Madeleine's War

by Peter Watson

  I never saw Justine again, and with good reason. The rogue agent within SC2 turned out to be—as you may have guessed—none other than Roland Kemp. Ulrich Kolbe had been correct in that Roland was neither solely a British SC2 agent nor a Gestapo agent—he was in fact a Soviet mole, playing each side off against the other.

  The evidence against him was there, in a way. His circuit was one of two not compromised by the Gestapo. Like Monique Brèger, he knew that if his circuit had been the only one not infiltrated, it would have looked suspicious. So he didn’t drop all of our people in the soup. Should I have registered that Roland had a shiny new lighter, and put that together with Monique’s story that Kolbe had been given an English model which he hid away after she noticed it? I suppose I should have done—but I didn’t.

  And it was he, you will remember, who introduced Justine to me. Roland and François Perrault had instructed her to get to know me, and yes, to sleep with me, to pretend she loved me, all in the hope that eventually we would be married, and she would move to London as the wife of someone high up in British intelligence—the classic “sleeper,” in fact. Gilles, her boyfriend in Nancy, didn’t exist. She invented him so she could turn up later, after their “fight,” and worm her way into my bed, to advance our relationship. When we were interviewing Kolbe, she had reacted with horror when she thought he was about to reveal the names of the double agents. Had he done so, the whole set of events would have blown up in her face. All the tears she shed in the restaurant where we had our last lunch were for Perrault, not for me.

  Justine had never loved me, and Perrault wasn’t quite so blameless as I thought. He wasn’t aware of Madeleine’s links to me, or to Philippe, when he had included her name on his intelligence lists as a captured SC2 agent. That was just as well. But he had been willing to use me in the communist cause, and that meant I didn’t feel quite so badly about what I had done to him.

  We found out all this only after Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to Russia last year, and certain documents were discovered in what they left behind. Roland had been recruited, like all the other Cambridge spies, at university before the war. He’s now in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight.

  Kolbe had said there were two enemy agents in SC2, but that was probably mischief on his part, to make us waste time looking for someone who wasn’t there, a trick much as the one I had devised about SC1 and SC2. There was no mention of a second spy in the Burgess and Maclean papers. Kolbe’s trick certainly worked on me. On the strength of it, I doubted Madeleine for weeks.

  Hilary got the knighthood he always wanted, but he didn’t have much time to enjoy it. The headache he had complained about when I called him from Paris turned out to be not just a headache but the early warnings of the brain tumour that killed him in 1947. He left me a pair of his brogues in his will—dead men’s shoes.

  After the war I was promoted and transferred to a new outfit, but since that organization I became part of still exists, unlike SC2, I can’t give its name.

  I fell into the habit of taking Philippa (never Pippa) to see her grandmother in Blakeney, and it was on one of those occasions that I met Elizabeth, when we shared a taxi from King’s Lynn in the rain. She is a headmistress at a school in Sussex, a few miles from the Southwater meadow from where Madeleine flew to France on the night of the last full moon before the invasion.

  Elizabeth’s job comes with a house and so we divide our time between my flat in Hamilton Place and her house in Sussex. Philippa, who is eight now, has just started at Elizabeth’s school, where she is shaping up to be no less of a tomboy than her mother. She has her mother’s unruly Botticelli hair and as I said, the same whisky-brown eyes.

  Whisky is still my vice, more than ever.

  All four of us (I’m not forgetting Zola) walk in that Southwater meadow from time to time. Elizabeth understands, and both Philippa and Zola—who are the best of friends—love it.

  But not at night. Never by moonlight.

  London, 1952

  · AFTERWORD ·

  Madeleine’s War is fiction: the plot and the characters have been invented. But the background—the context—is real.

  SC2 is modeled on SOE, the Special Operations Executive, set up by Prime Minister Winston Churchill to parachute agents—male and female—behind enemy lines in occupied territories all over Europe, to carry out acts of sabotage and to prepare Resistance workers for an uprising when the invasion occurred. The existence of the organization—especially its use of women—was a closely guarded secret for several years.

  The female agents were often recruited through FANY, and were trained in remote locations in Scotland and England, where they were taught sabotage techniques, communications skills, disguise, and how to resist interrogation because, as stated in the text, half of them were caught within six months of being dropped behind enemy lines. As part of their training, recruits were taught how to spot if they were being followed, and how to lose a tail when it was necessary. They were sent on exercises where they had to live off the land in the most inhospitable parts of the Highlands. As described, they were made to memorize a poem that could be used as the basis for code should their one-time pads be lost or used up. When they were parachuted into occupied territory, their silk one-time pads were sewn into their clothing. They were not sent out into the field until they could transmit Morse code signals of at least forty words per minute.

  Carborundum powder—silicon carbide—was used to disable the axles of railway wagons, and cyanoacrylate was developed as a gunsight but found wider use as a powerful adhesive. All efforts were made to make training as realistic as possible, with recruits being duped at critical times.

  The Paris Gestapo were headquartered in the avenue Foch, where they had several prison cells for interrogation purposes. The Gestapo did penetrate SOE security, and did break their codes. They announced this to SOE in a series of dramatic communiqués following D-Day and just before they withdrew from their locations in Paris and elsewhere in occupied France. This news was leaked to Members of Parliament, and this is how the existence of SOE was revealed.

  The headquarters of SOE were near Baker Street, much as were those of SC2, hidden behind a misleading “front” set-up. They did provide the BBC with its nightly broadcast of mysterious codes, many of which were made up.

  There was a ten-mile coastal exclusion zone around the southern half of Britain throughout most of the war.

  Winston Churchill did operate much of the time from a bunker below ground, under King Charles Steps, off Whitehall. These offices may now be visited as a tourist attraction.

  The Manhattan Project—the Allies’ top-secret operation to create an atomic bomb—employed hundreds of scientists of many nationalities in Los Alamos in the remote New Mexico desert, and French physicists were central to the success of the development of nuclear physics, winning Nobel Prizes for their efforts. The communists in France were at odds for most of the later months of the war with General de Gaulle, who worried about their links with Soviet Russia. He also tried to play up the role of French forces in the liberation of the country, and sought to minimize the role played by British and other Allied special forces.

  After the invasion of 1944, when Allied forces swept south and then east through northern France towards Paris, German forces did hold out at three Atlantic ports where they had submarine bases: Brest, St. Nazaire, and La Rochelle. The latter two locations were in areas honeycombed with underground caves; and it was in one of these, at Lascaux, that during the war prehistoric paintings were discovered, showing many animals, some of which were extinct.

  All the prisoner-of-war camps and concentration camps existed just as described in the text. Lysanders were one type of small aircraft used to drop agents into occupied territory and, most of the time, they flew when the moon was full.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Peter Watson is a well-known and respected historian whose books are published in twenty-five languages. He was edu
cated at the Universities of Durham, London, and Rome, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and numerous publications in the United Kingdom. From 1997 to 2007 he was a research associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. He has written two previous novels, Gifts of War and The Clouds Beneath the Sun, under the pen name Mackenzie Ford.