by Lynne Olson
Jeannie Rousseau
As Jones discovered later, the document’s author was a lovely twenty-four-year-old blonde with a photographic memory named Jeannie Rousseau, whose father was a high-ranking municipal official in Paris. A graduate of the University of Paris and an intelligence operative for the Alliance network, she was, the Washington Post later wrote, “one of the most effective—if unheralded—spies of World War II.”
Fluent in German, Rousseau, whose code name was “Amniarix,” worked as an interpreter in Paris for a syndicate of French industrialists who often met with German military officials to discuss thorny commercial issues like the Reich’s commandeering of French business inventories. In the course of her dealings with various German officers, she overheard scraps of conversation about secret weapons tests somewhere in eastern Germany.
The Germans soon started inviting the pretty Parisian to their evening social gatherings, where they ate, drank, and talked freely about their work, which included the secret weapons. Playing the role of a coquettish, dim-witted blonde, Rousseau “teased them, taunted them, looked at them wide-eyed, insisted they must be mad when they spoke of the astounding new weapon that flew over vast distances, much faster than any airplane.” Over and over, she exclaimed, “What you are telling me cannot be true!” Finally, one of the officers had had enough of her playful skepticism. “I’ll show you,” he said, pulling from his briefcase drawings of the rockets and documents detailing, among other things, how to enter the Peenemünde test site, the passes that were needed, and even the color of each pass.
Rousseau wrote down everything she learned that night, as she did after subsequent get-togethers with her talkative German friends. Within a few weeks, she had acquired a voluminous amount of information about both the V1 and V2, all of which Alliance dispatched to London.
Having been alerted by Rousseau and many others, the British confirmed the existence of the secret weapons through a series of reconnaissance flights over Peenemünde. On the night of August 17, 1943, more than five hundred RAF bombers pounded the complex, heavily damaging its research center and production facilities and destroying all blueprints of the V2s. Although Wernher von Braun, the head of the weapons’ research and production teams, survived, more than a hundred scientists, engineers, and other staff members were killed.
As Churchill later noted, the raid “had a far-reaching influence on events.” The production and testing of both weapons were pushed back several months, long enough to prevent an attack from interfering with the Normandy landings. Fearing more bombing raids, the Germans moved the V2 tests from Peenemünde to an area near Blizna, a small village in southern Poland, that they believed was beyond the range of Allied bombers.
That may have been true, but, by moving to Poland, they were now in the lair of the most skilled, extensive spy organization in all of occupied Europe. Just a couple of weeks after the first V2 trials at Blizna, London received detailed reports about them from Polish intelligence agents. The Poles also set up a special team whose assignment was to beat German patrols to the scene of their crashed rockets, where its members would scoop up and analyze weapon fragments, pieces of radio and other guidance equipment, spilled fuel, and anything else that might be helpful to Allied understanding of the missiles.
In the early summer of 1944, a V2 fell on a riverbank near Blizna but did not explode. Before the Germans could retrieve it, the Poles hid it, then took it apart and spirited the parts away. The head of the team, an engineer named Jerzy Chmielewski, later somehow transported the dismantled missile to an improvised landing field two hundred miles to the southeast. The British dispatched a plane from Italy to pick up the parts, along with fragments from other crashes, and carry them back to London.
Initially, the V2 was to be used almost simultaneously with the V1, which could have had calamitous consequences for England. But thanks to the raid on Peenemünde and continued difficulties with the V2’s production and testing, the Germans repeatedly had to postpone its use. Instead, as Churchill and his men discovered from reading Jeannie Rousseau’s reports, the V1 was to be deployed first.
In the fall of 1943, a flood of information poured in about the construction of what appeared to be launching sites in a number of locations near the northern French coast. Shaped like ski jumps, they all seemed to be pointing directly at London. One French agent, who worked as a draftsman at one of the sites, copied all its blueprints and sent them to the British capital.
Beginning in December 1943, the U.S. Eighth Air Force, operating from bases in Britain, launched massive bombing raids to knock out the V1 sites wherever and whenever they appeared. The Germans finally gave up on their construction, switching to prefabricated mobile launchers. It was from those platforms that V1 bombs were finally fired at England, beginning on June 13, 1944, eight months after Hitler’s planned launching date and one week after the Allies successfully landed on the beaches of Normandy.
“Were the Germans able to perfect these new weapons six months earlier, it was likely that our invasion of Europe would have encountered enormous difficulties and, in certain circumstances, would not have been possible,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the invasion forces, later wrote. “I am certain that after six months of such activity, an attack on Europe would have been a washout.”
For nearly three months, thousands of the pilotless missiles—called “buzz bombs” because of the noise they made—showered down on London and its outskirts, killing 5,500 residents, injuring some 16,000, and destroying about 23,000 houses. Most people considered the new onslaught to be far worse than the Blitz. In his memoirs, Churchill recalled the unbearable strain that the V1s exacted on his war-weary compatriots: “The man going home in the evening never knew what he would find; his wife, alone all day or with the children, could not be certain of his safe return.” The V1, noted Evelyn Waugh, was “as impersonal as a plague, as though the city were infected with enormous, venomous insects.”
But though the losses were heavy and the fear and worry excruciating, the damage caused by the V1s was considerably less than it might have been. The British could not prevent them from being launched, but in the fifteen months that they had known about the weapon’s existence, they had been able to plan countermeasures to greatly lessen its impact. Adaptations were made to the Allies’ fastest fighter planes to allow them to overtake the missiles and either fire at them at close range or tip them over with a wing. The pilots who engaged in this extremely dangerous “aerial shooting gallery,” as one flier called the midair interceptions, grew to be quite adept at it. Of the more than 8,500 V1s fired at London, fewer than 30 percent overall reached their targets. By August, less than one bomb in seven—about 15 percent—got through to the London metropolitan area, thanks in large part to the fighters and also to the improved performance of antiaircraft guns located on the English coast. Early in September 1944, the V1 campaign came to an abrupt end when Allied troops fighting in France overran the areas containing the buzz bombs’ launching sites.
Londoners, however, enjoyed only a few days of relief. On September 8, from sites in still occupied Holland, the Germans unleashed the V2 rocket, a forerunner of modern missiles, which tormented the British capital until just a few months before the end of the war. To most people, the V2s—which traveled faster than sound and approached their targets in total silence—were even more terrifying than their predecessors. More than five hundred of them exploded in and around London, rocking the city like an earthquake and killing nearly three thousand people.
Again, though, the death toll and scale of damage were far less than they would have been had Germany been left unhindered. Without the delays caused by the Peenemünde raid, the rockets would have been fired months earlier and from shorter ranges. After the Allies overran northern France in midsummer, the Germans were forced to launch the V2s from improvised platforms in Holland, nearly twice as far from London and with much less accuracy. “Although we could do little agai
nst the rocket once it was launched,” Churchill observed, “we postponed and substantially reduced the weight of the onslaught.”
Roman Garby-Czerniawski helped add to that effort. When asked by the Germans about the accuracy of the missiles, he told them, falsely, that most of the rockets were falling several kilometers short of London. German scientists then changed the V2s’ trajectory, causing many of them to overshoot the capital and explode in less populated areas.
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AFTER THE WAR, Churchill paid tribute to the “excellence” and “gallantry” of the countless European intelligence agents who had risked everything to ensure the success of D-Day and help save London. Yet most of them had engaged in their perilous work without ever learning if it had had any effect at all. Many years later, Jeannie Rousseau would describe the “lonesomeness, the chilling fear, the unending waiting, the frustration of not knowing whether the dangerously obtained information would be passed on—or passed on in time.”
A young Belgian intelligence agent made the same point at the end of a report about German radio communications that ended up on Reginald Jones’s desk. “We have been working so long in the dark that any reaction from London about our work would be welcome to such obscure workers as ourselves,” the operative wrote. “We hope this will not be resented since, whatever may happen, you can rely on our entire devotion and on the sacrifice of our lives.” Shortly thereafter, the Belgian was captured by the Gestapo and later executed.
Dozens of other agents suffered similar fates. The French artist who drew the fifty-five-foot map of the Normandy coast, for one, never knew about the triumphant outcome of his work. With fifteen other resistance members, he was arrested and on June 7, 1944—the day after the Normandy landings began—was shot. Jerzy Chmielewski, the Polish engineer in charge of dismantling the V2 rocket downed near Blizna, was caught by the Gestapo and executed in Warsaw in August 1944.
In a poignant irony, several of the operatives who had reported to the British about the V1s and V2s at Peenemünde were killed when the RAF bombed the complex. “A substantial proportion of our bombs fell to the south of the establishment itself,” Jones recalled, “and particularly on the camp which housed foreign laborers, including those who had risked so much to get the information through to us.”
Another Allied bombing raid—on a German factory making electronic components for the V2’s guidance and control systems—resulted in the deaths of hundreds of inmates at Buchenwald. The factory, where many of Buchenwald’s prisoners were forced to work, was adjacent to the concentration camp.
The man who made that raid possible was Pierre Julitte, once a staff officer for Charles de Gaulle in London and now himself a Buchenwald inmate. Tired of Free French intrigues, Julitte had returned to occupied France as an intelligence agent in 1942 and been captured a year later. After being sent to Buchenwald and assigned to work in the factory, he quickly realized what he was assembling: parts for a guidance system for “a self-propelled projectile, navigating in space and remote-controlled by radio,” which turned out to be the V2. Julitte smuggled out a report to de Gaulle’s London headquarters in which he described the components and urged that the factory be bombed, knowing that he and his coworkers would probably die if the Allies did as he suggested.
The raid, which was conducted on August 24, 1944, destroyed the factory and killed some five hundred workers. But Julitte was not among them. Although he had had no advance warning of the raid, he managed to get out of the factory as the bombing began and was only slightly injured.
Jeannie Rousseau, meanwhile, continued her reports to London, which now included intelligence she collected while making occasional business trips to Germany with members of the industrialist syndicate for which she worked. By the spring of 1944, she had become so important to the Allied scientific intelligence effort that British officials decided to bring her to London for an extensive debriefing. She was to be picked up by a boat off the coast of Brittany, but the operation went awry and she was captured by the Gestapo.
Rousseau spent the last months of the war in three German concentration camps, among them Torgau, whose inmates worked in a factory making armaments, including parts for the V2. When she arrived at Torgau, the twenty-five-year-old Frenchwoman refused to set foot in the factory and convinced a number of other newly arrived inmates to do the same. “We will go and pick your potatoes but we won’t make your bombs,” she told the camp’s commandant. She was confined to a punishment cell for several weeks, where she received daily beatings.
Rousseau’s war ended at Ravensbrück. Weighing only seventy pounds and close to death, she was rescued by the same Swedish Red Cross team that evacuated Mary Lindell and dozens of other Ravensbrück inmates. She was taken to Sweden, where she slowly recovered her health. In 1946, she returned to France and married Henri de Clarens, a French aristocrat turned resistance fighter who was himself a survivor of Auschwitz.
After more than thirty years of staying out of the public eye and trying not “to stir up old memories,” Rousseau, now the Vicomtesse de Clarens, agreed to a meeting in 1976 with Reginald Jones, who informed her in detail of the extraordinary contributions she and other intelligence agents from occupied Europe had made to the eventual Allied victory. Her encounter with Jones, whom she fondly referred to as “dear Reg,” was “a great personal experience but also shed a light on the past,” she later wrote in a foreword to Jones’s wartime memoir. “From what he tells us, our efforts were worth it.”
On April Fools’ Day 1944, the Abwehr’s Hermann Giskes sent a mocking cable to SOE announcing the official end of his Englandspiel campaign. “YOU ARE TRYING TO DO BUSINESS IN THE NETHERLANDS WITHOUT OUR ASSISTANCE STOP,” the cable read. “WE THINK THIS RATHER UNFAIR IN VIEW OF OUR LONG AND SUCCESSFUL COOPERATION AS YOUR SOLE AGENT STOP…SO LONG STOP.”
Actually, as Giskes well knew, das Englandspiel had been dead since the fall of 1943, when two Dutch agents he had captured managed to escape from prison and flee to Switzerland. There, they had reported to the Dutch embassy that the Germans had taken control of SOE’s entire operation in the Netherlands. That news was quickly transmitted to the Dutch government in exile in London, which passed it on to Whitehall. By then the RAF had already suspended its flights to the Netherlands because of the abnormally high casualties its crews had suffered there.
At the prompting of MI6’s Stewart Menzies and Claude Dansey, the British government’s Joint Intelligence Committee launched another official inquiry into SOE’s activities, again with the goal of shutting it down and transferring its functions to MI6. SOE officials “would gladly have murdered me,” Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, the committee’s head, recalled. “I arranged with [a colleague] that if I suddenly died, he was to carry out an autopsy.”* Once again, however, Winston Churchill rejected the committee’s recommendation and sided with SOE, which argued that the fiasco in the Netherlands had been an exception and that its activities in other countries had not been penetrated—a statement that was a long way from the truth.
Despite Giskes’s heavy-handed attempt at humor, there was nothing funny about a deception that had exacted such a terrible cost: more than fifty SOE and MI6 agents arrested and killed, as well as fifty RAF crewmen and several hundred members of the Dutch resistance who lost their lives. Yet even as Giskes crowed about das Englandspiel’s successes, he knew it had yielded surprisingly little intelligence of value to the Germans. Indeed, it had failed to achieve its “supreme objective,” according to Giskes: uncovering details of the forthcoming Allied invasion of Europe.
Even more unsettling for the Reich, SOE, chastened by the disaster in Holland, had made a startlingly successful comeback. From late 1943 on, it began cooperating much more closely with the European governments in exile. Finally coming to grips with the seriousness of the threats facing its agents in the field, it also adapted its operations to conform to actual conditions on the Continent. Wireless operators, for example, were no longer forced to transmit at t
he same time and on the same frequencies every week. Each transmission was limited to five minutes or less, which also helped decrease the risk of being detected. Even more important, the operators were able to jettison their big, bulky sets for new, smaller portable ones that ran on batteries rather than local electricity grids that could be monitored by the Germans.
Meanwhile, resistance movements in France and the Low Countries were also showing new signs of life. “Despite severe setbacks, they had made preparations for the invasion which could not be controlled, much less destroyed,” Giskes observed. “They had learnt how to mobilize forces…which could be set in motion at the moment of landing to form a formidable secret army behind the German front, an army which would appear everywhere but which could not be pinned down.”
In Holland, the resistance made an energetic fresh start with the help of a transformed N Section. Understandably enraged by das Englandspiel, the Dutch government in exile demanded considerably more input into clandestine operations in the Netherlands—demands that the humbled and embarrassed SOE was in no position to resist. N Section agreed to inform the Dutch before every new operation. Dutch officials were allowed to monitor SOE training courses for Dutch agents and to provide their own briefings.The Dutch also were shown all wireless traffic between N Section and the field, including SOE orders to agents, and were asked for their comments and observations.
The new collaboration produced immediate and striking results. From early 1944 on, N Section dispatched more than fifty agents to Holland—none of whom was detected by the Abwehr or Gestapo—as well as large quantities of arms and explosives. Extreme care was taken with security checks, identity papers, clothing, coding, safe houses, and other details about which SOE previously had been so careless. “Drops of agents continued blind,” Giskes said. “Transmitters were being replaced without being captured. It was evident that London was now profiting by the experience which it had bought so dearly.”
