Kieffer gave John a photograph of himself, because he did not have time to pose, and John painted the portrait in the guardroom, while also performing his regular duties. The SD had asked him to take on additional work that until then had been done by Gilbert Norman. “From about September or October 1943,” Vogt stated, “Dr. Goetz obtained the help of the above-named Captain STARR alias BOB for the setting of transmissions. As far as I know BOB only corrected the text of the transmissions devised by Dr. GOETZ so that it was not known that they were German translations.” This involved correcting English grammar in SD messages to London. Vogt pointed out, “However, this wireless traffic was already in existence before BOB helped Dr. Goetz and it would have certainly been maintained properly without the assistance of BOB.” John’s assistance made the SD’s deception of London more plausible, but it also gave him deeper insight into what the SD knew about SOE. This was information that he planned, one day, to escape with to London.
* * *
• • •
Mass arrests occurred frequently during the summer of 1943, and the capture of Francis Suttill’s PHYSICIAN circuit members left only one SOE radio operator in Paris. She was Noor Inayat Khan, code name “Madeleine.” Born of an Indian Muslim father and an American mother from New Mexico, she grew up in Paris. Her father’s Sufi order regarded her as a princess. In England, Leo Marks and most of the other SOE men who met the ethereal, dark-haired beauty fell in love with her. Her training reports were divided on whether she should go into the field at all. Although determined and devoted, her innocent otherworldliness left her vulnerable.
An RAF 161 Squadron Lysander had flown Khan with Diana Rowden, John Starr’s courier, to Le Mans on June 16, 1943, only days before her circuit ceased to exist. She evaded arrest and eluded German radio detectors while sending messages from a variety of houses in Paris. “We were pursuing her for months,” recalled Major Kieffer, “and as we had a personal description of her we arranged for all stations to be watched. She had several addresses and worked very carefully.” Dr. Goetz shared Kieffer’s assessment of the importance the SD placed on capturing Khan: “It was, naturally, of the greatest interest to us to arrest her as we suspected that she carried on wireless traffic with London, but [we] could not close in on her as the place of transmission was constantly changing.”
Maurice Buckmaster ordered her, for her own safety, to return to England. She was reluctant to abandon her post, but SOE authorized an RAF Lysander to pick her up in mid-October 1943. Only days before her scheduled departure, a Frenchwoman contacted Major Kieffer offering important information.
As described later by Dr. Goetz, the woman asked for a large sum of money, and in return she would hand over a British radio operator calling herself “Jeanne-Marie Renier” and code-named Madeleine. Kieffer ordered Khan’s immediate arrest. Early in the morning on October 13, Khan left her flat at 98 rue de la Faisanderie for one of the safe houses from which she transmitted. Vogt instructed a young French résistant-turned-collaborator named Pierre Cartaud to wait inside the flat in case she returned. At the same time, Kieffer sent Corporal Werner Ruehl of the SD’s radio department to capture her at one of her safe houses. Ruehl recalled:
[Master Sergeant Karl] Haug and I followed her. She was wearing a blue tailored dress trimmed with white, was about 1.60–65m., slim with dark hair, about 24 [Khan was 30] years old and wearing a dark hat. Madeleine turned suddenly and saw us. She quickly disappeared round a corner and we did not see her again.
Khan went back to 98 rue de la Faisanderie. When she opened the door, Pierre Cartaud seized her from behind. She fought, scratching his face and lacerating his wrists with her teeth. He threw her onto the sofa and pointed a pistol at her. He threatened to kill her if she went on struggling and called Kieffer, who sent Vogt and some other SD men to his aid. Vogt arrived and saw a bloodied Cartaud standing a safe distance from his prisoner. Khan, as distressed as she was angry, said, “Another few days and I should have been in England.”
Vogt took Khan, along with her radio and codes, straight to his interrogation room at 84 avenue Foch. She was a big fish whose capture gave the SD control of an important radio link. “You know who I am, and what I am doing,” she told Vogt. “You have my radio set. I will tell you nothing. I have only one thing to ask you. Have me shot as quickly as possible.” She expected torture, but Vogt proceeded in his usual sympathetic fashion. She refused to answer his questions. Frustrated, he ordered a warder to lock her in one of the cells. She asked to take a bath first, and Vogt agreed.
A few minutes later, John Starr heard a commotion. The warders told him that a new prisoner had attempted to escape through the bathroom window. They said the woman had asked her guard to close the door to give her privacy while she was in the bath. As soon as he did so, she climbed through the window and walked along a narrow rain gutter. Vogt, suspecting her intention, was waiting on a triangular roof within the internal courtyard. “‘Madeleine,’ don’t be silly,” he said. “You will kill yourself. Think of your mother. Give me your hand.” He took her to her cell, where she sat down and wept. “I ought to have let myself fall.” She sighed.
Khan refused to eat over the days that followed. When she finally accepted tea and cigarettes from Vogt, she went on ignoring his questions. Dr. Goetz took her downstairs to his radio room for a similarly fruitless interrogation and returned her to Vogt. Vogt did not give up, cajoling and flattering her for days. He occasionally sent Pierre Cartaud to her flat to bring clothes and toiletries, but even then, Kieffer noted, “Madeleine, after her capture, showed great courage, and we got no information whatsoever out of her.” Khan’s steadfast refusal to reveal anything impressed Vogt. “I suppose,” he recalled, “that she was the best human being I have met.” All she told Vogt was her cover story that she was Nora Baker of the RAF. Vogt, who never learned her real name, instructed John to write on his map of captured agents “Nora Baker, Royal Air Force.”
John’s cell was opposite Khan’s. Although he could not see her, he heard her crying at night. When guards brought her past his workspace for his first glimpse of the beautiful young woman, he noticed she had “light brown hair with some red lights” and wore navy blue slacks, a polo-neck sweater, and sport shoes. She looked French to him. Seeing her anguish, he wrote her a note, “Cheer up, you are not alone, perhaps we shall find a way out of here.” Passing it to her was difficult, because the guards did not leave them alone. He used the ruse of asking for permission to use the lavatory, dropping a pencil and “accidentally” kicking it around the corner toward Khan’s cell. Out of sight of the guards for a second, he pushed the paper under her door. No one noticed. The note asked her to exchange messages by pressing them into a crack in the wall under the lavatory basin. In the morning, when John went to wash, her reply was waiting.
This written correspondence was their only means of communication, John later explained, because they did not utter “more than forty or so spoken words in all her stay in Av. Foch. All we could say was ‘Hello’ ‘Cheer up’ ‘Good morning’ and the most she ever said to me was, ‘Carry on, you’re doing a great job, more than any prisoner I ever heard of.’” Their hidden notes, exchanged almost daily, drew them closer to each other than their few spoken words. Through them, they worked on a goal that was crucial to them both: escape.
Khan also communicated in secret with a prisoner in the cell beside hers, tapping in Morse on their shared wall. He was Colonel Léon Faye, a forty-four-year-old French veteran of the First World War, a career officer, and a founder of the ALLIANCE network. As an intelligence-gathering circuit, ALLIANCE liaised with Britain’s MI6 rather than SOE. Faye was on his third mission in France when the Germans captured him on September 16 in Aulnay-sous-Bois.
Khan asked John if she could tell Faye about their plans. He agreed, and Faye also secreted notes under the basin. John recalled, “He asked me if I thought we could make a getaway by going down the main sta
irs at night to which I replied impossible.” The safest route out of the cells was up, through the light shafts to the roof. Iron bars, however, blocked the way.
John examined the bars in his ceiling. They were three parallel struts secured in a wooden frame. To squeeze through, all he had to do was loosen the screws and remove one bar. He needed a screwdriver. His next notes to Khan and Faye asked about their skylights. Their bars, unlike his, had no frames. Rods went straight into the walls, which required digging out the plaster. They too needed a screwdriver, a knife, or some other metal implement.
There was no obvious solution to the lack of tools until an unexpected opportunity presented itself. The cleaning woman, Holwedts, asked the guards to fix her carpet sweeper. None of the East European warders wanted to help, so John volunteered. He laid the machine on the guardroom table and took it apart, spreading dust in every direction. The guards grew impatient as he tinkered, and they told him to hurry. It would take less time, he said, if he had tools. The guards sent Holwedts to bring her box of cleaning paraphernalia. John rummaged through it and found a screwdriver. The guards were too vigilant for him to pocket the tool, so he took the precaution of doing a halfhearted job to give himself a second chance at it. This came five days later when the cleaner knocked at the guards’ door to say her sweeper had broken again.
The guards told John to fix it, and when he finished, he slipped the screwdriver into a panel inside the fireplace behind him. If Holwedts complained it was missing, no one would find it in his cell. If anyone found it in the guardroom fireplace, he would not be suspected. John waited a few days, during which Holwedts did not mention the screwdriver. He then hid it in the lavatory for Khan, and she and Faye took turns with it, gouging bits of the plaster holding their bars in place.
As Khan chipped away late one night, she fell off the bed. The crash roused the guards, who rushed to her cell. She claimed she had attempted to hang herself, which earned her more sympathy from Vogt.
John’s skylight was too high to reach. He moved his bed from its place against the wall to the middle of the floor below the shaft, but leaving it there would be suspicious, so he slid the bed to the opposite wall. One of the guards noticed the change and called Vogt. John explained that he wanted a different view. Vogt got the joke and said, “That’s all right.” In the following days, he shifted the bed to another wall and then another. The guards lost interest in his eccentric behavior. Soon he positioned the bed under the skylight in the center of the room. It was still not high enough for John at five feet five inches to touch the ceiling. He took the chance of moving a chair from the guardroom to his cell. A guard again informed Vogt, who asked John what was going on. John explained that he wanted something to hang his clothes on rather than leave them on the bed or the floor. This seemed fine to Vogt, who told the guard to ignore it. Alone in his cell that night, John put the chair on the bed and stood on it. The shaft was within reach.
John next convinced Vogt to let him connect an extension wire from the switch outside his cell so that he could turn his light on and off without asking permission. Vogt thought it would mean less work for the guard, and he let John keep the switch. When he was ready to escape, John could turn off the light without having to ask the guard. Slowly, the plan’s elements were falling into place.
While working alone in the guardroom, John noticed a truncheon and hid it in the fireplace where he had secreted the screwdriver. Unsure that a wooden baton would be effective against armed guards, he left a note about it for Faye. The Frenchman answered that it might come in handy, and John left it for him in the lavatory.
Khan and Faye replaced the plaster they were digging out of their walls with kneaded bread. The dough, Khan wrote to John, was not the same color as the plaster. He recommended she use her makeup to tint the bread. Vogt then became an unsuspecting accomplice when, at her request, he sent Pierre Cartaud back to her flat for cosmetics and more clothing. Vogt was doing all he could to humor her in the vain expectation that she would operate her radio for Dr. Goetz or give him information. Her makeup arrived, and she mixed face powder into the bread to achieve the right shade of beige. In one of her coat pockets, she found tickets for the Paris Metro. If and when she and the others got out of the building, they could rush into a train without wasting time queuing for tickets.
When Faye’s bar was loose enough to pull out, he passed the screwdriver back to Khan. Their preparations had yet to attract their captors’ notice.
The SD, however, tightened its watch on John. Major Kieffer ordered the duty warders in the guardroom to keep him in sight at all times. He explained that he had given John “drawing tasks whose subject matter was to be kept secret,” and went on to note: “Since in the eventuality of an escape he posed a great risk to my office I impressed upon the guards again and again that however affable and obliging ‘Bob’ might be his lodging was to be carefully guarded and secured.” After all, John’s work for Kieffer, checking the English in the SD’s messages to London, gave John what Kieffer called “a great insight into our counterespionage work and [he] got to know numerous arrested agents, W/T operators, and organisers of hostile intelligence services.”
While the three prisoners prepared their breakout, avenue Foch was hosting more British agents. One was John’s former radio operator, John Young, who was captured along with John’s former courier, Diana Rowden, on November 18, 1943, in Clairvaux-les-Lacs. The SD put him in John’s cell, saying, “Here’s your old chief.” The two men whispered to avoid being overheard. Young told John that his interrogators in Dijon tortured him to find out where his radio was. He pulled up his shirt to show John the scars on his back. Despite the pain, Young did not tell them anything. That meant, to John’s relief, one less radio for deceiving London.
Guards moved Young to the cell beside John’s in the morning. A few nights later, when they thought it unlikely anyone would hear, they tapped Morse messages to each other. John invited Young to join the escape. Young declined, saying he had given Kieffer his word of honor not to flee. The other three agreed to make the attempt without him. In the meantime, John compiled a written record on tissue paper of everything he was learning about the SD’s penetration of SOE in France. If he could get it to London, the Funkspiel would be over.
TEN
Sabotage
Women were as brave and as responsible as men; often more so.
MAURICE BUCKMASTER
In the wilds of southwest France, George Starr was following the war’s progress to determine when to tell his impatient followers to take up arms. Britain’s Eighth Army, by this time famous for defeating German general Erwin Rommel’s Panzers in North Africa, invaded the Italian mainland from Sicily on September 3, 1943. Six days later, the Americans landed at Salerno. Italian partisans popped up to assist the Allied invaders. The Red Army on the Russian front was deploying local partisans behind German lines to disrupt the rails, roads, and telephones, hastening the Soviet defeat of the Wehrmacht along the River Dneiper.
On September 11, Free French troops liberated a little piece of France, the island of Corsica. Circumstances in Gascony, however, were turning against the Resistance. For more than a year, they had kept the secret of thousands of people organizing and training to fight, but this provided time for the Germans to infiltrate the Resistance and disable it. On October 17, 1943, George’s courier Pierre Duffoir bicycled to Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon in panic. George was away, so Duffoir gave his ominous tidings to Maurice Rouneau: the Germans had captured a truck driver carrying supplies from a recent parachutage. The man had revealed, under torture, the location of drop site London T25, the farm where George had spoken by S-Phone with Major Gerry Morel. Vichy police and German Feldgendarmen, military policemen, raided the farm. They tortured its owner, Coulanges, Duffoir’s relative, in front of his family. When he refused to reveal anything about le patron and the parachutages, they shot him dead and arrested his young son. Rouneau,
whose growing animosity toward his chief may have colored his memory, wrote that Duffoir accused George of confiding in Coulanges secrets about Castelnau, its mayor, and the pro-Resistance gendarmes in the nearby village La Romieu. If the Germans had subjected Coulanges to more torment, he might have revealed all they needed to destroy WHEELWRIGHT.
Duffoir also said that unknown men had called at his house in Agen. Fearing for his wife, Paulette, and eleven-year-old daughter, Josette, he left to bring them back to Castelnau. George returned soon afterward, and Rouneau challenged him over his alleged indiscretions. The confrontation exacerbated tensions between them, but they had to cooperate to avoid catastrophe. If the Germans knew about London T25 and the Coulanges farm, they might raid Castelnau at any moment.
George stuffed a few clothes into a suitcase and said, “Now I’m going. I hope nothing bad happens today. Tomorrow morning at eleven, let’s rendezvous near the Auvignon bridge at the edge of the village on the chemin de Caussens.” Rouneau dug radio sets and money out of the castle dungeon and hid them at Mayor Larribeau’s. He also assembled documents and valuables to store in metal cases. “I looked in vain for a newspaper cutting relating to the conviction by default [for sedition] that I received from the [Vichy] tribunal in Arras in 1941,” he wrote, suspecting George had destroyed the paper. “I found this bizarre, because the teacher had filed it to show after the liberation that the affair had been manipulated.” He and Jeanne Robert buried the crates in her garden behind the school.
Pierre Duffoir returned to Castelnau with his wife and daughter at nine o’clock that night. They were discussing with Rouneau what to do, when they heard knocking at the door. George slipped in and said, “I’m returning from Agen, where [Olivier] Prieur [butcher in Condom] took me. We’re completely finished! We have to be out of here quickly.” George claimed that a colleague from Rouneau’s old print factory in Agen said that the Germans questioned another printer, “Tortillon,” about safe house owner Hélène Falbet, Pierre Duffoir, and Rouneau. Rouneau wrote that George added, “So, they know everything now, and it’s likely they won’t delay in coming here, where the employees of the print factory know you come frequently.” Rouneau had doubts, because the colleague from the print factory would not have known the nickname “Tortillon,” which only he and Madame Falbet used. Despite that, he asked George, “So, what do you think should be done?”
They Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in Nazi-Occupied France Page 14
