by Larry Loftis
Reile stressed that they’d not get another shot at the big fish because he’d be in Paris only a few hours. Tracking the man in southern France, he said, was impossible since they didn’t have the resources to do so.
Hugo conceded the point.
“Do everything necessary for the arrest,” Reile said. The man would be arriving on the seven o’clock train from Marseille and would be meeting the woman at the Café Jacques off the Champs-Élysées the following afternoon at three.
The man’s name was Marsac.
* * *
18. Casale, who worked at the Cannes casino, hid numerous SOE agents during the war.
CHAPTER 8
GRAND DUKE
“Two umbrellas have been seen in Hyde Park.”
“Red umbrellas or blue ones?”
“Two blue ones—with handles.”
“Well, I hope they’ve rolled them up and taken a nice stroll down the Mall.”
It had become almost routine for Maurice Buckmaster: eighteen-hour day, a few precious minutes with his wife, supper, bed, and then a call between midnight and dawn.
Two parachute drops had been made in the Jura mountains, the caller was saying, the precise spot where Peter, Odette, and Arnaud had just relocated. Buckmaster had asked if men or materials were dropped and the reply was two agents, with wireless sets and equipment.
* * *
THE SECOND WEEK OF March, Odette and Peter received disturbing news: the Germans were going after the CARTE circuit. The Abwehr, it seemed, had finally decided to chase down the names it had found in Marsac’s briefcase in November.19
They started at the top, arresting and imprisoning Carte’s wife and two of his daughters. In Arles, seventeen agents were rounded up. Baker Street had no choice: it terminated the CARTE network and divided its work and agents between SPINDLE and a new circuit to be headed by Paul and headquartered in Auxerre.20 Surprisingly, Baker Street gave Paul a territory so large—from Normandy to Nancy—that it was unmanageable.
Days later London contacted Arnaud. A Lysander was going to pick up Peter on March 14, they said, on a field in Tournus—some 125 miles from Annecy—for debriefing at headquarters. Another message stated that Baker Street would be sending a Lieutenant Francis Cammaerts, code-named “Roger,” to take Peter’s place during his absence.21
Peter read the messages and as he was burning them, Arnaud stewed.
“If they think they can send out raw recruits to give me orders, they’ve got another thing coming!”
“Don’t be a chump, Arnaud.”
“The —— cheek of sending somebody out to take your place! As though we needed somebody to teach us how to suck eggs! I refuse to send his messages, and that’s flat! Besides, I know Lise feels just the same as I do.”
Peter assured him that London would send only someone who was qualified and fully briefed. It was tricky, to be sure: a green officer stepping into a labyrinth of intrigue with two headstrong subordinates under his command.
Peter made a decision. He told Arnaud that during his absence he was putting Odette in charge, and asked him to do what she said, and to watch out for her.
Arnaud agreed but grumbled that Peter wouldn’t return.
Peter promised that he would and extended his hand. “Au revoir, mon cher vieux.”
That evening Peter broke the news to Odette. He told her that she was in charge, that he would return, and that she must take care of herself and be vigilant until then.
It was somewhat inappropriate, she knew, Peter’s putting her in charge. After all, she wasn’t even a member of the army, much less an officer, and Arnaud was a lieutenant. But Peter trusted her, and that was enough.
The difficult part, she also knew, was not running SPINDLE; agents did their jobs with little instruction, and Arnaud could handle any sticky situation. The struggle now was the separation from Peter. Would London let him return or assign him elsewhere?
* * *
MARCH 14 CAME, BUT the Lysander didn’t. Once again Peter was left in a field scratching his head. On the 23rd a courier brought a message from Arnaud stating that a plane would pick him up on a field ten miles from Compiègne.
Peter looked at the paper. Compiègne. The town on the other side of France, across the Control border, some fifty miles north of Paris. He spun into action and the following day a car arrived with Paul, Jacques Riquet, and Jacques Latour. They would have to figure it out on the fly.
* * *
ON THE 23RD, THE plane came with Cammaerts and another SOE agent, Georges Duboudin,22 organizer of the SPRUCE circuit. Peter and Paul greeted the newcomers and exchanged places in the cockpit. At long last Peter was off for England.
Cammaerts’s reception committee—Marsac, Riquet, Latour, and now four others—crammed into one car and drove straight to Paris. Not that it was conspicuous, eight men traveling in one car well after curfew. They did have a permit, sort of: a doctor’s authorization for one of them to drive at any hour. If they were stopped, it would be precarious.
Fortunately, they encountered no checkpoints and Roger stayed with Marsac that evening and gave him two million francs and a pistol, compliments of Churchill’s Secret Army. They had lunch the next day and then Marsac left, saying he had a meeting on the Champs-Élysées later that afternoon.
London
AT BAKER STREET, PETER and Paul updated Major Buckmaster on the reorganization of Carte’s network. SPINDLE’s work in St. Jorioz was going well, Peter said, and Odette was running everything in his absence. Paul added that his group was operating in Auxerre, with Roger Bardet liaising between St. Jorioz and Normandy, where Bardet’s friend Jean Lucien Keiffer was based.
Buckmaster noted the personnel and locations, and Peter was called into the office of a young officer he didn’t recognize.
“Can’t you control your radio operator’s language any better than this?” the man blurted, rustling a paper.
It was bound to happen, Peter knew: his prickly radio operator was highly competent, but not quite the Cambridge or Oxford gentleman that many at Baker Street were accustomed to.
“I’m sorry about the language,” Peter replied, “but I associate myself entirely with Arnaud in this matter and I challenge anyone to control him better.”
The officer grumbled and Peter left without telling him that he had recommended the foul-mouthed operator for a promotion. Buckmaster agreed and the following day Arnaud received a wire:
FOR ARNAUD STOP CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR CAPTAINCY
Paris
HUGO BLEICHER LISTENED INTENTLY as Colonel Reile and a man named Monsieur Gaston went over details of the Marsac investigation. Gaston himself was a mystery, Hugo thought. He spoke French like a Frenchman, German like a German, and English like an American. Not that it mattered; if Reile trusted him, so did Hugo, whoever he was.
Marsac’s circuit originally had ten men in Paris, Gaston said, but almost all of them had been arrested in a recent raid. Marsac was coming to town, he explained, to replace these men and rebuild the operation. The key to the trap was a woman agent of Gaston’s named Claire,23 who would be coordinating the meeting. The rendezvous was set for 3 P.M., Gaston said, the time Claire was told to be at the cafe.
* * *
A FEW MINUTES BEFORE the hour they were ready: two agents at a table next to where Claire had taken a seat, two “lovers” at a table in the gallery, and Hugo and his assistant at a table behind the cafe’s balustrade. A half hour later, the Russian came in with two companions: a tall thin man, about thirty—presumably Marsac—and a beautiful, elegant woman.
Bleicher’s team watched discreetly as Claire and the Resistance trio discussed business. After about fifteen minutes, Claire retrieved a handkerchief to blow her nose.
Hugo pounced.
“Messieurs, mesdames!” he shouted as his team surrounded the table. “German police. You are arrested. Give us no trouble and come along without creating a disturbance.”
Hugo deposited the captiv
es in Fresnes Prison, and word was sent to headquarters. The beautiful woman with Marsac, it turned out, was his secretary, Lucienne Frommagot.
* * *
BACK AT MARSAC’S FLAT in the rue Vaugirard, Cammaerts was taking a nap, as he’d slept little the night before. Someone opened the blinds, and Roger flinched as he awoke. It was Lejeune.
“Sorry to startle you, Roger,” he said. “I have the key to Marsac’s apartment. I’ve some very bad news. Marsac has been arrested. Just a couple of hours ago.”
Roger sat up and began lacing his shoes. “I’d better disappear.”
Lejeune said he had a safe house at the Quai Voltaire where Roger could stay for the night, and then he’d better leave Paris. “Not one of us is safe here anymore if they make Marsac talk.”
Roger spent the night at the Voltaire and then bolted for Annecy. He checked in at the Hôtel de la Plage and then went to St. Jorioz to meet with Odette and Arnaud, who introduced Roger Bardet. Like Odette, Cammaerts didn’t trust the young man and determined to have nothing to do with him.
The situation was delicate. On the one hand, Baker Street had sent Cammaerts to run the circuit in Peter’s absence. On the other, the lieutenant knew nothing about the local situation, the dangers that lurked, or whom he could trust. In addition, it seemed advisable to keep him away from Bardet.
When the shady courier left, Odette and Arnaud discussed the options and decided that since the area was hot and Cammaerts had barely gotten the lay of the land, he should lie low for the time being. They sent him to a safe house in Cannes, where he was to remain until the smoke cleared.
Only Odette and Arnaud knew the address.
Paris
THAT SAME EVENING, COLONEL Reile called his favorite spy-catcher. “Bleicher,” he said, “we must get Marsac to talk quickly. Take over the whole Marsac affair and do it yourself under the code name ‘Grand Duke.’ You must show us now what you can do.”
Over the next three days Bleicher spent countless hours in Marsac’s cell, but the Frenchman refused to talk. Although he had not been trained as an interrogator, Hugo was a master. He changed tactics and patiently worked to win Marsac’s confidence. The Nazis and the German people were wholly distinct, he told Marsac, and “the Hitler system” was “far from bringing happy conditions.”
Hugo’s distancing himself from Hitler was easy to follow. Nazis were a distinct minority in Germany—between 6 percent and 9 percent of the population—a fact noted in SOE training and one which Marsac likely would have known.
Marsac lowered his guard. “I cannot believe the Germans are happy under such a debased regime. That system will not appeal to you either, I imagine.”
Hugo confirmed that it didn’t and continued the pleasant dialogue over several conversations. With Colonel Reile breathing down his neck, however, Hugo had to turn up the heat. He told Marsac that while he had nothing to do with the notorious and hated Gestapo, he’d have no alternative other than to turn Marsac over to them if he and Marsac could not come to “an understanding.”
Hugo let the threat—which was true—sink in for a day.
At their next meeting, Marsac broke. “Is it possible to settle my case between us,” he asked, “without bringing in the Gestapo?”
“Yes, certainly,” Hugo replied. “It depends on whether we come to some agreement. At the moment I am in sole charge of your case, and you will yourself have noticed that I do not get on well with the Gestapo.”
Marsac swung for the fence, hoping for freedom. In room 13 of the Hôtel Bergerac, he told Bleicher, was a suitcase containing one million francs—half the money Marsac had just received from Cammaerts—and four crystals for transmitters. The crystals Hugo could toss in the Seine, he said, but the money was Bleicher’s to keep. Hugo had the key amongst Marsac’s belongings, he said, and need only tell the concierge that he had been sent by Monsieur Marsac to retrieve the case.
Hugo stifled his astonishment. This was too good to be true. He was at the hotel within a half hour and everything was just as Marsac had said. The suitcase—apparently belonging to Marsac’s secretary—was full of lingerie, but underneath rested ten 100,000-franc notes and the crystals. Hugo gave the booty to Colonel Reile, who congratulated him and urged Hugo to obtain as much information as possible before Marsac’s colleagues began to inquire about him.
The next morning Hugo returned to Fresnes, acknowledged having picked up the money, and asked Marsac what he wanted in return.
The chance to escape, he said.
“My dear Marsac, it is really not so simple as you imagine to escape from Fresnes.” Hugo reminded him of the sentry who accompanied him to the cell, and of the ten locked doors that had to be passed before reaching the exit.
Surely they could leave the prison together, Marsac countered, on the pretext of an interrogation at Abwehr headquarters.
Hugo knew better. “If you get out of this prison,” he said, “you will do a quick vanishing act, whereas I will be hanged by the Gestapo from the nearest gallows.”
Bleicher was right, Marsac knew, but before he could offer a solution, Hugo made it himself: “The precondition for your escape is that I shall vanish with you—and to England. I would not be safe in France anymore.”
Marsac acknowledged that he could get Bleicher to London, and for the next day or so Hugo continued to develop trust. On occasion, Marsac would mention something about his net, and one day Hugo heard the name Paul [Henri Frager’s alias], whom he mistakenly believed to be the leader. Marsac disclosed in passing that Paul had been picked up from an airfield near Paris and was now in London. This meant that London controlled the circuit, Hugo surmised, and that it was being run by a British general.
Gradually, Hugo upped the ante. “Listen Monsieur Marsac, I must convince my Chief that I have won you over and that you are prepared to work for us.”
Marsac agreed. “I will work for you for a few weeks, or seem to. Then you give me a job to do for you in the South of France and I don’t come back.”
“Yes, something of that sort.”
Hugo pressed for a tangible asset to show his boss, like recovery of a wireless transmitter, but Marsac said they were all in southern France.
Colonel Reile was indeed pushing, and Hugo tried a new tack the next morning.
“Look, Marsac, with the best will in the world I cannot get you out of Fresnes just like that. You have no means of knowing how much I risk from the Gestapo. They have been watching every step I take for some time past. I have to operate cautiously.”
There was only one way to pull it off, he said. “I must have one of your men in here to discuss the next move with us both. We can do that on the pretext of confronting you with a witness.”
It was a bold move and Hugo knew that if it failed, his work would be in vain; Marsac’s agents would soon go to ground and the Frenchman’s usefulness would vanish.
Marsac asked for writing paper and a pen and wrote out two short letters: one to his wife and one to the circuit lieutenant, Roger Bardet. He had been in Fresnes ten days, Marsac told them in the letters, but had become friends with the interrogating officer, who had agreed to help him escape. Bardet would need to visit him in Fresnes, he explained, to help orchestrate the plot.
Handing them to Hugo, he said, “You are to be ‘Colonel Henri,’ Monsieur Jean. It is the name of my friend in Düsseldorf who is now a colonel in the German air force. You must play his role. We must from the very start be ready to dispel any doubts that they may have in London about my intentions.”
Bleicher was amused; promoted by his own prisoner.
Annecy
ODETTE TOOK HIM IN with a glance: fortyish, six feet or so, heavyset, large brown eyes magnified by thick glasses. With a granite jaw and Gibraltar head, he looked incredibly strong. Were it not for the ill-fitting suit, the man was a dead ringer for a wrestling coach.
The Annecy-to-St.-Jorioz morning bus stopped, and Odette lingered to allow the man to get off first. There was s
omething about him she didn’t like. He lumbered out with a heavy gait and plodding, elephant-like steps. He looked around as visitors do and then stopped someone for directions. Going the same way, Odette walked close enough to hear the request: he was looking for a house called Les Tilleuls—the Limes.
She paid no further attention and continued on to the Hôtel de la Poste.
At lunchtime Odette headed downstairs to the dining room and was perusing the menu when Lejeune hurried over.
“Lise, there is a man here who wishes to speak to you.”
Odette glared at him for breaking security. “You know Raoul’s orders—that you should never come and speak to me here.”
“Yes, I know. But this is urgent and—”
Odette cut him off and told him to leave. On his way out Lejeune stopped by the entrance and spoke with a patron who had just entered. It was the man from the bus, the plodder. He responded to the courier’s remarks with a wintry smile, glanced hard at Odette, and found a seat and called the waiter. A moment later he was at Odette’s table.
“Mademoiselle Lise?”
“I am she.”
“May I be permitted to take my coffee with you, Mademoiselle? I would not intrude if I had not things of importance to say.”
Flawless French, slight Belgian accent. A Frenchman living in Brussels, perhaps.
“You will forgive me, Monsieur. I do not know your name.”
“My name is Henri and I am an officer of the German Army.”
