Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass (5 page)

It is against that background of cynical deceit that the PROSPER network must be assessed. Suttill’s first wireless operator Gilbert Norman arrived in November, followed a few weeks later by a second radio operator of Armenian origin named Jack Agazarian. Bodington brought in his old pal Déricourt to select and supervise landing grounds for Section F agents.

On 22 January 1943, Déricourt returned to France, tasked with organising reception parties and safe houses for new arrivals and agents returning to Britain. At first, everything seemed to be working out surprisingly well. During April and May PROSPER received 1,006 Stens, 1,877 incendiary devices and 4,489 grenades; in June it took delivery of another 190 man-sized containers of materiel on thirty-three landing grounds spread over twelve
départements
. Within a few months, Déricourt also safely brought in no fewer than sixty-seven agents, but his amazing confidence and success rate was beginning to worry Agazarian so much that when next recalled to London, he passed on his suspicions to Bodington and Buckmaster.

Agazarian was right. Déricourt’s successes were due to his pre-war friendship with SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Boemelburg, the senior German spy-catcher in France. Listed in the Paris Gestapo files as Agent BOE/48,
³
Déricourt fed the details of the clandestine flights to Boemelburg, who then ordered anti-aircraft batteries along the flight path of the aircraft not to fire at them. What Boemelburg did not know is that his double agent was in fact a triple agent acting under instructions from SIS that overrode his duties for Section F. This was the real dirt of the deception operation: Suttill’s vast network was to be sacrificed in order to feed false information about the date of the planned Allied invasion of Europe when its members were tortured after capture by the Gestapo.

However, Buckmaster remained unconvinced by Agazarian and sent Bodington into France to check out the situation. Even when Suttill, Borrel and Norman were arrested by the Gestapo on 23 June and the PROSPER network wound up, Buckmaster never lost his faith in Déricourt and even put in writing as late as December 1945 that he was innocent of any collaboration with the Germans, and ‘had the finest record of operations completed of any member of SOE’.
⁴

One essential requirement for a spy is to have the appearance and demeanour of a grey person who does not stand out in a crowd, which could certainly not be said of Noor Inayat Khan, a head-turningly beautiful courier whose looks would cost her her life. She was now the only member of the PROSPER network still at liberty, apart from Déricourt. Khan reported to London that she could no longer contact any members of the network. One can imagine the loneliness and fear she must have felt, stranded in an enemy-occupied country, knowing that so many people had been betrayed, and that some of them must have given her description, under torture or otherwise, to Gestapo officers. Déricourt tried unsuccessfully to persuade her to return to Britain. Was her refusal to go because she suspected he would hand her over to the Germans after bringing her to the landing field? We shall never know because she was betrayed and arrested on 13 October. Thereafter, the only concrete record of her existence is a sad little plaque at Dachau concentration camp, recording the deaths of Khan and three other SOE women agents on 13 September 1944, allegedly after a near-lethal beating meted out for his personal pleasure by the sadistic AllgemeineSS officer Friedrich Wilhelm Rupert, later executed for this and other crimes.

That date was over two months after the deaths of Andrée Borrel and three other women agents at Natzwiller concentration camp in Alsace, as recorded on an equally sad plaque that was affixed to the camp crematorium there and is now in the memorial museum. Why the delay? Presumably because the women at Dachau were being interrogated for longer than the other four.

As
Nacht und Nebel
prisoners were destined to vanish without trace, the women at Natzwiller ceased administratively to exist. It was later discovered that they were taken individually to the sick bay on the evening of 6 July 1944, told to undress on the pretence that it was for an inoculation against typhus and then given what should have been an instantly lethal injection of phenol by the camp medical officer SS Untersturmführer Dr Werner Röhde or his assistant. Within minutes their bodies were shoved into the four-body camp crematorium by Hauptscharführer Peter Schraub. At least one of the women recovered consciousness sufficiently to scar Schraub’s face with her fingernails before being forced inside and the door slammed, so that she was burned alive. When Buckmaster’s assistant Vera Atkins, who made it her personal mission after the war to trace what had happened to the lost women agents, interviewed Schraub three months later, his face still bore the scars.
⁵

After the Gestapo wound up PROSPER with the exception of Déricourt and Khan, London continued to receive radio transmissions from Norman. Although the ‘hand’ of the sender was his, the SOE officer responsible for codes and ciphers was convinced that these messages were being sent under German control. Refusing to share this view, Bodington volunteered to go to France and check out the situation on the ground. Given his knowledge of all the Section F networks, this was an incredible lapse of security. Although equipped with his cyanide pill, who could be sure he would use it on capture? Or, did he know of Déricourt’s deal with Boemelburg, which made him as safe in France as he would have been in London?

Parachuted from an RAF Hudson on the night of 23 July, he was welcomed by Déricourt in a field near Soucelles, between Angers and Le Mans. According to his debriefing on return to Britain by Lysander on 17 August, he and Agazarian tossed a coin to decide which of them should go to an address Norman had given as his safe house in Paris. The coin-tossing was an unnecessary embroidery since, given the risk that it was a trap, it was logical for Bodington, as the senior officer, to order the less well-informed Agazarian to go. He was arrested at the house and tortured over a six-month period in the Gestapo wing of Fresnes prison before being deported to Flossenburg concentration camp in Bavaria. Although not designated an extermination camp, one in three prisoners died there.

At this stage the account of an episode in the Great Game descends into the shadowy world of a spy novel: who was the traitor? Soon after returning to Britain, Bodington was accused of being a double agent, as though he had betrayed Agazarian. Sacked from SOE, he was relegated to a non-sensitive post, lecturing servicemen on French politics. Suttill, Norman, Agazarian and several hundred of the PROSPECT agents died in captivity. Post-war interrogations of German counter-espionage officers revealed Déricourt’s relationship with Boemelburg.

In April 1946 Déricourt was arrested at Croydon airport when about to fly to France with a considerable quantity of gold and platinum, for which he had no export licence. In view of his ostensibly excellent war record, the magistrate let him off with a £300 fine, which was paid by a mystery man, never formally connected with any government organisation. In November 1946 Déricourt was arrested in France and eventually tried in June 1948 for causing the deaths of the PROSPER agents. At the trial Bodington admitted that Déricourt had told him about his contacts with the Germans shortly after he landed in France on 23 July 1943. Largely on the evidence provided by Bodington, Déricourt was acquitted for lack of proof that he divulged any important information or betrayed any specific individual. He continued flying until meeting his death in a crash somewhere in Laos in November 1962.

Interviewed by author Rita Kramer, another SOE agent who worked successfully in France named Francis Cammaerts told her that he believed Bodington and Déricourt became double agents for the thrill of fooling their comrades, but a shrewd locally recruited radio operator working for PROSPER argued that the winding up of the network was deliberately arranged by MI6. Suttill and the others, he argued, had been given to understand that the planned Allied invasion was scheduled for Autumn 1943 – this in the knowledge that one or more of them would divulge this under torture, causing the German High Command Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) to keep in the north of France forces that could have been deployed elsewhere.

According to the alternative explanation of the PROSPER fiasco, Colonel Claude Dansey, deputy director of SIS, was using Déricourt as a triple agent inside Section F. In the context of the campaign of deception operations to confuse the Germans about the true date and whereabouts of the Normandy invasion, Déricourt was ordered by Dansey, without Section F having any suspicion of the darker game that was being played out right under its nose, to betray Suttill’s network. Giving the enemy the PROSPER transmitters enabled them to mount a
Funkspiel
against London, as had been done in Holland with notable success. But that was only a sideshow. The real purpose of the triple agent betrayal was much darker: to sacrifice hundreds of Suttill’s recruits in order to convince the Gestapo of the false information they divulged under torture.

This version, if true, is typical of Dansey’s cynical worldview. He was a frigid, unlikeable man, known to dislike the French and mistrust all women, especially women agents. Unfortunately for history and historians, he gave orders for his widow to destroy all his confidential papers, secure in the knowledge that she would never dare to disobey him even after his death. And Nicholas Bodington died in Plymouth on 3 July 1974, taking with him, as did many intelligence officers, his secrets – in this case, the truth about the PROSPER betrayal.

It is against this background of deceit and betrayal that one has to assess what follows.

Notes

1
Dalton, H.,
The Fateful Years
, London, Muller, 1957, p. 368.

2
Jenkins, R.,
A Pacifist at War
, London, Arrow, 2010, pp. 54–6.

3
Marshall, R.,
All the King’s Men
, London, Collins, 1988, p. 253.

4
Foot, M.R.D.,
SOE in France
, London, HMSO, 1966, p. 302.

5
Kemp, A.,
The Secret Hunters
, London, Coronet, 1988, pp. 776–8; also Kramer, R.,
Flames in the Field
, London, Michael Joseph, 1995, pp. 115–27; also documentation at Natzwiller.

THE MAKING OF THE MAQUIS

Whatever their differences, and whenever they were founded, all the Resistance movements were formed for action, whether this was dissemination of news from the BBC or neutral sources, fly-posting anti-German tracts during the hours of darkness when curfew-breakers were liable to be shot on sight, or the collection of intelligence to be passed to de Gaulle’s BCRA or Section F in London. In contrast, the Maquis arose not from any patriotism or political motivation, but was inadvertently created by the collaborationist French government based in the spa town of Vichy, headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, the head of state, and his prime minister Pierre Laval, the manipulative Auvergnat lawyer who had single-handedly engineered the end of the Third Republic and the installation of the marshal as dictator, answerable to no one.

Laval had been hailed on the front cover of
Time
magazine, dated 4 January 1932, as ‘The Man of the Year’. Yet, Pétain’s dislike for the manipulative lawyer who had made him dictator was such that he fired Laval, but could not govern without his political acumen and was forced to reinstate him at German insistence. In one, possibly apocryphal, exchange between them at the time of Laval’s return to power, he won back the premiership by saying: ‘
Monsieur le Maréchal, nous sommes dans la merde. Laissez-moi être votre éboueur
’ – ‘We’re in the shit, marshal. So let me do the digging to get us out.’
¹

After Hitler’s Minister for Armaments, Albert Speer, complained that the manpower shortage in the Reich was critical as losses on the Eastern Front sucked almost every fit adult German male into uniform, on 21 March 1942 Fritz Sauckel was appointed plenipotentiary labour boss empowered to drain the occupied territories of able-bodied workers and transport them into the Reich as a replacement labour force. Hanged at Nuremburg in October 1946 for the brutality of the German slave labour programme,
²
Sauckel was a physically insignificant man who grew a Hitler moustache to give him what he thought was an air of authority. Meeting Prime Minister Laval on 16 June 1942, he demanded 2,060,000 workers from France in addition to the 1.6 million Frenchmen locked away as POWs under the terms of the armistice of June 1940 and used since then as cheap labour in the Reich.

A week later Laval announced to the French people that he had done a deal under which, for every three volunteer workers heading east, one POW would be released to return home. Called La Relève, or ‘the relief shift’, the scheme was a dismal failure, enabling him to twist the facts at his post-war trial – he was a lawyer by profession – and claim that it was thanks to him only 341,500 French workers actually left, earning the release of 110,000 POWs. Of these, 10,000 were wounded and disabled men who should have been released without any
quid pro quo
.