The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (6 page)

Apart from the
chef de réseau
and the pianist, the third member of the team was the courier. Until the beginning of 1942, women were not allowed ‘in the field’, nor
to train as agents. Then the British authorities realized that a woman walking in a town or village during the day was far less conspicuous and therefore much more useful than a man, especially a
young man, who ran the risk of being rounded up in a
rafle.
A
rafle,
or raid, was when the Gestapo would suddenly appear, usually in the middle of the day in a crowded place,
arrest all the young men in sight and send them to work in Germany as forced labour, usually in a munitions factory, on the railways or on the land, regardless of the profession shown on their
identity papers.

The courier often accompanied escaped British airmen, who had been shot down and managed to evade German capture, and escaped prisoners of war, most of whom didn’t speak a word of French,
from ‘safe house’ to ‘safe house’ until they were able to cross the frontier into relative safety, and hopefully make their way back to England. Her real mission, however,
was as a messenger for the
chefde réseau.

Female couriers were also a great help to the radio operators since a young man, especially a young man carrying a heavy suitcase, risked being stopped and searched, whereas a woman carrying a
shopping bag was able to move around more freely. In the beginning the transmitting set, or radio, weighed about twenty pounds and fitted into what could be mistaken for a small weekend case. So it
was nearly always the courier who carried the radio from place to place, hiding it in the bottom of a basket and covering it with leeks and carrots and turnips, giving the impression that she was
just another housewife on her way home from the market. As such, she was rarely questioned or searched.

Maureen O’Sullivan was a courier who was stopped. One day Maureen had to carry the transmitter further than usual so she strapped it onto the back of her bicycle. But she was held up at a
level crossing. While waiting for the train to pass through, a car full of Gestapo officers drew up beside her. One of them wound down his window, pointed and asked her what she had in her
suitcase. She knew that if she hesitated or appeared flustered she was lost, so she gave a big smile – like most of the young couriers she was very pretty – and said: ‘I’ve
got a radio transmitter and I’m going to contact London and tell them all about you.’ The officer’s eyes narrowed. The train whistled through and as the barrier was slowly raised
she hesitated as to whether to risk making a run for it. But she knew she stood no chance of escaping, so she just continued to smile. Finally the officer smiled back and said: ‘You’re
far too pretty to risk your neck with such stupidities,’ saluted and drove off. As she later said, ‘He could have asked me to open the case and I’d probably have been shot. But at
least I’d have been shot for telling the truth!’

The French called the agents sent from London
les hommes de Vombre
– the men of the shadows – which was a very apt description. We, however, called them the Crosse and
Blackwell Brigade. After being recruited, their uniform badges and buttons were changed. Their insignia was no longer that of their regiment, squadron or ship, but now read ‘By appointment to
His Majesty the King’ – the logo on the Crosse and Blackwell pickle jars. More affectionately they were known as ‘Buck’s Boys’, in honour of F Section’s head,
Maurice Buckmaster.

Prospective agents were recruited from every branch of the Allied forces stationed in England. They were young, usually between twenty and thirty-five, although a few were approaching forty. But
they were the exception rather than the rule. Yeo-Thomas was forty, and Lise de Baissac thirty-seven when they parachuted into France; Yvonne Rudellat, who went in by submarine, was forty-five. The
recruits were courageous, motivated, often very idealistic and, glancing through old sepia photographs, mostly devastatingly handsome. And they were all volunteers. There were no special advantages
or privileges given to those who joined SOE. They received the same pay as their comrades of the same rank working in a ministry or filing papers in a government office.

SOE recruits were the elite, the cream of whatever country they represented. They became, in effect, lone commandos, often on the run with the Gestapo at their heels. They knew from the start
that they had only a 50 per cent chance of survival. Right up to the last minute before they left, they were told that they were free to withdraw, and no one would think any the worse of them. I
don’t know how many, if any, changed their minds, but I personally never heard of anyone who did.

Of course, if they elected not to go, they would have been sent to the cooler’. And perhaps the idea of being sent to that remote castle, a fortress really, in the very northern tip of
Scotland, nicknamed purgatory’ by the agents, made the prospect of being hunted by the Gestapo a better option. And it was a straight choice between the two. Once trained, the prospective
agent could not be returned to his unit: he knew too much. What happened at the cooler’ is still shrouded in mystery, although rumour had it that, cut off from the world without a calendar, a
watch, clocks or timepieces of any kind, the inmates lost all sense of time and place, becoming almost zombies in their isolation. Or perhaps they were ‘brainwashed’ to wipe out the
memory of their intensive SOE training, so that when they were finally released they had forgotten all the secrets they had learned. Or what they had learned had become so out of date’ that
it would no longer be relevant or useful to the enemy if revealed. I never actually met an agent who had spent time in the cooler. But that is hardly surprising. They would have been kept well away
from Baker Street. It might even be that, because of the extremely tight security we all lived under, these prospective agents were not released until the war ended. How true any of these theories
are I don’t know. But there must be some truth in the stories. And whatever happened in the cooler, if the general public had known about SOE at the time we would probably all have been
locked away as either insane or a public danger.

Once an agent was infiltrated behind enemy lines, by whatever means, it was as if an iron curtain had come down between him and London. He could neither send nor receive personal messages. The
only news the family in England received, if there was a family, was an official card sent once a month by Vera Atkins, Buck’s assistant and a very prominent member of F Section, saying
‘We continue to have good news of your son/ your husband/your daughter. He or she is in good health.’ That’s all, nothing personal. But the agents working behind the lines did not
even receive that. They were completely cut off from home, country and family. They arrived in the field in civilian clothes, without the protection of a uniform, so that if they were arrested they
could not claim the status of prisoners of war. They were spies. And a spy’s fate awaited them. They had false papers giving a false name, false profession, false family, false birthplace,
false education, false nationality. Everything about them was false. Before leaving they were obliged to absorb their cover story to the point where, even if they were dragged from bed at three
o’clock in the morning, drugged with sleep, when questioned they automatically repeated the details of their false identity. They literally became another person.

Prospective agents were warned that if they were arrested, London could do very little for them. Before leaving, each one was given an ‘L tablet’, which they jokingly called
‘the insurance against torture’ and which they hid somewhere on their person. Some asked for it to be sewn behind the collar of their jackets, in the corner of a handkerchief or inside
a pocket or the lining of a coat or jacket. The men often carried pipes which were hollow in the middle where they could hide messages written on very thin, flimsy paper, but also hide their L
tablet. Some even had a filling in a tooth removed, the L tablet placed in the hole, and a false filling fitted on top, and one woman I knew concealed hers in a tube of lipstick. If arrested by the
Gestapo, the agents were advised to crush the tablet between their teeth and swallow it immediately. It was lethal potassium cyanide and would kill them within two minutes. But once crushed, the
tablet gave off a very particular and easily recognized odour. If the Gestapo smelt it on an agent’s breath they would have their stomach pumped to keep them alive. Speed was essential.

The Vatican even issued special dispensation to Roman Catholic agents who might otherwise have been hesitant about taking or even accepting the L tablet. But in these exceptional circumstances,
they were allowed to take their own lives with the blessing of the Church. But even then some Catholic agents were reluctant – Yvonne Baseden (‘Odette’) refused to carry her L
tablet, while my friend Bob Maloubier told me that he accepted his, then immediately flushed it down the loo. Perhaps others did the same.

If for any reason agents were arrested but chose not to use their cyanide capsule, they were under strict orders not to ‘talk’ for forty-eight hours in order to give the members of
their
réseau
and other resistance comrades time to disperse and, hopefully, escape. It was an order that cannot have been easy to obey, especially when a torturer was pulling out
your finger- and toenails one by one, submitting you to electric shocks or the ‘water treatment’ or suspending you from the ceiling by your ankles or wrists and beating you till you
become unconscious. You would then be revived, only for your captors to start tormenting you all over again.

Yeo-Thomas, who before the war had been the director of the famous Parisian fashion house Molyneux, was brutally tortured, possibly more so than any other SOE agent. Known to the Germans as
‘Le Lapin Blanc’, or "The White Rabbit’, he was finally captured on his third mission into occupied France and sent to Buchenwald, from where he made what can only be described as
a miraculous escape. With the connivance of a doctor in the camp infirmary, he exchanged places with a corpse. The doctor had no doubt realized that an Allied victory was imminent and was anxious
to save his skin. Three others escaped with him, but once outside the camp, they became separated, and Yeo-Thomas wandered through the German forests for days, living off whatever he could salvage
from the land. Exhausted, he was on the point of giving up when he realized that the American lines were only a few miles away, so, tearing off a strip from his camp uniform to make what he hoped
would look like a white flag of surrender, he managed to stagger towards them. The guards were about to fire upon him when he put up his hands and shouted, ‘Don’t shoot. Escaped British
prisoner of war.’ They didn’t shoot. But neither did they believe him. The story of his escape was so incredible that they thought he was a German plant. He was arrested, and taken to a
cell to await further interrogation. But on the way there, someone recognized him and exclaimed, ‘Why, it’s the White Rabbit!’, whereupon his handcuffs were removed and he was
given a huge meal. After months on a starvation diet and five days living off berries and grass, it proved too much, and he was violently sick. All he could manage to stomach was an orange.

When he was repatriated, shortly before the end of the war, Buck was waiting to greet him, together with Barbara, the young WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) officer he had met just
before his first mission and with whom he was to spend the rest of his life. When Barbara saw him descend from the plane it was lucky that Buck was there to steady her, because she staggered and
almost fainted. He was so haggard and ravaged that the shock at his changed appearance was almost too much for her. Shortly afterwards, his father was heard to say: ‘My son has returned. But
he looks like an old man of seventy.’ He was forty. I’ll always remember Yeo-Thomas. I admired him not only for his amazing, dogged courage but also because one evening he taught me to
make ratatouille – without the ingredients! After all, how on earth could one get hold of courgettes, much less aubergines or tomatoes, in wartime? And onions were so scarce one almost had to
go down on bended knee to persuade the greengrocer to part with a couple. Always supposing he had any. Instead, Yeo-Thomas explained the procedures with gestures, a pantomime using phantom
ingredients and a non-existent
cocotte.
I tried his ‘recipe’ after the war when goods began to creep back into the shops, and it was remarkably good! I wouldn’t say he
was a brilliant conversationalist, but he certainly had a sense of humour and fun. Perhaps it was this that kept him going during his captivity. He spent a great deal of time in F Section’s
corridors, being great friends with SOE’s brilliant cryptologist, Leo Marks. When they were together, if one passed Leo’s half-open door, great gusts of laughter always seemed to be
billowing out.

During his debriefing, Yeo-Thomas said that the first fifteen minutes of torture were the worst. But he also said that if an agent could manage to get through the first five minutes, he had it
made. The most terrible torture always happened at the beginning, but after three days even that became easier to bear: the body seemed to become accustomed to it. I’m not sure every agent
would have agreed with him. But it seemed to have worked for him, at least. Others told me that they recited poems to themselves, lines they had learned years before in school, Shakespeare’s
sonnets or verses from the Bible, or counted up to one hundred and then started again. Anything that might take their minds off what was happening to their bodies.

Prospective agents were aware of all this before they left. They were warned. And they were afraid. Brave men are always afraid, otherwise they tend to do foolish things, taking unnecessary
risks which endanger not only their own lives, but also the lives of others. Courage is not the absence of fear: it is the willingness to do the thing one fears. And they all did, leaving for their
missions regardless. They were frightened, of course they were. But they faced their fear.
And left.