CHAPTER SEVEN
With so many enemies, it may seem a miracle that any pigeon dropped as part of Columba survived to reach home. But in Belgium, all Leopold Vindictive knew was that Britain had managed to drop the birds once and that the one they found had then made it back home. The communications channel had worked, so why should it not work again? As the days passed, however, the frustration began to grow. The birds dropped on a flight on 3 August were never found. There was an attempt to drop more birds from another RAF flight in early September, but as a result of bad weather it returned to base with its pigeons still in their containers.
On 27 September 1941 Marie and Margaret heard a deeply discouraging message on the BBC: ‘Here is a special message for our correspondent Leopold Vindictive. We regret the absence of anything new from you, despite our best efforts. But – as before – have courage.’ Did the reference to ‘our best efforts’ mean another pigeon had been dropped? If so, it had not been received. And nor had the message yet reached London about the change of name, since they still used the original designation (no doubt annoying the royal court). The two sides were like star-crossed lovers whose messages constantly missed each other. Sitting on a huge stash of intelligence was both frustrating and dangerous.
On the night of 3 October, a few days after the BBC message was broadcast, pigeons were dropped again. Another RAF Special Duties flight crossed the Channel with specific coordinates to drop pigeons near Lichtervelde. It was again a secondary mission to an agent drop. Britain was still struggling to work out how to make contact with nascent intelligence networks. Belgium might have been small, but it was strategically important and a vital target for British intelligence services. It was littered with airfields and ports that might be used to attack Britain, and criss-crossed with main railway lines that ferried material from Germany into France. But how could you establish a link to the people there? Sending agents in and out to contact the networks was the ideal, but Belgium posed unique challenges. The coast was too well guarded for agents to be landed by sea. It was also the most densely populated country in Western Europe, which meant that – unlike France – it was near impossible to land agents or pick them up by aircraft without being spotted.
That night saw a rare success. Jean Cassart – a captain in the Belgian army codenamed Hireling – floated to earth by parachute south-east of Liège along with his radio operator. It was the third attempt to get them into the country, a sign of just how difficult these drops were. The two men hid in the woods until morning and then headed to a hotel to meet their contact. Cassart was there to coordinate sabotage – ‘he will organize small groups to kidnap and kill individual Germans,’ read his instructions.
The agent made it in, but what was the fate of the pigeons designated for Leopold Vindictive? Pilots were improving their dropping skills and on one occasion, the containers were dropped with neat precision in a row of back gardens from a height of fifty feet, almost as if Santa Claus on his sleigh were dropping off presents house by house. But this time the pilots seem to have dropped the birds five to seven miles to the west of their target. Navigating at night was a challenge. Columba worked if the intention was to hit a general area but was less effective when a specific spot was aimed at. Another opportunity had been missed.
Raskin continued to travel across the country giving religious talks. In his letters to his brother Albert he made no mention of his clandestine work. He stayed regularly at Lichtervelde with the Debaillie family. Whilst there he heard a rumour that pigeons had been dropped somewhere nearby but had fallen into German hands.
With no pigeons, the hunt for a radio transmitter or a way of getting a message to London gathered intensity as every day passed. Hector Joye had an idea. He would talk to his friend Clément Macq in Brussels. Macq had built his first radio in 1923 and had set up a business to sell wireless sets. Joye had been one of his clients and knew he was a patriot, having worked out Macq’s sympathies when they had a coded discussion about whether a new radio might be good enough to receive the BBC; discussing such a possibility was a signal of where one’s allegiances lay.
Joye first paid Macq a visit in July and asked if there was a way to construct a radio to send a message to England. Macq, a thin, angular middle-aged man, said he was unable to do so. That was not true: Macq was already secretly involved in a resistance network. But you had to be careful what you told people.
Joye was persistent. On a second visit, he went further in his pleas for help, asking Macq if he had heard the name ‘Leopold Vindictive’ on the radio. Of course he had, Macq said, an interesting sign of how the fame of the group was beginning to spread. Joye confessed – perhaps with a touch of pride – that he was one of its members. ‘We had a pigeon,’ he explained, ‘the English received the information and want more.’
Joye showed Macq some of the information they were now collecting, and Macq was astonished at the level of detail. Joye explained that they had no means of getting it to London since they had not received any more pigeons. Could Macq help establish a line to London in order to ask for more pigeons? Perhaps there was a way. Macq relented, realizing that this was a serious, if not necessarily experienced, group of amateur spies. He knew a man in Brussels who might be able to get a message through. He would speak to him.
Joye introduced Raskin to Macq, who would say that Father Raskin was ‘toujours bouillant’ – always on the boil, eager for action. But such enthusiasm was also a risk. Raskin said he wanted a radio transmitter to be ready the next day. Macq had to explain it was impossible. Could Macq perhaps build some kind of short-range transmitter which could send a message to a passing RAF plane, Raskin asked. Not possible, Macq explained. He could sense Raskin’s impatience.
Macq did say he might have one way to get a message to England. But it would not provide direct contact; rather it would be transmitted via a route using couriers carrying messages by hand. Nevertheless Joye gave him the message. ‘Leopold Vindictive 200 requests a bird without delay,’ read the text. ‘A message of the highest importance is ready to be sent. In the first message give instructions for dropping of the pigeons (ie 300 is ok). If you cannot, please give us a different route for sending maps. For information: our key position is in the castle of Wijnendale. We change our name to A.M.20. Use this for radio communication.’
As this note makes clear, there had already been another name change, this time to Ave Maria, a short prayer for help. Raskin told Macq during their meetings that the plan for his network had been submitted to someone close to the King, who had approved. That was the reason that they now needed the change of name – in order to protect any link. The urgency of their requests for pigeons also reflected the men’s knowledge that they had achieved something special.
When Macq paid a visit to Raskin at the missionary house of Scheut in Brussels in order to discuss installing film projection machinery, the priest showed him something that left him speechless. The frustration for Leopold Vindictive was that their efforts had now far eclipsed the work on the original message which had so stunned the British. The group’s appetite for espionage had been whetted. The first pigeon might have been the starter; now they were ready to deliver the main course.
After the fall of Belgium, the Nazis had begun building a set of defences along the Channel, including the coast of Belgium. This was initially to protect their forces as they were marshalled for a potential invasion of Britain. But from March 1941 the emphasis shifted to protecting the continent from British commando raids. A directive that month established a new unified command and ordered an increased pace of construction. In 1942 Hitler would order the extension of the coastal defences all the way from Norway through to the border with Spain; it would become known as the Atlantic Wall, designed to ward off an Allied attack or invasion. Belgium, along with Norway, was the forerunner in 1941 because it was considered the most likely target for enemy action. In May 1941, there had been two attempts to make some kind of landing on the coast but they had been unsuccessful. Belgium had the most heavily defended coastline in the world.
These defences were the grand project the three friends had been working on – an astonishing feat of intelligence gathering. They had travelled along the coast and mapped out the entire Belgian coastal defence system from De Panne near Dunkirk on the French border to Knokke on the Dutch border – a distance of 67 km, precisely drawn out in the same meticulous manner displayed in the first message.
Raskin travelled to give religious lectures on China, often appearing at schools where he would write out the children’s names in Chinese characters. He had permission from the Germans to travel, and there were bicycles he could use littered across the country. On the trips he would also scan for birds through a pair of binoculars, whilst at the same time noting down the defences he observed. He would also talk to his extensive network of contacts.
Arseen meanwhile did his spying while going about his business, the buying and selling of animal feed (which also bankrolled the operation). He drove a large American 1939 Pontiac and owned a set of binoculars and a Leica camera – all the tools needed for spying.
Hector Joye was free to make the most of his spare time, and he seems to have carried out the bulk of the reconnaissance work. The permission he had been given to visit the coast because of his need for fresh sea air gave him the perfect excuse to head out in his large Minerva car, touring Bruges, Ostend, Zeebrugge and other coastal spots. His two teenage sons came along on some of the trips and may perhaps even have been directly involved in the espionage work themselves.
The men first used a military map on which they would add the information they discovered. Next they made their own detailed, coloured drawings. Slowly, visit by visit, they updated these and added specifics. Barbed wire here. German emplacements behind some dunes. Roads to barracks and aerodromes. Munitions depots. A detailed legend was included to help the reader interpret all the details. German military buildings were depicted from different vantage points and angles. Arseen Debaillie travelled along the coast in August and September to spot machine-gun installations. His brother Michel told him about the existence of an ammunition depot in a forest. Sometimes the brothers travelled together, sometimes with Joye.
The Joye family still possess drafts of their coastal defence and Atlantic Wall map. The plans are breathtakingly beautiful and delicate, written out on near translucent tracing paper which could be folded tight to fit into a pigeon cylinder. Each consecutive draft from the early summer of 1941 onwards reveals more detail and – strikingly – more colour. By the end there are reds, yellows, greens, blues, oranges and browns. Red ink for bunkers, military installations, machine-gun posts, airports; black ink for railway lines; green ink for forests and woodlands; brown ink for roads and paths. The drafts were put together over months and were far more detailed than the message they had already sent by pigeon to London. Later versions are packed with tiny writing, noting updates such as when German troops took part in maritime exercises and what time guards were on duty on the coast, and which places were mined. Huge amounts of tiny text accompany the maps. The places where bombs might do most damage were marked out. The writing is illegible without a magnifying glass.
Across each significant section is drawn the symbol for Leopold Vindictive – a curly L in a sharp V. The final versions had the group’s seal. The result was Joye and Raskin’s masterpiece – as much a work of art as the watercolours and panoramas Raskin had drawn in the First World War.
If Belgium and the continent were ever to be liberated, everyone knew that there would have to be a landing on the coast, and that for it to work it would have to penetrate layer after layer of bunkers and hidden firing positions, barbed wire and large guns installed by the Germans. But it was not just for the longer-term eventuality of a full invasion that details of the defences were invaluable. Churchill was determined in the meantime not to adopt a passive mentality. ‘The completely defensive habit of mind, which has ruined the French, must not be allowed to ruin all our initiative,’ he wrote just after Dunkirk. ‘We should immediately set to work to organizing raiding forces on these coasts.’ This would be a task for newly created ‘Commandos’. Churchill was keen to target the coast, and Leopold Vindictive was collecting precisely the information needed to do so successfully. If the British wanted to launch a raid (as they did in Dieppe in August 1942, although with serious losses), let alone a full invasion, few things could have been of greater use than the maps that showed where each camouflaged Blockhaus with German guns lay in wait.
The maps were so detailed that when they were shown to Clément Macq he initially thought he was looking at the original German defence plans, and wondered how the priest had managed to steal them. The amount of work involved in both collecting the intelligence for the maps and then drawing them is astonishing. Only by understanding that can one appreciate the frustration of those who had produced such masterpieces but had no way to ensure they were seen by their intended audience in London.
The maps had to be carefully hidden. Joye concealed his own set of drawings in his house, placing them in the frame of the kitchen door. Inside the large complex of Scheutist missionaries where Raskin lived, there were plenty of rooms, basements and gardens which offered up hiding places. Raskin took his set of maps and drawings and placed them in a stainless steel briefcase, which he buried in the peaceful gardens. He told one person what he had done – Father Remi Verhaeghe, an assistant to the head of the organization and the one person there to whom he entrusted the secret of his resistance work. Raskin had made colour microfilms of the maps, and it was these that he hoped to send to Britain on the next pigeon. On the first floor of the mission house Raskin had his own room, hung with ornaments from China and containing his own books, papers and drawings. A two-foot plaster statue of the Virgin Mary stood on his writing table. The statue was hollow. Inside he hid the films.
The plans were incredibly precious, their possession dangerous. How to get them to London remained the challenge. Raskin did not want to risk passing them through networks of couriers – the chance that they would be intercepted or lost on the long, tortuous journey, which could take months, was too great given the work that had been put into them. There was still no doubt that the safest and fastest way to get them to London was by pigeon. They just needed to get a message to London to ask for pigeons. Macq said he would try his contacts.
Macq’s initial contact in Brussels was a former gendarmerie commandant, René Dufrasne, who had asked Macq for help with radios for resistance work in 1940. Dufrasne passed Raskin’s message on to the next link in the chain, an engineer who lived a couple of streets away called Maurice Muylaert. But then something odd happened. Muylaert surprised Dufrasne by telling him that he already knew all about Leopold Vindictive. More than that, Muylaert boasted that he played a key role in it.
The news went back though Macq to Joye, who then spoke to Raskin. It was time for the priest to make his own confession. Raskin sheepishly explained that he had been trying so many routes to send messages to London that Muylaert had been passed a radio message in July which he would try and get out to London. Muylaert had first met Raskin in February 1941 after being introduced by Madame Roberts. Muylaert had not, as he boasted, helped found the group, but he had known about it. He was part of Raskin’s circle of Brussels contacts, the secondary agents who supplied the priest with material.
Hector Joye was only now realizing that the pigeon which had landed was not, after all, the beginning of his friend’s espionage work. Rather it had been a gift from above, providing a route out for information collected by someone who had already been trying to spy for some time. Even before the arrival of the first pigeon, Raskin seemed to have been stockpiling intelligence from his contacts.
Raskin’s restless determination was both his strength and his flaw. It led him to try every avenue, and that was dangerous. Muylaert had been showing off by claiming to have founded the group. He had a reputation for boasting about his intelligence work, especially to his numerous girlfriends – in one case telling a girl in a cinema that he had a secret message in his pocket. He was proud of what he was doing. But pride could be dangerous if it was not tightly contained. Word about Leopold Vindictive was spreading. Radio broadcasts from the BBC – the only means of contact – did not help, but nor did the ever broader circles the group were moving in as they tried to find a way to reach London.
The Germans were already on the hunt for Allied airmen and those sheltering them. Now, as resistance began slowly to organize, it found itself facing a formidable adversary. Belgium was effectively under military administration and Section IIIF of the Abwehr, Military Intelligence, had the task of hunting for spies and disrupting enemy intelligence activity both in Germany and the territories it occupied. In Brussels the work was led by Major Mohring. But the key investigator was Georg Bodicker (also spelt Boedecker), originally from Hamburg. Bodicker was in his late thirties, slim with blond hair and glasses, his teeth artificial after his real ones had been knocked out in a car accident. He had the scholarly appearance of a teacher and spoke English and French.
Bodicker was no thug. He understood that rooting out spy networks required running your own spies. That was Abwehr IIIF’s speciality. It realized that the challenge of occupation required the active penetration of resistance cells and escape networks, after which as much intelligence as possible should be carefully gathered. Playing a long game in this way allowed you to try to understand every contact and connection before you eventually pounced, enabling you to arrest a wider network rather than simply the first people you had spotted. Abwehr IIIF was characterized by an effective combination of patience and boldness, MI5 in London reckoned.
Muylaert had passed Raskin’s messages to a police inspector named Joseph Dehennin. At the start of the war, Dehennin had fled to France and developed contacts with French intelligence. He returned to Brussels and promised to work loyally with the Germans, but instead sought to use his contacts to work against them. Dehennin and his group were in the early stages of building a network, passing political information to a French officer who would visit Brussels throughout 1941 and using a courier who could move across the border carrying material about German military movements and facilities.
Dehennin in turn had passed on Raskin’s messages to try to get them to London through one of the various routes his network employed, but this relied primarily on trusting the French to carry them out by hand through the Iberian peninsula. Documents – and eventually people, whether airmen or resistance fighters whose identity had been blown to the Nazis – would slowly follow the network’s path of contacts, first into France, then down to Spain and usually to Lisbon, from where they could eventually make it to Britain. Every step carried risk, and there was never a guarantee a person or a message would get through.
In April 1941, Bodicker had begun an investigation into Dehennin. His great success came from inserting an agent into Dehennin’s network itself. The Germans often did not speak the local language and so delegated much power to local agents, tasking them with the infiltration of enemy networks. Bodicker was careful to keep the identity of this new informer secret. In a cruel twist, the culprit was Dehennin’s own brother-in-law – a portly, 35-year-old fellow policeman called Eric Pieren who was being used as a courier for the messages. No one had any suspicions about him. But somehow this man, who had been seen as a patriot, was quite the opposite. By the summer, he was passing all the messages he received from Dehennin on to Bodicker, who would copy them before allowing them to move on so he could trace the network.
In early October, Dehennin passed to Pieren a long letter for the Belgian government-in-exile in London, who had also established contact, asking for a link to be set up to a group codenamed ‘Zero’ which could supply regular intelligence. Bodicker decided it was time to swoop. The next morning, Dehennin was picked up. In quick succession, Muylaert and two other members of his group were arrested by the Germans.
The Germans were careful to protect Pieren’s identity as the source of the intelligence. No one knew he had betrayed the group and he continued to inform for the Abwehr, collecting 4,000 Belgian francs a month for much of the war.
Everyone who knew the arrested men held their breath. Would they be next? Some of Raskin’s contacts in Brussels who helped on escape lines had already been arrested. How close were the Germans? Had the message from Raskin passed to Muylaert given him away? And would the prisoners talk about their contacts once they were interrogated? Raskin and his friends held their breath and waited. At any moment, the door might be kicked in. But slowly they were able to exhale. It seemed, after a while, as if they may have survived.
But there had still been no pigeons for Raskin and his friends. Their first alternative route to London had been cut off, and the Germans were now on his trail. Raskin did not know it, but the traitor Pieren had heard something in August to pique Bodicker’s interest – he had heard there was a priest in Brussels who was sending messages to England via pigeons dropped by parachute. But Pieren did not know his name.