Avenue of Spies

by Alex Kershaw

  Kennan had left Brussels that morning of July 2, 1940. A slim, balding thirty-six-year-old destined to become one of the great statesmen of the twentieth century, he was at the wheel of a rickety Chevrolet. Beside him sat Donald Coster, the volunteer ambulance driver who had witnessed the Blitzkrieg late that spring. Coster had told Kennan he was trying to get back to Paris to recover his clothes. It was a rather odd motive for leaving Brussels in a hurry, a poor rationale for making the hazardous and distressing journey through the ruins of northern France. The two Americans had water and some chocolate to fortify them, and had been warned that the country between Brussels and Paris was, in Kennan’s words, as “uncharitable to travelers as a desert.” The devastation was enormous. Some towns were totally gutted.

  On June 14, Coster had persuaded a Belgian Red Cross official to drive him to Brussels, where he and other Americans were granted safety at the American embassy. Before long, Coster encountered Kennan, who agreed to give him a lift to Paris. Coster had not told Kennan that he was trying to stay a step ahead of the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr, or the Gestapo, or perhaps both. But he had told him he could not sit around and wait for the Germans to reach Brussels. He had to keep moving.

  German troops were up ahead. The Chevrolet slowed. Kennan pulled out his diplomatic pass. Anxious seconds followed as the Germans examined it. The Americans were allowed through but it was slow going. Traumatized refugees returning to their homes clogged the roads. Finally, Paris was in sight. It was July 3 when Kennan dropped Coster off at the Hôtel Bristol, on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, not far from the Élysée Palace. The grand hotel with a spacious courtyard was one of Paris’s finest and home to a disparate band of American refugees.

  Soon, though, Coster was starting to feel positively paranoid, like a “sitting duck.” Germans were everywhere, “all over the place,” he remembered, “filling the best hotels, shopping with their Credit Marks in the luxury shops: snapping cameras and jotting down notes in their pocket diaries. Busloads of soldiers made conducted tours of the principal monuments.” The hotel’s telephone was working. But when he picked it up, he heard clicks as the line opened to listeners at German headquarters. He had to keep moving.

  One day that July, Coster left the hotel. He headed northwest, crossing the Seine, and made his way to the American Hospital in Neuilly. Somehow he knew of an American doctor called Sumner Jackson. Once he had found him, he asked the harried surgeon—a decorated veteran of the First World War, and well-known figure in expatriate circles—for help. Could he hide in the hospital until it could somehow be arranged for him to get out of France undetected by the Gestapo or the Abwehr, German military intelligence?

  It was a momentous decision for Sumner. He knew the risks were enormous. Coster was clearly on the run. Why else would he need to hide in the American Hospital? But how did he know about Sumner? If the Germans made a surprise visit, or their intelligence services tracked Coster to the hospital, what would happen? Sumner had a family to worry about, unlike in the last war. Now, suddenly, he was being faced with a defining choice, far more significant than whether or not to listen secretly to de Gaulle on the BBC. If he helped Coster, hiding him from his pursuers, he would be gambling not just with his own life but with the lives of those he cared most about: his family and the people at the American Hospital.

  —

  THE ALLIER River flowed fast past Phillip Jackson, standing on a riverbank with a fishing rod. Nearby was the free-spirited French girl, Paulette, around his age, the daughter of the man who owned the inn where Phillip, Toquette, and his aunt Tat were staying. The girl was a little cross-eyed, not at all attractive, and a true tomboy, but Phillip thoroughly enjoyed her company. She had a talent for fishing and had taught him several tricks, including how to set poaching lines in the gushing rock-strewn river at night to catch eel and trout. Phillip enjoyed the risk, the adventure, and spent most days with her, getting up early so the pair of them could sneak out of the inn, dew soaking their shoes, and check their lines, baited with gudgeon, before anyone came along and they were caught.

  For Phillip, that summer of 1940 was a wonderful interlude, never to be forgotten. He loved being in nature, fishing, hunting, and studying wildlife. One of his favorite books, which he had read from cover to cover, was La Pêche et les Poissons, an illustrated dictionary of fish and fishing. He knew all about the migration of the silver-backed salmon, how they swam across the mighty Atlantic to waters around Greenland and returned every couple of years to spawn in the Allier. He had learned to hunt and shoot with his father, bagging his first prey—a barn owl—with a 9mm child’s rifle two years before. During summers in Normandy before the war, a local fisherman, René Ligard, had shown Phillip how to gather gray shrimp with a large net when he wasn’t teaching the boy, at Sumner’s insistence, how to swim, which entailed coping with the cold and choppy waters of the English Channel.

  Phillip adored animals. But it was Toquette who had a true obsession with them. Along the Avenue Foch, she was known as “la mère des animaux”—the mother of animals. She had even been seen on several occasions leading a lamb along the avenue so it could graze on the lush lawns that flanked the riding paths. She took in every stray that came her way, even caring for a fox. At one point Phillip had counted no less than twenty-seven animals in the house and garden at Avenue Foch. Before the war, with his mother’s blessing, he had bred white mice to feed two snakes in an aquarium he kept in his bedroom. He sold the spares down on the quays along the Seine for pocket money.

  Toquette’s sister, Tat, kept a diary that summer. The twelfth of August was a particularly pleasant day, she noted, as she watched Toquette chase butterflies with Phillip in a meadow beside the Allier River. It was clear that her sister and nephew were as close as a mother and only child could be. The idyll was only briefly disturbed by the sight of a German fighter plane passing over, black crosses on its wings.

  —

  BACK IN Paris, Sumner was just as busy after the occupation as before. He expanded the American Hospital’s activities, determined to help at least some of the two million Frenchmen who had been taken prisoner by the Germans. Each morning Sumner watched from his terrace as a line of ambulances, manned by American and French volunteers and packed with bread and other essential products, left the hospital bound for camps around Paris where some 250,000 of the POWs languished. It enraged Sumner, who was at the best of times feared by patients and colleagues alike for his fierce temper, that more was not done to provide food and medicine to the camps. He blamed the situation on what he called the “bullshit bureaucracy of old men.”

  Sumner fought to get as much help to the camps as possible. Many of the ambulances sent out with food and other aid returned with seriously ill patients, who were struck by the cold air of neutrality in the hospital but soon warmed to Sumner despite his stern demeanor. According to one observer, these patients “feared and loved him. He was often intimidating, but he was mostly gentle, well read and forever telling interesting stories about America and the Great War.” He attended to as many of the POWs as he could, in the process learning a great deal about the camps and their locations and the security measures the Germans had or had not taken.

  Sumner saw an opportunity to do more than just treat the sick. He went a dangerous step further by falsifying records so that when some prisoners had recovered they were listed as deceased and did not have to return to captivity. Because the Germans had no presence in the hospital—not even sentries posted at the entrances—Sumner was able to hide some of these patients until they could safely disappear. A detailed report from the hospital to the United States, where its governors were based, of course made no mention of Sumner’s covert actions. Instead, it stressed that “too much praise cannot be given to Dr. Sumner W. Jackson, who had been a member of the attending Staff since 1925 and who accepted the professional supervision of the wounded for the period of the war.”

  Among Sumner’s patients
was a French-Jewish officer, known to others on his ward only as “Captain M,” who told a fellow patient that he had to escape France because the Germans had already warned him he would not be treated as a French officer but as a Jew, who would not be afforded any rights. Sumner made sure that when Captain M did leave his ward for good, there was no record of his stay in the hospital. The same was true of Donald Coster, the American ambulance driver, whom he had in fact kept hidden in the hospital’s basement until false papers could be found for him a week after his arrival.

  Two years later, in the fall of 1942, Coster would be one of twelve American spies operating in Morocco, known as “FDR’s Apostles,” who would help pave the way for Operation Torch, the Allies’ successful invasion of North Africa. Coster told a researcher in an interview in 1981 that it was Sumner, and no other, who had concealed him in the basement. Perhaps Kennan had provided Coster with Sumner’s name. The United States had no formal foreign intelligence service at this time: America’s spies worked for the State Department, most often under the guise of diplomats like Kennan.

  During his time as an ambulance driver, Coster had in all likelihood also been collecting intelligence for the United States: firsthand reports on the might of the Wehrmacht and the terrors of Blitzkrieg. It remains unclear if he believed Sumner was also an intelligence asset. But somehow, after meeting with the tall doctor from Maine, he managed to acquire the right papers and perhaps a new identity to allow him later that July to make his way through France and Spain to Lisbon. “And there,” he recalled, “was a sight I had often despaired of ever seeing again—an American ship, ready to sail for New York.”

  —

  SADLY FOR PHILLIP, his summer vacation of 1940 ended all too soon. Sumner learned that the Germans were requisitioning buildings throughout Paris. Even though he had been assured by the American embassy that the Germans would leave American properties well alone, he wanted to make doubly sure the Nazis did not seize the family’s homes at 11, Avenue Foch, and in Enghien. They had to be occupied if they were to stay out of the hands of the Nazis, just as the hospital needed to be full of patients to prevent the Germans from moving their own troops in. It was decided that Tat would stay in Enghien, while Phillip and Toquette returned to their first-floor home on Paris’s most prestigious avenue.

  Phillip and Toquette arrived back in Paris on August 19, 1940. The city looked very different to Phillip. He had never seen so many bicycles and so few cars. The Place de l’Étoile resembled a scene from a schoolbook about Shanghai or Peking with velotaxis and pushcarts everywhere. Swastikas, bloodred and garish, flew from buildings along the Avenue Foch. There were new signs outside restaurants around the Place de l’Étoile: “Mann Spricht Deutsch” (“German Spoken Here”). The smug Germans in gray uniforms gathering at the upscale boîtes and bars near Phillip’s home were not lean and mean, terrifying Supermen—the Aryan storm troopers of June. They were not shock troops. Those men had moved on. The legions of Fritzes in field-gray uniforms with cameras were mostly wide-eyed tourists eager to see the greatest prize of the Third Reich.

  Barely ten weeks into the occupation, Parisians were starting to chafe against rationing and other restrictions despite their occupiers going to extraordinary lengths to foster good relations. German soldiers were not allowed to smoke or loosen their ties in public, buy cocaine in bars, go swimming in the Seine, sing or dance in the street, ride horses in the Bois de Boulogne, be seen with black or Jewish women, or buy pornography. They could visit certain designated brothels only. However, the last rule was universally disobeyed: within the first month of the occupation, more than 750 hotels and 300 restaurants were placed on a German soldiers’ no-go list due to rampant prostitution.

  The Eiffel Tower, which Phillip could clearly see in all its majesty from the Trocadéro, was hung with a giant sign: “Deutschland Siegt an Allen Fronten” (“Germany Is Victorious Everywhere”).

  SIX

  WINGED VICTORY

  THE BLACK GESTAPO car pulled up in front of armed guards by a sentry box at 72, Avenue Foch. The guards had the silver runes of the SS on the lapels of their uniforms and a silver skull, the famous death’s-head symbol, on their caps. SS-Standartenführer Helmut Knochen had only to step out of the car and take a few brisk paces to reach the imposing entrance to the five-story villa from the Second Empire period, two hundred yards to the east of the Jacksons’ home. On the northern side of the avenue, it boasted wide staircases and a well-tended private garden, and had the notable distinction of being the first of many buildings on Avenue Foch to be requisitioned by the Germans.

  Knochen’s office was a large, well-lit room with high ceilings. The furniture was as elegant as the building, which before the war had been called the Hôtel Lyon-Broussac. After several weeks at the Hôtel du Louvre, he had set up Gestapo headquarters at number 72. So opposed to the SS “black men” were the German general staff that it had taken quite some time before Knochen and his men were even allowed to don their uniforms. In any case, Knochen preferred most days to wear well-cut gray tweed suits. Though formally allowed to stay in Paris, he and his two dozen colleagues did not yet have the power to make arrests. They were still a puny bridgehead, busy creating connections and gathering intelligence, waiting patiently for the day when they would gain real power.

  It was no accident that Knochen and his fellow Gestapo had chosen the Avenue Foch as their stomping ground. It was, after all, arguably the most exclusive address in all of Europe, boasting mansions of the Rothschilds, the Aga Khan and other royalty, and the American socialite Florence Jay Gould. And, of course, it bore the name of Marshal Foch, the colossus to whom the Germans had surrendered in World War I. The symbolism of setting up their base on the street named after Hitler’s most despised Frenchman was quite deliberate. Even the SS were capable of irony.

  Early that fall of 1940, Knochen started to lay down the foundations for the SS state that he hoped to help establish eventually in France. He began to recruit a private army of informers and enforcers who would carry out some of the more unpleasant tasks required, jobs he didn’t want to be officially associated with, errands essential to exerting his will—spying, bribery, informing, torture, and assassination. Once the French had recovered from the shock and trauma of defeat, such practices would be essential to maintaining order and security.

  Knochen’s most able recruits were easy to locate—all the Gestapo had to do was trawl local prisons for the toughest career criminals, men like thirty-eight-year-old Henri Lafont, a charismatic and seasoned bank robber, who would soon set up a torture chamber at 93, Rue Lauriston, less than a mile from Avenue Foch. Perhaps no other sociopath, not even Knochen’s closest SS colleagues, would see how low “Dr. Bones” was prepared to stoop in his quest to pull the levers of true power.

  Knochen’s official functions also continued and he prepared detailed reports on the political situation in France for his SS superiors in Berlin. German rule had been established with remarkable ease. The French had proven surprisingly accommodating. Following the armistice on June 22, the French Third Republic had been dissolved and France partitioned. An unelected regime headed by the deeply reactionary Marshal Pétain had been established in Vichy, capital of the so-called Unoccupied Zone, which encompassed most of central and southern France. Soon after, on July 11, the notorious appeaser, fifty-eight-year-old Pierre Laval, became France’s 120th prime minister, serving under Pétain, and rapidly fostered excellent relations with Occupied France’s new masters, the Germans. The eighty-four-year-old Pétain had commanded French forces in World War I and to many traumatized and frightened French the “Lion of Verdun” with the distinctive white handlebar mustache was more than ever the nation’s savior. They agreed with him when he blamed an unholy trinity of socialists, agnostics, and urban intellectuals for France’s defeat. Liberal decadence had seen France humiliated as never before in her long martial history. The republican motto of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” (“Freedom, equality
, brotherhood”) was soon abandoned under Pétain’s “National Revolution,” which illegally replaced the French Third Republic, in favor of a slogan that better fitted his authoritarian and increasingly fascist regime: “Travail, famille, patrie” (“Work, family, fatherland”).

  On September 4, from his spacious new office at number 72, Knochen noted in one missive to Berlin that an “anti-German attitude is beginning to take ground.” He could not yet detect any signs of armed resistance. But he knew it was only a matter of time before some of the youths, who made “loud whistles” in cinemas when newsreels showed Hitler or Goering, would do more than clap loudly at bomb damage caused by the British, and strike back with bullets and bombs.

  It did not take Knochen long to familiarize himself with his new neighborhood and its many attractions. Paris was a different city from the one he had come to know in 1937 on an extended stay. Then cars had scarred the grand boulevards, coughing exhaust fumes. Now the city was more beguiling than ever. Knochen could appreciate its elegant lines, the uncluttered avenues and boulevards given a new perspective. With the city stripped by German decree of civilian cars and trucks, trees could breathe deep again, and that fall of 1940 the foliage, russet and golden, would stay longer than before. Sounds from previous centuries returned: the hammering of a cobbler or a blacksmith. Some evenings Knochen would have heard nightingales sing as he strolled up the avenue toward the Place de l’Étoile, breathing air that was almost as pure as that in Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s mountain retreat.