At Norfolk House, General Frederick Morgan and his COSSAC team had worried over the problem of the planned invasion of France. Their major priority had always been the invasion of Sicily and as the plans for that operation crystallized, it became more and more obvious that the invasion of France was not going to be possible in 1943. The cross-Channel operation was doomed because of limited resources and imprecise objectives, but that argument wasn’t going to go far with Churchill. The issue was left for as long as possible – in fact, until the first week of April when the Chiefs of Staff presented Churchill with some cold hard figures. The Allies had enough landing craft for the Sicily landing, but not for France as well. If Sicily came first, and it would, then it would take four months to transport and make ready the same craft for the cross-Channel operation. That meant it would not be possible to mount the operation before winter, which was out of the question.1 Churchill’s commitment to the Russians was at stake. He took these painfully hard details away and lived with them for a week. Then finally, on 10 April, he notified the Chiefs of Staff that he concurred with their view but that ‘these facts should not become widely known’ – and that at the earliest opportunity ‘an elaborate camouflage and cover operation’ should be mounted to conceal them.2
All he had to do now was break the news to Stalin.
Meanwhile, on 26 April, General Morgan was informed that the real invasion of France would now take place in the spring of 1944 and that the original operation to seize and hold a bridgehead on the French coast had given way to a deception plan. He had been given full command of Churchill’s ‘camouflage and cover operation’, entitled Operation COCKADE. The Prime Minister’s views were made clear: the absence of a real operation must be completely disguised from the enemy and all measures should be explored to ensure success.
But already there was a flaw, a critical flaw that would only become apparent long after the dust had settled. The virtue of a deception plan was that it was a cloak cast round a real operation to disguise from the enemy the actual objective. Here there was no ‘real operation’ to disguise, it was a cloak cast round nothing at all.3
On 30 April, the Chiefs of Staff delivered a report that formalized the Prime Minister’s wishes and pride of place was given to Operation COCKADE, ‘a vast scheme of cover and deception’ to keep alive the expectation of an invasion of France and so pin the German forces in the west. The target date for this phantom invasion had to be set late enough to give them enough time to set it up, but not so late in the year that it stretched credulity. The first week in September was judged the latest possible date.4 It had not escaped their notice that this had been the month the Germans had planned to invade Britain in 1940. The only spot along the coast that could accommodate an invasion force of any size was Calais – which became the geographical focus of all their plans. The Allies’ first Commander in Chief was not destined to orchestrate the return of Allied troops to French soil, but instead to direct a rather elaborate piece of amateur dramatics, on a scale that would have satisfied Cecil B. de Mille.
At Baker Street, SOE received no indication that the grand strategic plan had been altered. Quite the contrary. SOE, and F Section in particular, were encouraged to believe the invasion of France was imminent. Drops of arms and equipment to the networks in France had, after a brief hiatus during December because of bad weather, resumed and remained steady. Then suddenly, in April, there was a massive leap of more than two thousand per cent. The total number of Sten guns, incendiaries, pistols and grenades that the networks had received in the previous five months was doubled in the month of April alone. The build-up was staggering. From 32 Stens in March to 644 in April; 34 grenades in March to 421 in April; 162 kilos of high explosives delivered in March, 2508 kilos in April. In May, the figures doubled again, and more than doubled again in June.5
During that April, the PROSPER network received over 20 containers of arms, by far the lion’s share of material sent to France. An infectious mood of expectation spread throughout the twelve Départementes the network covered. Local sub-circuits were thrown into an unprecedented level of activity. Pierre Culioli and Yvonne Rudellat were out nearly three times a week with their teams, laying flare paths and then rushing to gather up the containers dropped from what seemed like a continuous relay of Halifaxes. All over their area, well supplied armouries were being secreted in barns, in chicken houses, anywhere. Francis Suttill now stood at the head of the largest SOE network in Europe. From the Ardennes to the Atlantic coast, thousands of Frenchmen had been drawn into his embrace. He felt, with the arrival of spring, a step closer to the point and purpose of his mission, to what he saw as his destiny.
Déricourt and Suttill had actually met in March. They developed the habit of occasionally lunching at the restaurant Chez Tutulle, near the Place des Ternes. Then in early April, Suttill felt it was worth introducing GILBERT to a wider circle of the group. He collected Déricourt and JuJu in his car and drove them south-west towards Versailles. At the famous agricultureal research establishment, the École Nationale d’Agriculture in the town of Grignon, Suttill had perhaps the largest and most picturesque of safe-houses; the home of the principal, Professor Maurice Vanderwynckt. He, his family and some of the staff secretly worked for Suttill. The college became a kind of out-of-town headquarters and was extensively used for meetings and planning sessions. Suttill gathered round him an eclectic group of solid practical foot-soldiers and intellectuals. He could, on the one hand, convince a young farmer that he should allow them to use one of his fields for parachute drops, then, on the other, conduct a philosophical examination of the nature of fear with the young students from Paris. At Grignon he gathered quite a colony of farmers and philosophers.
It wasn’t quite what Déricourt expected to find in the headquarters of a great secret army. Instead of a martial atmosphere, there was a distinct ‘on campus’ feel about the place. Suttill enjoyed nothing better than a stroll with two or three friends amongst the groves of fruit trees that embraced the college buildings. Jean Cocteau often came there, as did Octave Simon the sculptor (organizer of the SATIRIST group) and the Irish writer Samuel Beckett who was a member of a small Paris-based group of intellectuals organized by Armel Guerne. Colleagues of Vanderwynckt, the distinguished biologist Professor Balachowsky and his wife, also organized a small sub-circuit in the Versailles area from the town of Viroflay.
Déricourt found Suttill’s coterie of intellectuals, artists and academics a little hard to swallow. He never doubted the man’s greatness and was certainly attracted to him, as most people were, but he also felt that he looked completely wrong for the part. ‘Prosper was magnificent, strong, young, courageous and decisive, a kind of Ivanhoe; but he should have been a cavalry officer, not a spy.’6 But if Déricourt saw him as a cavalry officer, Suttill was also a man whose courage matched his ambitions. He was not just an intellectual, he was also a trained killer and a born leader of killers. A killer with the diplomatic skills to win the trust and support of the Communists, which automatically increased the price on his head.
Between March and April Déricourt got to know those at the core of Suttill’s organization, namely Gilbert Norman, Suttill’s deputy; Andrée Borrel; Agazarian, the radio operator; and Jean Worms, the man with whom he had flown into France. Borrel was one who did not take to Henri, possibly because his masculine charms were of little consequence to someone who was otherwise persuaded, but more likely because, like Vera Atkins, she knew insincerity when she saw it. Borrel aside, everyone else trusted him and came to depend on his Lysander operations. In fact the meeting at Grignon was called in order to discuss the increase in Lysander traffic that was anticipated during the next few weeks. In London there was a growing queue of agents waiting to get back into France and prepare for the invasion.
Soon after the visit to Grignon, Déricourt and Clément met to scour some maps of the Loiret for suitable fields. As they chatted into the night Déricourt paused – then suddenly declared that the job had become too much for him. He needed help. Henri was deadly serious. He looked tired and drawn, the weight of some hidden responsibility had begun to drag him down.
What Clément didn’t know was that Déricourt had begun to worry about the consequences of his secret arrangement with the Germans. Once he’d actually met PROSPER and the others, people he found it impossible not to admire, there was no mistaking a change in his attitude. Slowly it had dawned on him that his operation for Dansey was not only dangerous but also exceedingly sinister. But he couldn’t get out of it. Nor could he explain anything to Clément. He simply had to convince Rémy that he had to have assistance with the actual operations. Rémy asked him to describe in minute detail precisely how the March operation had proceeded, which Déricourt did with obvious relish. Clément, typically cautious, thought about it for a day, and then agreed.7
Déricourt was grateful, for Boemelburg was about to increase the stakes. During March and April there had been a five-fold increase in the radio traffic between the Paris-based networks and London, mostly concerned with arrangements for arms drops or Lysander operations. From the Boulevard Suchet, the SD had monitored this increase and reported it to Kopkow in Berlin. The Fuhrer himself had taken an interest in PROSPER, ever since reports from Boemelburg claimed he would play a vital part in the Allies’ invasion plans.8 These latest reports provoked a new set of priorities from Kopkow. Henceforth all attention must be focused on PROSPER and discovering the date of the projected invasion.
Boemelburg had asked Josef Kieffer to secure a couple of apartments for his meetings with GILBERT. Kieffer was not impressed with this development, and sceptical about GILBERT. He had a polite but not warm relationship with his chief, who was twenty years his senior and about three ranks above him. Born in the German border state of Saarland in 1907, Kieffer had been a civil policeman in that district during the time it was administered by the French after the Great War. He had learnt his trade amongst professionals whereas Boemelburg was a product of the Party. Having joined the SS and been transferred into the SD, Kieffer was sent to Paris because the SS assumed from his record that he would have some knowledge of the French. In fact, like most Saarlanders, Kieffer didn’t speak a word of French.9 For someone who was a relative newcommer to the SS he was considerably less tolerant than Boemelburg, less appreciative of the well-played ‘double agent’. He considered intellectuals highly suspect and believed that Boemelburg could be too easily led. In one aspect, however, Kieffer and Boemelburg were very similar. They were both extremely ambitious. Despite their differences, Kieffer rarely quarrelled with his chief, and despite his scepticism about GILBERT he was prepared to wait and see.10
Déricourt was summoned to his next meeting with Boemelburg. Instead of being picked up by car, he was told to rendezvous at an apartment – a worrying precedent. Boemelburg sent him a pair of keys, one for a flat in the Boulevard Malesherbes, up near the Metro St Augustin, the other closer to the Champs Elysées, near Madeleine. Both apartments had been confiscated from Jewish families. The meeting took place at the flat near the Champs Elysées. There was a long corridor leading from the front door, at the end of which was a small table and chair. On the table sat a telephone and some writing paper. To the right, a single door led into the living room which had been stripped of everything of value. Leading from the living room there was a bathroom, kitchen and bedroom. As a precaution, Kieffer had microphones placed in the lamps and the telephone, but they were rarely used.11
This meeting marked the start of a steady increase in the quantity and quality of information Déricourt delivered. Mere information about who had come and gone was not enough. In future Boemelburg wanted the date and place of each operation beforehand, so that he could arrange to have the new agents followed.
It was at this stage that they worked out a finely balanced arrangement that promised to keep the game going indefinitely. Boemelburg wanted to be able to trace everyone London was sending into France. Déricourt needed to preserve his integrity. In return for receiving notice of all the Lysander operations in advance, Boemelburg guaranteed there would be no arrests. It looked like the ideal arrangement. Boemelburg needed to get a complete picture of the PROSPER network and, if possible, to discover the date of the expected invasion. From experience they knew that any premature arrests would only result in the creation of a new series of networks out of the remains of the old. This time he wanted total victory.
Déricourt’s terms were clear. No one, absolutely no one, should come anywhere near the landing field. Once he had relinquished responsibility for the incoming agents, Boemelburg’s men could then begin their surveillance. Most importantly, under no circumstances must there ever be an arrest. The British must never be given any reason to question his integrity. There was very little argument12 – the old Nazi appreciated the advantages of the arrangement, for the more the British came to trust and rely on GILBERT, the more valuable he would be to Boemelburg. Déricourt’s only other concern was for Rémy and JuJu. They had to be protected from all eventualities. If it worked, FARRIER would be safe and Boemelburg would become a hero.
There were many solemn promises and declarations, ‘Even if Germany loses this war, we’ll take care of you. We’ll get you a new identity, take you to some neutral country, see that you have enough money to start a new life.’13 Déricourt, however, preferred to look after his own future.
On 14 April, Déricourt was at the Gare d’Austerlitz for a rendezvous with a radio operator called Maurice Clech. Déricourt told him to buy a ticket and then meet with him again, outside the station at Amboise. From there they walked to a small restaurant where Clément was waiting. Clément went ahead to set up the flare path, the others would follow in an hour. It was another double Lysander operation, bringing in four important organizers and their assistants. Déricourt and Clech collected bicycles Rémy had secreted outside the town and rode to a small field near the tiny hamlet of Poce’-sur-Cisse. Déricourt did not know for certain whether or not they were being observed. He had given their location to Boemelburg and had his assurances. They now had to wait and see.
For Rémy, that first operation was one of the most exciting moments of his life. The first few notes of the Mercury engine, drifting out of the thick night sky, sent shivers of excitement down his spine. Down came Flying Officer Vaughan-Fowler, Déricourt flashed the recognition signal and the Lysander acknowledged. Rémy dashed out to the aircraft and up to the ladder. Down came Henri Frager (PAUL), after him came Dubois (HERCULE). Meanwhile Déricourt had leapt up on the wing-struts towards the pilot’s cockpit and passed over the mail Suttill had given him. With the passengers clear, the thumbs-up was given and Vaughan-Fowler took the Lysander down the Amboise field.
In the air, circling the field in another Lysander, was Flying Officer McCairns and two passengers. Once Vaughan-Fowler was airborne and at a safe distance Déricourt signalled to the other pilot that he could begin his approach. McCairns began his descent too soon, much further from the field than was safe. Rémy could tell something was wrong and asked Déricourt, ‘Why don’t they put on their landing lights?’ Déricourt shrugged. The pilots were reluctant to turn their lights on until they were on the ground, for fear of being seen. But the sound of the huge Bristol engine could be heard for miles and everyone in the neighbourhood knew when an aircraft was in the area. Then crack!
On the ground it sounded like heavy timber snapping; in the cockpit, it was the sound of splintering and tearing material. There had been a collision with a small tree. The aircraft rose up then the engine was heard to throttle back and the aircraft descended like a stone, crashing and shaking itself to a halt near Déricourt’s torch. McCairns was furious. He and Déricourt bellowed at each other above the engine noise as Rémy helped the two passengers down.
There was nothing Déricourt could say that could explain the situation; McCairns was convinced it was the reception committee’s error and he would say so in his report. At Tangmere they found the propeller badly damaged, the extra fuel tank gashed and the tailplane hanging by a single bracket. The pilot was lucky to have made it back to base under the circumstances. He had been doubly lucky. First there was the fire in the plane’s engine back in March, now this. It was a black mark for the SOE and Déricourt’s credibility was about to take a plunge.
Back on the field at Amboise another complication was developing that would also affect the future of Déricourt’s operation. It started as a simple argument with one of the new arrivals. Beneath the small grove of trees where the bicycles had been stored, Rémy had been trying to organize the next stage, transporting four passengers and nine packages of equipment. Phillipe Liewer and his assistant, a French Canadian named J. C. Chartrand, were heading north to Rouen, where they were to set up a new group codenamed SALESMAN. The other couple, Henri Frager and his wireless operator A. Dubois, had arrived to establish the network DONKEYMAN in the Yonne district, north of the Loire. Frager had only been out of the country for three weeks and had returned to pick up the threads of what had already been a long tour of duty. He and Suttill had developed close ties and these would continue, though the DONKEYMAN and PROSPER networks were not formally linked.
Déricourt had planned to take them as far as the little town of Amboise, a few kilometres away, where they could take a quiet local train to Orléans or wherever. Frager had other ideas. He had no interest in Amboise, he preferred to go straight on to the city of Tours and catch a train from there.14 The idea seemed absurd to Déricourt, Tours was over 30 kilometres away. Still a little shaken after his row with the RAF, Déricourt was in no mood for an argument. In fact there was more than a little tension on both sides. Frager, not the calmest of individuals at the best of times, was prepared to make an issue of it right there under the trees.
At the back of Déricourt’s mind sat the quiet dark figure of doubt about his arrangement with Boemelburg. With the noise of the Lysander just a memory and the merest whisper now seeming to travel to the other side of the field, he just did not know whether or not they were being observed. It was quite possible his arrangement with Boemelburg would be worth nothing and the SD had decided to take advantage of the situation. In which case, all he wanted was to be rid of these four marked men. But Frager would not be charmed into submission. There was no alternative; they mounted their bicycles and set off for Tours.
It was about 3.30 in the morning when Dubois led them to a small schoolhouse at Tours, where his mother-in-law, Madame Menon, was the headmistress. They all went inside for a rest and something to eat. At about 7.30, the party at the schoolhouse were disturbed at their breakfast by an early-morning visit from the SD. The Germans apologized for the intrusion and, demonstrating every courtesy, explained that they were part of a commission that was obliged to inspect the school’s library for works the occupying authorities felt might be incompatible with the Nazi view of history. Having browsed through the library for some thirty minutes, the gentlemen from the SD thanked Madame Menon for her assistance and departed.
Everyone let out a great sigh of relief. It had been one of those remarkable accidents of fate which were bound to happen in an occupied country. They were all secretly proud of themselves for having kept so calm and collected. All except Henri Frager. He found the experience deeply unsettling and was immediately suspicious.15 He worried at it, like a dog with a bone, suspecting that somehow Déricourt was responsible. But his was a lone voice; these visiting commissions were a fairly common event. Though it must be said, it was not work the SD were usually concerned with. Normally it was one of those tedious tasks left to the Feldgendarmerie led by a representative of the German occupation authority. Frager’s instincts were probably correct, the men who called at the schoolhouse probably were Kieffer’s. Though Boemelburg’s orders were clear enough, it was more than likely that on this first operation for which they had details of time and place, Kieffer just couldn’t resist putting his people on the spot.16
Déricourt was just as surprised by the visit as everyone else. Clearly, the arrangement needed a lot more refinement before it could be said to be working properly. For that reason, he hadn’t told the SD anything about the operation he was to conduct the following night. Déricourt and Clément took leave of the others, took the train up to Vendôme and then travelled cross country to the tiny village of Pont-de-Braye, about mid-way between Vendôme and Le Mans. There they rendezvoused with JuJu who was on her way to London. If she was going to be in constant touch with PROSPER’s people, then SOE insisted she be put through a training course and be properly established. The day before, there had been a nervous little scene at Charles Besnard’s flat in Rue Malakoff. Julienne (he never called her JuJu) had anounced that she was going away for some time: ‘A tour of duty in the provinces.’ Besnard suspected she had something to do with the Resistance, but didn’t press her on it. The evening had ended in silence and Julienne left before he woke the next morning.
At Pont-de-Braye, Squadron Leader Hugh Verity brought his Lysander (‘J’ Jiminy Cricket) down and badly damaged his tail wheel on what must have been a cart track across the flare path. He knew nothing about it until his return, when it went down in the book. He off-loaded two agents from the Gaullist section who had no need of Déricourt’s assistance and departed the scene. Meanwhile the young JuJu climbed half-way up the ladder, gave Henri a big hug, and was sent on her way.
With the arrangement now fairly neatly poised, though perhaps still needing a few refinements, there developed an unnecessary complication – a political problem that threatened to jeopardize Boemelburg’s operation unless it was nipped in the bud. The problem, at this stage a mere ripple flowing out from Berlin, had been caused by the hostility that raged between the Nazi Party security machine, the Sicherheitsdienst and German military intelligence, the Abwehr. The head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, was not only unsympathetic to Nazi ambitions, he was downright hostile. This mercurial doyen of the German intelligence community was secretly engaged in a plot to remove Hitler and attempt to negotiate peace with the Western Allies. Since Churchill’s declaration at Casablanca that the Allies wanted nothing less than Germany’s complete surrender, that idea had run into sand. Nevertheless there were a great many young turks in the SD who harboured the darkest suspicions about Canaris and the Abwehr in general. One in particular, Horst Kopkow, had made it his personal ambition to destroy Canaris. Consequently, the Abwehr were engaged in a life-and-death struggle for control of German intelligence and counterespionage operations.
Whereas in the past, the division of labour between the Nazi security police and the Abwehr’s own counter-intelligence departments had proved very effective, by the turn of 1943 that spirit of co-operation was dead. The SD demanded complete responsibility for what they referred to as ‘war winning intelligence operations’.17 Kopkow had ordered that the SD’s operations in France were to have absolute priority over anything the Abwehr was engaged in, and that there should be no interference whatsoever in those operations. His wishes had been communicated before the end of 1942 and had recently been re-affirmed in the light of Boemelburg’s reports on PROSPER.
Unfortunately, Kopkow’s threats of fire and brimstone were made a long way away, in Berlin. In Paris, the Abwehr felt that the SD’s methods, though they produced results, were crude and distasteful. At the headquarters in the Hotel Lutetia, Colonel Reile held command over a young and brilliant group of officers, none more audacious than Sergeant Hugo Bleicher, who was engaged upon an operation that would allow him to penetrate right into the centre of the PROSPER organization – and into direct conflict with the Avenue Foch. The Abwehr were aware of the development of a new network in the north and their reports indicated it had some significant strategic importance. At that stage, however, no one – not even the SD – had the vaguest inkling of its true size.
Unlike Boemelburg, the Abwehr had no easy entrée into this new network, but Bleicher did have an asset ready to exploit – the list of names they had stolen months before from a member of the CARTE network. In November the previous year André Marsac, one of the CARTE couriers, had been followed onto a train to Paris by an Abwehr agent and while he was asleep the contents of his briefcase, a list of co-conspirators, was removed. Bleicher had presumed that CARTE’s legions and PROSPER were one and the same – a fair assumption. In fact, his first use of the list led him not to Suttill, but to Henri Frager.
Through various deceptions Bleicher made contact with a number of people in what was the DONKEYMAN network. One of these was a Roger Bardet whom Bleicher had succeeded in recruiting to work for him. Bardet, apart from being a key figure in DONKEYMAN, was also Frager’s lover. By the time Frager had returned from London, Bardet had become Bleicher’s agent. The young Hugo had also got control of a number of SOE wireless sets down in the Yonne and was using them in what was known as a Funkspiele or radio game. Essentially, when a set was captured, preferably with the correct codes, then a skilled operator could play that set back to London leading the British to believe their agent was still free, and that way feed them a lot of false intelligence. In essence it was the reverse of what the British XX Committee were doing with German agents sent to Britain, though without the co-operation of the operator.
Through the radio monitoring centre at Boulevard Suchet, the SD discovered Bleicher’s radio game and mistakenly presumed that the ‘little sergeant’ from the Hotel Lutetia had already penetrated the PROSPER network.18 Boemelburg was furious. Slamming his hand down onto his desk he demanded Bleicher be stopped. No one had any right to PROSPER but himself. Kieffer was given the added responsibility of keeping the Abwehr out of the game. Soon after they had learnt of the radio game, Kieffer kept an appointment with Colonel Reile at Abwehr headquarters, where he gave the Colonel the full benefit of SS Sturmbannfuhrer Kopkow’s views regarding PROSPER. By that stage, Reile (and his ace, Sergeant Bleicher) knew they hadn’t yet penetrated PROSPER, but a group they called ‘the St Jorioz Terrorists’ – Frager’s group DONKEYMAN. He reassured Kieffer they had no knowledge of PROSPER.19 Kieffer did not believe him.
In the meantime, a very sophisticated operational structure was created at Avenue Foch to deal with the GILBERT operations. Dr Josef Götz, an interpreter and linguist, was given administrative responsibility for building up the surveillance teams. Josef Placke organized recruitment. It was decided to draw upon the infamous Bony–LaFont gang, a gangster-like outfit created by Inspector Pierre Bony and Henri LaFont, largely out of crooked ex-policemen and criminals. Götz went through long and detailed briefings, explaining how important it was to select the right people for each operation, where they should hide themselves, how to remain inconspicuous on a country railway platform and so on. The whole operation took on the look of a well-planned military manoeuvre.
The next meeting between Déricourt and Boemelburg occurred sometime during the third week of April, following JuJu’s departure. The most important subject under discussion was the fact that Déricourt had been ordered back to Britain at the end of the week. Flying Officer McCairns’ report had placed the blame for the near-disaster at Amboise squarely on Déricourt’s shoulders. Squadron Leader Verity felt that Déricourt was getting somewhat over-confident and that ‘perhaps he needed a strip torn off him’.20 At least he should come back for a week or two for a rest. It was not something Déricourt could avoid, he had been ordered back and that was that. Boemelburg wasn’t happy at all. Déricourt had become his key man and he didn’t like the thought of losing him – even for a few weeks. It was an awkward moment. There was even the outside possibility that he might not come back at all!
Déricourt’s answer was that he wouldn’t abandon his wife and Clément. Boemelburg didn’t have a great deal of choice in the matter. Clément’s and his wife’s safety was a guarantee for both sides. Before they parted Boemelburg gave Déricourt a warning not to involve himself with Frager or any of his contacts. They had been penetrated by the Abwehr and for that reason were highly dangerous.
Leaving Jeannot on her own in Paris was very difficult. Doubly so as he had left her, in a sense, as surety. In their little room in the ‘Col Moll’, Déricourt and Jeannot had found a kind of peace and security since moving to Paris. Though he found it impossible to be faithful, he was utterly devoted to her, as she was to him. She was not a co-conspirator, she was his sanctuary and he would do almost anything to preserve that state of affairs.
On the other hand, he was relieved to be returning to Britain. He desperately needed to talk to Dansey. The situation with the SD was escalating each week and he no longer felt in control. He was also beginning to have certain moral qualms about what he was doing, especially after having met Suttill. These feelings needed to be assuaged, along with a lot of doubts and uncertainties about his own security.
On Thursday the 22nd, the day before Good Friday, Déricourt bought a ticket for Le Mans and then visited one of his restaurant meeting places to wait for the evening train. Before he departed, news arrived of a disaster. Earlier that day two elderly sisters, Germaine and Madelaine Tambour, had been arrested by the Abwehr. The news streaked around the PROSPER meeting places like lightning. Alarm bells were going off everywhere – especially at Avenue Foch. Germaine Tambour was an associate of Suttill’s. In fact she knew a great number of people. Bleicher had finally stumbled into PROSPER, probably through the list of old CARTE associates that had been stolen in November, long before Suttill had arrived in France. Germaine Tambour had worked for CARTE.21
At first none of this was clear. Arrests had been made and for a while no one knew how or why. Déricourt tried to telephone Boemelburg but couldn’t get through. At the Avenue Foch, Kieffer could be heard bellowing down the corridors at his subordinates. He was telling them what he was going to do with Reile. Before he boarded the train for Le Mans, Déricourt finally spoke with Boemelburg who tried to reassure him that it had nothing to do with the SD, it was the work of the Abwehr. Nothing would happen, it would be all right.22
Hardly reassured, Déricourt stood on the field at Pont-de-Braye with Rémy, waiting for that familiar sound of the Rolls-Royce engine. Out of the moonlit sky, Verity brought down ‘Jiminy Cricket’, while above them Flight Lieutenant Bridger circled in a second Lizzie. In six hours Déricourt would be sitting down to eggs and bacon in the mess at Tempsford, hundreds of miles away from the chaos in Paris.