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

1942 gave way to a mild winter of wind, rain and mud. Repeated squalls lashed the elegant frontages of the Quai des Chartrons and beat at the windows of Dohse’s offices in Bouscat. The streets and alleys of the great port were empty, save for passers-by scurrying, collars up, to unavoidable destinations, a few cars sloshing through puddle-strewn streets and an occasional bedraggled horse pulling a bedraggled cart – and equally bedraggled carter – across wet cobblestones, under a leaden sky.

      It was not good weather for parachuting.

      In February, the weather at last turned, ushering in a long period of drought and unseasonable heat: in Bordeaux the temperature rose to twenty degrees. By the time April came, the ground was so dry that huge forest fires, driven by strong winds, consumed 100,000 hectares of conifer forest in the Landes region. It was whispered that the Germans had set the fires deliberately to destroy hidden Maquis camps and drive out the young men and women who had taken to the woods to escape being sent as compulsory labour to Germany.

      But the fine weather had its advantages, too; Jean Duboué was now able to spend long days identifying and preparing parachute sites. This involved recruiting and training teams of men and women to act as reception parties who would mark the site with lights, collect the parachuted containers and spirit them away in lorries and carts to safe hiding places. He drew up sketch maps of each site with notable points, accurately established the location by latitude and longitude and agreed a special code-phrase for each dropping point, to be broadcast over the French service of the BBC when a drop was imminent. These were, in the main, utterly banal phrases such as ‘the circle has become a square’, ‘artichokes have a hairy heart’ and ‘perhaps, perhaps and then’. In all, Duboué and his team established some sixty sites in and around Bordeaux and a further fifty across the rest of western France. These stretched from a water meadow near the village of Villedieu-les-Poêles, twenty-five kilometres from the Normandy coast, to a forest clearing close to the Burgundian village of Véron, southeast of Paris, to Scientist’s most southern site, a field bounded on three sides by a river, near the town of Dax, in the shadow of the Pyrenees. The myriad details of all these sites were painstakingly encoded and sent to London in Morse code through Roger Landes’s little radio set, perched on his kitchen table, in his bungalow beneath the German radio mast in Cenon. The strain on both man and machine was immense. London began to consider sending out a second radio operator.

      Sometime towards the end of January, disaster struck when Landes’s radio burnt out. London ordered him to take the defective wireless to Paris, where a radio engineer, who was a member of Francis Suttill’s Prosper network, would either fix it or provide a replacement. Landes and Mary Herbert took the train north to the French capital, travelling as man and wife.

      By now the Prosper circuit had become SOE’s second-biggest network after Scientist in what had been the German occupied zone. During their week in Paris, Mary Herbert stayed at the flat of Andrée Borrel, Prosper’s courier, close to where Landes had lived when he was at the École des Beaux-Arts before the war. Fearful of being recognised, Landes steered clear of the area and, security-conscious as ever, moved from address to address, never spending two consecutive nights in the same house.

      Following this visit, the two British networks maintained close relations, with Borrel and Norman making several return visits to Bordeaux and staying in the rooms above the Café des Chartrons. It was friendly, fraternal and fun – but it was very bad security.

      As was another event which took place at about the same time.

      On 20 January, André Grandclément finally married his Lucette. A large reception was held afterwards at their apartment in the Cours de Verdun. It was all very grand, as one guest remembered: ‘All André’s friends were there, together with their neighbours and many of those in the Resistance who worked with him. It was a brilliant affair and André was in terrific form – very proud and full of self-confidence.’ Another described the constant passage of Resistance leaders swirling in and out of the front door of number 34, directly opposite the gates of Pierre Poinsot’s police headquarters on the other side of the road, as ‘like a windmill’.

      De Baissac was naturally among the guests invited to this grand occasion. And so too, at de Baissac’s request, were Vic Hayes and Roger Landes, who met Grandclément for the first time. The two English newcomers were deeply shocked by what they saw. Everyone referred to everyone else not by their aliases, but by their real names. There was no security of any sort, nor any attempt by the more than forty of André Grandclément’s Resistance colleagues who attended to enter or leave discretely, or to hide who they were or what they did.

      The two Englishmen were also taken aback at the right-wing views openly on display on all sides. The feeling was mutual. André Maleyran, one of Grandclément’s key lieutenants, was also present that day. He described Landes in words which mix disdain with the unmistakeable undertows of anti-Semitism: ‘At that time Landes was a little no-one – a tyke. He was the kind of person to whom you say “you stay there and keep quiet” – and he would do as he was told. He was just a small spoke in a big wheel. He was nothing.’

      Landes responded to the event with alarm: ‘I left the meeting immediately and told de Baissac that I never wanted to have anything to do with Grandclément again.’ De Baissac, who was now spending much of his time with Grandclément, agreed that all future dealings with ‘Bernard’ and all liaison with the OCM would, in future, be handled by him. Landes and Hayes were given permission by London to team up with Duboué and Paillère and establish their own independent Resistance groups. There were ten of these in all, each with their own associated parachute drop sites, and all totally unconnected with Grandclément. From this small precaution would come, in due course, deliverance; but from the fissure it created would also grow an unbridgeable and deadly chasm of rivalry, suspicion and betrayal.

      In fact, it may well have suited Claude de Baissac to be the sole point of contact with Grandclément. For by this time, the two friends were involved not just in Resistance affairs, but in business ones too.

      Building up and arming the Resistance for the ‘coming invasion’ was an extremely expensive affair; Resistance leaders were regularly paid according to their responsibility. Even ordinary members of parachute reception parties received 500 francs every time they attended a drop. The guides across the Pyrenees received 5,000 francs for every escapee they delivered safely into Spain. To fund this expenditure, London provided huge sums of money to both Francis Suttill in Paris and Claude de Baissac in Bordeaux. When Landes dropped into the Loire valley in October 1942, he was carrying in his money belt 250,000 francs (about the equivalent of £50,000 today) to be shared between de Baissac and Suttill. Regular sums followed by parachute during the last months of that year and the early months of 1943.

      Nevertheless, de Baissac was constantly short of ready cash and often had to resort to borrowing from local businessmen and bankers against promissory notes, or British government war bonds. These were to be paid back by the UK government after the war. One of these promissory notes was for 90,000 francs, lent to de Baissac by Grandclément on 10 March 1943. Money, however, was not changing hands in only one direction. Grandclément also received regular large subventions from de Baissac to cover the ‘expenses’ of his organisation, although in this case he showed a marked reluctance to provide either receipts or any account of his expenditure. One Resistance colleague complained that, quoting reasons of ‘security’, Grandclément resolutely ‘refused to provide any monthly report accounting for his expenditure. He even refused to give the total numbers of people he was paying.’ Sadly, Grandclément was not, in reality, being nearly as security-conscious as this might suggest. At the same time as claiming that keeping accounts was a security risk, he was meticulously recording the names and addresses of almost all his senior Resistance contacts, uncoded, in a special green file marked ‘insurance customers’, which he kept in an unlocked cupboard in his office at Cours de Verdun.

      The local OCM chief was also known to have a number of other commercial activities. Some of these were straightforward and above board – for example, an investment which Grandclément had made in a local textile firm. Others were illegal – like a scam for creaming off the profits from the works canteen of a bank in Poitiers. Several more were closely connected with the black market.