by Leo Marks
(a) That the agent in question is going to a reception committee, and can, if necessary, leave any written matter which he does not care to carry about with him with this committee.
(b) That if spare plans and poems are not taken by the agent himself they will have to be sent with a container operation to the same reception committee and passed to him by hand through various intermediaries. This is an undertaking which we naturally wish to avoid.
I ventured to suggest to MS/A that the question of whether an agent should take spare plans and poems with him, or whether these should be sent to him afterwards, was a matter for the country section to decide after consideration of the circumstances of the agent’s work in the field and the requirements of MS section.
I understand that MS/A agrees that in this case at least the operations should go on as requested in our W/T form, and would respectfully ask you to take the necessary action.
Nick had added a footnote, ‘Contact me immediately,’ with the last word underlined.
We had an unusually open debate considering that the subject was Holland. He was reluctant to leave the distribution of codes to the discretion of any country section, least of all the Dutch. And we agreed that Byrne’s objections to giving Netball a supply of spare poems were valid. Yet we both saw hidden advantages in allowing him to have them. To Nick, it was a chance to reassure the Dutch that we trusted their judgement and were merely observing routine signals precautions. To me it was a chance to send a message to Giskes – the kind that could only be delivered by a captured agent.
Killick’s letter clearly stated that Netball could leave any written matter which he didn’t care to carry about with him with his reception committee. But the reception committee in which Killick had such confidence was being organised by Cucumber, who was high on my list of suspect agents. Moreover, Cucumber had close links with Boni, the one agent about whose capture I was absolutely certain, with Ebenezer a close second.
If my convictions about Holland were right (and they were so intense that I sometimes doubted them), Netball’s chances of survival were virtually non-existent and he was likely to be picked up on landing. In which event he’d have no chance to dispose of his codes, and if his journey to Holland achieved nothing else, he might unwittingly help us to mislead Giskes.
If the master discovered that Netball had been given a six months’ supply of poems he might reasonably conclude that we weren’t about to change his favourite coding system and were likely to remain wedded to poem-codes till the death of our agents did us part. Either misconception would help the surprise element of WOKs and LOPs and might even prolong the lives of his prisoners.
Nick didn’t comment on any of this. Nor did his eyebrows dissent from it.
Netball was issued with twenty-five spare poems photographed on soluble paper and carefully camouflaged. Three of the poems had been written by Killick after I’d explained to him that original compositions offered far better security. Such was the convoluted thinking which had become second nature to us when dealing with N section.
On 15 March I gave Netball his final code briefing. It lasted the whole morning, and the stem of my pipe snapped in two (I smoked cigars in front of no agent but Tommy) when he thanked me for all the trouble I’d taken. I blamed the mishap on the manufacturers, and nearly snapped in two myself when he promised to bring me a meerschaum from Holland when his mission was over.
I gave printers and photographers a hard time for the rest of the week.
Although few of us believed in miracles unless we were responsible for them, two occurred on 20 March:
1 Heffer was still at his desk at six o’clock.
2 The Chiefs of Staff issued an official directive to SOE.
The latter was a forceps delivery after two years of acute labour pains, and the Guru proceeded to summarise its wondrous implications.
The parameters between C and SOE were now clearly defined. We’d become the first organisation in the history of British warfare with a licence to commit sabotage, with the possible exception of the Houses of Parliament.
We were henceforth responsible for conducting all forms of clandestine warfare, for building up secret armies in occupied territories and for securing maximum co-operation from governments-inexile. SOE’s quota of aircraft, arms and essential supplies would be substantially increased, which would lead to a sharp rise in dropping operations, and every department in SOE would at last have a chance to fulfil its potential.
Above all, the directive was explicit enough to be C-proof.
‘So God bless the Chiefs of Staff,’ said Heffer, ‘even if no one else does.’
I made a note to remind Father to give Alanbrooke a discount on his bird books.
And suddenly heard myself shouting three questions at Heffer, who seemed in a hurry to leave: Was SOE at last in a position to discuss the Dutch situation openly with the Chiefs of Staff? … Could the Dutch traffic be shown to Tiltman of Bletchley instead of to some anonymous investigators called in by Gubbins? … Was it too late for us to prevent Netball and two other agents (Lacrosse and Gherkin) from being dropped?
His expression warned me that for all the good the directive was going to do Holland it might as well have been drafted by Giskes. He gently explained that the Chiefs were counting on the Dutch secret army to implement Plan Holland (the D-Day uprising), that its success was one of their main reasons for granting the directive and that far from Dutch operations being cancelled he’d understood from Nick that they were going to be increased.
He then urged me to concentrate on producing WOKs and LOPs, and escaped while he could.
On 23 March I gave Lacrosse and Gherkin their final code briefing. They were to be dropped into Holland the same night as Netball. And to the same reception committee.
That was the end of the March retrospective.
Devoid of prescience except when it wasn’t needed, I had no inkling of the catastrophes to follow.
THIRTY-FIVE
The Masterstroke
Home-Station wireless operators were closer to agents in the field yet further removed from them than anyone else in Signals.
They transmitted and received all their messages yet never read their contents.
They knew agents by their touch but never saw their faces.
They worried if they were late for their skeds but were never told the reasons.
It was a new experience for them to have an agent being captured while he was still transmitting …
On 2 April Boni came on the air at his prearranged sked, signalled ‘QTC2’ (I have two messages) and began transmitting them with his customary skill. But a few seconds later he stopped operating normally and sent a series of unintelligible letters. He then broke off altogether, ‘and his transmission ended with a sharp emission as if the operator’s hand was resting on the keyboard’.
This description was sent to London by Ken Howell, our most experienced signalmaster. It was rare for Ken to express himself strongly but he ended his report with a definitive statement: ‘I have no doubt whatever that this agent has been caught at his set after sending the first five groups of his 67th message.’
I listened to a recording of these five groups and said ‘fuck’ a hundred times under my breath, each one a tribute to Giskes’s craftsmanship.
Boni had been caught long before 2 April.
But who in SOE was going to believe it?
*
While high-level conferences were taking place between Gubbins, Nick and Bingham, and between Gubbins, Nick and the Executive Council, I tried to grasp the implications of Giskes’s masterstroke, the most baffling indecipherable I’d yet encountered.
Why had he suddenly decided to dispense with the services of Boni – a one-man Signals directorate who handled the traffic of Parsnip, Potato, Cucumber, Trumpet and Tomato (amongst others)? And why had he done it in such a way that SOE couldn’t fail to realise that Boni was blown? What new trap was the cunning bastard se
tting for us?
‘The hand resting on the keyboard’ might mean that Boni himself was finally at rest.
But there’d be none for me until I understood Giskes’s motivation and could convince SOE of it.
Nick sent for me as soon as his conferences were over. Clearly not wanting another, he gave me as brief a situation report as he thought he could get away with.
All Boni-related operations had been cancelled in case he’d been taken alive, and the three new agents (Netball, Lacrosse and Gherkin) wouldn’t be dropped before 16 April. As a further precaution, all Boni’s contacts were going under cover, and London wouldn’t know the details of his capture until they resumed transmitting.
Pre-empting my bombardment, he added that Gubbins had never been convinced by Plan Giskes (the indecipherable to Boni) that he’d been caught months ago and accepted Ken Howell’s report as conclusive.
He made the mistake of pausing for breath, and I shot my first question: ‘If other agents confirm that Boni’s been caught, will this be regarded as proof that they aren’t blown themselves?’
He snapped that decisions of this kind must be left to those qualified to make them and that our job was to report irregularities and breaches of security and not pass judgement on the contents of agents’ messages.
I pointed out that I’d been forbidden to discuss the biggest irregularity of all with anyone but himself and Gubbins and reminded him that since June ’42 not a single Dutch agent had made a mistake in his coding, and whether or not he and Gubbins chose to believe it, the few indecipherables they’d sent us were due to Morse-mutilated indicator groups and I was beginning to think that the whole damn lot of them must have been caught on landing.
Our fatigue made equals of us for the next ten seconds, and he wearily admitted that he was as concerned about the Dutch traffic as I was, but there was no point in rehashing reports which had already been considered. However, if anything new aroused my suspicions, I was to bring it to him at once and he’d take it to the general. He reminded me to keep my anxieties about Holland to myself and eyebrowed me from the office before I could unload the other million of them.
On 7 April Ebenezer broke cover to transmit a long message from Potato and a short one of his own.
Potato regretted to inform London that at the beginning of April Boni had been caught in a surprise raid on his flat in The Hague, and that Cabbage believed he’d been betrayed by a traitor in the Victory group. Potato shared this suspicion and contact had been broken off with all members of the Victory group. Potato assured London that Parsnip and Cabbage were both safe but had suspended all activities for the time being.
Ebenezer reported that during the recent bombing raid on Amsterdam three members of the Catarrh group had been killed, and he warned London that the damage caused by such raids was out of all proportion to the harm which they did to the civilian population. (A caring Giskes?)
Two-way traffic was then resumed.
On 8 April N section informed Ebenezer that they’d lost contact with Boni since he’d faded out completely during his 2 April sked and asked him to authenticate Potato’s account of his capture.
He replied almost by return that Boni had been picked up on 2 April by three police agents, who seemed to know when and where to find him, and that everything had happened very quickly. He added that, according to Parsnip, Vinus had also disappeared and was feared to be in German custody.
N section’s confidence in Ebenezer, Parsnip, Potato and Co. was now greater than ever, but even they had become anxious about Kale.
This key figure had taken over command of the secret army last November but had consistently found excuses not to return to London to give a first-hand account of his progress.
I began to sense the dimension of Giskes’s problems and made a list of questions which only he could answer.
Had he decided to sacrifice Boni not only to cast doubts about the Victory group’s loyalties but also because he was running out of excuses to explain Kale’s failure to return? And surely he must have had similar difficulties explaining why Professor Jambroes (Marrow) had also failed to return despite N section’s repeated requests? (After months of inspired prevarication Jambroes had finally agreed to return in November, but on the day he was due to leave he was killed ‘in a shoot-out with German soldiers’, a ‘tragedy’ first reported by Kale and subsequently confirmed by N section’s favourite team of investigative reporters, Messrs Cucumber, Potato, Parsnip and Co.)
On 13 April Kale sent a lengthy message via Cucumber stating that because of the unavoidable delays in returning he proposed to send a full report on the secret army’s progress in a number of separate messages. He would use his own code and spread the transmissions between Cucumber, Broccoli and Tomato.
With Nick’s permission, I warned N section that Kale was in danger of overloading his code and that it would be safer to send all his reports in Cucumber’s reserve poem number three, which he must use exclusively for his secret-army traffic. Another reason for suggesting a change of code was that if Kale had been caught it might prevent Giskes from realising that London suspected it.
On 14 April N section instructed Kale to use Cucumber’s reserve poem number three for his secret-army reports, but stressed that continued efforts must be made to assist Broadbean to reach Paris to organise new escape lines.
N section then instructed Tomato to inform Kale that Netball would bring an envelope with him containing spare poems for Kale, Cucumber, Tomato and Broccoli, and that if Netball’s drop were delayed until 16 April, Gherkin, a first-class organiser, would accompany him.
While these arrangements were being finalised without any objections from Holland’s leading travel agent, the April moon was also being used (not always to better advantage) by SOE’s rival French sections.
On 15 April Peter Churchill was once again despatched to the south of France. This time he was dropped into the Haute Savoie, where Odette Sansom and Rabinovitch were waiting to receive him. He almost succeeded in dropping into Odette’s arms, and Rabinovitch transmitted a message from him that he’d arrived safely and that his reception committee was ‘absolutely perfect’.
Two days later Rabinovitch reported that Peter and Odette had been captured the previous night in the Hôtel de la Poste in St Jérioz. He would send a detailed report as soon as he could.
On 18 April he sent a message which was far too long for his own security explaining that, after leaving Peter and Odette at the hotel, he’d returned to his set to report to London. The hotel had been raided in the early hours of the morning by a group of carabinieri led by a German who he believed was a senior member of the secret police. Peter and Odette, posing as husband and wife, had been found in an upstairs bedroom and arrested. He thought they’d been taken to an Italian prison.
On 19 April Buckmaster urged Rabinovitch to return to London via the Spanish escape routes, but Rabinovitch refused. He knew that Roger (Cammaerts the plodder) had gone to Cannes and wanted to warn him of Peter’s and Odette’s arrest. Only when this had been accomplished would he return to London. In the meantime he would keep his messages as short as possible and would stay out of touch for the next week.
Three days later two more of Buckmaster’s agents were arrested. They were Germaine Tambour and her sister Madeleine, whose contacts had been invaluable to F section and whose house had been used by a group of key agents (including Peter) as a letter box and meeting place.
It was a major setback for Buckmaster, and I pretended not to see him when I passed him in the corridor on his way to the Signals Office. He was deeply involved with all his agents, but Peter was in a special category. He was not only Buckmaster’s friend but a member of his headquarters staff with a detailed knowledge of his forward planning, and Maurice now had to face the likelihood that two of his principal circuits (Prosper and Carte) had collapsed. He sent a batch of messages to the field warning his agents not to use safe houses frequented by Peter, Odette and the Tambo
ur sisters, and gave them a list of new ones which they must start using immediately.
It was left to Duke Street to provide April’s only good news.
On 16 April de Gaulle recalled Passy, Brossolette and Tommy from France. They were picked up by Lysander close to midnight and resumed their duties in London early next morning.
I checked that Tommy’s cigar lay in state next to the photo of the Louis–Schmeling fight which Rabinovitch had given me. They were still the only objects in my desk I could be sure of finding.
*
On 18 April Kale’s first report on the Dutch secret army was transmitted by Cucumber. It was perfectly encoded in Cucumber’s reserve poem number three and gave a detailed analysis of the progress being made in the sixteen provinces where the main recruitment was taking place.
On 21 April Netball, Gherkin and Lacrosse were dropped into Holland with twenty-eight containers and seven packages.
On 22 April Ebenezer confirmed Lacrosse’s safe arrival. He added that more supply operations would be very welcome in the near future and that eight tommy guns should be included. He also needed a large quantity of abrasives (my comments on supplying them were open to offer).
On the same night Cucumber reported the safe arrival of Netball and Gherkin, and asked when the next shipment of containers could be expected.
Compliant as ever, London assured him that dropping operations would continue until the end of the moon period on 25 April but would be cancelled during the dark period and resumed when the new moon started on 9 May.
Later the same day (23 April) London assured Ebenezer that six containers would be despatched to him in the next moon period but warned him that the address in Switzerland used by Potato for his innocent letters was no longer safe.*
