by Noreen Riols
The prospective agents arrived in batches, accompanied by a conducting officer who was not a member of the Beaulieu staff. For the women students, the conducting officer was almost invariably a FANY officer. The conducting officer lived in the various houses with the students they had brought down and often attended the classes: but they were primarily there as counsellors, ‘mother hens’ really, to look after the students and help them if they had problems. Those students who were to work in the field stayed at Group B for three weeks to a month. But there were other people who came as ‘observers’ and often took part in exercises and attended classes: the ‘observer’ stayed a maximum often days.
Vera Atkins once visited Beaulieu as an observer and took part in a night exercise, though it is difficult to imagine the elegant Vera doing anything as undignified as prowling around the forest in the early hours of the morning with a group of disguised Beaulieu officers. The officers at Beaulieu taught the finer points of being a secret agent. In a bar or restaurant, never sit with your back to the door. When travelling on public transport, if possible, don’t take a seat, stand on the platform or near the exit. Never take a direct route to a rendezvous or hold large meetings, and never, ever hold meetings with several agents gathered together. Punctuality was stressed, and agents told that if the person they were to meet did not show up on time, they were not to wait, but to leave immediately.
There is an amusing story of a Beaulieu student who, during an exercise, was given a rendezvous with an unknown woman at three o’clock outside the post office in Bournemouth. But he arrived early. Thinking that he recognized his ‘contact’, he approached an innocent young woman who was startled to be accosted. Apologizing profusely, he walked around the block and on his return accosted another supposed ‘contact’, but with the same result. Taking a third trip around the block, he went to speak to the person who finally turned out to be his real contact. But, when he approached her, an elderly lady hit him viciously over the head with her umbrella and threatened to call the police, accusing him of trying to ‘molest nice young ladies’!
The officers usually walked through the forest every morning to the different houses where the classes were held: every officer except Johnny, who needed a truck, because he carried with him an enormous door on which was every conceivable lock one could imagine. He had to teach the students to pick these locks, because once in the field they wouldn’t have keys to all the places they wanted to enter. Johnny had learned this technique from a burglar. He must have been a very experienced, highly qualified burglar, because the British government had released him from a long sentence in a London prison on condition that he taught his tricks to SOE. There was also the safe-blower, Johnny Ramensky, who was reputed to have blown open both Goebbels’ and Goering’s safes. How true that information is I don’t know. He was apparently part of SOE, though I never met him.
We certainly were an unusual group of people. It’s hardly surprising that MI6, the official intelligence agency, disapproved of us.
It was at Group B that the students were taught how to signal to a contact who was scheduled to call on them, or a radio operator approaching a house before transmitting, that it was dangerous to enter, or even to loiter in front of the house or flat. This was done by arranging in advance to have the curtains or shutters wide open or half closed: closed could mean danger, don’t approach; open, it’s safe for the moment, come in. A flowerpot or an ornament placed in the middle of the window could mean all clear, but at the side, danger. One agent organized a lookout living at the entrance to her courtyard to loudly play a series of chords from an arranged symphony to warn her that the Gestapo or the police had entered the building. These tactics were also used when meeting a contact. If an agent had a newspaper rolled under his arm, don’t recognize him, keep walking. If the newspaper was folded and put in a jacket or coat pocket, coast clear. It was in the agent’s interest to remember to get the signals right!
Propaganda warfare was also one of the weapons agents were taught to use, to great effect. This included spreading false rumours: whispering that brothels for the exclusive use of German soldiers were serviced by prostitutes with venereal diseases, that rat droppings, powdered glass and undetectable poisons had been found in German rations. They also learned how to surreptitiously put itching powder into German underwear, I imagine by instructing the women laundering soldiers’ clothes, or cleaning their barracks. Another ploy was to paint large ‘V for Victory’ signs on walls all over France. Some even encased the cross of Lorraine – the Gaullist symbol of the Free French – inside the ‘V. Propaganda leaflets and newspapers were also dropped into France by plane, and it was up to the agents to ensure that as many people as possible read these papers.
There was a very handsome young major at Group B, Peter Follis, a former actor, who taught the trainees disguises. ‘Forget about false beards,’ he apparently told them. ‘That’s too obvious. Go for the more subtle disguises: part your hair a different way, dye it, wear glasses, put pebbles in one shoe to give you an authentic permanent limp.’ Shrieks of laughter could be heard coming from his classes as agents became hunchbacks or cripples, or gave the impression that they were on their last legs. They used each other as mannequins and, under Peter Follis’s direction, were transformed from their mid-twenties or early thirties into sixty- or seventy-year-olds with the clever use of ashes rubbed round the contours of their eyes and to accentuate or create lines on their faces, white shoe cleaner to turn the hair on their temples grey, balls of cotton wool or chewing gum stuffed into their mouths to fill out their cheeks and completely transform the shape of their faces, ageing them by as much as thirty years. And, of course, glasses, usually large horn-rimmed pairs with window panes for lenses.
At Beaulieu future agents or ‘trainees’ were taught how to use ciphers and to make secret ink out of egg white, lemons and even urine. I imagine the idea was that the writing would be invisible to the naked eye and would only be revealed when held up to a light, a torch bulb or the flame of a candle – after which, should the paper not be destroyed, the writing would disappear. They also learned how to open letters and reseal them without leaving any trace, and how to place objects in such a way on a desk or in a drawer that an agent could immediately detect whether someone had entered and searched the room during his absence.
More insidiously, they learned how to make different concoctions to slip into a drink or a dish which would slowly poison whoever ate or drank it. Or, less drastically, to immobilize a whole barracks for several days with a substance which would give the soldiers severe, but not fatal, abdominal pains. Any trick was worth a try!
Every morning the officers instructed the students in these and other techniques. In the classrooms there were photos of high-ranking German officers, Admiral Canaris – later executed at Flossenbürg – Heydrich, Himmler, etc. There were also photographs of German uniforms which the students had to study closely, and be able to recognize and identify so as to be familiar with the different members of the occupying forces: the Gestapo, the SS, the Wehrmacht, the Abwehr, the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, the Luftwaffe, etc. which, once in the field, they would meet on the streets every day.
At the end of their time at Beaulieu students would be dumped at night in the middle of the New Forest and, without a torch, map or compass, told to find their way back to HQ and break into the commandant’s office without being caught by one of the Beaulieu officers prowling about the forest, hiding behind trees or lurking in the bushes waiting to pounce and ‘arrest’ them before they reached their target. One student – I won’t mention names – managed to evade the lurking officers, break into a room and stumble across the bed of a pretty young girl wearing a lavender satin nightie. He said it was a mistake. But his theory is open to doubt. He was a Frenchman, after all. . . and quite a lad! Often after an exhausting night of exercises in the forest, an agent would be rudely awakened from a deep sleep at about 3 a.m. by loud hammering on his bedroom door accompanie
d by strident voices shouting: ‘Open up, Gestapo.’ And a black mark would be placed against his name if he answered, ‘Come in,’ instead of the language of the country for which he was destined. The prospective agent would then be hauled out of bed, still drugged with sleep. If he didn’t wear pyjamas, he was also in the nude, not an attire which lent itself to a dignified approach when facing a brutal interrogation. After he had been dragged downstairs to a dark room full of Beaulieu instructors, dressed as Gestapo officers, bright lights were shone in his eyes, almost blinding him, and harsh, staccato questions shot at him. Threats, accusations, insinuations, mingled with wheedling promises of release and rewards, if he would cooperate, defect and work for the enemy, were hurled at him from every side: sneers that resistance was useless, the Gestapo already knew everything about him and his activities since his comrades had all been arrested and had betrayed him, rained down on him in rapid succession. In the midst of this turmoil, the poor, unfortunate student was expected to keep his wits about him, answer coolly and correctly in the right language, repeating his ‘cover story’ inside out, endlessly giving details of his movements and activities – false, of course – down to the minutest detail. Sometimes, after having been thrown back into bed, exhausted, not only by the night exercise but also by the interrogation, he was pulled roughly out of bed half an hour later, and the whole process would begin again. Brutal, but it was a foretaste of what could happen to him if, once behind the lines, he should fall into the hands of the Gestapo.
At Beaulieu the training was very thorough. It was here, at this last school, that the agent’s fate was decided, because even after their long, arduous schooling, it was never a certainty that they would be allowed to leave.
Beaulieu, the ‘School for Secret Agents’, the last training school for these ‘Baker Street Irregulars’, as they were also known, was also called the ‘Gangster School’. I don’t know who gave Beaulieu that nickname but I suspect it was MI6, the official government intelligence agency. We were a bizarre group of people, so it’s hardly surprising that MI6, the ‘real’ spies and spycatchers, hated us. We weren’t behaving according to the rules . . . or the Geneva convention. They patronizingly called us ‘amateur bandits’, which of course was what we were!
SOE certainly collected some odd characters – the entire service was made up of unusual, colourful and often eccentric people. Perhaps one of the most colourful, certainly the most flamboyant, was Denis Rake, a law unto himself. Denis was the only known F Section homosexual agent. Before the war he had been an actor and also a circus turn, beginning his career at the age of three as a tumbler, when his mother, an opera singer, happily handed him into the care of a manager at the Sarazini circus and disappeared. As far as I know, his father’s profession, if he had one, was not recorded. The young Denis travelled widely with the circus all over Europe and was at one time kept in luxury by a prince in Athens. When the liaison came to an end he turned to musical comedy in London, understudying many famous actors, and after the war became butler to the film idol Douglas Fairbanks. One morning an official letter, addressed to Major Denis Rake MC, arrived at the Fairbanks London house in the Little Boltons. The astonished and mystified screen idol, who had believed Rake to be a charming but harmless queer’ who was good with the children, confronted his butler with this surprising revelation. Denis apparently smiled and shrugged off his wartime achievements as ‘unimportant’, saying that he only became an undercover agent in order to prove that homosexuals could be as brave as their heterosexual counterparts!
Rake had heard about SOE by chance, in a pub in Portsmouth, when eavesdropping on the conversation of some airmen who were disobeying orders and talking indiscreetly about dropping agents into occupied France. Intrigued by the idea, he managed to get an interview with a member of Buckmaster’s staff, who happened to be the brother of a well-known actor Rake had once understudied. He was accepted for training, but declared ‘hopeless’ by his conducting officer. At Arisaig, he announced he was scared of ‘bangs’ and refused to handle firearms or explosives, but worked non-stop at his Morse lessons. Denis had the impression that he was doing F Section a favour by offering to drop as an agent, and declared he would only go on his own terms. But in spite of Rake’s independence and his adverse reports, Buck realized that he had the makings of a very fine radio operator and allowed him to continue his training. Since the parachute course had not been a success either, Buck decided to send him in by the sea route. Denis was flown to Gibraltar, where he boarded a trawler, then a submarine and finally a felucca, from which he was transferred to a dinghy a few miles from the coast of south-west France and left to row himself ashore. He later said that when he left the felucca and rowed alone in the dinghy on a moonless night on the dark sea he felt fear such as he had never known in his life.
While working in the unoccupied zone of France he was arrested and badly knocked about, but managed to escape. Learning that a radio operator was needed in John Farmer’s Freelance réseau in the Auvergne, the occupied zone, Denis volunteered to go. But while making his way from the unoccupied to the occupied zone, he was again arrested and imprisoned in Dijon, where he was tortured and lost several teeth. With the help of a priest, who hid him in a swill bin, he escaped from that prison. He never gave away any information during either of his arrests or brutal interrogations. After making his way across the demarcation line to the occupied zone, he stopped off in Paris, where he dropped into the bar Le Boeuf sur le Toit, which had been one of his haunts in the 1930s. The barman recognized him and introduced him to a German, Max Halder, who, the barman whispered, was a member of an ancient German family and was violently anti-Nazi. Could Max have been a relative of General Franz Halder, an anti-Nazi Wehrmacht officer who escaped execution but was sent to a concentration camp after he was suspected of being involved in the July 1944 plot against Hitler’s life? I have not been able to find out, but it seems very likely, since General Halder’s father, also a general, was called Max.
The two men discovered that they had much in common, apart from their sexual orientation. They were both lonely and they both hated war. They spent several weeks together, and Denis said afterwards that, had it not been for the war, he and Max Halder would probably have stayed together for many years, perhaps even for ever. But finally Denis regretfully decided it was time he made his way to Freelance, the réseau he had volunteered to join, where the now famous Nancy Wake was the courier. John Farmer, the organizer of Freelance, although admitting that Denis was a first-class radio operator, couldn’t stand him, though whether it was because of his homosexuality or not I don’t know. But Nancy was rather fond of him.
When Buck heard about Denis’s antics he blew sky-high and threatened to have him court-martialled on his return, especially since John Farmer, who had been expecting Denis to arrive, had no idea what had happened to him and may well have believed him to be in the hands of the Gestapo.
But Denis’s escapade was not as dramatic – or catastrophic, as far as F Section was concerned – as the disappearance of an agent who arrived in the South of France carrying a huge sum of money (counterfeit, of course, ‘made in England’), which he was to hand over to the organizer of the réseau he was sent to join. For reasons of his own, he never joined the réseau. He disappeared – with the money – and was never heard of again. Perhaps a search party should have been sent to the casino in Monte Carlo. And perhaps that is why most drops were made to a reception committee, so that suddenly wealthy agents would not be tempted to defect.
Denis was not the only agent Buck, in one of his sudden outbursts of anger, threatened to have court-martialled. Terry Kilmartin, who later became literary editor of the Observer, was a member of F Section staff at Norgeby House during the war years. He had wanted to go into the field, but Buck had always refused. ‘I need you here,’ he had said calmly, leaving poor Terry very frustrated. I don’t know whether he had ever trained as an agent, but he must have learned how to parachute, because one
evening Terry took the matter into his own hands and left with a ‘Jed team’, who were dropped into France that night. ‘Jedburghs’ were a group of three men, one British, one French and one American, who after D-Day dropped in uniform into occupied France to help Resistance fighters who were ‘clearing up’ after the retreating German Army. Some of them had horrendous adventures.
I don’t know how Terry managed it, but he went. The next morning Buck looked into the office, frowned and asked: ‘Where’s Captain Kilmartin? He’s not usually late.’
There was a heavy silence, then a voice piped up: ‘In France, sir.’ Buck frowned, obviously not immediately understanding the implication.
‘In France?’ he queried.
‘Yes sir,’ the same voice replied: ‘He left with the Jed team last night.’ Then it was a case of: everyone scatter, he’s about to explode. Buck went puce in the face and did explode.
‘I’ll have him court-martialled when he gets back,’ he bellowed, and, furiously slamming the door, stamped off. But, being Buck, he never did. Perhaps he was too kind-hearted, or he may have been so pleased that both Terry and Denis returned that he preferred to forget his threats.
On the night of 5 June 1944 two other agents, Bob Maloubier and Violette Szabo, were scheduled to be parachuted into France for the second time, Violette never to return.
