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

for collaborators. Most of our activity was outside Bordeaux,’ one early British agent concluded.

      It was not long before a climate of suspicion began to infect Bordeaux city life. People tended not to speak to each other in the streets and tried to avoid speaking at all to those they did not know for fear of agents provocateurs and collaborators. One commentator said, ‘Neighbours reported confidentially on one another. People were denounced for anti-German sentiments and for listening to foreign news broadcasts.’ Another, describing the attitude of the average Bordelais, reported, tartly: ‘[They believed] their duty as patriotic Frenchmen was more than adequately fulfilled by listening to BBC London in their slippers in front of the fire,’ adding, ‘influenced by German propaganda [the Bordelais] were terrified of Communism and of losing their money’.

      Though they found German rule irksome, the people of Bordeaux were, for the most part, content to continue with their lives quietly and as best they could in the circumstances. The great biannual spring and autumn fair took place as usual in the Place des Quinconces. Photographs from 1940 show unarmed German soldiers mingling with local crowds on the fairground rides. That year, as every year in the past, the Amar Circus – complete with lions, elephants, tigers and clowns – made the journey from Paris to play to full houses on the Bordeaux quays. La Petite Gironde, a broadly collaborationist Bordeaux daily newspaper, advised that the proper attitude to the occupation should be to ‘understand and be resigned’ – a proposition which many in the city followed.

      Even when the Germans began a drive against the city’s Jews, sentiment in the city remained largely unmoved. On 27 August 1940, a Jewish man, Laiser Israel Karp, was summarily condemned to death for raising his fist at a German parade. On 17 October a notice was issued requiring all Jews and Jewish enterprises in the city to register. Five days later, 5,172 Jews and 403 Jewish businesses had complied. Early in 1941, Jews were banned from seventeen public places in the city, including all parks, theatres and cinemas and many schools. A year later the Vichy authorities in Bordeaux hosted a travelling exhibition with a strong anti-Semitic theme. Entitled ‘The Jews and France’, it proved a huge success in the city, attracting 60,000 local citizens through its doors.

      During the course of 1941, however, as the German occupiers reacted to provocations and attacks with increasing ferocity, the mood in Bordeaux – as across the rest of France – began to shift. On 20 October the German military commander in Nantes was assassinated and the following day the weighted-down body of Hans Reimers, an officer in the Wehrmacht, was discovered in Bordeaux harbour. Hitler insisted on responding to these ‘outrages’ with maximum severity, overruling appeals from German military commanders in France for a more restrained response. In Bordeaux, fifty civilian hostages, most of them suspected communist sympathisers, were taken to the old French military camp at Souge, fifteen kilometres west of the city, and executed. They were the first of 257 ‘Resistance martyrs’ who would die before German firing squads at Souge before the war was over. More attacks were followed by more reprisals and, as French outrage grew, the ranks of resistants began to swell.

      In November 1941, a special French police brigade under the command of a ruthless pro-German Frenchman called Pierre Napoléon Poinsot, was established in close cooperation with the German authorities to tackle the new threat. His first act was to launch a major drive against the communists. In sweeps, notably in the Bacalan quarter of the city, and in a number of rural communities in the Gironde region, hundreds of suspects, men and women, were arrested and incarcerated in an internment camp at Mérignac.

      By now executions and deportations had become an established part of the German system of control and repression. According to secret British estimates, across France a total of 5,599 people were executed and 21,863 deported in the last quarter of 1942 alone. Resistance organisations started to spring up in Bordeaux and its hinterland. Some of these were small, personal and informal. Others were part of larger information-gathering networks. Many were under the control of foreign intelligence services, notably the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS – also known as MI6), the Free French in London and the Polish secret service. By the end of 1941 there were no less than nine of these foreign-controlled spy networks tripping over each other in Bordeaux and the Gironde. In addition there were also numerous smaller ‘private’ Resistance fiefdoms, such as the one run by Raymond Brard, the head of the Bordeaux port fire brigade, whose network was based on the membership of a weight-lifting and ‘Gironde wrestling’ club in a city backstreet.

      One of the first of these ‘private’ initiatives was established at the end of August 1940, just ten weeks after de Gaulle left France. Its founders were two neighbours who lived on the Bordeaux waterfront.

      Jean Duboué, a strikingly handsome man of imposing build with a strong face and a direct, challenging gaze, was already an established figure in Bordeaux. Forty-three years old when the Second World War began, this was not Duboué’s first conflict. He had been wounded in one of France’s bloodiest calvaries of 1914–18: the battle of the Chemin des Dames. A self-made man, Duboué had left school in Bordeaux aged twelve to work down the coal mines of the Basque Country. Returning to Bordeaux, he began a new career as a restaurateur, managing the Grand Café du Commerce et de Tourny, one of Bordeaux’s most prestigious restaurants. From here he branched out with his own businesses. One was the Café des Marchands, a modest restaurant and boarding house frequented by dockers and travelling salesmen on the Quai des Chartrons. By the end of the 1930s, Duboué’s businesses were doing well enough for him to purchase a country retreat southeast of Bordeaux, where he, his wife Marie-Louise and daughter Suzanne spent every weekend and most holidays.

      His co-conspirator, Léo Paillère, recently demobilised and an ex-captain of infantry in the First World War, was, at fifty, older than Duboué. A man of distinctly right-wing tendencies, Paillère lived with his wife Jeanne and their five sons next door to the Café des Marchands.

      During late 1940 and early 1941, Duboué and Paillère set about recruiting a number of friends as agents. They gathered intelligence on German positions, troop movements, weapons and ships in the port – especially the blockade-runners and submarines. The intelligence was smuggled out of Bordeaux by Suzanne Duboué (sixteen years old at the time and known in the family as ‘Mouton’, or ‘lambkin’ in English). She took the secret reports to a restaurant owner called Gaston Hèches in Tarbes, 140 kilometres south of Bordeaux. Hèches then passed them along a clandestine escape route he controlled, over the Pyrenees to the SIS representative in the British consulate in Barcelona. When this route was closed, or too dangerous, Suzanne carried the intelligence hidden in a basket across the border to the Spanish Basque coastal town of San Sebastián, where the British consulate doubled as the gateway to another escape line and courier service to Madrid, Gibraltar and London.

      The Duboué–Paillère reports on German activity first began to reach London early in 1941, the year which was, for Churchill and the British, the annus horribilis of the war. The heady days of solitary defiance and the Battle of Britain were over. Now British forces were engaged in a long struggle of retrenchment and attrition, and losing on all fronts: in the Atlantic, in the deserts of North Africa, on the plains of Russia and against the Japanese in the Far East. Churchill knew that after Dunkirk it would take time – probably years – to turn the tide. He knew too that if Britain was not to retreat into passive defence, then apart from RAF attacks on German cities, his only means of carrying the war to the enemy was through clandestine and unconventional warfare.

      In 1940 he created three new organisations to wage this secret war: Combined Operations, charged with conducting commando raids on the European coastline; MI9, tasked with helping escaped Allied prisoners and downed pilots to get back to Britain; and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), established in July of that year and ordered, in Churchill’s inimitable words, to ‘set Europe ablaze’.

      Staffed mainly by amateurs in the spying game, the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’ (as SOE swiftly became known, after their headquarters near Marylebone station) were regarded by Britain’s professional spies in SIS with a sniffy disdain, bordering, when occasion arose, on murderous enmity. Malcolm Muggeridge, himself an SIS officer, commented: ‘Though SOE and SIS were nominally on the same side in the war, they were, generally speaking, more abhorrent to one another than the Abwehr was