The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish Page 5

  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 lot 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.

  Chapter 3

  I was sent first to Montague Mansions, a block of flats in the street behind Norgeby House, to work with the Crazy Gang, the secret agents I had met that first afternoon when I was interviewed by Harry Miller. Once I was part of their team, I discovered they were in fact delightful, and very friendly. But all the same the place made me think of a windmill operated by the Marx Brothers. The doors were always wide open and men and women in shirt-sleeves, mostly men, seemed to be perpetually roaring up and down the corridors, shrieking to each other. The entire block might have been teeming with members of the Secret Army, but if it was I never found out. We were such a closed group, even among ourselves.

  Montague Mansions was never designed to be an office complex. It was a sedate, rather luxurious block of flats which had been taken over by SOE. And it could not have been a more inconvenient place in which to work. We used to trip endlessly backwards and forwards between Norgeby House and Montague Mansions: the crucial thing we needed or the person we were looking for was always in the other building. The house had three floors plus a basement. I was working on the top floor. And there was no lift. I cannot think how many times I raced up and down those flights of stairs, and I do mean raced. I’d caught the bug from all the other hyperactive inhabitants tearing about the place.

  On my way down I flew past Leo Marks’s office on the ground floor. Marks was probably the greatest cryptologist of the war. He was very young – only about twenty-two at the time – short and stocky with a bulbous nose but a captivating smile. He had a great personality. His door was always wide open, and there always seemed to be a party going on inside. Apart from the fact that he was very popular,
there was the added attraction that his mum always sent him to work laden with cakes and sandwiches, which he shared around – commodities that were not to be found on every table during the war. Leo had been recruited to cope with the coded messages that came in from the different réseaux and was in charge of a roomful of decoders, all girls I believe, who worked in Michael House, a neighbouring building belonging to Marks and Spencer.

  Before Leo’s arrival, messages that the decoders found difficult, even impossible, to transcribe – they called them ‘indecipherables’ – were often returned to the pianist with a request for retransmission. But given how much pressure the radio operators were under, it was inevitable that they made mistakes. Sometimes the organizer dictated messages to the pianist while he was actually transmitting, which meant he had to encode them as he transmitted – an almost impossible task. And the result was often a jumble of letters which the girls couldn’t decipher. But when Leo arrived he decided that there was no such thing as an ‘indecipherable’. If the pianist had risked his life to send the message, then the least people at the receiving end could do was work at it until a solution was found rather than ask the radio operator to risk his life again. He inspired the girls with his enthusiasm, but sometimes they still had to admit defeat. Then Leo took over, going through endless permutations until he finally deciphered the message -I believe the greatest number was over 900, and it took him three days to work it out. Leo found perfectly encoded messages suspicious. He concluded that they came either from a German operator who had somehow managed to secure the code or a pianist who had been arrested and was being forced to continue transmitting under German control, thereby enabling the enemy to discover plans for drops as well as other useful information. But this unfortunate situation was not as dramatic as it might appear, because it also worked the other way round, to our advantage. If the Section head knew that the code, and possibly the radio operator, were in enemy hands, he was able to feign ignorance of the fact and reply to the ‘false’ message with ‘false’ information – which might explain how the rumour was spread that the D-Day landings were to take place near Calais, sending German troops scurrying to the front in the wrong direction. Leo could always recognize an operator’s ‘fist’, or the way he transmitted. And he could also tell whether the message actually came from our pianist or from a German operator who had either captured the code or was working his set.

  One of my first tasks on arrival at Montague Mansions was to make sure that the messages personnels, which went out on the BBC every evening, were delivered to the basement by five o’clock. These were always prepared at the very last minute. I don’t know why. To my mind, they could easily have been handed to me earlier, enabling me to make a regal descent of the staircase, instead of having to breathlessly hurtle down it like an unexploded bomb and slither into the basement at the last minute, where an elderly sergeant, a hardened veteran from the First World War, was in charge. Well, in a sense. He had a staff of one: a young corporal, who sat at a table in the far corner of the room, wearing headphones and tapping out something on a machine. I don’t know what. I had quickly taken to heart the order I had received on my first day not to ask questions. The sergeant appeared to have been born with an unlit home-made cigarette screwed permanently to his upper lip. What he did I don’t know. He didn’t appear to do anything. But I imagine he must have had some kind of function. He was a pleasant chappie, but then I suppose he had no reason to be otherwise, since his sole raison d’être appeared to be to stand and glower at the poor corporal. I felt sorry for the young man. But, since he never looked up from his tapping, I couldn’t smile and convey my sympathy.

  These messages personnels, which were not coded but were broadcast en clair, were the brainchild of Georges Bégué, the first F Section agent to be parachuted into occupied France, in May 1941. He dropped ‘blind’, that is with no reception committee waiting to receive him, and had to find his own ‘safe house’, from where he transmitted the first radio message back to London. The person who received him, Max Hymans, lived in Valençay and later became a prominent member of the local Resistance movement, which, with his help, Georges Bégué recruited. But once the réseau was up and running, Bégué realized that in order to receive the necessary supplies of agents, money, arms, food, ammunition, clothing and combat boots, and also to inform HQ of enemy movements and sabotage operations, a system had to be devised whereby an agent in the field could safely communicate with London without fear of a message being intercepted by the enemy. Not only had the organizer to send a message via the radio operator during one of his daily ‘skeds’, but there had to be some means by which London could safely reply, announcing when the requested drop would take place. And that reply had also to be rapid and watertight, with no chance of the enemy intercepting it and using it to their own advantage, which would have been a hazard had it been sent to the pianist. So the messages personnels were born.

  I’ve no idea what happened to the messages personnels once I’d handed them over, nor do I know how they arrived at the BBC. I imagine someone must have collected and delivered them. I remember one afternoon crashing into the basement at the last minute and bumping into a young Free French sergeant I had often swayed with on the crowded tube in the early morning. While clinging desperately to the overhanging straps, in an attempt to remain upright, we always greeted each other with nods and smiles, since we were both attempting to read a newspaper sent out by the Free French. He got in after me and, oddly enough, left at Baker Street, my stop. Now I knew why. He must work somewhere in the building. We gaped at each other in surprise. I said, ‘You!’ He smiled and nodded. I never saw him again. Perhaps he’d decided to travel by bus. Or perhaps he’d been locked up in a dungeon somewhere because he had been ‘recognized’. We worked in a very funny set-up.

  The BBC played a very important role during the war. For France alone there were eight or nine programmes broadcast daily. And the French listened to them, risking arrest if they were discovered. The Germans also tuned into to the BBC’s programmes and jammed the lines, making listening almost impossible. Sabine, a friend of mine who was a young girl during the war, told me that before tuning in to the BBC every evening to listen to the news from London, her father used to put a blanket over their wireless set to cushion the sound. He then disappeared beneath it, followed by as many members of the family as could squeeze in. As she was only eight years old at the time, her presence wasn’t considered essential. But she apparently pushed herself between a collection of knees to hear the ominous boom of Big Ben followed by the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony – da, da, da, dah – before the threat of suffocation forced her to abandon her post. But one evening her father peered round the blanket and called her back, making room for her close to the set. She was puzzled, but when she began to question him he put his finger to his lips and said, ‘Shush . . . listen.’ ‘I could hardly believe it,’ she told me all those years later, her eyes shining at the recollection. ‘The voice of the young Princess Elizabeth, the heir to the British throne, came over the crackling airwaves. I was so excited, I held my breath. She spoke for about five minutes sending a message of hope and encouragement to the children and young people of France. At the end she said, “My sister, Margaret Rose, is here beside me waiting to greet you.” And the two young princesses sent their final good wishes before they said goodnight. For me it was the most wonderful moment,’ Sabine continued. ‘The princesses’ tinkling voices had given us hope in the midst of a dark and dreary war.’ She cannot have been the only young person in France who was helped and encouraged by our future Queen that evening.

  The BBC was listened to by millions of French people, and the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth were whistled loudly in the streets, the whistler often putting up two fingers, the defiant victory signal used by Churchill, to accompany the tune. Suddenly a voice had pierced the darkness, bringing hope and encouragement, boosting their morale and giving them the strength to r
esist throughout the years of occupation.

  The main programme of the day went out at seven-fifteen every evening. Big Ben chimed the hour. The introductions were made, followed by the latest news. The correct news was always reported, good or bad. And there wasn’t much good news to report in the beginning. Perhaps that’s why the French went to such great pains to listen, knowing that the news they heard from London was the truth, because all they were fed by Radio Paris were lies and German propaganda.

  I asked Jacques, my husband, who was in France during the greater part of the war, before he joined General (later Maréchal) de Lattre de Tassigny’s First French Army, to tell me what the reactions were to the BBC broadcasts. This is what he said.

  ‘When I was a student, I believed that Paris was the hub of the world, that the sun never set on the French colonial empire and that the French Army, victorious in World War I, was invincible, the best army in the world. So when, in June 1940, France collapsed, the German Army paraded down the Champs-Elysées, Hitler was photographed at the Eiffel Tower and German domination and rule penetrated every fibre of my country’s life, disillusionment and humiliation dealt me a devastating blow. A dark cloud had descended on France. In the occupied zone it hovered overhead. In the so-called “free zone” under the control of the Vichy Government it threatened on the horizon. We were now part of Nazi-dominated Europe, cut off from the remaining, but dwindling, free world. And our former ally Great Britain had become, so we were told, our enemy.

  ‘The media – newspaper and radio – was in German hands. The French prime minister, Pierre Laval, loudly declared that he wished for a German victory, while with eloquent violence Philippe Henriot, the French propaganda minister, known as the French Goebbels, poured out his bitter hatred of the Allies, the Jews, the résistants and, among others, General de Gaulle.1 Every day, Radio Paris broadcast a talk by a well-known journalist, Jean Hérold-Paquis, who always ended his commentary with the stirring words: “England, like Carthage, shall be destroyed.” Into this despair, the voice of the BBC sounding daily during eight or nine French news bulletins was the only weapon, the only ray of hope we had left during those dark times. It was strictly forbidden by the Germans to listen to these broadcasts and, if we were caught, the risk was great: arrest, prison, often ending in a concentration camp. In an attempt to stifle this voice of hope and freedom the Germans jammed the BBC French broadcasts, making listening almost impossible. But since these programmes were available on several wavelengths, we managed to tune in and, with luck, hear them.