by Larry Loftis
The follow-up directive was worse: “It must be made clear to the enemy that all sabotage troops will be exterminated, without exception. That means that their chance of escaping with their lives is nil. Under no circumstances can they be expected to be treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention. If it should become necessary for reasons of interrogation to initially spare one man or two, then they are to be shot immediately after interrogation.”
And Hitler was an equal opportunity killer, without regard to nationality or gender.
* * *
ON THE MORNING OF September 14, Buckmaster gave Odette an identity card for her new persona—“Odette Metayer”—and asked her to recite her “life story.” Odette parroted the details of her birth and life growing up in Dunkirk, her father’s name—Gustav Bédigis—and his work as a bank official at Crédit du Nord. Her mother’s maiden name, she said, was Lille Lienard.
Reciting the actual death of her real father—woven seamlessly into the Metayer story—she spoke of her marriage to Jean Metayer, his employment at the Hernu Peron et Cie Shipping Agency, and his untimely death in 1936 due to bronchitis. They lived at 73 Grande rue in Boulogne, she said.
Buckmaster nodded and handed her a ration card. “You happened to be in Cannes at the end of December 1941, and you exchanged your ration card on the twenty-fourth. You were then living at the Hôtel Pension des Alpes, 15 rue Dizier. Coupons for September have been cut out.” He explained that her code name within SOE—in the office and in the field—would be “Lise,” and that her operation would be identified as CLOTHIER.
Maurice then paused. “There is one matter, Madame Metayer, which you have omitted to mention in telling us the story of your life. Have you any children?”
Odette paused a moment, and then her eyes went dead.
“No, Monsieur. I have no children.”
Buckmaster nodded and read Odette the final instructions for Operation CLOTHIER, including contacts, addresses, postboxes, codes, and overall mission. She was to be stationed at Auxerre, he said, forming a small network and acting as a courier to Paris. She’d be given 50,000 francs and would be instructed later about receiving more. She’d depart for Gibraltar the following day, September 17, and should be in France roughly ten days later. She was to memorize the instruction pages overnight and return them to him in the morning.
“Have your clothes been checked?” he asked.
“Yes. Every stitch I have on is either French or has a French dressmaker’s tab. I picked out a dark grey coat and skirt,” Odette added, “so as not to show the dirt in prison.”
Buckmaster held her gaze. “Do you think you’re going to prison?”
“I don’t know. But it’s as well to be prepared.”
The major nodded and handed her several small pills. “One of these will incapacitate your enemy for twenty-four hours,” he said, “by giving him or her a violent stomach ache and its attendant disorders. If you want to feign illness yourself, take one. It won’t be comfortable but it’ll fool any doctor.”
He handed her a second batch. “Now these, on the other hand, have the reverse effect. They are stimulants and should only be taken when you’re damned tired and have to make a special effort. They are guaranteed to keep you going, mentally and physically.”
Odette put them away and Buckmaster gave her a third set. “If you slip one of these little chaps into anyone’s coffee, it will knock him out completely for six hours—with no aftereffects.”
She nodded and the major held up one more, a small brown tablet. It was called an “L” tablet, he said, for lethal. “If you get into the sort of jam where there’s absolutely no way out, swallow this and you’ll be out of the jam permanently.”
Odette added it to her bag and Buckmaster grinned. “That’s not a very pretty going-away present, I’m afraid, so we’ve decided to give you another. Here you are, Lise, with love from the French Section.”
He handed her a small item wrapped in tissue and Odette opened it and smiled. It was a beautiful silver compact.
She was now ready. Diarrhea pills, speed, sleep dope, lethal pill, and beauty aid. Bring on the Germans.
Buckmaster asked if she had any final questions and Odette said she didn’t, but requested a favor. She had written a batch of letters for her children, she said, all undated, and asked if he could post them one week at a time.
Buckmaster said he would and Céline–Lise Clothier–Odette Metayer was off.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING DAY, ANXIOUS to see her beloved France and begin her work, Odette boarded a Whitley bomber. The plane taxied to the end of the runway and stopped to wait for the landing of an incoming aircraft. Odette peered through the window and started.
The landing plane was coming straight at them.
There was a violent collision of metal as the plane clipped the Whitley’s starboard wing. The pilot immediately cut both engines and the shouting began. Someone opened the door and Odette tumbled out. Fortunately, the plane didn’t ignite and no one was injured.
On September 27 a Lysander became available and Odette again headed to the airfield. As the plane was warming up, however, Baker Street received a cable stating that the Gestapo had arrested her contacts; three had been summarily executed, the rest soon to be.
Odette returned home, and Buckmaster told her to sit tight while he coordinated other contacts and searched for another plane.
A week later he called and Odette caught a train to Plymouth, where she was to depart by seaplane for Gibraltar. As she sat in the Mountbatten Airport, she watched the Catalina bobbing in the water as high winds jerked its moorings. Sheets of rain followed, and it appeared that this mission, too, would be jinxed. After several hours, an officer from the Royal Air Force came in and confirmed what Odette expected: the weather would not allow departure.
She returned to London.
The War Office scheduled another flight five days later and instructed Odette to report to Redruth in Cornwall. From there she was escorted to a hotel and told to get any sleep she could. An attendant would wake her at 0100, they said, for a 2 A.M. departure from Newquay Cornwall Airport. Odette drifted off, and promptly at one someone knocked on her door with a cup of hot tea.
It was raining.
At the airport she was told there was a slight delay: the Whitley’s starboard engine had a fuel stoppage, someone said, and mechanics were addressing it while the luggage was stowed. They’d be under way shortly.
Finally, the craft was cleared and Odette climbed aboard. There were no seats, she saw, and the fuselage was crammed to the hilt with cargo. Finding a small spot on the metal floor, she arranged herself against a wooden crate and tried to stretch her legs. It wouldn’t be the most comfortable ride, but at least she was finally leaving.
The engines revved up and they taxied to the runway. Odette sat back. It had been a long process: the guilt at Somerset, worry about leaving her children, the training, the injuries, the false starts. Now at last she could fulfill the duty her grandfather had encouraged so many years before.
The Whitley lifted off, dipping for a moment and then resuming its trajectory. Another dip. Odette swung her eyes to the cockpit. The pilot was trying to gain altitude, but the bomber was responding by rising and sinking. Up and down, up and down it went, a sluggish battle with gravity.
The airframe began to shudder.
Cargo creaked as it slid, then a thunderous burst as the starboard engine went.
Odette braced herself.
They were going to crash.
* * *
4. Founded in 1907, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry was an all-female voluntary service within which SOE couriers were registered. While its members wore a military-style uniform, FANY was not part of the army or reserve.
5. SOE’s shooting and training methods were validated in the field time and again. One radio operator, upon returning to England after escaping, shared his story. Not long after arriving in France, his cover had been
blown, and he was arrested by the Gestapo. The agents searched him but failed to find the .38 he’d hidden in a concealed holster. He was handcuffed and hustled into the back of a car.Three Gestapo joined him, one in the back and two up front. As they sped down the Route Nationale, the operative unbuttoned his shirt and slid a manacled hand over his weapon. Per his training, the pistol was cocked, with only the safety catch on. Pushing down the lever, he whisked out the gun and delivered two rounds to the back of the driver’s neck. The car flipped, and he shot the other two. He escaped, still handcuffed.
6. The boys at the Frythe’s Station IX, a former hotel in Welwyn Garden City, and the Firs, a mansion in Whitchurch, invented and developed an unusual assortment of “dirty tricks.” The Royal Arsenal had already invented plastic explosive, so rigging a bang inside a lump of coal, a log, a Chianti bottle, or a flashlight was relatively simple. The most devious of these small explosives was the rat charge. Skinned and hollowed, the carcass was stuffed with explosive and sewn back together. With a time-pencil fuse up the tailpipe, the incendiary was undetectable.
7. The impact fuse—used famously in the “beanbag” Gammon grenade—was a particularly innovative invention from the mad scientists at Frythe and Firs. It was this very explosive that had been employed by SOE-trained Czech agents to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich in Prague only months earlier.
8. One instructor who knew a thing or two about playing a part was Kim Philby, a Soviet spy who later worked for MI6 and fled to Russia after the war. He recalled a night training exercise where a group of candidates was called to breach an upstairs room in a house that had been set with alarms and booby traps. They each also had to get past patrolling guards played by Philby and other staff members.They did, although Philby said later he could have sworn that no one got through.
CHAPTER 3
MISSION TO MARSEILLE
A sense of weightlessness and then falling, a thirty-three-thousand-pound coffin screaming down. The Whitley slammed the earth, freight crashing forward, and Odette covered herself as a tidal wave of cargo rained against her. The bomber skidded along, dragging itself over sodden turf and rock, and lurched to a stop.
Odette heaved a wooden crate off of her and heard someone trying to yank open the door.
It was jammed.
“Get out everyone quickly!” someone shouted. “She may go on fire.”
The door finally gave way and Odette scrambled over the scattered freight and jumped out. Miraculously, the plane didn’t ignite and she ran ahead of it a few yards and froze: they had stopped ten yards short of a cliff that fell a hundred feet to the Celtic Sea.
* * *
BACK IN LONDON, MAJOR Buckmaster asked once more if she still wanted to go to France. Odette said she did, but suggested that it might be best if she went by sea.
“You are going by sea,” he replied. “This country can’t afford to write off any more bombers on your behalf.”
* * *
IN THE MIDDLE OF October a troopship leaving from Gourock finally transported Odette to Gibraltar. While the British colony was the logical staging point for an Allied insertion into France, “the Rock” was a less than ideal waiting station. Situated on the tip of neutral but pro-Axis Spain, the area was closely monitored by Abwehr (German Military Intelligence) agents. J. C. Masterman, chairman of the Double-Cross Committee of the Security Service, or MI5, called it “one of the most difficult and complicated places on the map.” And since it was the launching point for convoys operating in the Mediterranean, it was bombed by the Italians and its port raided by commando frogmen from their Tenth Light Flotilla. In July 1940 Vichy France had even attacked it in retaliation for the Royal Navy’s assault on the French fleet docked in Mers-el-Kébir, Algeria.
Here Odette waited, holed up in a safe house. For two days she heard nothing, but on the third, a young man in naval uniform showed up at her door. His name was Jan Buchowski, an impetuous but brave Pole who, at twenty-three, had already won a Virtuti Militari. He was one of two Polish seamen who were captaining a pair of twenty-ton feluccas9 on the Gibraltar-to-French-Riviera run. Poland’s General Wladyslaw Sikorski, in describing the young bucks to SOE’s General Colin Gubbins, said that they were “too rough even for the Polish navy.”
Depending on weather, the trip would take ten to eighteen days, and the quarters were tight. The boat would travel under several flags, and when another craft was in sight, the passengers had to be herded below. Rough seas were a constant and German patrols, surface or U-boat, were always a risk. As everyone at Baker Street knew, the job required hardy, confident men; if they were a little rough around the edges, so be it.
“I am the commander of the felucca Dewucca and I am ordered to take you to France,” Jan told her. Before Odette could reply, he added: “I must now refuse to carry out this operation.”
“Why?”
“You are a woman. I will not take a woman, a young woman such as you, to this . . . this business. A man—yes. A woman—no. The matter is finished. May I have a drink please?”
Odette poured some whiskey and Jan raised his glass.
“Your health, Madame. You will possibly permit me to invite you for some dancing when I return to Gibraltar?”
“When you return to Gibraltar, you will already have landed me in France. It is an order of the War Office.”
Jan smiled. “The War Office is very far away, Madame.”
Odette poured another drink and explained that it was her fifth attempt to get to France. If she had to swim, she told him, she was going to get there.
“Madame would look most beautiful in a bathing dress.”
“I demand that you take me to France.”
“All over. I will not take you. I am Polish and I will not take a lady like you in my small and dirty boat. The conditions are bad, very bad. It is no good. All over. When I return, I will invite you for dancing. To travel to France is no good for you but only foolish. I refuse to take you and I spit in the face of the War Office. Finished.”
The luck. Odette had finally made it to Gibraltar, only to be thwarted by a Polish Don Quixote. She kept the drinks flowing and eventually, highly intoxicated, Jan relented.
They set sail October 23 and at long last Odette’s espionage career began. Jan was earning his keep, she saw, as he had four men and three women10—apparently only one of whom he considered a lady—aboard the Dewucca.
About the fourth day at sea, Jan began to tease Odette. “Did they give you a big pistol to take to France?” he asked, grinning. She replied that she could have taken one but that they were noisy and cumbersome.
“You prefer the more subtle, more quiet, more feminine methods of killing people?”
Odette paused and measured her response. “Have you a pistol, Jan?”
He handed her a .38 revolver.
“If you throw up an empty bottle and I hit it, what will you give me?”
Jan chuckled. “You hit a bottle! You are foolish. As well, this pistol makes a very big bang. Not a bang for small girls. When we return, I will invite you for dancing in Gibraltar.”
“What will you give me?”
“If you hit a bottle, I will give you anything you ask. I will even dance the tango with you—in Gibraltar.”
Jan grabbed a bottle and flung it far into the air. Just as it touched the water, Odette fired and the bottle exploded.
Jan gaped. “My God.”
Odette asked for his fifth of whiskey and tossed it into the sea, chiding him for being obnoxious when he drank. Her Beaulieu evaluations were being confirmed, it seemed, even before she set foot in France.
That night Odette slept on deck, under the lee of the galley as she had been doing, but the temperature dropped significantly before sunrise. Sometime after dawn, she woke peacefully. She could feel the chill on her cheeks, but she was not cold. Glancing down, she saw why: Jan had draped his sheepskin coat over her while she slept.
* * *
BEFORE DAWN ON NOVEMBER 2, the De
wucca slid quietly into the harbor at Cassis, a small port on the southeastern edge of Marseille, and dropped anchor. Odette stood on the bow, staring at the shore and listening to the soft lapping of waves.
France. Her France.
And her war with Germany, now commencing. She was neither anxious nor nervous. Instead, she was calm and resolute, almost detached.
She was ready.
She said good-bye to Jan and watched as a dinghy motored out to meet them. On board a man named André Marsac, head of a Resistance group in Marseille, greeted her and the others and said he would escort them to Cannes.
When the dinghy reached the water’s edge, one of the men in the reception committee took her suitcase and Odette stepped ashore. Even with her eyes closed she could have determined that this was France: the smell of pine and lavender, mimosa and thyme, garlic and perfume could be found nowhere else.
Marsac delivered the group midmorning to the Villa Augusta, a flat owned by a trusted Resistance member, Marie-Lou Blanc, who was code-named “Suzanne.” Inside, Odette met her contact, Captain Peter Churchill.
He was tall, she noticed, and extremely handsome. He wore glasses but behind them were confident brown eyes. His face was chiseled and tan, and from the way he moved and the muscles in his forearms, she could tell he was athletic.
The son of a British consul but no relation to Winston, Peter Churchill had graduated from Cambridge with a degree in languages and was fluent in French, Spanish, Italian, and German. His reputation as a remarkable athlete was well deserved: he had captained the Cambridge ice hockey team—one of the finest players the university had produced, they said—and was a first-class skier, diver, and six-handicap golfer. Following in his father’s footsteps, he had served in the British diplomatic corps in the Netherlands and Algeria before becoming undersecretary of the Home Office Advisory Board in September 1939.
