A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  The men at Orchard Court were informal and genial. They had a butler-doorman known as Park, who had been a messenger in the prewar Paris branch of the Westminster Bank. Park had a memory for faces and the quiet efficiency of Jeeves, whose creator, P. G. Wodehouse, was in Nazi hands and pretending to collaborate. It was one of the small ironies of the situation that the atmosphere in the Orchard Court flat resembled the Wodehouse parodies of English society, with all its eccentricities. But afternoon tea and cucumber sandwiches in that place covered a deadlier purpose.

  Questions had been raised about employing MADELEINE. Fellow trainees had written confidentially to Vera Atkins, suggesting that the girl was unfit for the ordeals ahead; she was “emotionally fragile and in many ways too innocent.” The girls who made these well-meaning pleas, reminiscent of a petition to save a prisoner from the gallows, only reinforced the judgment of those who considered MADELEINE ideal for the task ahead. Atkins and MADELEINE convinced the men in Orchard Court that she should go.

  On one of those June days in England when the quiet country roads are heavy with the scent of dog rose and honeysuckle, both girls, in civilian clothes, were driving an open car so old that it attracted no attention even in this austere time of severe gas rationing. They arrived that evening at a thatched Sussex cottage. Atkins led the way into a cramped hall and up a narrow flight of stairs. There was a ground-floor room from which MADELEINE could hear men’s voices. She was rushed past. One of the CO’s duties was to make sure the agent did not accidentally run into anyone, including the airmen of Special Duties 161 Squadron.

  MADELEINE was to be delivered straight to a reception committee after flying in a Westland Lysander that would land in a field marked out by a prearranged pattern of lights. The signal of departure beamed to French listeners would be given at the very last moment in the middle of a routine BBC entertainment program: “Jasmine is playing her flute.”

  There now began the customary nerve-shattering delay. The moon was right, the weather was good, the reception committee had reported that a field had been prepared. But no aircraft was available. There was a persistent struggle to get aircraft for these operations. The Baker Street Irregulars had to fight the regular armed forces for machines. They had to fight the regular intelligence services for priorities. The Air Ministry had to be placated when valuable planes and crews were lost in what seemed like foolhardy expeditions for which explanations were seldom, if ever, forthcoming. It was possible to jump the chain of command but not advisable: a short-circuited air marshal or general might prove resentful some other way—on some other day. When the bureaucracy became insupportable, Stephenson could be called upon to talk directly with Churchill. He could do this because all of them recognized that in the last resort, Stephenson was getting the weapons they needed. The situation eased later when Baker Street operated directly under SHAEF and its commander, General Dwight Eisenhower.

  In day-to-day operations, not even the resourceful Vera Atkins would interfere. If she were told planes were busy elsewhere, that was it. She settled down in patient resignation. Some agents were not only put through the test of waiting, hour by hour, never knowing why, but also flew out to the drop zone or airstrip and came back again, sometimes three or four times. Their training taught them to make decisions, keep command of situations, seek positive solutions. It was difficult to submit unquestioningly to the dictates of others. MADELEINE had this submissive quality. Her attitude was expressed in her story of the river that reached the sea by going around obstacles instead of attacking head on. She liked and she wrote about gentle animals. She meditated a great deal on metaphysical matters. Her childhood friends remembered that she peopled her garden with small figures of her own imagination and was in despair when told there was no world of small benevolent spirits. She described her philosophy as oriental. She saw action and inaction intertwined in the Buddhist circle of life.

  She checked her things again. Her transmitter and clothes were to be dropped by parachute later. She wore a simple dress and scuffed shoes. She carried in her handbag a small .38 pistol in case the reception committee should be ambushed. The pistol she would bury later, together with her parachute if she were obliged to drop instead of land. Atkins searched her once again, seeking some overlooked detail—a broken match that might be recognized as non-European, or even a piece of English gravel stuck in the sole of a shoe. Agents had been caught because they screwed up a London theater stub and absent-mindedly left it in a pocket. There were small things that could never be explained during a surprise search in the middle of wartime Paris: a bobby pin, a strange piece of thread in a darned jacket, or a stale fragment of Virginia tobacco.

  At two o’clock in the morning there was a clatter on the stairs. A muffled figure knocked on the door and peered inside. “Time to go.”

  The Lysander was silhouetted against a moonlit sky. It was a high-wing monoplane with a fixed undercarriage and capable of 200 miles an hour, half the speed of German fighter aircraft. It relied on a single engine and it would hedge-hop low and slow. It was black like a winged hearse. The pilot looked about twenty years old. Nobody spoke. Mechanics moved in darkness through the prescribed drill. But when the Lysander rose heavily toward the near-full moon, MADELEINE was heading for certain execution.

  Less than a hundred hours before her departure, the reception committee had radioed Bletchley that Nazi security forces were swarming through the reception area near Le Mans, and requested that all air operations be suspended. This was June 12, 1943. Yet supplies and agents continued to be dropped. On the sixteenth, two Canadian agents were parachuted into the district: John McAlister and Frank Pickersgill.

  Why were the warnings ignored? Why was MADELEINE permitted to continue the mission? Investigations since then have failed to produce satisfactory answers. Perhaps there never can be logical explanations for tragedies in secret warfare. MADELEINE was picked in response to an urgent appeal for an operator from the PROSPER network. Yet there was already some evidence that the network had been betrayed. When her Lysander landed, there was no reception committee to ease her passage through the first awful hours in hostile country. Why did the pilot not bring her back to England? The trouble with secret operations was that the tight security, intended to protect agents, could work against them. The pilot was one link in a tenuous chain of men and women, each expected to follow orders and listen only to whatever information was relevant to the job. One hundred hours after PROSPER transmitted danger signals, those signals were still being evaluated while the machinery of secret operations ticked on.

  MADELEINE had scrambled out of the Lysander, saw it roll forward and soar back into the air, and then she began walking to the railroad station at Le Mans, confident that her “luggage” would be delivered by a later flight. She arrived by train in Paris late on Thursday, June 17, and went straight to her first contact, at 40 rue Erlanger: Emile Garry. He was a secret-army sector chief for the department of which Le Mans was the capital, commuting between there and Paris under cover of a fake work permit. He took her next day to Professor Alfred Serge Balachowsky, of the Pasteur Institute, a distinguished biologist who was also chief of the Versailles section of PROSPER. She reported to Baker Street over the section’s transmitter, concealed in a greenhouse, less than forty-eight hours after her departure. Thus she became the first woman radio operator to transmit for the French secret armies.

  The following Monday, Balachowsky drove to a farm where supplies had been dropped, including three transmitters for MADELEINE. He did not know it, but on this day the two Canadians, McAlister and Pickersgill, had just been caught. By a tragic coincidence, they were with the first woman agent ever sent into France by Baker Street, an elegant forty-seven-year-old Kensington interior decorator named Yvonne Rudelatt. She had come alone by boat, a felucca that had landed her on the Côte d’Azur. There she had reported to Peter Churchill as a courier. She had been in full operation for many months. Now she collected the Canadians and was on her
way to Paris when they ran into a roadblock. They seemed to pass the brief interrogation. But an SS officer asked to see the Canadians’ false papers again. The driver, scenting disaster, pushed hard on the accelerator of the tiny battered Citroen. There was a car chase, and the Citroën was gunned to a stop. Yvonne Rudelatt fell from the car, wounded. Before she lost consciousness, she shot and wounded two German guards who were beating her with rifle butts. For this she was to perish, after the agony of many jails, in a Belsen gas chamber at the age of fifty-two. McAlister and Pickersgill survived months of torture and a year in one death camp before being executed at Buchenwald; they were hung from butcher’s hooks and allowed to die by slow strangulation against the crematorium wall. Before that horror, Pickersgill was to have a taste of freedom, only to refuse it when he saw what it entailed for MADELEINE.

  Ten days after Professor Balachowsky retrieved her luggage on a peaceful June night, he was arrested. During the following week, dozens of French agents were rounded up. In London, a signal was delivered to Maurice Buckmaster at Baker Street. It reported the destruction of the PROSPER network. All the leaders and their equipment had been captured, and only one transmitter remained in operation. That was MADELEINE, whose call sign ended the message.

  Buckmaster surveyed the area of disaster. He was to say later that Berlin security headquarters regarded the French network as the heart of the secret army that was most dangerous to the Third Reich. Now it was smashed. Buckmaster told MADELEINE to get out of Paris; an aircraft would be sent to pick her up. The girl replied no. She was the only operator left in the Paris region. Without her, all communication would be lost. She could pick up some threads and reconstruct at least one circuit, if not more.

  Buckmaster made a hard decision. If the girl stayed, it could be only a matter of time before she was caught. Yet the catastrophe had left her as the most important “station” in France. He signaled approval, but warned her not to transmit. All Gestapo detection gear would be trained on her transmitter now that the rest had been wiped out.

  The girl, on her own now, moved about Paris looking for old school friends. She found her former music teacher, Henriette Renie, for instance. One contact led to another. She stayed briefly in different parts of the city, trying not to compromise those who showed hospitality. She had a bicycle and carried the transmitter with her. Despite Buckmaster’s warnings, she began regular transmissions from the first week of July and she continued until October, when she was caught and taken to Gestapo headquarters.

  MADELEINE took frightful risks. This became clear after the war when the story was pieced together. But unwittingly she compromised a number of agents. Nobody could be blamed. She was not aware of other factions within the secret army. London was not aware, until too late, of who had been caught and who remained at liberty. Nor did Baker Street know of a so-called pact between the Gestapo and hapless French civilians on whose land the police had found British parachutes and containers. The pact was widely proclaimed in rural areas. It guaranteed that members of the Resistance would be treated as soldiers, not as traitors liable to execution. In the confusion, many farmers and laborers, believing they were going to be discovered anyway, collaborated. When the Gestapo had all the evidence it needed, the pact was predictably broken. Thus the smashing of one network led to the infiltration of others. The Gestapo was expert in bluff and counterbluff. For instance, only two weeks after MADELEINE’s flight from England, a leader of the PROSPER network was lying in a Paris jail staring in horror at an old Michelin map marked with secret dropping zones. The map had been presented by SS Hauptscharführer Karl Langer, who followed this up with a file of photostats covering the previous five months: they were copies of reports to London of sabotage operations. Langer recited the dates and locations of parachute drops and then added: “We know that your network has just received someone called MADELEINE. We have not found her yet. We will.”

  What seems incredible is that the girl continued to function for so long after this. She took a few precautions: dyed her hair, made use of a dozen apartments scattered around Paris from which she could transmit. She picked up such invaluable contacts as the peacetime director of the French Société Radio Electrique, who serviced her transmitter, and a Paris businessman who had enrolled members of the secret army on his staff to provide them with cover. She had been taught to convert a cramped bathroom into a radio station: the French toilet bowls were worked by a chain to the water cistern, and this chain provided an aerial, while the current code could be read from one’s underwear on the floor. Her “safe house” was 3 Boulevard Richard Wallace, the home of a doctor. At the beginning of October, the Gestapo had intercepted certain phone calls from Sablons 88.04 that indicated an agent at work. This was the telephone number of MADELEINE’s safe house. She was working with a rebuilt circuit, a group of saboteurs, when arrested. The group had traced underground sewers in which the Germans stored torpedoes to be shipped to the U-boat pens at Brest, and MADELEINE had just conveyed their request to London for the new explosive known as marzipan because of its sweet smell resembling that of almonds.

  She was taken to the top floor of the five-story Gestapo headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch, where cells were reserved for important agents. The two Canadians, McAlister and Pickersgill, had been removed to torture chambers at 13-bis, Place des Etats-Unis, where they continued to resist efforts to make them play back their own radio transmitters under Gestapo guidance, until finally they were shipped to extermination camps.

  Her interrogations are now a matter of record, in evidence given at war-crime trials and in postwar questioning of German officers. She was almost killed in one attempt to escape. Her interrogators faced her with information suggesting that her colleagues had already confessed. The Gestapo knew about Buckmaster. They showed her details of Baker Street operations that made her wonder if a traitor existed at the heart of the organization.

  Baker Street began to fence in the dark with the Germans, a dangerous duel when invisible weapons sliced across a pitch-black stage. Whoever won, some agents must lose. On the German side, small bits of information gleaned from different prisoners gave MADELEINE an impression that the Nazi counterespionage authorities already knew everything. London, trying to confuse the enemy, had to be wary of being itself confused. Some of the stations, like Pickersgill’s BERTRAND, were being played back under German control. Was MADELEINE under German control? Could she be persuaded to work for the enemy if confronted with evidence of “betrayal” by her colleagues? These anxieties plagued Baker Street, and the Germans knew it. But Baker Street knew German anxieties and transmitted personal messages to Pickersgill to see if he was working his post under German control, or had resumed working in freedom, or was not working it at all. The questions for Pickersgill could not be answered by the Germans operating BERTRAND, so they dredged him out of the cesspool of Rawicz concentration camp. He was brought back to Avenue Foch, sick and emaciated and reduced to that state of physical degradation when the mind functions badly. The Gestapo stood aside. Smooth young German officers offered Pickersgill good food, clean clothes, the prospect of an end to the nightmare. He refused. They proposed a small excursion into some of the more amusing quarters of Paris as proof of their good will. He refused. But he was a Canadian, a soldier, and, like themselves, a man with his life still ahead of him—surely he must recognize their good will, their intervention on his behalf, their outrage at the way he had been treated?

  Pickersgill must have guessed what they were after. The tough training that seemed to have been all wasted when he was captured now did prevent a worse catastrophe. Bloodied, half-starved, aware of what awaited him back in Rawicz, he responded to the discipline of his own beliefs and the warnings of instructors: “If you are caught, they will try every trick. Say nothing beyond your cover story. Stick to it. Never stray from it. They will try kindness alternating with savagery. During the sunny periods, you will be tempted. . . .”

  If Pickersgill had weakened, he
might have talked about himself. He did not know that Bletchley, trying to check if he was still operational, was signaling him with stray personal references to which he alone could reply; therefore he could not know what personal matters were of interest to the Gestapo in its attempt to deceive Bletchley. These might have been the most innocent details of family life. He might have accepted the invitation to a decent dinner in a black-market Paris restaurant and inadvertently he might have mentioned in the atmosphere of false bonhomie that he liked porridge at breakfast or once bicycled to school or had a mother in Ottawa. He had no means of judging what was, and what was not, likely to help counterespionage experts maintain London’s confidence in BERTRAND’s transmissions. He did not even know if BERTRAND was transmitting under German guidance. Knowing nothing, he refused to take any risk, yield any ground, or drop his guard in any way. He was aware of other prisoners, but were their messages, tapped on the water pipes, yet another trick? He knew there was a girl under interrogation, MADELEINE? What had she said? How did the Germans know about this or that aspect of the circuits into which Pickersgill had been inserted? Too many questions and no answers.

  Although INTREPID’s headquarters were in New York, he traveled frequently and to far places. He virtually commuted to London by military aircraft to see Churchill and others involved in his secret operations. Churchill here broods among the bombed ruins of the Houses of Parliament. The dark figure silhouetted in the foreground is INTREPID.

  Kim Philby, the Soviet superspy who tried covertly to undermine the Anglo-American wartime intelligence alliance, had earlier followed his masters’ directives by openly expressing pro-Hitler views. Here (marked by arrow) he sits at a dinner, held by the Anglo-German Fellowship on July 14, 1936 in London, soon after Hitler proclaimed his anti-Jewish “Nuremberg Laws.” Another member of the Fellowship was Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the London Times, who was “doing my utmost, night after night, to keep out of the paper anything that might hurt their [the Germans’] susceptibilities.” The Nazi Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was Ambassador to Great Britain when he harangued this gathering on the need to fight “Bolsheviks.”