The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville

by Clare Mulley

  Christine was now one of SOE’s most highly trained, experienced and motivated agents, but she still faced an agonizing wait while on standby to depart. Parachute drops could only take place during a fourteen-day moon-period. Even when the moon was bright, flights might be held up by ‘a thousand accidents of politics, weather or war’.91 In Christine’s case something more personal delayed her at the eleventh hour. ‘She was pretty impatient and we had an awful dilemma,’ the officer in charge of her departure tactfully reported, ‘when at a certain time of the month, her physical condition and the moon coincided.’ When her drop was delayed on this pretext, ‘it took the whole of the unit to keep her pacified and occupied’ until the next flight opportunity arrived.92

  Finally, on 7 July 1944, Christine was driven to the airfield half an hour before take-off. She was dressed in a shirt, skirt and jacket cut to a French pattern by a tailor in London’s Margaret Street. Her hair was set in the latest French style, and even her teeth had been checked to ensure they complied with French dental practice. Now she had her clothing searched for old bus tickets, small change or any other tell-tale evidence that might give her away, and was fitted with her parachute suit. A FANY gave her some sandwiches and a flask of tea for the journey. She was also given Benzedrine, to keep her awake for a few extra hours should she feel exhausted at the wrong moment, and her ‘L’ tablet: a little cyanide pill coated in rubber so that it would not melt in the mouth unless bitten.

  In October 1942 Hitler had ordered: ‘all opponents engaged in so-called commando operations … are to be exterminated … all quarter is to be denied on principle’. To ensure there was no misunderstanding, a supplementary directive added that ‘all sabotage troops will be exterminated, without exception … the chance of their escaping with their lives is nil’.93 Christine was about to be dropped into France, one of the most dangerous theatres of the war, where few SOE agents were expected to last more than three months before being brought back to England if they had not already been caught, and where wireless operators had an average life-expectancy of only six weeks.94 She felt alive again at last.

  10: A FRENCH OCCUPATION

  In 1944 Francis Cammaerts was twenty-eight. Tall, lithe, with serious dark eyes and a serious attempt at a moustache, when he relaxed with a cigarette he was distinctly handsome. The youngest child of a Belgian poet and his English actress wife, famed for her ‘voice like figured satin’, he was born in Kensington during the First World War and his earliest memories were of being brought up ‘under the shadow of poison gas, absent fathers and one-legged lovers in the park’.*1 Thoughtful and confident, at sixteen he became a socialist and a pacifist, even renouncing his Belgian citizenship to avoid national service. Later, he would personally execute one man and plan the deaths of many others, but he would never entirely relinquish his belief in the value of either democracy or the pacifist cause.

  When war was declared Francis was a history teacher. His brother Pieter enlisted immediately, but Francis registered as a conchie. Convincing the Conscientious Objection Tribunals of the sincerity of his views, he avoided both active service and jail, and spent the next two years working on the land in Lincolnshire. Over Christmas 1940, Nancy Finlay, the sister of a friend, visited. Nan, as she was only ever known, casually walked in on Francis in the bath as he was washing off the blood of a goose he had just slaughtered. That evening they made love in his car and they were married three months later. Nan’s friend, the journalist Katharine Whitehorn, claimed she valued Nan above all for her human wisdom and emotional strength. They were qualities that would be sorely tested over the coming years.

  Three weeks after Francis’s wedding, his brother was killed in action. In his grief, Francis began to question his absolute position. Nan was already pregnant and their first child was born in January 1942. When Francis held his daughter in his arms he knew he could no longer stand aside. That spring he decided to take an active part in the war, but he was not prepared to give up his freedom of conscience to do so. ‘I might be ordered to kill people in a way that was entirely wrong’, he argued. ‘Once you’d accepted the notion of the discipline of an armed force you were bound to accept the probability of stupid and ridiculous orders which you’d have to obey.’2 Passionate, moral, abundantly qualified but fiercely independent, Francis, like Christine, was tailor-made for SOE.

  Francis was interviewed in a War Office annex by Selwyn Jepson, author of popular detective stories and SOE’s F (French) section recruiting officer, who characterized him as ‘a man of the highest principle’.3 Bilingual, highly intelligent and fit after his work on the land, he was an ideal candidate. MI5 signed him off with their standard ‘nothing known to his personal detriment’, and months of intensive training followed.4 Curiously for a man who was to prove so successful in the field, he was assessed at first as ‘rather lacking in dash’, ‘a plodder’, and ‘not suitable as a leader’, perhaps because he seemed so ‘very quiet and unimposing’.5 But Francis was also a good shot, strong at close combat and ‘highly intelligent, very keen and completely reliable’. For Leo Marks, SOE’s head of coding, there was ‘nothing plodding’ about him, and whether it was ‘the quality of that smile, or the penetration of that look’, Marks found himself ‘feeling very sorry for anyone who made the mistake of writing this man off. Unless he happened to be a German.’6 Like a headmaster signing off a school report, Gubbins then upgraded Francis, concluding he was ‘an excellent man … one of the best types we have had’, and arranging for his immediate transfer to the field.7

  Christine was still kicking her heels in Cairo when, one moonlit night in March 1943, Francis, now code-named ‘Roger’, was slipped into France in a single-engined Lysander monoplane. He had been tasked with the challenging mission of preparing for the Allied invasions by building a cohesive resistance movement in the southeast. He was sent first to André Marsac, second-in-command of the ‘Spindle’ circuit run by Peter Churchill and Odette Sansom. The same Lysander that delivered Francis to a hop farm in Compiègne also collected Churchill, who managed to convey one warning during their exchange: always carry a newspaper as France was light on lavatory paper. Then Churchill was up the aircraft’s fuselage, into Francis’s still warm seat and away to breakfast in London. The operation had been perfect. The Lysander stopped just twenty yards from the reception committee on the ground and was airborne again within 150 yards and three minutes. But once Francis was on occupied soil, with no possible means of return, everything quickly spiralled towards disaster.

  Despite the night-time curfew, the French reception team drove to Paris. As a ‘security measure’ they threw Francis’s revolver and papers out of the car window into a river. Francis could not help feeling that this was all ‘slightly risky’, but his concerns were soon allayed over a flask of rum with Marsac.8 He spent the next day browsing Paris bookshops and acclimatizing himself to the sight of German officers strolling along the pavements. ‘Paris is grey and gloomy,’ he reported, ‘total black and white photography.’9 After an unsettling random body search outside a Métro station, he returned to the flat to wait for Marsac. But Marsac did not return. Nor did he make their rendezvous in a café the following day. After forcing down a lonely meal and a few cups of acorn coffee, Francis picked up his suitcase and headed, at rather a brisk casual walk, for the Gare de Lyon. Marsac had been arrested that morning and, just one day in, Francis was already a wanted man.

  Things did not improve when he arrived at the beautiful lakeside village of Saint-Jorioz in rural south-west France where Peter Churchill had his HQ. Here Francis was met by ‘a lot of very nice, very brave young men … dressed like young résistance people’, who took him to a building that, he felt, might as well have been signposted ‘Résistance Clubhouse’.10 Hearing that a new British agent was criticizing the security of the circuit, one of the young French leaders arrived, ‘breathing fire, and threatening to shoot everyone’.11 In the midst of the ensuing scene a letter arrived from Marsac, written from
his Paris prison cell, to introduce a disillusioned German ‘Colonel Henri’ who wished to be flown to London for talks. To Francis this was clearly madness: one of the first principles of SOE training was that, should enemy agents or informers present themselves to try to win your confidence, they must be killed.12 Unable to dissuade Odette Sansom from exploring what he called this ‘impossible fantasy’, Francis left that evening to start a fresh circuit further south.13

  Francis’s instincts were right. The mysterious ‘Colonel Henri’ was really Sergeant Hugo Bleicher of the Paris Abwehr, German armed forces intelligence. The day that Peter Churchill returned to Saint-Jorioz, Bleicher arrested both him and Sansom. Churchill’s pocketbook, containing several contact details, was also taken, and the circuit was effectively destroyed. Although both agents survived the war, Sansom refusing to talk even in the face of horrific torture, several others lost their lives as a result of the operation, the second successful sting of its kind by Bleicher. Only Christine’s detested Ben Cowburn had evaded Bleicher before, later claiming he knew he could not be a colonel as ‘he wore such cheap shoes’.14

  More than a dozen SOE circuits were active in France at this point, each organized around three key roles – leader, wireless operator and courier, all of whom were usually trained in Britain. Francis had been assigned to lead the ‘Donkeyman’ circuit in the upper Rhône valley but, unwilling to trust anyone linked to the Spindle network, he elected to establish a new group of his own. Hoping that it would have more success than ‘Donkeyman’, the new circuit was code-named ‘Jockey’.

  The only Donkeyman contact Francis used was Auguste Deschamps, better known by his code-name, ‘Albert’. Albert was a principled man who, along with his family, had been a resister from the start. A brilliant wireless operator, he had been trained in London but was accepted as a French peasant wherever he went. His wireless set, eight inches wide by three deep, fitted, with headphones and aerial, into an artificially aged attaché case, with the dials and plugs all fixed into the upper lid. When his prearranged transmission time approached, Albert would open it up and fix the aerial across the ceiling with the earth connection perhaps attached to a water pipe and the power lead plugged into a light socket if he did not have a battery. Then, with paper and pencils at the ready, he would tap out his message, and twiddle the dials until he picked up the incoming signal from London or Algiers. Having captured several radio sets, along with their operators, the Germans knew exactly how the system worked. Once they had picked up a signal they would listen in, sending out cars fitted with direction-finding equipment to find the source. Whenever he was transmitting Albert knew that the Germans were ‘after him like sniffer dogs’.15 This meant he was constantly on the move, and more than once Francis would drive up to find no trace of his friend who, not waiting for a car he recognized, had already made himself scarce. Over fifteen months Albert would send over 400 messages to London – an SOE F Section record. He was never caught.*

  Together Francis and Albert started recruiting potential saboteurs through the freemasons, whose secretive practices came into their own during the occupation, and other groups more recently forced underground like the Communist party and the trade unions. For a while all the Jockey members seemed to be working in the local industry – manufacturing rabbit-fur hats – which had limited strategic value. Francis then recruited Pierre Agapov, a young French radio engineer who became his second-in-command, along with the leader of the local resistance, a corn merchant called Raymond Daujat. Soon he had several hundred men and was responsible for an area larger than Wales, which stretched from Lyon to the Swiss border, down to the Mediterranean and along to Marseille.

  Knowing the fate of the Spindle circuit, Francis was obsessed with security. He kept his true identity a secret from everyone. He never slept in the same place for more than three nights in a row. His organization was cellular, with each group operating independently, and while he knew how to reach all the local leaders, no one knew how to reach him. The telephone was forbidden. Writing information down was forbidden. And, once recruited, no one could resign or be sacked from the organization; if there was any of what Francis vaguely called ‘bad discipline’, the person in question would be shot.16

  By the end of May 1943 Francis had prepared the first of his drop zones, and began receiving arms and equipment. Training began in the men’s own homes but later moved to the hills where they could use explosives, anti-tank PIATs, and bazookas without attracting unwelcome attention. Francis had courage and determination, men and munitions, a clear mission and growing experience. He even had a price on his head and, after the arrest of Agapov, his photo in the Gestapo files. The one thing he did not have, and needed desperately, was a trained female courier to take messages and supplies between his different teams, and to keep in contact with the ‘Maquis’, the resistance fighters who had left their homes to form a permanent base in the hills, after whose scrublands they took their name.

  It was June before Francis’s courier arrived. Cecily Lefort was an Englishwoman who had married a wealthy French doctor and divided her time between Paris and a fishing village in Brittany. When France was invaded, Cecily went to London, joined the WAAF, and gave the use of her Breton villa with its secluded private beach to SOE.* She then volunteered to return to France for special operations. She was brought in by Lysander, the pilot commenting, rather unhelpfully at this juncture, that her accent was poor and she looked flustered, like a ‘vicar’s wife’.17 Keeping cool under pressure was not something that came naturally to Cecily. Francis respected her, and she was useful, but it was clear to him that she ‘looked forward with terror to the next day’, and every day ‘anticipated failure’.18

  Cecily’s arrival coincided with a sabotage push by the Jockey network, which drew German attention to the area. One team successfully took out the hydroelectric station in Durance, interrupting power supplies and the plants producing aluminium for the Luftwaffe. A series of operations followed, putting railway turntables, locomotives and communications pylons out of action. The plan was to cut off local Abwehr forces from their HQ in advance of the Allied invasions, but progress was not achieved without the loss of several men and the arrest of Albert’s wife and daughter. Then, just three months after she arrived, Cecily broke security protocol when, stuck late at night, she called at a safe house despite warnings that the address was compromised. The Gestapo arrived immediately. Alone inside, she panicked and hid in the coal cellar. It was too obvious, and by the time Francis arrived it was too late to help her. ‘If she sticks to her story,’ he reported as positively as possible to London, ‘I feel sure she has a chance of being released.’19

  Cecily was carrying nothing incriminating and refused to name names either at Lyon prison, or under further interrogation by Bleicher at the Gestapo headquarters in Paris, the infamous 84 Avenue Foch. Apparently ignorant, she began the long journey to Ravensbrück, the concentration camp built by Himmler exclusively for women and known by the French as ‘L’Enfer des Femmes’ – Women’s Hell. Its function was to work the women to death, while extracting maximum profit from their labour. Over 130,000 women and children would be incarcerated there, including Odette Sansom, who was being held in isolation when Cecily arrived, and Paulette Deschamps, Albert’s teenage daughter. Over 90,000 of the inmates would die from starvation, beating, execution by hanging, gas or firing squad, or from medical experimentation. Soon after her arrival, Cecily was diagnosed with cancer of the stomach and ironically underwent a successful operation before being given the pink card that designated her as ‘sick’, and of no further labour value. She missed an opportunity to escape, trying to persuade a friend to join her, and was gassed in February 1945.20

  Cecily had lasted almost twice as long as the average female courier in France and her arrest spooked London, prompting Buckmaster to recall Francis. During debriefing he gave a critical report of Cecily, claiming she had shown ‘little initiative’ and concluding bitterly that ‘it is q
uite useless to send into the field a man who cannot be relied upon to keep calm or at least preserve an appearance of calmness in an emergency’.21

  While in London, Francis lobbied for more air deliveries and a new female courier. He had seventy-five cells waiting for supplies. Despite Gubbins’s commitment to air support for France, which he rated as ‘strategically by far the most important country in the Western Theatre of War’, he had not been able to divert aircraft from Bomber Command. Without arms and explosives it was impossible for the units on the ground to get results. It was also difficult to keep the teams motivated – and pointless trying to recruit more.

  Francis spent a difficult Christmas with Nan in Harrow. He enjoyed his first cuddles with his new baby daughter, the only person outside ‘the firm’ to whom he could talk about his work, but managed to give Nan trench mouth, which cost her several teeth. In January 1944 Hitler used his New Year Proclamation to declare that ‘the present struggle overrides all the inhibitions which purely humanitarian considerations imposed in the past, because at the end of it there will in any case be no victors and vanquished, but only survivors and annihilated’.22 It was a chilling reminder of the danger faced by SOE agents throughout Occupied Europe. And a few days later Albert contacted Francis with bad news – one of his cell leaders had been killed during an attack on a train.