.
I repeated my instructions back to my teacher. “You’ll give me a rubber knife. I am to stab the enemy or slit his throat, and quickly move on. If I stab a vital organ or successfully slit his throat, a red light will come on. If I don’t, there will be no light, and you’ll say ‘You’re dead,’ and I’ll start over again.”
Learning to kill was a lot easier than I expected. The training numbed me to the fact that I was ending a human life. I learned how to kill using pressure points only, how to strangle someone with a wire, and how to use a blow dart. The blow dart took me a long time to master.
“What am I doing wrong?” I asked my instructor. “I can’t seem to make a bull’s-eye once, much less accomplish it one hundred percent of my tries. That’s what I must do to pass, right?”
“Yes, it is, monsieur. You’ll get it eventually.”
I learned Morse code using a light or a tapper. I was taught the universal military signs used in combat, which replaced voice communication. I was trained to throw a knife accurately. I lifted weights daily to build myself up even more and ran an hour a day with about sixty pounds of sand on my back, up and down all sorts of terrain.
I perfected the Greco-Roman fighting that I had learned from my tutor as a child. I was taught how to throw a grenade and how to shoot a machine gun. “Do not waste ammunition,” my instructor emphasized. He showed me how to effectively destroy an objective with “plastics,” a crude type of explosive.
I went underwater with another instructor who showed me how to blow up my intended target with a form of explosive made of putty. I learned to swim long distances holding my breath, to breathe through a reed, and to dive with scuba equipment, concentrating on using as little oxygen as possible.
All this training was one on one. At the camp, there were research laboratories creating James Bond-ish types of apparatus like a camera hidden in the button of a jacket or overcoat, a camera that could be activated in the mouth by clicking the shutter with the tongue, a ring that would emit a dart to instantly put an enemy to sleep, another ring that had a small needle inside, which would kill the adversary instantly with curare. There were land mines created that resembled horse droppings and blowguns with curare-tipped arrows developed in South America that killed instantly.
After the completion of the course, as I was leaving camp, I realized that I had enjoyed the training immensely, but I hadn’t learned to parachute from an airplane yet. I knew that
I couldn’t go on a mission until I learned how to jump from a plane, unless they planned to take me to Europe by boat. I was growing increasingly anxious to go on my first mission, but instead one of the gray mice drove me to Mr. Churchill’s house, which was, in fact, feeling more and more like home to me each time I returned.
THREE
Learning to Parachute
The staff at the estate seemed pleased to have me back. I changed my clothes and went out to the stables to visit the horses. Mr. Churchill was in London. Soon I fell back into my routine of riding every day and eating exceptionally well.
Days later, the prime minister returned and summoned me to his office. He seemed preoccupied, but I had correctly anticipated what was coming. “Now that you have finished your training and have your first gold tooth, I am going to send you to learn to parachute jump.”
He must be a mind reader, I thought.
“You’ll go to the mountains of Scotland where there is a specialized training camp. You’ll have a Scottish instructor who speaks French. I’ve been told he’s as big as a mountain. They say he can lift five hundred pounds like nothing. That sounds like a bit of an exaggeration, so let me know if it’s true. You’ll be under his tutelage, so you’ll learn to jump well.”
I arrived by plane at a military airfield and was picked up by several men, one of whom, a sergeant, was enormous. They all climbed out of a small bus-like vehicle and welcomed me enthusiastically. Their exuberance was so different from the English reserve. I sat behind the sergeant who was scrunched next to the driver.
