by Alex Kershaw
Bickler’s victims: While SOE enjoyed success elsewhere in occupied Europe, notably the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, in France it had a decidedly mixed record. Many of its agents were rushed into the field with plenty of guts but insufficient training and were caught with almost comical ease. Some of SOE’s brave public schoolboys had actually arrived in Paris wearing brogue shoes never seen in France, carrying obviously fake ration cards, and speaking such bad French that they had only to open their mouths to get arrested. As one captured SOE agent, Francis Cammaerts, recalled: “Those who tried to play games with the Germans were bound to lose. We were amateurs, they were professionals, and there was no hope of outsmarting them. They were skillful manipulators of information and made it appear they knew more than they did.” Several captured SOE agents would later confirm that Kieffer was a skilled interrogator who rarely resorted to violence. His ever-obedient driver and a translator took over when prisoners proved uncooperative. “Well, the game is up,” Kieffer often began his interviews with captured British public schoolboys. Then he would smile and point to the F Section organizational chart. “You seem to know more than I do,” blurted one agent. “We know much more even than you think,” replied Kieffer. “The documents that were sent to your country were read by our people before they were read by you.” Kieffer needed no reminding of the critical importance of his work. He knew that no less than Adolf Hitler had a keen interest in his counterintelligence operations on Avenue Foch. Failure was completely out of the question.
orders from General de Gaulle: Château de Vincennes military archives, 17P 136, Goélette Frégate file.
intelligence organization in London: Francis Deloche de Noyelle, interview with author.
“Colonel Passy”: Thirty-two-year-old Passy’s real name was in fact Andre De Wavrin. A legendary and controversial figure in the history of the resistance, he had been born in Paris, the son of a businessman, and had joined General Charles de Gaulle in London in 1940, taking charge of the Free French’s military intelligence unit, the BCRA, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action. On February 23 that year, he had parachuted into France to help unify the nascent resistance forces in France.
“Would you be willing to help?”: Francis Deloche de Noyelle, interview with author.
“did not hesitate for a second”: Ibid.
of their only child: Ibid.
It was safer that way: Phillip Jackson, interview with author.
member of the network: Ibid.
would never allow it: Radio France International, November 11, 2010.
been born in Switzerland: Phillip Jackson, interview with author.
across the rough pasture: National Archives UK, HS 9/421.
as agent BOE/48: Robert Marshall, All the King’s Men (New York: Harper-Collins, 1988), 186.
sent to the French resistance: Ibid., 261.
dying days of the war: A year before, in the summer of 1942, SOE had decided to set up a network in Paris called Prosper. All went well at first. But then on January 22, 1943, Déricourt had arrived in France from London. It was his job to find suitable places for Lysanders to land by moonlight and to organize reception parties that would, eventually, pick up over fifty British agents. In early spring 1943, radio operator Jack Agazarian became increasingly suspicious of Déricourt. After being returned to London from France on June 16, he informed his superiors at SOE headquarters on Baker Street of his doubts about Déricourt’s loyalty. His bosses refused to believe Déricourt was working for the Germans and he was allowed to stay on in France.
titled “Pour Prosper”: Robert Marshall, All The King’s Men, 181.
hauled to Avenue Foch by the Gestapo: Another remarkable Prosper agent, twenty-nine-year-old Noor Inayat Khan, alias Nora Baker, only just managed to avoid arrest and quickly reported back by radio to London, informing SOE of the disaster.
“engaged in the breaking” of their network: Robert Marshall, All The King’s Men, 186.
agents to their eventual deaths: National Archives UK, WO/235.
he was brutally tortured: The Germans had first arrested Moulin, the elected head of the Eure-et-Loire region, in June 1940 after he had refused to sign a German document that incorrectly pinned blame on black French Army troops for civilian atrocities. A man of high principle, he had then tried to kill himself rather than cooperate with the Nazis, slashing his throat with a piece of broken glass. Fortunately for France, he had been saved. Then, in November 1940, the Vichy government had ordered him to dismiss all socialist officials in his region of France. When he had refused, Pétain’s regime removed him from office. Moulin had promptly joined the nascent French resistance and had managed to get to London in September 1941, under the false identity of Joseph Jean Mercier, where he had met General Charles de Gaulle, who had asked him to return to France to unify several resistance groups, to set up a coordinated “army of the shadows.” That spring of 1943 he had finally succeeded in doing so but in the process his true identity had been revealed to the Gestapo. On May 7, as a hunted man, he had written to de Gaulle in London: “I am now being sought by Vichy and the Gestapo who, as a result of practices adopted by certain elements in the Resistance movements, are fully aware of my identity and my activities. I am resolved to hold on as long as possible, but if I disappear, I shall not have time to notify my successors.”
few hundred yards from the American Hospital: www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/barbie.html.
“be lucky if he does”: www.onac-vg.fr/files/uploads/jean_moulin_lieux_de_memoire.pdf.
11: THE LAST SUMMER
That morning, Phillip pulled: Charles Glass, Americans in Paris, 321. See also Hal Vaughan, Doctor to the Resistance, 79–80.
grandeur of Haussmann’s boulevards: Phillip Jackson, interview with author.
raging in the skies above: Ibid.
“shrapnel falling everywhere”: Ibid.
tail of a B-17 bomber: National Archives, US, EE-234.
blowing both their heads off: Joe Manos, interview with author.
felt himself falling into space: Joe Manos, Escape and Evasion report, EE 234, National Archives, US. Report made November 30, 1943.
landed on rocky ground: Joe Manos, interview with author.
some of his fellow crew members: Ibid.
“use by the troops”: National Archives, US, EE-234.
amid the other passengers: Joe Manos, interview with author.
was the French Legion of Honor: Ibid.
“That’s a crazy idea”: Joe Manos, Escape and Evasion report, NARA.
at number 11, Avenue Foch: Don Lasseter, Their Deeds of Valor, 373.
“is left of my house”: Phillip Jackson, interview with author.
near the docks: Ibid.
his equally brave wife: Joe Manos, interview with author; Réseau Goélette file, 17 P 136, Château de Vincennes military archives.
whom operated in Brittany: Goélette Frégate archives, 17 P 136, Château de Vincennes, Paris.
by motor torpedo boat: Ibid.
as the British were concerned: Phillip Jackson, interview with author.
Allied intelligence of the war: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3663005.stm.
including the one at 11, Avenue Foch: Phillip Jackson, interview with author.
Hitler’s first concentration camp: Fritz Molden, interview with author.
was wounded in late 1941: Blake Ehrlich, Resistance—France 1940–1945 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 235.
sent back to Germany: Fritz Molden, interview with author.
“Étienne Paul Provost”: Hal Vaughan, Doctor to the Resistance, 103–4.
“designs of the V-1 rocket”: Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre, Is Paris Burning? (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2000), 190. According to these authors: “In Paris, the only trace that now remains of the mysterious Etienne Paul Provost is a dusty dossier in a two-room apartment on
the rue Royer-Collard. There, in the fading archives of the Goélette network, in a brown folder marked “CLAYREC RJ4570,” are the records of Posch-Pastor’s service with the network and a copy of his citations.” Source: Ibid.
“might have been written off”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday, 1948), 260. Von Camperfeld was a notable success story. But the broader picture for British intelligence, especially SOE’s F Section, was far from inspiring. By October 1943, Hans Kieffer had been so successful that only one operative for SOE was still at large in Paris, twenty-nine-year-old Noor Inayat Khan, code-named Madeleine. A descendant of the Indian ruler Tipu Sultan, she had been born in Russia to an Indian Muslim father and American mother, raised in Britain and France, recruited by the SOE that February, and then dropped into France by Lysander as the first female SOE radio operator sent to help the French resistance.
It was remarkable that Madeleine was able to evade capture in Paris for so long given the dragnet of informers and the sophisticated radio detection headquartered at Avenue Foch. By moving constantly, using several addresses, including one near the American Hospital in Neuilly, transmitting to London in perfect code, changing her identity by dyeing her jet black hair, and trusting her instincts, she managed to stay a step ahead of Knochen’s men. Several times, his radio experts, circling Paris in the back of disguised vans, detected her on the airwaves but were unable to track her down in time: it took around half an hour to zero in on a transmission. Noor was infuriatingly elusive, transmitting for just a few minutes and changing the crystals in her radio set to confuse her pursuers.
There were several close calls. At one point she tried to hang the aerial for her transmitter from a tree near her apartment in Neuilly when she heard a German voice. “May I help you?” asked a German officer in French. Yes, he could, she calmly replied, and the German promptly helped her attach the seventy-foot-long aerial to the tree, assuming Noor wanted to listen to music on the radio. On another occasion, while traveling on the metro, carrying her thirty-pound A Mark II transmitter/receiver inside a small suitcase, two German soldiers approached and demanded to see inside the case. “A cinematographic apparatus,” she said without missing a beat. She opened the case slightly and to her relief saw that the Germans were clueless. “Well, you can see what it is,” she said. “You can see all the little bulbs.” The soldiers then left her alone.
Finally, Madeleine ran out of luck. As with so many SOE agents, she was betrayed. Early that October, Renée Garry, the sister of the head agent of the “Cinema” and “Phono” circuits, allegedly contacted Hans Kieffer at 84, Avenue Foch. Kieffer promptly dispatched his Swiss-born translator, bespectacled Ernst Vogt, code-named “Andre,” to meet with Renée, who said she would reveal a British radio operator if she was paid 100,000 francs, around 500 pounds or $2,000 in 1943.
Vogt readily agreed. He was authorized to pay far more than she was asking. Noor was being offered at a bargain price. The going rate for an SOE agent was a million francs. Renée was paid and then revealed that Noor kept her wireless set at a house on the Rue de la Faisanderie, “parallel to the Avenue du General Serrail, which led off the Avenue Foch.” In fact, her latest safe house could be seen from 84, Avenue Foch.
A couple of days later, on October 13, 1943, Vogt and a handsome Frenchman named Pierre Cartaud, also working for the Gestapo, waited for Noor at the specified address. Another agent spotted Noor entering a patisserie nearby. She was wearing a blue dress trimmed with white and a dark hat. She left the patisserie and two agents started to tail her. She turned around, saw them, and then disappeared around a corner. They gave chase but could not find her. For hours, they combed Avenue Foch and nearby streets.
Noor arrived at the safe house later that day. She turned the key in a lock on a door to an apartment. Behind the door stood Pierre Cartaud. As she entered, he tried to arrest her, grabbing her by the hands, but Noor bit his wrists savagely, drawing blood. He tried to push her onto a sofa to handcuff her but she struggled fiercely once again. So he drew his gun from his jacket and threatened to shoot her. Using one hand to aim at her, with the other he picked up a telephone and called Avenue Foch. Kieffer immediately sent Vogt and two other men for backup. Vogt later told British intelligence that when he arrived “Cartaud was standing covering her from the farthest possible corner of the room and Madeleine, sitting bolt upright on the couch, was clawing at the air in her frustrated desire to get at him, and looked exactly like a tigress.”
“Sales Boche! (Dirty Germans!),” she kept crying.
Vogt had never seen such rage.
Madeleine was quickly taken to 84, Avenue Foch, less than a hundred yards away. Kieffer was delighted. He had finally caught the last British member of the SOE Prosper network. But, to Kieffer’s great frustration, she refused to say a word for the first forty-eight hours, as had been instructed by her SOE trainers, and then when she then did open her mouth she proved to be a superb liar. Nevertheless, Kieffer was able to use her indirectly—his agents had meanwhile discovered her notebooks. Although it was strictly forbidden, she had copied down all the messages she had sent as an SOE operative.
Noor refused to reveal any secret codes when presented with the notebooks, but Kieffer knew enough to put her wireless into play, sending false messages from her to SOE headquarters in London. Noor had been dubbed “Bang Away Lulu,” so heavy was her touch on the wireless keys, yet no one at Baker Street’s SOE headquarters noticed the changes in her style of transmission, in particular her “fist”—the tempo with which she tapped the keys when she sent her Morse code. There was no doubting the great courage of its agents in the field, but SOE’s senior command was at times woefully amateurish when compared to the Gestapo operations on Avenue Foch. One French agent who hid Noor at her home in Paris, Emily Balachowsky, later held SOE in utter contempt: “I believe in a total incompetence of the service.”
The Funkspiel with Madeleine’s radio set resulted in yet another coup for the former policeman from Karlsruhe, Major Hans Kieffer: London fell for the fake Madeleine and sent three more of its agents, who were arrested by his men as soon as they landed by parachute. Madeleine herself remained uncooperative, despite continued torture and interrogation. On November 25, 1943, at about three in the morning, Kieffer was awakened in his room on the fourth floor of 84, Avenue Foch by a guard. “Bob [an SOE agent] and Madeleine had escaped,” recalled Kieffer. “They, with the French resistance leader, Colonel Faye, had broken through the iron bars in the cells leading to the window of the ceiling and they climbed up onto the flat roof. By means of strips of blankets and sheets, knotted together, they let themselves down onto the balcony on the third storey of a neighboring house and there smashed a window and entered the apartment.”
Noor managed to make it out of the apartment and onto Avenue Foch. Alerted to her flight, several began a manhunt. Noor was soon spotted and chased down a one-way street, where she was cornered and arrested at gunpoint. According to Kieffer, Noor refused to give her “word of honor” that she would not “attempt any further escapes.” She was sent to Germany on November 27, 1943, “for safe custody” and placed in solitary confinement, shackled in chains. Classified as “highly dangerous,” she continued to refuse to say a word that might help. On September 13, 1944, at Dachau concentration camp, she would be executed with a single shot to the back of the head. Her body would then be cremated. The SS were rigorous: there was to be no physical trace left behind. The last word she uttered before being murdered, aged thirty, on active service for her country was “Liberté.”
for much of the war: Frank Griffiths, Winged Hours (London: William Kimber, 1981), 92.
get to Switzerland: www.lessorsavoyard.fr/Actualite/Annecy/2012/08/11/article_15_aout_1943_un_bombardier_anglais_s_ecr.shtml.
eating his petit déjeuner: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80027123.
“ ‘tour of Europe’!”: Fran
k Griffiths, Winged Hours, 120.
striking distance of Spain: Joe Manos, interview with author.
“bound to be challenged”: Frank Griffiths, Winged Hours, 128.
“the lights of Spain”: Ibid., 135.
left for Britain by plane: Joe Manos, Escape and Evasion report, NARA.
including Sumner and Toquette Jackson: Over seventy years later, in 2014, Manos would still be enormously grateful to them.
12: THE LAST METRO
if the Germans lost the war: Clara Longworth de Chambrun, Shadows Lengthen, 175.
more or less as they pleased: Matthew Cobb, The Resistance, 220.
“We’ll all be hanged”: Yves Pourcher, Pierre Laval Vu par Sa Fille, 312.
they slept beside him: Carmen Callil, Bad Faith, 309.
“or a wooden crate”: David Schoenbrun, Soldiers of the Night (New York: New American Library, 1981), 323.
parked outside most cafés: Ibid., 321.
“Germans were quartered”: Alice-Leone Moats, No Passport for Paris (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1945), 228–246.
low on General de Gaulle: Phillip Jackson, interview with author.
“listening to the BBC”: Michael Neiberg, The Blood of Free Men (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 9.
just around the corner: Cécile Desprairies, Paris dans la Collaboration, 470.
mansions all along Avenue Foch: www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/1705143/BERGER,%20FRIEDRICH_0006.pdf.
“you’re being watched”: Clemence Bock, unpublished memoirs.
right-wing journalist Alfred Fabre-Luce: David Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich, 174.
“trees on the Champs-Élysées were a brilliant green”: Yves Pourcher, Pierre Laval Vu par Sa Fille, 317.
“tired, with an absent air”: Clemence Bock, unpublished memoir.
“people you know there”: Ibid.
railway wagons had been damaged: David Schoenbrun, Soldiers of the Night, 273.
L’heure des combats viendra: Terry Crowdy, French Resistance Fighter (Oxford: Osprey, 2007), 50.
