Game of Spies: The Secret Agent, the Traitor and the Nazi, Bordeaux 1942-1944. Paddy Ashdown

a special chemical sent out from London, causing serious damage to the accumulators on German and Italian U-boats operating from the Bordeaux pens.

      On 22 November 1942, Landes signalled London informing them that de Baissac intended to appoint Léo Paillère (who had by now been released from jail) as Scientist’s ‘organiser-in-chief’. This meant that Scientist was now intimately connected, through Duboué and Paillère, with Grandclément’s Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCM) – though de Baissac had not as yet met the head of the OCM in Bordeaux (probably because André Grandclément had been in Paris, at the bedside of his ailing father.)

      Things were also now moving on the wider scale, as the balance of the war began to change in the Allies’ favour. Following Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa in November 1942, German, British and French minds turned to what everyone knew would happen next – the attempt by the Allies to gain a foothold on the mainland of occupied Europe. Torch had opened the way to the era of large-scale invasions, rather than small commando raids such as Operation Frankton. As 1942 drew to a close the idea began to take root in some circles in London (including Baker Street), in the high command in Berlin and amongst the people of France, that the long anticipated Allied landing on the French coast would take place sometime in the summer or early autumn of 1943.

      SOE, meanwhile, were still under some criticism in London for how little they were delivering to the main war effort, measured against the resources they were employing – especially Halifax bombers which could, the RAF strenuously argued, be more gainfully deployed attacking German cities than dropping secret agents and arms into France. In an attempt to boost their record of success, Baker Street claimed in their December 1942 report to Churchill that the blockade-runners in Bordeaux harbour had been sunk by them (de Baissac’s team), not Hasler’s Royal Marines. Churchill, however, knew the truth from German signals, decrypted by Bletchley, which told him of Hasler’s success little more than twenty-four hours after his limpet mines had exploded. It was now politically vital that SOE showed that it had a major role to play in the coming invasion – minor, random pinprick acts of sabotage would no longer do.

      It was in this context that, in the second half of November 1942, de Baissac and Duboué travelled north to Poitiers for a meeting with the Paris-based leaders of the OCM. Among those present were André Grandclément’s uncle, General Paul Jouffrault, and the overall OCM head, Colonel Touny. The main task of what would come to be known as the conférence de Poitiers, was to reorganise the entire underground OCM structure in Bordeaux and the Gironde, rather grandiosely, along the lines of a conventional division of the French army. But the secondary purpose was to reach an ‘agreement’ with de Baissac that Scientist would henceforth act as the channel through which SOE would arm the entire OCM network across occupied France, estimated by de Baissac to number 15,000–20,000 fighters. This was a huge logistic undertaking which would, over time, involve de Baissac having control of sixty parachute sites and a dozen or so Lysander landing grounds spread from Brittany in the north, to Paris and northern Burgundy in the east, to the foothills of the Pyrenees in the south.

      When de Baissac put the Poitiers compact to London for approval, Baker Street agreed.

      It was a crucial moment in Britain’s secret war in France. For political reasons, which had more to do with increasing SOE’s influence in London than having secure and effective networks in France, SOE ditched its policy of small self-contained networks in favour of the more tempting prospect of having a whole underground army under its control in the case of an invasion. From now on Scientist, which had been tightly targeted and secure in Bordeaux, would be vulnerable to infiltration and destruction through any weakness in the vast rambling, rickety structure of the OCM, which sprawled across the whole of northern and western France.

      The OCM leaders in Paris wanted even more centralisation. At the end of 1942, Colonel Touny proposed to de Gaulle that he should have the command of the French Resistance in all of northern France. Although the OCM was clearly the largest Resistance organisation in the country, and despite the fact that the London French were at the time supporting it with a subvention of 1.5 million francs a month, the proposal was rejected by London on the grounds that the OCM was seen as too right-wing, too elitist and ‘too’ anti-Semitic.

      At some point during the Christmas holiday period, de Baissac went to Paris where, over lunch, he met André Grandclément for the first time.

      No doubt much of Grandclément’s two months in Paris had been spent clearing up the old admiral’s affairs and taking on his duties as the new head of the Grandclément family. But he had also been busy with politics – especially right-wing politics. At one meeting during this period he described his personal aims and those of the OCM in markedly ambitious terms: to create a force which would maintain internal order after the liberation of France so as ‘[to] establish a new system of civil, administrative and political government for the France of the future [which would be] anti-communist, anti-socialist … and strongly opposed to further Jewish infiltration’.

      Despite Grandclément’s clear anti-Semitic leanings (and notwithstanding the fact that one of the key members of Scientist – Landes – was himself a Jew), the first meeting between the head of the most important British network in southwest France and the largest French Resistance organisation in the region was a success. A firm partnership – and friendship – were established between the two men, who agreed a merger between Scientist and the OCM in the southwest, with de Baissac in overall command and Grandclément (who was now equipped with the alias ‘Bernard’) acting as his deputy. De Baissac later assured Baker Street that he considered his new colleague ‘very able and trustworthy’ and suggested that Grandclément should be given ‘an official status in the hierarchy of the organisation’. Baker Street gave their approval to the relationship and opened an SOE file for Grandclément – who would later claim that this moment had also been marked by SOE making him ‘a major in the British Army’.

      The scene was set for a new phase in the war against France’s occupiers in the southwest.

      For Dohse in his office in Bouscat a picture was beginning to emerge which he could no longer ignore. ‘In the course of 1942 we knew the Resistance was forming, but we could not work out in what form,’ he wrote later. ‘Our local intelligence services were unable to give us a detailed picture of what was going on … my job was to try to stick as close to the [newly forming] Resistance organisations as I could, so as to infiltrate my agents into the enemy networks … but we lacked French agents capable of doing this.’

      Meanwhile, sabotage attacks in the region were increasing, as was the frequency of the mysterious night flights over the Bordeaux area by British bombers. The threat against German lives and interests was growing. An invasion looked more and more likely. It would not be long before Berlin would be calling for action.

      9

       BUSINESSES, BROTHELS AND PLANS

      In the first days of 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt met in the congenial surroundings of the Anfa Hotel, Casablanca, under a warm winter sun, to discuss the next phase of the war. Stalin was absent, saying he could not leave Moscow during the battle of Stalingrad. De Gaulle and his arch rival, General Henri Giraud, attended briefly for an awkward photograph meant to illustrate their ‘unity’. It shows the two men – who enthusiastically hated each other – stiffly shaking hands from as far apart as possible, while Churchill smiles impishly at their discomfiture and Roosevelt looks on benignly, like an indulgent father watching his children behaving politely at a family gathering.

      At Casablanca, Churchill and Roosevelt decided that the invasion of France would not take place until 1944. The French leaders were of course not informed. Neither, more controversially, was Baker Street. Both continued to act on the presumption that the invasion would happen – indeed was a certainty – by the early autumn of 1943. Colonel Buckmaster, the head of SOE, went so far as to claim after the war that ‘[in] 1943 we had a secret message telling us that the invasion might be closer than we thought’ – a statement for which there is absolutely