by Leo Marks
According to the t.l.m. (testy little menace), Arquebus was to be dropped into the northern zone of France, which was German occupied, the south being controlled by the puppet Vichy government. The mission’s first objective was to contact the growing number of independent resistance groups whose political differences prevented them from working together, and weld them into the nucleus of a secret army. Arquebus then had to estimate this army’s potential as a paramilitary force and persuade its leaders to serve under one field commander, who would receive his instructions from London. Once this was accomplished, Arquebus next had to establish under what circumstances (if any) the active but volatile Communist groups would be prepared to co-operate with the secret army.
The unexpected presence of a British officer at these vital negotiations would demonstrate to the French as well as to SOE that (in Tommy’s words) ‘both sides had finally noticed they were fighting the same war’.
From the moment that Passy, Brossolette and Tommy (code name Sea-Horse) landed in France they had a major PR job to do, and if ever a public figure needed one it was Tommy’s idol, General ‘Moi, je suis la France’ de Gaulle.
This proud, arrogant self-proclaimed embodiment of the croix de Lorraine (the Free French symbol), disliked by Churchill, distrusted by Baker Street (the ultimate compliment), complained with all his Gallic fervour that the British were habitually discriminating against him and his followers. He was particularly incensed at having to get SOE’s consent every time he wanted to despatch a Frenchman back to France, knowing that no such strictures were placed on Buckmaster’s agents except by the Germans. Barely tolerated in London, not yet established in France, he was engaged in a battle for survival of SOE vs C dimensions with his formidable rival, General Giraud. The prize was control of all French military, paramilitary and resistance forces. Giraud had the backing of the Americans while de Gaulle had to make do with SOE’s, and the success of the Arquebus mission was as important to his future as a directive was to Baker Street’s. He would have led the mission himself if he could, but he knew that it could safely be entrusted to Passy and Brossolette.
Passy was almost as difficult to handle as de Gaulle. He had a list of grievances against SOE as long as the Magna Carta, and I had one against him. He was the principal advocate of the secret French code.
One of Passy’s justifiable complaints concerned French citizens who’d escaped to this country. He knew that if any of them volunteered to return to France they were sent to the Royal Victoria Patriotic School to be screened by the British. But once there, they were never offered to the Free French until Buckmaster had had first refusal of them, and his headhunters invariably selected the most promising.
His even more serious grievance was harder to substantiate. He was convinced that British agents in France were persuading French citizens that they were being recruited to serve under de Gaulle when in reality they were being enlisted for F section or for other British interests (C). He wanted a British officer to accompany him to France to witness the scale of this deception, discover who was responsible for it and make a full report in writing, no matter what his findings. Who better for this than the Chairman of the Awkward Squad?
De Gaulle knew very little about Tommy but was prepared to accept Passy’s judgement that he was the only person in SOE who could be trusted to tell the truth as he saw it.
I’d begun to understand why de Gaulle needed a code the British couldn’t read and wished I could oblige him.
I thanked Charlotte for the trouble she’d taken and offered to teach her how to break indecipherables any time she wanted.
As a courtesy to Passy I’d offered to conduct the Arquebus briefing on Free French territory instead of in Dorset Square, and Tommy had readily accepted. With shoes shined, curls disciplined and larynx sprayed to give body to a voice which Mother referred to as my ‘deep brown melter’, I set out for Duke Street – often called Puke Street by members of F section.
I had only two legs of Arquebus to brief because Pierre Brossolette had already left for France. I was sorry to have missed him, as he owned a bookshop on the rue de la Pompe and we could have compared notes on le knock-out.
I checked the most important item I was carrying – a Churchill-sized Havana which I’d stolen from Father’s humidor (‘They breathe more easily inside there, my son’). I hoped it would help Sea-Horse to breathe more easily inside occupied France. I’d also written a code-poem for him but suspected that he’d find the cigar more acceptable.
A Free French sergeant examined my pass as if I’d just printed it, spoke briefly into a telephone (my name sounded better floating in garlic), and then reluctantly allowed me to proceed upstairs.
Tommy was in a small anteroom surrounded by half a dozen Free French officers. General ‘Moi je suis’ stared down at them from the wall looking slightly less censorious than he did at Dorset Square. Tommy introduced me to Capitaine Manuel, Passy’s second in command, and then led me down a short passage to Passy’s office.
Charlotte Denman had spoken of Passy with awe, all the more awe-inspiring because she so rarely had any, and I’d learned from her that his real name was Dewavrin and that he’d taken his nom de guerre from the tube station at Passy. Nick had once described him as a ‘cold fish’ without disclosing where he’d sampled him.
My first impression of him as he rose from behind his desk was that he had the energy of an express train out to break a record and the mental quality of a barracuda with a high IQ. Tommy introduced me as SOE’s chef de codage, which impressed me more than it did Passy. We locked eyes for a moment and I was relieved when he looked away that a stye hadn’t formed. I suspected that he was trying to be cordial.
There was an incoming message on his blotter which looked like the one in secret French code which I’d broken in the toilet. He studied it, then rose to his feet, frowning from his engine to his luggage compartment. He announced he had to leave and offered to come to Dorset Square for briefing if I wasn’t here when he returned.
It took me a little while to realise that Tommy and I were alone.
‘My God, Tommy, what a powerhouse.’
‘You should see him on a good day,’ he said proudly.
I was seeing Tommy on a good day. He was so relaxed it was unnerving. Puffing away at his cigar, he asked for WOK news, and I told him I was expecting a verdict within twenty-four hours, though I didn’t know from whom.
He instructed me to stop worrying as you couldn’t keep a good code down, that progress of any kind took twice as long in SOE as anywhere else and that I must push on with all my other codes which were on the boil. I’d not said a word to him about the codes which were incubating, but then, that was Tommy.
He waited patiently for the chef de codage to get on with his job.
I showed him a WOK which had been produced on waterproof paper. He examined it as if he had nothing else on his mind, then gave a brief nod, which was his seal of approval. I told him that as he was the first person to have seen a WOK, I wanted him to be the first agent to use one, and nobody but the coders of Grendon need know if he did.
He thanked me for the offer but declined it. He wouldn’t accept anything which wasn’t available to all agents. Nor did he think he should use an original poem for his code even if I’d brought one with me. He felt sure he’d send fewer indecipherables in some verses by Verlaine which he knew by heart.
I told him that if Sea-Horse sent any indecipherables I’d ask Buckmaster to break them.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘It’s time he learned French.’
He reached for a pencil and paper to show that he wasn’t claiming exemption from coding exercises. I asked him to encode a message at least three hundred letters long and he nodded approvingly.
His coding instructor at Beaulieu had said in his report that Tommy had arrived at the school ‘already a first-class coder’, and I knew that the exercise was academic. He numbered his transposition key as if he were climbing a ladder to Barbara’s window.
The next time he did any coding he’d be in occupied France. That was his goal, his ambition, his WOK, and I was glad for his sake that he was in sight of achieving it.
I had never met anyone I trusted so completely or whose trust I valued more. I remembered the long nights when he’d helped me to break indecipherables without even asking who’d sent them and the encouragement he’d given me to stand up to Ozanne. It was hard to believe that he would no longer be on call and I wished that bright Sergeant Blossom could arrange for me to ring him in France.
He finished his exercises without a single mishap, and when he gave me his work for checking, I found that I was the one who’d made a mistake. He’d referred to Arquebus twice in the body of the message and each time he’d spelled it ‘Arquebuse’. I’d looked up the wrong word.
The former tripod listened patiently while I ran through the precautions he’d heard so often at other agents’ briefings: use long key phrases, try not to repeat them, free your language, send messages in a mixture of English and French. Double-check your security checks. Nod and nod and nod.
I told him that we would soon be recruiting a bevy of FANYs licensed to use all their resources to make code briefings as memorable as possible.
Nod and nod and nod.
I realised that I was impinging on precious Barbara time, that the briefing was over and that I must say goodbye to the Chairman of the Awkward Squad. We shook hands in silence. I was the first to disengage because my fingernails were sweating.
He put his hand firmly on my shoulder.* ‘Well, chef de codage,’ he said quietly, ‘congratulations on your new appointment.’
‘And on yours. Merde alors, Tommy.’
‘Your French is improving.’
‘You should hear it on a good day. Merde alors, Tommy!’ I wasn’t sure if two merde alors were as good as one mazeltov so I wished him that as well.
Under my breath, of course. What there was left of it.
London had had no contact with the Grouse since their abortive attempt to destroy the heavy-water plant. According to Skinnarland, a kindly man when he wasn’t coding, they’d been hiding in the mountains for the past four months and were thought to be starving. Two weeks ago their code name had been changed to Swallow.
The new attempt to blow up the Norsk Hydro was even more dangerous than the first because the Germans had had time to prepare for it, and its outcome was even more important as they were known to be stockpiling heavy water. SOE’s attacking force consisted of the Gunnersides, the Grouse and Mr Skinnarland himself, who was prepared to blow his cover.
Wilson was waiting for me in the hallway of his Chiltern Court flat. He was looking more harassed than I’d yet seen him and asked me to stand by for a quarter of an hour as the Gunnersides were in the final stages of a briefing which he now had to attend himself. He told me to make myself comfortable in his office – a technical impossibility – and hurried into the briefing room.
I was convinced I knew who was conducting that briefing and preferred to stay in the hall to see who emerged.
Over the past two months a spate of Top Secret telegrams in main-line cipher had been exchanged between Wilson and Major Malcolm Munthe, SOE’s man in the Stockholm legation. The messages concerned the chief engineer at the Norsk Hydro, Professor Jomar Brun, who was uniquely placed to advise on the new attack and was fully prepared to do so.
With Munthe’s help, Brun was smuggled across the Swedish frontier a few weeks ago and arrived in Stockholm bringing with him hundreds of photographs of the Germans’ latest fortifications, charts of their patrol systems and a detailed layout of the plant itself. Munthe immediately arranged for the RAF to fly him to London, and Wilson at once despatched him and his invaluable data to SOE’s camouflage and special devices section, the Thatched Barn at Barnet. With all the station’s facilities at his disposal, Brun rapidly constructed a large working model of the Norsk Hydro, and the Gunnersides had been practising on it ever since at their Southampton training school under his personal supervision. Brun’s presence in England was the greatest asset, apart from courage and Skinnarland, which the Grouse/Gunnersides had.
The fifteen-minute wait slouched into thirty and the thirty into forty-five. I was well into contingency time and began to worry about the Golf briefing, an appointment I was so reluctant to keep that I was determined to be early for it.
Wilson finally emerged from the briefing room accompanied by two men. I recognised one of them as Colonel Bjarne Oen, chief Intel-ligence officer on the Norwegian General Staff, a key member of Wilson’s brains trust. The other was a bushy-haired civilian who was talking in undertones which he appeared to have difficulty in hearing himself, and if he wasn’t the professor I was Ozanne.
Wilson apologised for the delay and said that the Gunnersides were now ready for me.
I tried to look as if I were ready for them, and hurried towards the room where four months ago I had briefed the Grouse.
The six Gunnersides were Joachim Ronneberg, the team leader, Birger Strømsheim, Fredrik Kayser, Knut Haukelid, Hans Storhaus and Kasper Idland. They sprang to attention with the same immediacy as the Grouse, projected the same aura of indivisibility and might just as well have been called Haugland, Helberg, Kjelstrup and Poulson.
I wanted to present them with a working model of a briefing officer but felt too pedestrian to conduct any traffic – a private joke which caused me to laugh out loud. I realised that the tension of my next briefing was building up on the Gunnersides’ time.
They responded to their coding exercises as readily as the Grouse had, and I focused on Knut Haukelid’s bowed head, unable to believe that I was in the same room with him.
He’d been an active member of the Norwegian Resistance since 1940 and was one of the audacious trio which had blown up the submar-ine base at Trondheim. This same trio had helped to create the shuttle service of fishing smacks known as the ‘Shetland bus’ which ferried agents between Scotland and Norway. After the Trondheim raid Haukelid had escaped to the safe harbour of the British legation in Stockholm, and SOE’s harbour master, Major Munthe, had helped him to reach London. But the other members of his trio – Sverre Midskau and Max Manus – had been captured. Midskau was feared dead, but Max Manus threw himself off a train which was taking him to concentration camp, found his way to Stockholm, and with Munthe’s help would be arriving in London in a few weeks.
That man Munthe was an invisible presence at every Norwegian briefing and at every operation. Nor were his activities confined to Scandinavia. He’d transformed the Stockholm legation into a centrepoint for SOE’s finances and communications, and its apparently limitless resources were at the disposal of agents in eastern Europe, the Low Countries and France. He’d also started a training school in Sweden so that would-be resistance fighters who’d been smuggled across the frontier could return to their own countries to act as wireless oper-ators and saboteurs.
The Swedish authorities were aware of his extracurricular activities (he was assistant military attaché) and showed their country’s strict neutrality by allowing anyone in Sweden with the inclination to do so to sing the German National Anthem in public. Occasionally Munthe was one of them.
I’d met him when he’d called at Dansey’s office to discuss main-line and agents’ codes. He was younger than his traffic suggested, in his middle to late twenties, a Scots fusilier whose appearance in a well-cut kilt caused the main-line coders to flash messages at him he couldn’t fail to decipher. After the meeting I asked him if he were related to Axel Munthe, author of The Story of San Michele. Our Malcolm was his son. I’d offered to smuggle him across the frontier of 84, where a first edition of his father’s masterpiece had pride of place in my father’s legation. One day, perhaps.
The Gunnersides were proving to be slow, methodical and unadventurous coders, with Haukelid in the lead by half a message. At this rate of progress there was a real danger that I would be late for the Golf team’s briefing, but I wasn’t
prepared to hurry the Gunnersides. Time was all I could give them.
A limpet on the hull of Haukelid’s message seemed to have come unstuck and he was checking it carefully. That was the sign of a good coder. The others were labouring on.
So was I. My confidence was seeping away like sixpences in a fairground, and I knew the reason that made it even worse.
I’d caught myself committing the briefing officer’s worst crime: I’d thought about my next briefing in the middle of my present one and still couldn’t stop it.
Nor could I stop worrying about Plan Giskes. The operation would be so much safer if I could have access to Y’s records, followed by a technical session with Nicholls and Heff.
The Gunnersides were ready and I heard myself telling them to check each other’s messages. Returning to the present, I then checked their checking and suddenly was on my feet talking security.
I would have kept them there all day if I could. Anything to postpone the next briefing.
I realised that they were looking at me with the courteous resignation which was the Norwegian equivalent of a fidget. They had let me off lightly. Any officer who briefs entirely by reflex should be blown up at the Norsk Hydro.
My job here was done. Shoddily. Perfunctorily. But done.
I left Chiltern Court for my final briefing of the day, no longer sure if I were right about anything except the cost of being wrong.
Note
* It’s still there, Tommy. Hope you know it.
EIGHTEEN
The Coding Cabaret
Unless I’d misread the situation in Holland, I was on my way to meet four Dutch agents who were already blown.
Over the past two months eleven messages about their impending drop had been exchanged between London and Trumpet and Boni, who were at the very top of my list of suspect operators. Trumpet’s circuit was now organising their landing grounds and reception committees. The elusive Jambroes was said to be eagerly awaiting them, but the elusive Giskes was just as likely to be.
