By 1944 accommodation in Paris had become scarce. Many of the rooms that had been available earlier in the war had now been taken by people coming into the capital in search of work; the Germans had commandeered others. Although it might be tolerable for a wireless operator to live in a building close to where Germans lived, it would be impossible to send messages from such an address, so Didi’s requirement for two places made her task very difficult. After staying in a safe house for a few days, with Louise’s help she managed to find a room in Porte Champerret, an area in the northwest of Paris named after one of the gates in the nineteenth-century Thiers Wall, the last of the seven defensive walls of Paris. For Didi it was a very convenient place in which to live, as it was close to the city and had its own Metro station. However, it proved to be much more difficult to secure a place for her wireless set.
Remembering what she had learned on her training course, Didi knew that the place from which she would make her transmissions had to be away from neighbors’ prying eyes, yet somewhere where she would not look suspicious if she were seen entering and leaving it regularly. She also recalled being told that suburbs were the safest places from which to broadcast, as the Germans had most of their direction-finding equipment in cities and towns. Eventually, again with the help of Louise and her contacts, she found a house in Bourg-la-Reine, a suburb southwest of Paris about 8 kilometers from the center of the city. It belonged to a M. and Mme. Dubois, who were agreeable to the young wireless operator using it for her transmissions. The Dubois house was, therefore, as close to being ideal as it could be.
Didi’s next task was to take the wireless set to its new home. She wasn’t looking forward to this, as she would have to travel across Paris carrying the equipment, which weighed around 18 kilos and was the size of a small suitcase. She could take the train and hope that she got a seat in an empty compartment. It would certainly be quicker than walking, but would not give her a good chance of escape should things not go as planned. On the other hand, carrying a case of that weight through the streets of Paris, while it might allow her a better chance of flight should she be suspected of anything, would be very tiring, possibly dangerous, and could take her a long time.
When the Germans had first come to Paris they had behaved reasonably well for an invading force. Although the local people hated them being in their capital city, they had been left alone in most cases. Four years on, however, many of the occupying forces had lost their manners and life had become much more difficult for the locals. Even walking along the same street as a German soldier could be risky. The troops often stopped and searched people whose faces they didn’t like. It was not unusual for a soldier to hit or kick a Frenchman or woman, and there was also the danger of being knocked over on the street by one of their vehicles. Didi still had to send a message to London to tell the SOE that she and her circuit leader had arrived safely and, although she needed to be ready to transmit whenever Savy contacted her, she hadn’t yet found out if he had returned from his trip to visit Major Antelme. Whenever she called on Louise to find out what was happening, she was always disappointed to discover that Savy had not been in touch. Then one day, Louise told her that the circuit leader was back in Paris.
Jean Savy had been having problems of his own. When he and Didi had parted the morning after their arrival, Savy had gone directly to the area where he knew France Antelme had planned to be. He was keen to start the work that they were going to be doing together as soon as possible, as there was still much to be done, and many more people to contact and persuade to donate money and goods for the Allied invasion army. When Antelme had arrived on the night of 28/29 February, as head of the Bricklayer circuit, his wireless operator Lionel Lee and his courier Madeleine Damerment had gone with him. Since this was only two days before Savy had arrived, he had assumed that finding Antelme would be relatively easy. Then he received some devastating news.
The trio had landed at Sainville, approximately 30 kilometers east of Chartres, parachuting from a 161 Squadron Halifax, piloted by Flight Lieutenant Caldwell, London having ignored Maurice Southgate’s advice to use the dropping zone near Poitiers. Antelme had asked that they be dropped to a reception committee and was pleased to find people there to meet them. After landing they gathered up their parachutes and quickly made their way towards their reception committee. Too late they realized that the waiting group of men was not the team they had expected but Gestapo officers. All three of the new arrivals were arrested and taken to the offices of the Sicherheitsdienst in Paris at 84 avenue Foch, where Sturmbannführer Hans Josef Kieffer, senior German counterintelligence officer, interrogated them.
Antelme was in a rage and refused to disclose any details of who he was or what he had been sent to do. When Kieffer let him know that his identity was already known he admitted that he was France Antelme but refused to give any other details, claiming instead that he was to receive orders on his arrival in France. Lionel Lee and Madeleine Damerment also refused to disclose information about their roles.
When Antelme had asked to be dropped to a reception committee, it was decided that it should come from Cinema/Phono, a subcircuit of the famous Physician/Prosper circuit operating just south of Paris. Before leaving for France, Antelme himself had expressed confidence in this circuit, although there were a few officers in London who had suspicions that all was not well and that there was a possibility that the circuit had been penetrated. As a precaution Antelme was told that after his arrival he was to cut all contacts with Cinema/Phono.
A few days after the arrests, F section, believing that the Bricklayer team had arrived safely, received a message that told them that Antelme had hit his head on a container of supplies when he landed on 29 February and that he had been severely injured. The message came from the wireless operator of the Cinema/Phono circuit, Noor Inayat Khan—or so they thought. In reality she had been captured in October 1943, four months before.
When she was arrested, Noor used a special security measure given to her by code master Leo Marks, who had told her, during an extended briefing in London before she left for France, that she should never use an 18-letter key phrase in any of her transmissions. If a message arrived from her containing such a key phrase, he said he would know that she had been arrested.1 The very first message sent by Noor under duress contained just such a key phrase and Marks knew that she was in trouble. He immediately contacted Buckmaster and told him what had happened, but the Colonel refused to believe him and announced his intention of continuing to send messages to Noor. When she was next made to send a message she omitted one of her two regular security checks to alert London but this did not work either. Although she had never left out the codes in any of her previous messages, it was assumed that she had simply forgotten them and, unbelievably, this “oversight” was ignored.
For the next few months the wireless messages purporting to be sent by her had in fact been sent by Kieffer’s subordinate, Dr. Josef Goetz, a teacher and language expert in civilian life, or by one of his signals officers. Every one of them had been sent with only one security check, as told to them by Noor, yet no one in London, including Buckmaster, seemed to be concerned. Since there were those, albeit a small number, who had doubted the veracity of the messages sent by this circuit anyway, one has to wonder why the decision to send the three agents to a reception committee from Cinema/Phono had been made. Whatever the reason—sloppiness? arrogance? complacency?—this gross lack of judgment ensured that three valuable agents were lost.
On 24 March, nearly a month after Antelme, Lee and Damerment had been captured, Lee was instructed to make a broadcast to London confirming the details about Antelme’s injury. He gave the Germans false details about where his security checks should be placed and another message was sent, reporting this time that Antelme’s health was deteriorating. Soon yet another message was sent, again with the security checks in the wrong place, which told London that Antelme had died of his injuries. Despite Lee’s efforts to let them know that his messages were not safe, officers in the Signals Directorate had marked “Special check present” on the transcripts of the broadcasts and the paperwork had simply been filed. Three weeks after Lee’s transmission, Gerry Morel, F Section’s Operations Officer, who was one of the few who doubted the reliability of the messages, was still feeling very uneasy about them and asked for the transcripts to be reexamined. They were all pulled out of the files and each one was scrutinized. Finally it was admitted that the checks had been put in the wrong place. F Section accepted that the Germans had been working the wireless sets, and that it was therefore safe to assume that Noor Inayat Khan, France Antelme, Lionel Lee and Madeleine Damerment were all in the hands of the enemy.
In Paris, after their interrogation in the avenue Foch, Antelme and Lee were taken to the Gestapo torture chambers in rue des Saussaies in a final attempt to make them talk. Believing that London would know by the wrongly placed checks that they had been arrested and would be able to alert all their contacts in France, so that they could disperse and save themselves and the circuit, they bravely endured the torture and remained silent. After a few days the Germans assumed that the people expecting the three agents to arrive would have realized that they had been captured and would have disappeared. The torture was stopped, as any information they might have gained by continuing it would, by now, be out of date. Antelme and Lee were no longer of any use to them and were sent on to the concentration camp at Gross-Rosen in Lower Silesia (now Rogoznica, Poland), where they were both executed, Antelme on 19 May and Lee on 27 June 1944. Madeleine Damerment was taken to the civilian prison in Karlsruhe, where she was kept for some months before being transported to Dachau concentration camp near Munich. Noor Inayat Khan, who had been behind bars in the prison of Pforzheim, was brought to Dachau to join Madeleine in late summer and on 13 September 1944 both women were executed by shots in the back of the neck.
Had these been the only errors made by F section regarding the transmission of messages and missing security checks that led to the deaths of agents, it would have been bad. But there is strong evidence that this was only one of several occasions on which similar mistakes had been made, yet London had learned nothing from the blunders.
In June the previous year Gilbert Norman, the wireless operator for the Physician/Prosper circuit in Paris, had been arrested, along with courier Andrée Borrel and the circuit leader Francis Suttill, whose code name Prosper gave Physician its alternative name. Norman, an excellent wireless operator who rarely sent a message with any errors, transmitted one in which one of his checks was missing. Because it was so unlike him to do this, Leo Marks was convinced that he had done so to inform London of his arrest; this, after all, was what the checks were for. Others in London were also convinced that he was no longer free and was sending the messages under duress. But Buckmaster, ignoring the obvious proof of his arrest, immediately sent off a reply, reprimanding him for his serious breach of security and warning him not to do it again.2 This reply told the Germans that Norman had lied to them about the way he transmitted to London and sealed the wireless operator’s fate. Gilbert Norman was taken to Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was hanged in September 1944. Francis Suttill, the circuit leader, died in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen near Berlin and courier Andrée Borrel was executed in the only Nazi concentration camp built in France, Natzweiler-Struthof, southwest of Strasbourg.
If more proof of London’s ineptitude were needed, Maurice Southgate knew of similar situations and, in a report written on his return to England, made the following accusation:
Several times I have had proof of agents from SOE being dropped on grounds held by the Germans themselves. The Germans then used the wireless sets, codes and crystals of the new arrivals, but for a long time they did not realise that there were two checks on outgoing telegrams (from the field to England), one the true check, the other the bluff check. These telegrams were sent out with one check only and most obviously should have been phoney to London HQ. Time after time, for different men, London sent back messages saying: “My dear fellow, you only left us a week ago. On your first messages you go and forget to put your true check.” (Squadron Leader Southgate would very much like to know what the hell the check was meant for if not for that very special occasion.) You may now realise what happened to our agents who did not give the true check to the Germans, thus making them send out a message that was obviously phoney, and after being put through the worst degrees of torture these Germans managed, sometimes a week later, to get hold of the true check, and then sent a further message to London with the proper check in the telegram, and London saying: “Now you are a good boy, now you have remembered to give both of them.”
This happened not once, but several times. I consider that the officer responsible for such neglect of his duties should be severely court martialled, because he is responsible for the death and capture of many agents, including Major Antelme for one, who was arrested the minute he put his foot on French soil.3
Colonel Buckmaster still could not admit that some dreadful errors of judgment had been made. Commenting on Southgate’s report he said: “The attached is clearly the report of an extremely tired man. Its lack of continuity and its abrupt switching of subjects bear eloquent testimony to the sufferings of the author.”4
It was against this backdrop of monumental errors that Didi would be embarking upon her career as a wireless operator.