CHAPTER NINE
Jef Van Hooff felt afraid. Even his MI6 minder looked tearful, he thought. He and Marcel Thonus climbed aboard Whitley aircraft ‘B’ 4166 and the engines started up noisily. It was a cold night but their flying suits kept the two Belgians warm as they set off on their mission.
The pilots did not know the real names of those they were taking to Europe. But they knew this was an MI6 job. Those were even more secret than the missions organized by SOE. MI6 usually insisted that its agents must never share an aircraft with agents of any other service, and that nothing be put in writing about them in operational log books. MI6 liked to keep things tight. That was going to be a problem for Raskin and Leopold Vindictive – that, and the petty rivalries among spy services in London, in which men like Jef Van Hooff were pawns. MI6 had decided that Van Hooff and his companion Thonus would be dropped with instructions to establish contact with a number of groups and individuals. Among those groups – added late after Vandael’s arrival just a few weeks earlier – would be Leopold Vindictive.
Van Hooff looked down at the floor of the cabin, where he saw two containers and two small baskets of pigeons. They were for the resistance, it was explained. But not for Leopold Vindictive. Van Hooff and Thonus swigged rum to keep warm as the plane made its way towards the Channel just after ten at night. Thonus seemed a world away. Van Hooff was having dark visions of what might lie ahead. After a while he drifted into a deep sleep.
He was woken with a start. The sound was different. Enemy fire? The jump door was opened. Just in case they needed to make a sharp exit, the sergeant flying with them explained. Thonus and Van Hooff sat with their legs dangling. Suddenly there were bright streaks across the aircraft. ‘What’s that?’ Van Hooff asked the sergeant. ‘It’s the engine,’ the sergeant replied, not very reassuringly. Van Hooff was convinced it was tracer fire coming from all sides. The men pulled their legs back in quickly. But it was just the port engine causing problems. Sitting in the containers, the pigeons seemed as scared as he did, thought Van Hooff.
After an hour or two, they approached the drop point in a wood near Valenciennes. It was just after midnight.
They looked at the light which told them the correct moment to jump. A red light meant get ready; green meant go. Red came on. The men tensed, and the plane began to descend. But the light did not change. Van Hooff’s eyes began to hurt as he stared at it without blinking, desperate not to mistime his jump and miss the right landing spot. But it stayed red.
The seconds ticked by. The sergeant emerged from the cockpit to explain that the pilot could not locate the right point for the drop. There was too much ground haze.
‘What now?’ Van Hooff asked.
‘Back to England,’ he said.
Van Hooff tried to quell his anger by gulping the last swig of his rum, and sat behind a container cursing. The pigeons sat next to him in their baskets, oblivious.
Just after half past three in the morning, the plane was home. Exhausted, Van Hooff fell into a sleep so deep there were no dreams or nightmares. For Jef Van Hooff, the irony was that after the crazy things he had done to get out of Belgium, the planned parachute jump to go back in as an undercover agent working with the resistance seemed almost straightforward.
The 30-year-old had left Belgium nearly a year earlier. He had been a footballer with FC Mechelen and then a sports journalist. A picture of him in his football kit before the war shows him as an apparently carefree, well-built young man with a broad, easy smile and dark hair. After the occupation, he first made his way into France and then hid on a boat from Marseilles that crossed the Mediterranean to Algiers. From Algiers he headed to the border with Morocco. Then he clung for twelve hours to the underside of a wagon which crossed the hot desert. From there he made it – perhaps inevitably – to the crossroads for those trying to hide or escape: Casablanca. On a dark night, Van Hooff stripped off and swam naked with thirty others to clamber aboard a boat that would take them to the British outpost of Gibraltar. The boat had not gone far when the motor gave out.
After six days and nights packed in like sardines, they landed in Algeciras. Eventually a British destroyer picked them up and took them to Gibraltar. A month later Van Hooff made the dangerous crossing on a transport ship and eventually arrived in Liverpool.
For Van Hooff, like all the other refugees arriving from Europe, his treatment at his first experience of Britain was not dissimilar to that meted out to their children by the British elite. He found himself cooped up in a place that was ostensibly a school but actually more like a prison. The Royal Victoria Patriotic School in Wandsworth, south London was a vast neo-Gothic castle that acted as the processing centre for arrivals from Nazi-occupied Europe. Beneath its battlements laced with barbed wire, the guards were ready to shoot. The security was tight thanks to the fear that the Nazis were sending in agents posing as refugees.
After a cup of soup and a tiny scrap of meat, arrivals were interviewed carefully about the smallest details of their previous lives and their journeys to Britain. Interrogators were looking for inconsistencies. Not only the answers they gave, but the clothes they wore and the documents they carried were scrutinized for evidence of deception. The discovery of some sticks, cotton wool and white powder in a wallet of one Belgian who arrived in the spring of 1942 was the beginning of the end for him since they were telltale signs that he had been trained to use invisible ink. For him and other spies who were discovered, the hangman’s noose lay ready at Wandsworth prison across the road.
But as well as looking for enemy spies, the sifting was also a means whereby British intelligence could find their own recruits. Van Hooff told people he had left Belgium pretending he was going on holiday to France but instead had come to the UK to join the Belgian section of the RAF. But in October 1941, he was marked out as a man with the independence of spirit and will to survive that would make for a good secret agent. The job of a recruiter is to understand the character of the man in front of him. Over whisky and cigarettes, one recruiter regaled Van Hooff with the risks and the romance of clandestine work. By the end of the conversation, Van Hooff was intoxicated with the idea of parachuting back into his homeland. He saw himself arriving as a hero to the rescue of his friends and family.
Two different British intelligence services were sending in agents undercover into occupied Europe. There was MI6, the well-established and rather sniffily superior Secret Intelligence Service, which gathered intelligence, and then the noisy new kid on the block, the Special Operations Executive, SOE, tasked by Churchill with setting Europe ablaze with acts of sabotage. It was the latter service which reached Van Hooff first. On 21 October 1941, SO2 – a unit of SOE involved in using agents to spread black propaganda and stir up resistance – sent a request to MI5 for a trace on Van Hooff because they were considering employing him as an agent. On 14 November, an MI5 officer wrote back saying ‘Nothing Recording Against’, meaning there was no indication of anything negative about the man, adding that ‘he made a good impression at his interrogation’.
The leading figure of the SOE section dealing with Belgium for much of the war was a colourful character even by the eccentric standards of the secret world. Hardy Amies joined the beehive-busy SOE HQ at Baker Street in 1941 aged 32 and the Belgian section that November. A fresh-faced, good-looking young man, his civilian occupation was noted as ‘dress designer’; after the war, he would gain renown as the Queen’s dressmaker, and a fashion label still bears his name. His colleagues in British intelligence soon realized that the fact he was gay (in both senses of the word) did not disqualify him from work specializing in violence. ‘He is far tougher both physically and mentally than his rather precious appearance would suggest,’ noted one instructor. Amies played by his own rules and could be ruthless. During the war he planned the Belgian end of ‘Rat Week’, in which collaborators who had sold out members of the resistance were shot or beaten to death.
Amies’s willingness to undertake such actions likely reflected his frustration at the failures SOE had endured in Belgium and the heavy losses it had suffered. The year 1941 had been bad for the team he joined. ‘None of the officers on the staff of the Belgian section had any practical previous knowledge of clandestine work. They gained it by experience which can only be described as bitter,’ read an official evaluation.
Recruits were often of poor quality. A mechanic they trained was deemed ‘absolutely appalling’ by the security team thanks to his fondness for drink and for picking up ‘the most awful women’. Amies overruled the warnings and sent him into the field, where he picked up a peroxide blonde and took her to the Palace Hotel in Brussels, which was packed full of Gestapo. He was arrested and eighteen people were shot as a result. Amies had been the man who had to identify the mutilated body of the agent whose parachute caught when he jumped over Belgium in July 1941, at the time Leopold Vindictive’s pigeon was dropped. It was a sight he never forgot.
Belgium suffered in comparison to the resources devoted to France. ‘We were very much the poor child of northern Europe,’ Amies reflected. ‘We had low priority. If there was a moonlit night – weather-wise correct for parachuting – and there was only a certain number of planes that were available for taking off agents and parachutes, France got priority over us. There would be a lot of frustration. A great deal of my energy was taken up in assuaging the distress and the anger and the nerves of the parachutists that were delayed. There’s nothing like getting teed up for going off and then it is delayed.’
SOE needed unsentimental agents, hard men with little to lose, willing to obey orders to carry out sometimes morally as well as practically challenging tasks. At interview, they decided to see what Van Hooff was made of. ‘A train is occupied by hundreds of Germans and war material of the highest importance,’ an SOE recruiter asked him. ‘But it also carries a member of your family. Could you blow it up?’ Van Hooff’s answer was honest. No. Then he was not right for them, it was explained. SOE only wanted those who would answer yes to that question.
The next afternoon someone else came to interview Van Hooff. The Royal Victoria Patriotic School was the site of fierce competition between spy services. This time, the man said he was called Page. He was in his mid-forties and English in character but Latin in look, Van Hooff thought, with his olive complexion and curly jet black hair. He could also speak French like a native. The interview this time was more like a conversation than an interrogation, cordial as if the two men were exchanging pleasantries in a park.
As he spoke of the work of his agents, Van Hooff thought the mysterious Page talked with respect and affection, almost paternally, of his charges. He did not gloss over the hard truth of the torture they had endured after their capture by the Gestapo. By the end of the long conversation, Van Hooff was sold. Page had worked his magic and reeled him in by care rather than bludgeon. The Belgian wanted to be worthy of Page’s respect – even if that meant taking a gamble with his life. Page had just recruited Van Hooff for MI6.
The Belgians knew the man as ‘Major Page’ but his real name was Frederick John Jempson (after the war he changed his name to Page-Jempson). He joined the police in 1914 and then Special Branch, but after twenty-five years he left as war began and joined first the military and then MI6. He would be the officer in charge of Belgium at MI6 HQ for much of the war. He had a sometimes flamboyant manner but was an effective operator, and was spoken of with high regard by those who worked with him – apart from SOE, whom he fought to keep off his patch.
Page served directly under Claude Dansey, the all-powerful, almost spectral presence whose hidden hand guided MI6 operations all over Europe. Dansey’s job title was assistant chief but many thought him the real power behind ‘C’, the Chief. Dansey was battling to rebuild MI6’s work in Europe, and his wily character meant no one was to stand in his way, no one else was to know what he was doing. SOE was supposed to stir up resistance through sabotage and by setting up secret armies. In contrast, the task of MI6 was to gather intelligence. There was an inherent tension between the two types of work. Sabotage was loud and noisy and drew attention. Espionage was designed to be stealthy, to keep a low profile so that it could endure.
Dansey did his best to control SOE in the early days – insisting that all SOE radio traffic from the field went through his hands at MI6 – but control was wrested from him. The month that Van Hooff and Thonus were to be sent was the lowest point of relations between SOE and MI6 in the whole war. Dansey thought SOE were amateurs, crashing around, but he also recognized that what Churchill wanted was someone to make a lot of noise and carry forward the spirit of subversion and resistance, as much to boost morale at home and in occupied Europe as for the actual impact of its activities. The perception was that at least SOE was doing something, which was not always the view of MI6’s work. MI6 even feared being swallowed up if a new figure was appointed to run both organizations. At one point, SOE paraded a letter from the Air Staff saying it had carried out the finest piece of intelligence gathering during the war. R. V. Jones was summoned to a meeting with Dansey, who wanted to find out who had written the letter. Jones was forced to reveal that it was he. He explained that SOE had produced a report from one of their agents – a member of the French resistance – who had infiltrated a German control hut which operated its latest navigational beam for night fighters, and whose report of his findings showed remarkable bravery combined with technical understanding. When Jones finished, Dansey began walking round the room shouting ‘The cheats, the cheats, the cheats!’ before claiming that the agent was actually from MI6.
There was competition to recruit the best agents, for RAF slots to drop their men into enemy territory, even to prioritize which messages were sent out on the BBC. The Royal Victoria Patriotic School was itself a flashpoint. Amies had furious rows because he believed that the best men were always being funnelled to MI6 and not to him. In the case of Van Hooff, SOE let him slip through their hands and into those of MI6.
Van Hooff was next introduced to the Belgian intelligence service in London. This drew him into a vicious, murky realm of refugees and spies. British intelligence operations in Belgium were a poisonous brew of vitriolic rivalries and in the spring of 1942 they too had reached their lowest point. MI6 and SOE were not just feuding with each other but also with the Belgians in exile. London was home to a myriad of exiles from each country, all manoeuvring for influence in the hope of perhaps running their country if the Nazis were ever driven out (as de Gaulle managed on the French side). The Belgians were no exception. Layered on top of political ideology and personal ambition were the linguistic divides that addled the country, and also the question of how loyal to be to a king who had remained under occupation. There were two intelligence outfits linked to the exiled government. The Sûreté (tasked with protecting the state) was focused like MI6 on intelligence gathering. Around the corner in Belgravia was the Deuxième Bureau, which like SOE was more interested in military intelligence and sabotage. The resultant infighting was savage and spilled over into relations with the two British services, each of the four trying to play off the other side against their competition. ‘It is many years ago since I first had to deal with the Belgians and their intrigues. They have not altered one bit in twenty-five years,’ Dansey, a man who distrusted the security of exiles, noted bitterly, whilst understating his own role in fuelling the various intrigues and the fact that his service drew much of the intelligence it presented as its own in London from the Belgians and other foreign services.
The Sûreté was led by Fernand Lepage, a 35-year-old magistrate who had escaped to London and started to set up the intelligence agency virtually from scratch. Lepage had been in Britain as a child during the First World War when his family fled the conflict, and had been educated at English schools. That meant he could speak the language fluently as well as navigate its politics. Within a few weeks of returning to London in 1940, he had been contacted by a mysterious Englishman – Page again. The MI6 officer took Lepage to a flat in St James’s Street where he was confronted by Dansey, who gave him a lecture on starting a freelance spy service. ‘Do you realize, Lepage, that you are endangering the security of the realm?’ he was told.
Lepage confessed that he knew little about intelligence work but wanted to learn. Dansey softened, and eventually the two men concluded a written agreement which would be the basis of close cooperation. Lepage preferred MI6’s intelligence work to SOE’s sabotage, which led to bitter, vicious rows. He did not want to blow up his own country’s factories and potentially kill civilians, even if the Nazis might be using them. Lepage feared that the SOE’s supply of weapons to militia groups risked arming groups who would fight each other to take over the state after the war. That was the kind of thing the rival Deuxième Bureau wanted to do, but Lepage warned MI6 that they wanted to build a ‘crypto-fascist regime around the monarch’. The Deuxième Bureau meanwhile said it would only cooperate with SOE if it promised to have nothing to do with the Sûreté. It was an unholy mess which had real consequences for the lives of agents operating in Belgium.
On 11 March 1942, just before Van Hooff made his flight back to Belgium, Lepage and Amies’s boss at SOE had a screaming match in which each called the other a ‘bloody liar’. Lepage was convinced SOE had been sending agents into Belgium without telling him. He was right. SOE had not told the Belgians, as they believed their own sabotage operations were being sabotaged. They thought the Sûreté was carrying out surveillance at SOE training schools and then getting hold of any SOE agents before they left for Belgium and warning them not to engage in sabotage. One of Lepage’s aides had been caught by Hardy Amies frightening off nine potential recruits for SOE who withdrew at the last moment. Each side withheld messages they were supposed to pass on, and Lepage was left ‘hopping mad’ when he discovered that SOE had sent a message to an agent in Belgium asking for details about his own background.
SOE thought the problem stemmed in part from Lepage’s personal ambition. ‘To achieve his ends and safeguard his own position he can be proved to “double-cross” to an unlimited extent,’ went one SOE memo, highlighting the personal vitriol that bled into relations and even led to the darkest possible accusation as part of an attempt to oust him. ‘This “double-crossing” gives rise to the strongest suspicions of treachery.’ Another SOE official said the leader of the Belgian government-in-exile was using Lepage ‘as a head of a Gestapo service to brow-beat and terrorize all Belgians in this country and watch their every movement to prevent by all means in his power anything which might jeopardize his apparently dominating position’.
But Lepage had the full backing of the Belgian government-in-exile – and of MI6, who saw him as their man. Lepage was particularly close to Page (leading Lepage’s own staff to mutter occasionally that he was in the pay of England rather than Belgium). SOE considered Page a ‘very cagey individual’ who might even be happy to see the rift grow deeper. The mansions of Belgravia made for a bitter, distrustful backdrop for the agents who risked their lives. This could have real consequences for resistance networks like Leopold Vindictive operating on the ground.
For Van Hooff, after his recruitment by MI6, the following months were a mix of hard training and hard carousing. Soho and Piccadilly were the playgrounds for men preparing to risk their lives and desperate for one more night on the town. Londoners carrying their gas masks often looked on disapprovingly, unaware of why he and others were drinking and dining at the best restaurants. Agents wanted to party; but this meant word often got around the small exile communities about who was about to head back home.
Van Hooff’s training took place in a large house in Hans Place, just south of Harrods department store in Knightsbridge. There were no uniforms, no names for the recruits – just a serial number and nickname. Guards watched them during the day. The fear was that German spies might identify or turn agents before they even landed back in their own country. They were also tested. Could a recruit’s tongue be loosened by too many drinks? Or by a conversation with a pretty girl (who was, unknown to the agents, working for British intelligence)? Many failed the tests. By the end of two months, half the original entrants had been weeded out. Van Hooff learnt to look on everyone with suspicion. He would need to do so when he got back to Belgium.
The school for spies included training on radio sets – how to transmit and receive, how to take a set apart and put it together again, how to encode a message. There were also lessons on enemy weapons and uniforms. Van Hooff paid attention. He knew his life might depend on his ability to remember each answer. He was quickly singled out and promoted to lieutenant.
After classroom education, there was physical education in Manchester with a former officer of the Lancers of Bengal, and finally parachute training. What would you do if your parachute did not open? Put on another, the instructor joked to a group of Poles, Czechs and Belgians. When it was Van Hooff’s turn to do his first training jump he preferred to close his eyes.
Finally, Van Hooff was given his instructions, stamped TOP SECRET – details of his cover and his mission, his codes and contacts. There was a week in a fancy hotel to read and learn his file by heart with orders to make no contact with anyone except Page and a man assigned to mind him. But on the fourth day, something strange happened. Van Hooff’s minder had gone off for a chat with some women when the hotel front desk called up on the internal phone and said there was a guest to see him – a captain. This did not sound right, he thought. He knew he was not supposed to have visitors. He said the man should wait a few minutes before coming up. Van Hooff called Page, who said he had not sent anyone and told Van Hooff to hold the man there for ten minutes if at all possible while Page tried to organize a response.
The visitor made his way up to Van Hooff’s room a few minutes later. He was dressed in British uniform. He knew Van Hooff’s codename – Lieutenant Press. Without any niceties but in a well-spoken accent, he asked the Belgian how he was getting on with his instructions and his codes. He said he wanted to see them. Van Hooff’s suspicions – already strong – were now sky-high as the man became more insistent.
‘Who sent you?’ Van Hooff asked.
‘Major Page,’ he replied.
Van Hooff knew this was false since he had spoken to Page. He tried to play for time – talking about this and that but handing nothing over. Eventually, after a final refusal to show him the file, the man left.
Outside the hotel was a parked car. As the mysterious captain walked past, he was pushed inside the car. Later, when Van Hooff tried to ask Page about what had happened, he just smiled. ‘Lieutenant Press, you have done a good job,’ was all the MI6 officer said. ‘Don’t worry.’
Don’t worry? thought Van Hooff. It seemed to him that a German spy might have tracked him down, which meant he was not safe in London, let alone Belgium. Was that really what happened? A strange reference in an SOE file a few months later refers to Page having a ‘stooge’ who had now been removed to a ‘cooler’. ‘This man, you may know, has been a source of great trouble to us and to the Belgians themselves,’ SOE wrote. Was this stooge linked to the hotel incident? Page was a man who liked to play games. It is possible the hotel guest had been sent by Page as one final test for recruits; perhaps it was the same person as this stooge, perhaps not. But there is no record of a German spy infiltrating British intelligence in this way, or of any investigation by MI5.
By March, Van Hooff was ready to go. When he arrived at the airfield, he met his partner for the mission, Marcel Thonus. The two men knew each other from training school but it would be going too far to say they were friends. Van Hooff was the smarter and more professional of the two. He knew Thonus was a hard-boiled veteran of the Foreign Legion, and he was not entirely sure about him, not least because of his fondness for a drink.
Thonus had been recruited by MI6 in September 1941, aged 32. ‘Was recruited at a time when agents were extremely scarce,’ reads the opening line of his MI6 service file, almost apologetically, perhaps aware that he was not one of the best. He had a square chin and short, slicked-back hair. No father was named on his birth certificate from Liège and he had taken the name of his mother. At the end of 1941, MI6 had informed the Belgian intelligence service in exile that they wanted to employ Thonus. One of Lepage’s aides had met Thonus, who told MI6 that he had been with the Foreign Legion and participated in various operations before coming to Britain to join the Belgian forces. But the man from the Sûreté discovered from the records that Thonus had actually deserted from the Belgian army. He explained to MI6 that it was impossible to use a deserter as an agent. The British were insistent and eventually Lepage gave in, agreeing he could be sent on a mission ‘so that he could redeem himself’. ‘The Belgians were good enough to arrange this matter for us. He was sent as a mutual agent,’ his MI6 file noted.
That last line was telling. These agents did not owe their loyalty of service to MI6 alone but also to the Belgian Sûreté. That was what was meant by ‘mutual agents’. Thonus’s MI6 service record notes that financial responsibility for him – in other words his salary and costs – was undertaken by the Belgian government. One thing the Belgians in exile did have was money, thanks to a steady income from their colony in the Congo.
With their training over, the only thing left for the Belgians to do was to take the leap into the unknown. On 25 March, Van Hooff’s MI6-assigned bodyguard-cum-watcher, already edgy after previous events at the hotel, took a phone call. They were told to head for Tempsford airfield. Their flight was to be one of the first since the RAF Special Duties squadron had moved there a few days earlier. Tempsford, in Bedfordshire, was built on a swamp and said to be foggy and boggy, especially if you were a pilot and veered off the runway.
After the disaster of Cassart’s pick-up in December 1941, landings in Belgium had been ruled out. Parachuting agents in was the only option. Dropping agents from planes had been tried in the First World War but was hampered by the agents’ regular failure to jump at the right moment over the targeted drop zone. A cruel solution to this had been found. The poor agent would sit in the passenger seat of the RAF plane, which had been modified so that at the right moment the pilot could pull a lever (probably shouting ‘Tally-ho!’) and the passenger’s seat would give way – just like one of those movie scenes in which the arch-villain disposes of a poorly performing subordinate. The agent would be dropped into the sky below and, it was hoped, would gracefully parachute to the ground.
By the Second World War, things had moved on. When a mission was to be run the RAF team would get a call from SOE or MI6. That evening the BBC might broadcast a message personnel, including a phrase meaningless to everyone except the reception committee, who would now know a landing was coming. They would wait at the designated field for the sound of an engine. With torches at the ready they would flash in Morse the right code letter for that day and then light up an ‘L’ shape for the plane to land on, guns at the ready in case of ambush. Sometimes agents would be dropped ‘blind’ with no one waiting for them, and have to make their own way to a rendezvous point with contacts.
Pigeons were a part of life at the RAF Special Duties airfield. Four mobile pigeon lofts were looked after by a staff of three who lived on site, always on standby to pack and dispatch birds for a flight. As well as Columba, pigeons were given personally to some agents sent behind enemy lines. When the war started, portable radio transmitters were in their infancy, unreliable and dangerous to be caught with. Sending an ‘innocent letter’ using an agreed code took its time. But a pigeon could fly back immediately and inform London of a safe arrival or of any problems. The first success had come in early October 1940 when Philip Schneidau – Agent ‘Felix’ – was parachuted into France carrying with him a pair of pigeons supplied by a fancier vetted by MI5. William Dex Lea Rayner of the Air Ministry advised Schneidau to cut off the toes of a pair of socks and stuff the pigeons into them so that their heads peeped out. On the sixth attempt, Schneidau finally parachuted into France. But ten days later the Lysander that was supposed to pick him up did not appear. He was unaware of it, but the weather had been too bad back in Britain. Schneidau encoded a message and attached it to the leg of one of the pigeons, releasing the bird from Fontainebleau at 8.20 a.m. on Sunday. By 3 p.m. the same day, the pigeon arrived in Kenley, just south of London. Fifteen minutes later a dispatch rider arrived and raced the cylinder to the Air Ministry. But in true bureaucratic style, it took another thirteen hours before anyone with the right authority actually read the message. A Lysander had already been dispatched. As Schneidau climbed into the plane, a bullet shattered its compass. The pilot became lost en route home and Schneidau was still trying to change into civilian clothes in case they were over enemy territory when they eventually ran out of fuel and crashed. Jumping naked out of the wreck, he and the pilot were relieved to find they were in Scotland.
This use of pigeons to acknowledge the arrival of agents and send brief messages soon found favour primarily not in MI6 but in SOE. The leadership of SOE first heard reports of Columba and of MI14(d)’s successful pigeon service in November 1941. It was keen to get hold of the intelligence it had gleaned, while agents with the French and Belgian sections were also using pigeons. Much to the annoyance of Rayner, who felt cut out, SOE ran some tests and decided it preferred MI14’s civilian birds to those of the Air Ministry. In November 1941, Rex Pearson told SOE they were welcome to use Columba birds. Radio transmitters might be the future but SOE found pigeons had some advantages. Many agents preferred pigeons, because once released they left nothing incriminating and required little specialist training, although there was the disadvantage that pigeons were a means of one-way communication only and a message might not get through. If they were to be released immediately on arrival simply to tell London that the agent had landed successfully, pigeons were sometimes carried around the neck of parachuting agents. They could also be carried in a rucksack (although there was the danger of an agent falling back and crushing them) or strapped to the stomach.
SOE agents were soon given up to six pigeons from the Columba lofts selected for their stamina and experience. Agents were given written instructions on how to look after their pigeons. They should not hold on to a pigeon long – after a day or two in a confined space the birds would get wing stiffness, but a bird could be kept for up to ten days if there was somewhere it could exercise, like a shed, attic or outbuilding (but you had to beware of cats and rats). The agent had to be careful because if a pigeon could see out of the shed or attic it might get used to its surroundings and refuse to leave. The birds should be given 30–35 grams of food a day – not more, or they might prove unwilling to leave their comfortable surroundings. Agents were also told to check the birds’ droppings. ‘Colour provides guidance. If showing Green and Watery pigeon is out of sorts and not reliable for flying. Cause of above generally flight or rough handling on the journey. Remedy – quiet and normal feeding.’ Light brown poo tinged with white meant they were ready to fly.
Agents were advised to liberate pigeons clear of buildings, high trees and wires. Fog meant they might lose their way, headwinds would slow them down. In darkness they would stop flying, which meant they travelled further in summer. The best time to liberate them was early morning, so they could home the same day.
One place to which agent messages returned was Bletchley Park, home of the code-breakers. Thirty to forty pigeons lived in a loft around the back of the main mansion house above a garage. A landing board with an electric bell would alert staff if a pigeon returned in the night. Messages would then be taken to the local police station, where a dispatch rider would pick them up. SOE’s messages were delivered to Room 055a at the War Office, who then took them to HQ at Baker Street.
Columba itself could be used to drop pigeons for agents who were waiting at specific points, rather than, as more usual, dropping them over a wider area for whoever found them. Often the pigeons were dropped at the same time as arms, ammunition and other equipment. In these cases, four or six pigeons were dropped in a special container on one parachute. One RAF team was shot down on the way home, killing all on board. The return of a pigeon from the reception committee with valuable intelligence was the only way the RAF knew the plane had arrived at the drop site. But among British intelligence services, there was a sharp division over the use of pigeons – and it would be one that cost Leopold Vindictive dear.
Van Hooff himself, ironically, was a fan of using pigeons to send messages back from the field, preferring them to radio. The Belgian Sûreté at the same time he was sent was beginning to examine their use (contacting some fanciers in Folkestone). But the Belgians only started properly in May 1943 and the problem was that MI6 – who had sent Van Hooff and were now trying to reach out to Leopold Vindictive – was never as keen. Rex Pearson’s concern, when SOE started using his birds, was that MI6, having previously cold-shouldered the idea, might wake up and try to take over pigeon operations now they were producing results. He did not need to worry. The intelligence they brought back made R. V. Jones pretty much the only backer of pigeons within MI6. At one point, he persuaded an air commodore posted to MI6 that the pigeons on the windowsill at the service’s Broadway HQ were the primary means of communication with the French resistance. ‘For days, at our instigation he solicitously provided them with saucers of water!’
MI6 were sniffy about the whole Columba ‘racket’, SOE noted, and ‘have got no belief in it’. MI6 seem to have initially been dismissive of both Columba and the use of pigeons by their own agents. The use of birds was ‘spasmodic and only ancillary to our normal communications with agents in the Field’, a report noted.
Pigeons were perhaps not what the macho spies at MI6 thought should be at the heart of the spying game. This perhaps explains why Thonus and Van Hooff – agents of MI6 rather than SOE – were sent in with radios but no pigeons for Leopold Vindictive when they left in March 1942. The tragedy was that there were pigeons next to them in the planes as part of a regular Columba drop. But they were not intended for Raskin and Leopold Vindictive. It seems a terrible oversight from MI6, who would have known that Raskin and his collaborators had originally used pigeons. But why did Melland and Sanderson in MI14 not ensure the pigeons were sent with the agents?
The reason was that MI14 itself was in the dark about the whole mission. This was down to MI6 and secrecy. Melland, Sanderson and the team at MI14(d) may have been the first to contact Leopold Vindictive through Columba. But the subsequent messages from Leopold Vindictive – like that given to Vandael – had been delivered through evasion and intelligence networks, which belonged to Dansey and MI6. And MI6 kept itself to itself. In its mind, this was all about the problem that other agencies were ‘leaky’ and amateurish. It was an analysis which had some truth: ‘The gossip tends to swell,’ Amies conceded. But this could also be used as an excuse when secrets meant power. MI6 had seen the intelligence from Columba and knew how good Leopold Vindictive’s network was. But now MI6 wanted to contact Leopold Vindictive itself. It had not told MI14 about the message received from the network. Nor had it told MI14 it was now dropping in agents to make contact. And it did not want to use pigeons, even though these were precisely what Raskin had asked for. The rivalries and secrecy of British intelligence came at a terrible price.
Thonus and Van Hooff were primed to go in March. The full-moon period had started on the 23rd, two nights before Van Hooff’s first flight ended in the anticlimax of a return to base following sparks and engine failure. It was to be a bad patch. Seventeen operations were attempted and only four completed. Drops into Belgium had failed to find any reception committees. But the following night, 26 March, Van Hooff and Thonus were ready to try again. Agents – known as Joes – were normally driven to Tempsford at the last minute from a country house nearby which acted as a holding place.
Thonus and Van Hooff were first taken to a building known as the barn where they were prepared. Then the two men had their pockets inspected carefully. Their clothes had been made in Belgium so as not to arouse suspicion. They had to be sure there were no receipts or items which might give away the fact they had spent time in London. They were given false papers in their cover names. In one room, their parachutes were prepared and fitted by a dispatcher. In another, the radio sets were handed over. Then on went the flying suits, and each took a weapon, and finally a shovel to bury their parachutes, a bottle of rum and enough food to last them a day. Now they were ready.
They flew with other planes and other agents in a larger operation. Van Hooff and Thonus’ plane crossed the coast at the Pas de Calais. Encountering haze, the pilot dropped his height and set course for Cambrai. This time the light went green. The containers of pigeons were dropped on the same flight – but not at the same place as the men – before the plane made its way home just after midnight. The agents were in.