The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish Read online

  To Jacques and our children, Olivier, Hervé, Marie-France, Yves-Michel and Christophe

  Contents

  Foreword by Paddy Ashdown

  Acknowledgements

  SOE Organization

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Secret Lives and Loves in War-torn Britain

  PART TWO

  The Aftermath of War, the Dream – and the Reality

  Epilogue

  Roll of Honour

  SOE F Section circuits in France

  Foreword

  A few years ago, I was researching my book, A Brilliant Little Operation, about Operation Frankton, the top-secret raid on German ships in Bordeaux harbour in 1942. I’d grown up on the extraordinary story of the ‘Cockleshell heroes’. Indeed, without them I would never have served in the Special Boat Service, which was formed in the aftermath of their exploits. But what I discovered was that, at the same time as the marines were carrying out their attack, an SOE team of six British officers was a hundred yards away in a café about to do the same thing. I was intrigued and wanted to find out more. In the course of uncovering this extraordinary story, someone suggested I should contact Noreen Riols, one of the few people still alive who was actually involved in the SOE. I fell in love with her immediately, read her previous books and told her that she should write another about her life. She replied she was already doing just that – and here it is!

  Today, Noreen is a charming white-haired grandmother with a remarkable twinkle in her green eyes, and a wonderfully witty raconteur. But in the 1940s, still in her teens, she was a key member of SOE. As one of the few surviving members of F Section, her knowledge of the organization and its operations was crucial in helping me understand exactly how Operation Frankton came about.

  Perhaps it is her nature, perhaps it is the training which filters into the operative’s DNA; Noreen has always downplayed her role in SOE. She is being far too modest. Without people like Noreen the SOE would not have achieved what it did. Her primary, although not unique, task was to be a decoy girl (she is the last living decoy) – testing potential agents, deploying clandestinely to France, on their cover stories. This was vitally important because if they got it wrong they, and others, would die. Noreen played other roles in the organization, including the delivery of the weird and wonderful coded messages that were broadcast by the BBC every evening to tell agents that operations were ‘on’, training new agents in the not always gentle art of espionage, despatching them off on their missions and helping to debrief them on their return. She and the others worked tirelessly and often at personal cost.

  SOE was acknowledged by no less a man than Eisenhower as having played a key part in the winning of the war on the western front which began in France on D-Day. Without it, and all those who worked for it, the Second World War might have ended very differently. I am, therefore, delighted that Noreen has finally agreed to write a memoir of her experiences during the war. Like her, it is witty, vivid and unsentimental, and it is also a story of remarkable courage and determination.

  Paddy Ashdown, May 2013

  Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon

  Acknowledgements

  Very special thanks to my dear friend Elspeth Forbes-Robertson, who, with endless patience, answered my calls for help and correction, researched and always promptly came up with the right answer and also checked the finished manuscript at least three times in order to detect any ‘lapses of memory’ on my part; to my great friend Lizzy Buchan, who not only introduced me to my agent Andrew Lownie, for which I shall be eternally grateful, but also ‘pushed’ me to write this book; last but certainly not least, to Georgina Morley and her wonderful team at Pan Macmillan, whose help and enthusiasm brought these pages to life; and, as always, to Jacques, my husband, who has encouraged and supported me throughout. To all of them, a very big thank you.

  SOE Organization

  At the end of the war, SOE had 13,000 agents in Europe and Asia.

  Prologue

  In June 1940 France fell, and a great slice of Europe was now in German hands. With Soviet Russia as his ally, Hitler was confident that the collapse of Britain was imminent and that a German invasion of the island would be a mere formality. But he hadn’t bargained for the bulldog spirit of Winston Churchill, that visionary who had predicted the threat of German aggression seven years earlier. At that time, he and Anthony Eden had been lone voices crying in the wilderness, for the most part ignored or scorned by the British parliament. But in May 1940 Neville Chamberlain, who had naively believed Hitler’s promises of nonaggression, was forced to resign and Churchill succeeded him as prime minister. Almost immediately he defiantly declared, ‘We will never surrender.’ His determination fired and inspired the British nation throughout the war.

  Churchill understood from the very beginning that this war was going to be different from any other war Britain had ever fought. Only he had the foresight to see that the soft-shoe approach of MI6, the official intelligence service, would no longer be effective. The gentlemanly warfare Britain had always fought was not possible: that age was over, and only ungentlemanly schemes would succeed. Influenced by the German infiltration of agents into Europe during the 1930s – which had been so successful that almost every foreigner in Britain was suspected of being a ‘fifth columnist’ – Churchill called upon his close advisers to immediately organize such an ‘army’, a subversive guerrilla force, responsible directly – and only – to him. The Special Operations Executive, also known as Churchill’s ‘Secret Army’, was born, and its first leader, Hugh Dalton, was instructed by Churchill to ‘to set Europe ablaze’.

  Its founding was not the subject of parliamentary approval. Its budget and its very existence were secret: indeed secrecy became SOE’s code, and its officers used aliases when attending government or other business meetings. SOE was a shadow world in which truth, as Churchill said, had to be protected by a bodyguard of lies. This secret army was to cover every occupied European country and, working behind the Germans’ back, carry out acts of sabotage and disrupt their means of communication. It would be Churchill’s ‘fourth fighting force’, along with the Navy, the Army and the Air Force. To be sure of victory, Churchill needed an army of ‘bandits’, to use MI6’s derogatory name for the SOE. And they were right: we were trained to be bandits.

  SOE was destined to fight a war on three fronts. It had not only Germany as an enemy, but also General de Gaulle and MI6. Often in a war there are ‘minor’ wars being fought beneath the surface. The enmity – often bitter, even destructive – between SOE and General de Gaulle could be described as one of these ‘minor’ wars.

  As the only woman survivor in France of SOE’s F (for France) Section, I am often asked to share my memories with various audiences in both France and England. I always accept these invitations, since I consider it not only my duty, but also my privilege to tell the story of the courage and dedication of so many unsung heroes and heroines, many of whom I knew personally, who fought clandestinely for France, and for freedom.

  When SOE’s secret files were opened to the public in the year 2000, the media and many historians were drawn to the subject. Since then, I have been interviewed by both print and broadcast journalists, all eager to know, from a former recruit, what happened ‘in the shadows’ during the war years.

  Countless stories have been written and many films and documentaries made on SOE operations in occupied Europe. But, as far as I know, very little has been told of how these operations were organized back in England. I was part of them, sharing many tense moments with agents not only before they were infiltrated behind the lines into enemy territory, but also on their return from thes
e missions. One of the highlights of my time in SOE was having the opportunity to meet so many men and women, both pilots and agents, who were totally dedicated to their high-risk missions, and to witness their amazing achievements, mostly unknown outside the ‘racket’, and, even today, often unrecognized.

  According to a Latin motto, ‘spoken words vanish, but written words remain’. Since a number of friends and journalists have asked me to record my secret experiences within SOE, I have finally yielded to these requests – and this is my story.

  Many of those who have heard my story ask me what happened afterwards. At their insistence, I have also recalled my life in war-torn England – and my post-war experience working for the BBC World Service. There I found a similarly elite and fascinating group of people as those I had known within SOE and, as I had done during those war years, I learned so much in both those inspiring environments.

  My narrative is therefore divided into two parts: the war years and SOE in Part 1 and the post-war dream – and reality – in Part 2. The book ends seventy years after the war began with a ceremony of remembrance at Valençay, a small town in the Loire Valley. Each year, on 6 May, we gather there in front of the memorial erected to commemorate and honour the memory of the 104 F Section agents, fifteen of them women, who did not return. Through this annual commemoration, we hope to pass the flame on to the next generation and so keep alive not only the memory but, through that memory, the spirit of those young men and women who gave their lives so that we might live in freedom today.

  PART ONE

  Secret Lives and Loves in War-torn Britain

  Chapter 1

  My mother thought I was working for the Ministry of Ag. and Fish. She died in 1974, just before her eightieth birthday, without ever learning the truth, and she wasn’t the only one, because all those who worked for SOE, Churchill’s Secret Army, were subject to the Official Secrets Act. It wasn’t until sixty years later, in 2000, that the British government opened these secret files to the general public. Immediately the media in all its forms pounced on the few survivors still upright, and the questions they most frequently asked me were: ‘How were you recruited?’ ‘Why were you recruited?’ ‘Who suggested you?’ I’d really like to know! Even after all these years, I still haven’t the faintest idea who recruited me, or why.

  I was a pupil at the French Lycée in London at the time. Like all young people of my generation, on reaching the ripe old age of eighteen I received my call-up papers. I remember breathing a sigh of relief when one morning I saw the official envelope with the government stamp lying on the front-door mat, because, not having done a scrap of work at school, I knew I didn’t have a hope of passing my final exam. This was my get-out clause. In 1940 practically the entire school had been evacuated to the Lake District, and the Lycée handed over to the Free French Air Force to serve as their HQ. Only one class of sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds was left in situ, closeted in a far corner of the building away from the roving eyes of young Frenchmen who now stalked the corridors. I fell into this category. So, since the arrival of those young men, my studies had been sadly neglected. I’d spent my days roaring round South Kensington on a motorbike clinging ecstatically to the muscular waist of a Free French airman. The place was bursting with them and we pupils were very few – twenty-four girls and one boy! The young Frenchmen didn’t have a great deal of choice. Nor could they afford to be too choosy. They had serious competition from the Polish Army, also stationed in South Kensington, not far from the Lycée. The Poles were terribly dashing in their square caps, long grey overcoats almost sweeping the pavement and high black boots, bowing and clicking their polished heels all over the place. The Frenchmen rather paled in comparison.

  Dear myopic Madame Gautier was one of my teachers at the Lycée. I thought she was about a hundred at the time, but realize now that she can’t have been more than fifty. She always wore a woolly hat, scarf and gloves and a thick tweed overcoat in class whatever the season, declaring she would never get used to the English draughts. Sitting behind her desk on the raised podium, she used to stare in bewilderment at the rows of empty desks in front of her and sigh, ‘Oh là là, là là. Où sont-elles passées, toutes ces filles?’ (‘Where have all the girls gone?’). She didn’t know it, but we were of course perched on those motorbikes, clinging for dear life to Free French airmen, who were driving us at a crazy rate round the streets of South Ken. Only a few ‘swots’ and Wilhelm, a plump, good-natured German-Jewish boy, remained in class.

  Another teacher, Madame Laurent, used to prowl between the desks, noisily sucking sweets. She had a malicious acid tongue and often humiliated me in front of the class, sneering at my clothes, which were too ‘English’ and lacked French ‘chic’. Her husband had abandoned her and run off to the Lake District with the gym mistress when the school was evacuated there. We thought her sad situation highly amusing and used to mock her behind her back. Teenage girls can be very cruel.

  Volatile Madame van Gravelange was a White Russian, brought up in Romania and married to a Dutchman. She taught us German – in French – and never seemed to know which language she was speaking. She was very dramatic. Rolling her eyes heavenwards and with much waving of arms, she often shrieked, ‘Noreen, you make me take the ’air out of me.’ I never discovered whether she meant air or hair!

  Poor homesick Señor José Maria (the rest is unpronounceable), who sighed for his native Spain, was only interested in teaching girls who were short and dark with liquid brown eyes. I was then tall and blonde, so was relegated to the back of the class and totally ignored, though I did learn to sing ‘La Paloma’!

  Madame de Lisle was a kind of school administrator who always wore a fashionable hat both indoors and out. I never saw her without it, though I suppose she must have removed it to go to bed.

  And our lovely, gentle directrice, a single woman in her forties – what we called in those days a ‘maiden lady’ – had adopted an orphaned French baby. Suzanne used to sit in her pram in the courtyard, fussed over and petted by us all, until the day a bomb fell. After that, she disappeared. I don’t think she was hurt, merely badly frightened, but her adoptive mother must have either sent her to the country for safety or kept her with her in her office.

  The bomb fell very near the Lycée, and part of the school was hit, but I certainly didn’t realize the danger, nor was I particularly frightened. After the air-raid warning sounded I had been on my way down the stairs to the shelter in the basement when I heard the ominous drone of approaching enemy bombers. Instead of hurtling down the stairs to relative safety, I stopped on the half-landing and gazed out of the large window, fascinated. I don’t know what I was hoping to see. Luckily a French airman with more common sense than I saw me, leapt down the stairs and threw himself on top of me. We both crash-landed in a heap on the floor just as the bomb fell on a nearby building and the window above us shattered into a thousand pieces, most of which fell onto our flattened bodies.

  I remember getting up, rather dazed. I don’t think I even thanked him for saving me from what could have been a very disfiguring if not fatal accident. I just tottered down to the entrance hall in time to see the proviseur (headmaster), Denis Saurat, being carried on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance. It was mid-morning, and we were all sent home. But I didn’t go home. Delighted to have an unexpected free day, I spent the afternoon wandering around London, returning home later than I usually did, full of my adventures, to find my mother, who had heard on the lunchtime news bulletin that the Lycée had been hit, frantic with worry. The telephone lines to the school had been down, and she had been unable to obtain any news of me. Naturally she thought the worst. When I was late home, her fears had been confirmed, and she was about to scour the local hospitals, convinced that I was one of the casualties. I almost had been! I shudder now to think what dreadful injuries I might have sustained had it not been for the airman’s rapid intervention. But at the time I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.


  I regretfully left this idyllic situation when my call to salute the flag gave me the choice of working either in a munitions factory – an idea which did not appeal – or joining the armed forces. Deciding that if I couldn’t beat ’em I’d better join ’em, I marched to the recruiting office to enlist in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, as a Wren – partly because I come from a naval family, but mainly because I liked the hat. I found it most seductive, and one’s legs were shown off to much better advantage in sheer black stockings than in the thick woolly khaki or dull blue ones issued to the unfortunate women recruits to the Army or Air Force.

  When I went to sign on, however, a vinegar-faced woman told me tartly that the only vacancies in the Wrens were for cooks and stewards. My hopes took a rapid plunge. This was not at all the future I had fantasized over. The idea of spending the rest of the war making stews and suet puddings was not the glamorous image I intended to present to the waiting world. Vinegar-face seemed to gloat over my crestfallen appearance. ‘It’s either that or a munitions factory,’ she threatened. Her voice, like an umpire’s whistle, rang a death knell in my ears. The future looked very bleak. I knew there was no point in arguing, so I asked for time to consider. She sighed exaggeratedly and glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘It’s almost lunchtime. Make up your mind and come back at two o’clock,’ adding menacingly, ‘Otherwise I’ll put you down for a factory.’

  Like a beaten dog, I slouched from the room and out of the building and teetered glassy-eyed down the street, convinced that, because of her decision not to allow me to lead my country to victory, there was now no hope for Britain.

  ‘Hey there, you look as if you’ve lost half a crown and found sixpence.’