The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  SOE almost precipitated its own demise by a succession of follies that cost lives, together with massive embarrassment when they were revealed. By far the worst took place in Holland, and also involved MI6. In the summer of 1941 one of Broadway’s agents was captured with a large pile of back messages – a common sin of commission by secret wireless-operators – which enabled the Abwehr, with the aid of a German cipher expert named Sergeant May, to break its traffic. On 13 February 1942 two more MI6 agents were captured, one of whom talked freely.

  Meanwhile two Dutch SOE agents were dropped under circumstances which suggested fantastic carelessness in Baker Street: both were issued with forged identity cards on which the royal arms of Holland were represented by two lions which both faced the same way, instead of addressing each other. Even more incredible, Hubertus Lauwers and Thys Taconis were issued with identical civilian clothes. When they remonstrated with their conducting officer in the briefing shed at Newmarket before being dropped on the night of 6–7 November 1941, he waved aside their concerns, saying that no one would notice. They arrived safely nonetheless, and went to work respectively in The Hague and Arnhem. Taconis received assistance from a local man named Ridderhof, who was a secret V-Mann – a Vertrauensmänner, or German informer, of which Holland had many in 1941. Everything Taconis did was reported to the Abwehr’s effective and ingenious Maj. Herman Giskes. On 6 March 1942 Lauwers was seized in mid-transmission at a flat in The Hague, carrying copies of several old messages. When he resumed transmission, the receiving operator failed to notice that he gave the agreed security warning that he was under enemy control. Thereafter, agent after agent was parachuted into Holland to be received by Giskes’ men. Amid their shock, and bitterness at betrayal, most of the prisoners talked, so that each new subject for interrogation was disorientated by the discovery of how much the Germans already knew. Lauwers inserted further warnings in subsequent transmissions, including the word ‘CAUGHT’, but the N Section in London blithely ignored them.

  The rapid expansion of SOE meant that many agents, and especially wireless-operators, were dispatched into the field hastily trained, as were most of their Whaddon Hall counterparts. An Abwehr interception specialist later captured by the British expressed scepticism about SOE radio discipline in France. Alois Schwarze, a twenty-four-year-old NCO, said that many Allied agents transmitted very slowly; they reported the intended timings of their next schedule in plain language or very simple code; their three-letter callsigns were easy to pick up, as were their ‘hellos’ and ‘goodbyes’. He and his colleagues were amazed how often captured wireless-operators had failed to notice that they were being monitored by German direction-finders. They were also often caught in possession of copies of old signals, in the fashion of the Dutchmen. Much of this lack of professionalism was inevitable when civilians were rushed through training as spies and dispatched into the field, but more than a few men and women paid for it with their lives.

  It is a myth, vividly exposed by the Dutch experience, that Allied agents and Resistance workers who fell into German hands seldom talked. Almost every prisoner of any nationality gave away a little or much, with or without undergoing torture. Controllers expected only that their field officers and agents should withhold names for a minimum of twenty-four or forty-eight hours, to enable meetings to be cancelled, contacts to flee. The Gestapo in Paris employed Latvian, Dutch and indeed French collaborators to conduct the torture of prisoners, while German officers asked the questions. Captured agents were usually offered a 50 per cent chance of life if they talked, and such bargains were sometimes kept. An SD interpreter named Corporal Weigel, who took part in many ‘extreme interrogations’ at Versailles, recalled the names of just two prisoners who remained silent: one was a Madame Ziegler, whom he believed to be Alsatian, the other a Captain Tinchebray, taken in June 1944 at Saint-Marcelle. Those were exceptions to a harsh generality, recognised alike by occupiers, Resisters and their London sponsors. The broad truth about spies of all nationalities who fell into enemy hands was that they were kept alive as long as they could serve a purpose, and shot when their usefulness expired. The emotive word ‘murdered’ is often used by post-war writers when mentioning SOE agents, and especially women, killed by the Germans. In truth, all of them knew that if taken death would almost certainly be their fate, legitimised by the laws of war. Every captured agent who wanted to live struggled to decide how much he or she might reveal without becoming a traitor, and some misjudged the answer.

  Giskes eventually operated fourteen British wireless sets in his Englandspiel, which continued for more than two years, with successive consignments of arms and explosives, together with saboteurs and wireless-operators, parachuted directly into German custody. Fifty-one men from SOE, nine from MI6 and one woman from MI9 were eventually taken, of whom all but a handful were shot. When five made an escape in August 1943 and sent a message to London warning of the disaster, all unknowing they entrusted it to a V-Mann, and thus it was never forwarded. While two of the escapers were on their way to Britain the Abwehr signalled to SOE on one of its own sets, reporting the men to be under Gestapo control, with the result that when they arrived they were confined for some weeks in Brixton prison. It was Giskes himself who decided that he had exhausted the possibilities of his Operation ‘North Pole’, and on All Fools’ Day 1944 sent a final mocking signal to SOE: ‘WHENEVER YOU WILL COME TO PAY A VISIT TO THE CONTINENT YOU MAY BE ASSURED THAT YOU WILL BE RECEIVED WITH THE SAME CARE AND RESULT AS ALL THOSE YOU SENT US BEFORE STOP SO LONG.’ Beyond the MI6 and SOE agents who were lost, hundreds of local Resistance workers perished as a result of the gross misconduct of SOE’s Netherlands section by Major Charles Blizard and Major Seymour Bingham. Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote on 19 June 1944, acknowledging that for all his disdain for German intelligence-gathering, its officers displayed formidable effectiveness in countering Resistance: ‘Whatever the RSHA’s deficiencies in the evaluation of intelligence, its competence in counter-espionage cannot be questioned.’

  Those who mock the Germans for having swallowed for so long the productions of the British Double Cross system should take heed of the gullibility of SOE and MI6 in their Dutch operations. All that was different was that while the intelligence transmitted by the Abwehr double agents under British control addressed issues of high strategic importance to Germany, the Dutch connection had only local significance for the Allied war effort. The scandal – for such it was – so enraged the Netherlands government that for a time after the war they believed Major Bingham to have been a double, serving the Nazis. In truth he was merely incompetent, but he wisely emigrated to Australia, to start a new life in a continent where his shame was unknown. SOE narrowly survived Whitehall demands that it should be wound up after the fiasco in Holland was revealed, because Churchill rejected any wholesale reorganisation of the secret services until the war ended.

  An anonymous post-war critic, obviously familiar with the secret world and perhaps himself a veteran of the rival MI6, wrote that many of SOE’s senior personnel ‘displayed an enthusiasm quite unrestrained by experience, some had [communist] political backgrounds which deserved a rather closer scrutiny than they ever got, and a few could only charitably be described as nutcases’. Yet Bill Bentinck, who knew all the secret services’ top men intimately, in his old age offered warm praise for SOE, asserting that it had ‘good people, very good people’. If Colin Gubbins was not brilliant, he was a capable organiser supported by some able civilians in uniform. Bentinck emphasised MI6’s weakness, by contrast: ‘There were a lot of old boys, people who’d been there from World War I and had been hanging on … They fancied themselves as spy-masters.’ Nigel Clive, himself an MI6 field agent, said ‘SOE was unquestionably the best.’

  Both at the time and since, some extravagant claims have been made about the ability of Resistance movements to influence the main course of the war. R. Harris Smith, an admiring chronicler of the American Office of Strategic Services, wrote: ‘Partisan warfare was
a viable alternative to frontal assault, but SOE and OSS officers sent to establish links with the Resistance were hampered by anti-partisan prejudice at Allied headquarters.’ British and American senior soldiers were indeed sceptical about the usefulness of guerrillas, but there were excellent reasons for their caution. Partisans made a marginal contribution to the war effort in several theatres, but even in Yugoslavia and Russia they could not provide a substitute for the might and mass of regular armies. Resistance in many societies, especially within the Balkans, had much more influence on post-war events than on the defeat of the Axis.

  From 1943 onwards, Yugoslavia became the focus for SOE’s most ambitious operations in support of Tito’s partisan army, which received vastly more weapons than any other national guerrilla force; but France remained Baker Street’s most celebrated theatre. It proved relatively easy to insert agents by light aircraft in the north, and by parachute further afield. Between 1941 and 1944 the RAF flew 320 Lysander sorties, of which 210 were successful, landing 440 passengers and evacuating 630, at a cost of only six pilots killed. In the countryside, many British agents and wireless-operators survived at liberty for long periods. But in French cities, in a society ruled by collaborators and riddled with informers, the rate of attrition was horrific. On 5 June 1943, Sir David Petrie, chief of MI5, noted in a general broadside to Menzies that both MI6 and SOE had ‘for months past been suffering serious losses of agents on the continent’ because of German penetration – and that was before the Dutch disaster was revealed.

  A majority of all Allied agents captured by the Germans in Europe were victims of betrayal. Oluf Reed-Olsen wrote of his experience as a British spy in Norway: ‘One was most afraid of one’s own people; I think all agents, saboteurs and other “visitors” in Norway will agree this was so. And there were many who stood aside, from hate and fear of Russia, when even the smallest contribution to the cause was asked of them, because they considered the Allied cause to be too much affected by Communism.’ Olsen’s strictures applied equally in France, where a few British traitors also did terrible harm. The escape-line leader ‘Pat O’Leary’ – Captain Albert Guerisse of the Belgian army – used as one of his helpers in the north during the winter of 1941 a man who called himself Captain Harold Cole, supposedly an evader left behind after the BEF’s 1940 evacuation. MI9 – the secret escapers’ branch of the War Office – found no officer of that name on the British Army’s books, but instead a Sergeant Harold Cole who had deserted from his unit, taking with him its mess funds. Guerisse was already suspicious that Cole was squandering his Line’s cash on extravagant living. After a tense meeting, he dispatched the man to Lille in disgrace.

  Within a few days of his arrival in the city in December 1941, Cole had assisted the Germans to arrest one of the Line’s most devoted helpers, the Abbé Carpentier, who had been printing documents for escapers on a private press. Long afterwards, it was discovered that the Abwehr had been using the Englishman for months, under various aliases. An order went out to Resisters to shoot him on sight. In May 1942, however, Cole was arrested by Vichy police in the unoccupied zone of France and given a long prison sentence, which removed him from Resistance view. He reappeared only in 1945, when arrested in the American Zone of Germany, again masquerading as a British captain. He escaped from detention and fled to Paris, where he was eventually killed in a shoot-out with the police. MI9 considered him responsible for fifty deaths of members of the ‘Pat’ Line and their connections.

  For much of the war a fundamental division persisted between the British and Free French visions of Resistance. Churchill was eager to stimulate and hasten armed revolt, to assist the Allied armies in achieving the defeat of Nazism. Gen. Charles de Gaulle, by contrast, cherished a political concept – salvation of the soul of France from the slough of humiliation into which it had been plunged by surrender in 1940. He defined Resistance as ‘a national expression’. Free French intelligence, which depended on SOE for operational facilities, was directed from London by André Dewavrin, ‘Colonel Passy’, an engineer officer born in 1911, a graduate of the Paris École Polytechnique and a former instructor at Saint-Cyr military academy. Dewavrin’s cleverness was never in doubt, nor his considerable personal presence – tall, with thinning fair hair and a deceptively soft voice. He proved a skilled political infighter, as was indispensable in the snakepit of London exile politics. He customarily wore civilian clothes, and SOE officers noted that when he appeared in uniform, it was a sure weather warning that there was to be a row with somebody. His department, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action militaire, or BCRA, was housed at 3 St James’s Square, just across Pall Mall from de Gaulle’s main headquarters in Carlton Gardens. Dewavrin recruited some remarkable personalities, prominent among whom was ‘Rémy’, Gilbert Renault, who was originally commissioned to organise an escape line through Spain, with the slender credentials that he had once directed a movie about Christopher Columbus. His organisation, the Confrérie Notre-Dame, became justly celebrated, respect enhanced by its contribution to the Bruneval coup.

  For the most part, however, de Gaulle and Dewavrin viewed their agents in the field more as emissaries of ‘their’ France than as instruments of Allied victory. Free French prestige slumped when the first BCRA man dispatched into the field, late in 1940, reached his dropping zone in an RAF aircraft, but then refused to jump and spent the rest of the war as a staff officer in Carlton Gardens. In the summer of 1941 the BCRA controlled just two wirelesses in occupied France, one of which was shut down in August. SOE appropriated the most promising recruits for secret service among the refugees who arrived in Britain from France, to receive protracted interrogation and screening at the Queen Victoria Patriotic School in Wandsworth, ‘a tower of Babel’. Moreover, de Gaulle’s political design for a highly centralised national movement rendered the BCRA’s networks especially vulnerable to German penetration.

  The general professed to be insulted by the unwillingness of the British to confide their secrets to his people – who were rigorously excluded from the Ultra loop. MI6 described relations with the Free French as ‘like trying to live amicably with a jealous, touchy and domineering wife’. British codebreaking revealed – for instance – de Gaulle’s men conducting secret talks with the Chinese about securing their assistance to regain Indochina. A sum of £5,000 had to be paid from British secret funds in May 1944 to silence a Frenchman named Dufours, who brought a legal action against the London Gaullists to secure redress for his own unlawful imprisonment and torture by them. Carlton Gardens was indifferent to what the British regarded as a scandal. Its chiefs took the view that they had the right to treat their own nationals however they saw fit, even in the heart of London.

  The BCRA inherited from the French army a reckless attitude to signal security, using codes which the Germans broke even after MI6 warned Carlton Gardens of their vulnerability. The Wehrmacht had captured a trainload of French intelligence documents during the Blitzkrieg which took lackadaisical Abwehr analysts two years to work through. In 1942 they discovered that among this haul was a list of all French sources in Germany, together with the sums of money paid to them. By far the largest recipient was known as ‘Asché’, or simply ‘He’, whom the Germans belatedly identified as Hans-Thilo Schmidt, the Allies’ pre-war informant about Enigma, who was arrested in April 1943 and perished in September, though it is uncertain whether he was executed or committed suicide.

  That spring, André Dewavrin made a personal tour of France, to explore for himself occupation conditions. This was certainly courageous, and ‘Passy’ returned safely, but it represented a grotesque risk when he was privy to all his organisation’s secrets and contacts. Flamboyance was immensely dangerous in secret agents. De Gaulle and Churchill were alike attracted to such Resisters as Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, a child of privilege who became one of the general’s most prominent supporters. De la Vigerie, however, was considered by many of those who met him to be an unstable fantasist. O
n a tour of America he once gave a press conference with a sack over his head, supposedly to mask his identity, which was well-known from Berlin to Washington, DC. At a meeting at the Foreign Office, ‘C’ and SOE’s chief expressed their shared view ‘that the leaders of the French Resistance movements, including M. Emmanuel d’Astier himself, were not nearly so interested in fighting the Germans as in building up an organisation which would seize power when the Germans were driven out’. There was truth in this. MI6 and SOE assembled most of the important humint to come out of France, especially in advance of D-Day. Dewavrin was embarrassed to discover that Henri Frenay, leader of the ‘Combat’ Resistance group, was selling intelligence for handsome sums of cash to Allen Dulles of OSS, rather than donating it to the Free French cause.

  British apprehension about the elaborate Gaullist political structure inside France, and its vulnerability to informers, was vindicated in the spring and summer of 1943, when the Gestapo conducted mass arrests. Victims included Jean Moulin, principal standard-bearer of the ‘London French’, who was tortured and executed, and Gen. Charles de Lestraint, a sixty-three-year-old nominated by de Gaulle as leader of his so-called Armée Secrète. Lestraint possessed no aptitude for secret war, nor indeed much merit save his opposition to France’s Vichy rulers. His arrest on 6 June 1943 was no loss to the Allied war effort. Though propaganda made de Gaulle a giant in his country by the time of D-Day, cynics asserted that the BCRA created more martyrs than useful Resisters.