Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  From then on, Déricourt provided the SS with detailed information about every SOE agent who traveled into and out of the Paris region, along with dates and locations of landing operations. The Germans agreed to Déricourt’s proviso that they not intervene in any of his operations, although Gestapo agents were stationed nearby and had incoming agents under surveillance practically from the moment they landed.

  As Frager had charged, Déricourt also passed on to the Gestapo the reports and other documents that agents gave him to send on to London. The material, which supplied German counterintelligence with invaluable information about upcoming SOE operations, was photographed and returned to him within twenty-four hours, so it could be dispatched to SOE headquarters with no one the wiser.

  Thanks to Buckmaster’s fateful decision not to investigate Déricourt, SOE operatives kept landing under his auspices until February 1944, unaware that Gestapo agents were watching them as they stepped off the plane. Almost all of them were arrested on the day of their arrival or very soon thereafter.

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  DURING AND AFTER THE WAR, rumors circulated that Déricourt wasn’t the only one guilty of betrayal. Allegations were also leveled at none other than Claude Dansey, the deputy chief of MI6. One of Dansey’s accusers was Colin Gubbins, the new head of SOE, who apparently believed that his archrival had had a role in Prosper’s destruction. According to William Stephenson, who headed Britain’s wartime intelligence operations in the United States, Gubbins “formed the impression that Dansey was involved” in the collapse of the network. Gubbins told Stephenson that “Dansey had betrayed to the enemy a number of his key agents in France,” Stephenson recalled. He added, “Because Gubbins was not a man who lied or exaggerated, I believed this, for I myself had formed the impression that Dansey was an evil man who would stop at nothing to get someone out of his way.”

  Echoing that view, Gubbins’s deputy, Harry Sporborg, told an interviewer after the war, “Make no mistake about it. MI6 would never have hesitated to use us or our agencies to advance their schemes, even if that meant the sacrifice of some of our people.”

  There’s no question that Dansey and Stewart Menzies were still trying to do all in their power to shut down SOE operations in France and the rest of western Europe, believing that SOE was compromising the safety of their agency’s intelligence efforts in those countries. If Gubbins’s organization in France “could be suppressed, our intelligence would benefit enormously,” Menzies was publicly quoted as saying in January 1943. Up to that point, however, he had failed in his efforts to convince Churchill to put an end to SOE.

  There’s also no question that Claude Dansey was icily indifferent to the fate of agents in the field. The writer Somerset Maugham, who served as an MI6 agent in World War I and wrote Ashenden, a collection of interconnected short stories based on his experiences, reportedly used Dansey as a model for one of the book’s main characters: Colonel R, a British intelligence officer who recruits the protagonist. “A lot of nonsense is talked about the value of human life,” Colonel R tells his protégé in one of the stories. “You might just as well say that the counters you use at poker have an intrinsic value, their value is what you like to make it; for a general…men are merely counters and he’s a fool if he allows himself for sentimental reasons to look upon them as human beings.”

  When news of the Prosper disaster broke, Dansey rushed into the office of Patrick Reilly, a young diplomat working temporarily as Menzies’s assistant. “With delight all over his face,” Dansey asked Reilly if he had heard the news. When Reilly said no, Dansey acted “as if this was the most important moment of his career.” “SOE’s in the shit,” he exclaimed. “They’ve bought it in France. The Germans are mopping them up all over the place.” Reilly, who after the war served as British ambassador to France and the Soviet Union, recalled feeling “quite sick inside. I realized that Dansey was the most evil and the most wicked man I had met in public service, and nothing since has made me change my mind.”

  In an effort to capitalize on Prosper’s destruction, Menzies swiftly submitted a damning report on SOE activities in France to the British chiefs of staff and the Joint Intelligence Committee. In it, the MI6 chief declared that “resistance groups [there] were to a considerable extent compromised and that the enemy must be in possession of much detail regarding those groups….[They] cannot be counted on as a serious factor.”

  The Joint Intelligence Committee agreed, recommending to Churchill that MI6 assume control of SOE and that RAF supply flights to France be stopped. To Menzies’s and Dansey’s dismay, the prime minister vetoed both ideas. The French resistance movement, he insisted, was vital to the war effort. Though enemy reprisals had indeed been terrible, he added, it must be remembered that “the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church.”

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  DID CLAUDE DANSEY INDEED play a role in the ruin of Prosper? Such speculation continued to circulate after the war and was the subject of a 1988 book entitled All the King’s Men. In it, Robert Marshall, a former BBC producer, claimed that Dansey had foisted Déricourt on Buckmaster and that Déricourt was in fact working as a triple agent, reporting back to MI6 on German counterintelligence operations in France. The problem with that theory is that there is no hard evidence to back it up.

  But it’s also true that this was not the only time Dansey’s name had been coupled with a British agent who turned out to be a traitor. In August 1941, at his behest, MI6 had sent a wireless operator named Bradley Davis to join Marie-Madeleine Fourcade’s fast-growing Alliance network in France, one of the agency’s most important intelligence operations. Fourcade and her colleagues were stunned when they first saw Davis. He was, she recalled, “the most ridiculous, most grotesque parody of a ‘typical’ Frenchman, attired…in a short jacket and waistcoat, striped trousers, a spotted cravat, a stiff shirt with cutaway collar beneath a little goatee beard, pince-nez, and as a crowning glory, a bowler hat. Was this British Intelligence? The boys burst into roars of laughter.”

  To Fourcade, however, Davis, the first Englishman to work in the field with Alliance, was no laughing matter. From the beginning, he acted suspiciously, asking too many questions and showing too much interest in everyone who came to see her. When he finally left to work as an Alliance radio operator in Normandy, she breathed a sigh of relief.

  Not long afterward, news came of widespread arrests of Alliance operatives in Normandy and Paris. One of Fourcade’s agents in the French capital sent word to her that Davis, whose code name was Blanquet, had betrayed them to the Gestapo. When she relayed the information to Kenneth Cohen, her MI6 liaison officer in London, he dismissed the suspicions and argued that Blanquet was “operating admirably in Normandy, sending us first-class information.” She asked Cohen if he was certain that Blanquet was transmitting from Normandy, adding that several of her own agents had seen him in Paris.

  MI6 did not pursue the matter, however, and the arrests of Alliance operatives continued. But in the end, Fourcade and her lieutenants amassed enough evidence to convince MI6 higher-ups that Blanquet had indeed been responsible for the capture, torture, and deaths of dozens of their colleagues. “It’s incredible, incredible!” Léon Faye, Fourcade’s deputy, exclaimed. Fourcade agreed, later writing, “We had good grounds for amazement. The first man sent to us by British Intelligence was working for the Nazis.” In an urgent cable, Cohen instructed Fourcade and her men to find and execute Blanquet. They did so. During an interrogation before he was killed, Blanquet admitted to being a British fascist who had infiltrated MI6 so he could work with the Nazis in France.

  Anthony Read and David Fisher, who wrote a largely sympathetic biography of Claude Dansey, called the Bradley Davis/Blanquet affair “one of Dansey’s most serious mistakes”—a blunder that “brought almost total disaster to the Alliance network.” Other historians have suggested the possibility of treachery in the higher reaches of MI6. Again, there is no evidence to support such a claim. The truth is that MI6, f
or all its complaining about the amateurism of SOE, was, more often than not, as inept, careless, and downright stupid as its hated rival in its selection of agents and conduct of intelligence operations.

  As for Fourcade, her MI6 liaison officer was relieved to note that Davis’s betrayal “did not dim her loyalty to the British.” That may have been true. But it certainly disillusioned her, as did a several-month stint in London beginning in July 1943. With the Gestapo hot on her trail in France, Dansey and his cohorts were anxious to bring her in for a rest and debriefing. She, in turn, wanted assurances from them of more money and other aid for her crippled organization.

  During her stay in London, another, more massive wave of arrests swept through Alliance, this one netting several members of her inner circle, including her close deputy and friend Léon Faye. Fourcade was devastated. “Since September 16, my beloved Eagle [Faye’s code name] had fallen, and with him more than 150 members of my network, including the veterans,” she wrote. “Every time I crossed out the name of a friend, I experienced the feeling of having wielded the executioner’s axe. I was dying of grief.”

  Fourcade and all the friends she lost had repeatedly risked everything over the previous three years to provide the British with the detailed intelligence they demanded—from the condition of the Luftwaffe and location of German army units to the number and movement of ships and submarines in French ports. But “while the Gestapo was hunting us down,” she noted, Dansey and the other British officials she met had been busying themselves with another kind of war, waged against their fellow bureaucrats in Whitehall and occasionally against the Free French. Like other newly arrived French citizens who had personally defied the Germans, Fourcade was disheartened by London officialdom’s detachment from the tragic realities of life across the Channel.

  “Everyone I speak to seems to be fighting the war at a distance, a mental as well as a spatial distance,” Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigerie, the founder of the Libération-Sud resistance movement, noted of his own stay in London. “The Resistance and its adversaries were reduced to files, locked away in huge metal cabinets.”

  In the future, neither Astier nor Fourcade would waver in their commitment to working with the British; both their operations would be of significant help to the success of the Allied invasion of France. Yet neither ever got over their disappointment with the London-based officials with whom they associated. “Never in my life had I felt so hurt,” Fourcade later wrote. “To use our information as part of the continuing struggle for power seemed to me to be quite inhuman….Cannon fodder for British Intelligence, that’s all we were.”

  On a blazingly hot day in August 1941, the British vice consul in the Spanish city of Bilbao was roused from his afternoon nap. He must return to the consulate at once, he was told. A group of Allied escapees had just arrived from France.

  At the consulate, he found four men and a petite, dark-haired young woman dressed in blue fisherman’s trousers. The woman, who spoke French and identified herself as Andrée de Jongh, acted as their spokesman and leader. The men, she explained, were a Scottish soldier left behind at Dunkirk and three Belgian officers who wanted to join their country’s forces in Britain.

  Many other British servicemen were still hiding in Belgium, the twenty-four-year-old de Jongh added. Some, like the Scot, were survivors of the fight for France and the Low Countries; others were British pilots and crewmen shot down on recent bombing missions. In the past few months, she had set up an escape line through Belgium and France, manned mostly by friends of hers, to help these men get back to England. If the British government would give her money to help pay for the line—for mountain guides, safe houses, food, and rail fares—she could bring out many more. But, she made clear, the line would have to remain under her control.

  Although the men who accompanied her verified de Jongh’s story, the vice consul was somewhat skeptical. How could this slip of a girl organize such a complex operation on her own? More specifically, how had she managed to get these men across the dizzying heights and fast-flowing rivers of the Pyrenees—a dangerous and grueling trek for the most experienced outdoorsman?

  Nonetheless, he finally came to believe her. In a cable passing on her request to London, he described de Jongh, who was known as Dédée, as “a girl of radiant integrity, as well as something of a beauty and physically hard as nails.” His message was sent to MI9, a small, clandestine agency (and subsection of MI6) created in late 1940 to act as a liaison with British prisoners of war and to help rescue Allied servicemen trapped behind enemy lines. MI6’s Claude Dansey, convinced that de Jongh was a German plant intent on sending enemy agents into Britain, initially rejected her proposal. But Lieutenant Colonel James Langley, the twenty-five-year-old head of MI9’s escape section, supported her, and in the end the British government agreed to finance her operation—a shoestring venture that would soon evolve into the most important Allied escape network in western Europe.

  James Langley

  Airey Neave

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  JAMES LANGLEY AND HIS MI9 colleague Captain Airey Neave had a vested interest in the success of de Jongh’s escape line and others like it. Early in the war, both men had been caught behind German lines and had themselves been rescued by fledgling escape networks. The Cambridge-educated Langley, an officer in the Coldstream Guards, had been wounded during the 1940 fighting in France—an injury so severe that his left arm had had to be amputated. Nonetheless, he had managed to escape from a German hospital in Lille, helped by a French nurse who had found a safe house for him. He had later acquired fake identity papers and had been passed from one sanctuary to another until he finally reached neutral Spain.

  For his part, Neave, who had joined Langley at MI9 in 1942, had been captured after being hit by machine-gun fire at Dunkirk and had later been sent to prisoner-of-war camps in Germany and Poland. In April 1941, he had escaped from the Polish camp, only to be arrested soon afterward and interrogated by the Gestapo. He had then been transferred to the “bad boys’ ” punishment camp at Colditz, a forbidding medieval castle near the German city of Leipzig used to house persistent Allied escapers.

  Surrounded on three sides by sheer rock cliffs, Colditz was said to be impregnable. But Neave and his fellow prisoners were determined to prove otherwise—an attitude that underscored the Germans’ dubious logic in depositing the most expert and seasoned escapers in one place. After two escape attempts, the twenty-five-year-old Neave finally succeeded in early January 1942, when he and a Dutch army lieutenant, disguised as German officers, broke out of the heavily guarded fortress during a snowstorm and reached Switzerland four days later.

  Getting Neave, the first Briton to escape from Colditz, back to England was a high-priority operation, but it still took him four months to make the perilous 1,500-mile journey. In the course of that trip, he was guided by members of the Pat O’Leary line, the first major escape group organized after the fall of France. Based in Marseille, it bore the code name of one of its founders, a Belgian doctor whose real name was Albert Guérisse.

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  IN ALL, SOME 7,000 BRITISH, American, and other Allied servicemen, most of them aircrew, were spirited out of occupied Europe during the war. Escape networks existed in all the captive nations, but they were most active in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. Those were the countries over which hundreds of England-based planes flew on their daily bombing runs to Germany from 1941 until the war’s end. The losses of aircraft were heavy, up to 15 percent on some days, but many crew members of downed bombers were able to parachute out before their planes crashed, leaving them stranded in enemy territory. At a time when trained bomber crews were in desperately short supply, it was vital for the Allied war effort to retrieve as many airmen as possible and bring them back to England to continue the fight.

  By 1943, an American or British airman who was shot down over northwest Europe and was lucky enough to evade immediate capture had a good chance of finding a safe house, where
he would be hidden until sent to a collection point in a nearby large city, such as Brussels, Paris, or The Hague. There he would be supplied with false identity papers and suitable clothes, given strict instructions on how to behave, then escorted, usually by train, to the Spanish frontier, where he and other evaders would be shepherded by guides over the Pyrenees. Hermann Göring, who noted that “it takes less time to build a plane than to form a crew,” was as keenly aware of the value of those men as were their commanders in England. The Luftwaffe chief ordered the escape lines to be crushed, using any means necessary.

  Even though participation in the escape networks was arguably the most dangerous form of resistance work in occupied Europe, thousands of people, from the very young to the very old, took part. The most perilous job of all was handled mostly by young women, many of them still in their teens, who escorted the servicemen hundreds of miles across enemy territory to Spain. Unlike resistance fighters, who were in hiding much of the time, these women did their work out in the open, riding on trains and other public forms of transportation with foreigners whose appearance and actions were often all too distinctive. “Nothing could have expressed more powerfully the spirit of resistance to Hitler,” Airey Neave later wrote of the Frenchwomen who had accompanied him through France. According to Neave’s biographer, his “admiration of the girls who carried out this dangerous task grew and unquestionably reshaped his attitude to women.” Having shed much of the chauvinism endemic among Englishmen of his generation and class, Neave would emerge almost four decades later as a top aide to Margaret Thatcher and the main organizer of the movement that led to her selection as Conservative Party leader and election as Britain’s first female prime minister.