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

leaving the house: slingback sandals with raised heels, a deep V-neckline green dress, which swung on her hips as she strode lightly along the forest track. She was happy: by the morning she and the husband she adored would be far away from this snake pit of betrayal and treachery.

      In a few moments he would have to kill her. He had agreed to this when they had decided on the executions an hour previously. He had not killed before – though he had ordered others to be killed. But he was calm. It had to be done and he was ready for it.

      On the woman’s right walked a second man, his hands too plunged deep into the pockets of a heavy coat, though it was a warm summer’s evening.

      They strolled along the track, between the fir trees, chatting amiably.

      ‘When will the aircraft arrive?’

      ‘After dark I suppose. We’ll hear when we get to the landing site.’

      ‘How long will it take?’

      ‘To London? About three or four hours I should think.’

      ‘Oh! As long as …’

      The sentence died in a cacophony of shots and screams coming from the other side of a small copse to their left.

      With a flick of the wrist, the Colt was out of his pocket, its muzzle pressed against the back of the woman’s skull. He pulled the trigger. But it wouldn’t yield. In the millisecond it took him to push the safety catch down, the woman, feeling the cold of the muzzle, turned her head. He could already see the flared white of her left eye and the terrified gape of her mouth when the gun fired. She dropped silently to the ground, a crumple of green and red lying incongruously on the forest path, as his shot echoed through the woods, startling a small cloud of evening birds.

      They half-carried, half-rolled the woman’s body into a stream, which ran quietly in a nearby ditch. Her fresh blood billowed in the clear water.

      They were joined by two men half dragging another corpse, which trailed a wide smear of blood on the woodland path.

      ‘Both dead?’ the man with the Colt asked.

      ‘Yeah, but Christian botched the young man. I had to finish him off. He shouted for mercy.’

      ‘Put him in the ditch and we’ll collect the other. The guys will clear up in the morning.’

      Ten minutes later the two men’s bodies lay heaped in an awkward jumble on top of the woman’s. Their blood mingled with hers, turning the little rivulet into a meandering of crimson among the grasses and ferns.

      They covered them with branches, walked back to their vehicles in the gathering dusk and drove to Bordeaux, arriving just before the start of curfew.

      1

       BORDEAUX – BEGINNINGS

      After Paris, probably no French city was more affected by the drama of the fall of France and the early months of the German occupation than Bordeaux.

      On 10 June 1940, with the sound of German artillery ringing in their ears, the French government fled Paris. Four days later they set up their new emergency wartime capital in Bordeaux. As newcomers, they were not alone. The city was already bursting with a vast tide of humanity, which the French christened the Exode – the great exodus of refugees desperately fleeing south to avoid the advancing German armoured columns.

      Historically this was not a new experience for Bordeaux. Twice before the city had acted as the emergency capital and chief refuge of France: during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and again in 1914. But everyone sensed that this time was going to be different. This time it was going to be not just a military defeat, but a national catastrophe in which all would be engulfed.

      The last scenes of France’s tragedy were swiftly acted out.

      On the evening of 16 June 1940, General de Gaulle, who had been sent to London to secure the support of the British, flew back to Mérignac airport outside Bordeaux in a plane which Churchill had placed at his disposal. He booked into the Hôtel Majestic and arranged an urgent interview with Marshal Pétain, who was headquartered next door at the Hôtel Splendid. The interview was short and fruitless. De Gaulle promised Churchill’s help and pleaded with the old marshal to begin the fight back. But it was too late; the die was already cast. Later that day the French prime minister resigned and Marshal Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun in the First War, began negotiating an armistice with the Germans. Disgusted, de Gaulle returned to Mérignac and, on the morning of 17 June, took off for London accompanied by four clean shirts, a spare pair of trousers, 100,000 gold francs and the honour of France. The day after, he made the first of his great speeches from the British capital, appealing to all French men and women to rally to his cause and rescue their country from the shame of defeat.

      Initially, however, the general’s impassioned pleas fell mostly on deaf ears. The mood in France following its rout was predominantly one of stunned apathy. ‘The population was, if not pro-German, at least disposed to do nothing if they were left alone,’ one senior German intelligence officer put it.

      Under the terms of the armistice signed by Pétain, France was divided by a demarcation line – in practical terms, an internal frontier – running from the Lake of Geneva to the Pyrenees. This separated the northern, occupied zone – a virtual annex of Germany – from the zone non-occupée, governed by Pétain’s Vichy government in the south. In the Bordeaux region the demarcation line ran along a north–south axis forty kilometres east of the city, and encompassed in the German zone not just the great port itself, but also the entire Atlantic coast south of the Médoc peninsula. Security along the Atlantic coastline was further supplemented by a ten-kilometre-deep zone interdite from which all French citizens were banned, unless in possession of a special pass.

      The Germans acted swiftly to take control of the occupied zone, not least by requisitioning a number of key addresses in the French capital, most infamously 82–84 Avenue Foch (soon rechristened by Parisians ‘Avenue Boche’). Here they established the headquarters of the main state security organisations – the Abwehr (officially the spy service for the German army); the Gestapo (which from mid-1942 would be responsible for all intelligence-gathering on Resistance movements in occupied territories); the Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP), the police arm of the Abwehr; and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), reporting directly to Heinrich Himmler at his headquarters in Berlin. The SD was originally tasked to root out domestic dissent in Germany, but it soon also expanded its activities into the occupied territories, establishing a strong intelligence presence in Paris and Bordeaux, where it would increasingly use the Gestapo as its action arm for arrests and interrogation.

      At 11 a.m. on 28 June, less than a fortnight after de Gaulle left the city, the newly appointed German commandant of Bordeaux and its region, General von Faber du Faur, entered his new residence in the city, an imposing townhouse on the Rue Vital Carles. Here the préfet of the Gironde presented him with a magnificent welcoming bouquet of flowers in a fine cut crystal vase.

      The city which formed the heart of the general’s new command was – and still is – one of the most beautiful and venerable in all France. Lying along a crescent-moon-shaped curve of the Garonne river (from which the city gets its nickname, the ‘Port de la Lune’), Bordeaux had been a port since Roman times, shipping iron and tin from its quays; in later centuries, slaves, coffee, cotton, indigo and agricultural products were added to the trade. But the most valuable of all Bordeaux’s commodities – and central to the region’s wealth and dignity – was wine. From the great clarets of the Médoc, to the Graves and Sauternes of the Garonne valley, to the cognac grapes of Charentes – Bordeaux’s rich hinterlands of vineyards made the city affluent, proud, and uncompromisingly mercantile in its outlook.

      In the pre-war years the entire port area had been rebuilt and renovated, from the working district of Bacalan at the northern end, south along the sweep of the Quai des Chartrons, to