CHAPTER 12
A Bad Decision
A week after her return to England Jacqueline was called to SOE headquarters for the customary debriefing that all agents had to undergo on coming home. Still extremely tired, she patiently answered questions and gave information about the workings of the Stationer circuit, its agents and the agents of other circuits with whom she had come into contact. The debriefing was a painstaking process; each piece of information that Jacqueline was able to give, however small, painted a vivid picture of life in the field. While operating in France the agents did not have time to cover every angle of their work in their reports. They managed to sort out most of their problems themselves and couldn’t waste time reporting back to London with details of every incident that had occurred. But it was vital for London to know all available information about the difficulties their people suffered, if only to ensure that the mistakes of the past didn’t happen again.
For hour after hour Jacqueline described the long, exhausting journeys that she made from one town to another across the huge Stationer area. She told the officer conducting her interview, for instance, how she had quickly discovered that season tickets were available on the railway and how it made her life so much easier to have one, as it meant she didn’t have to queue for a ticket each time she traveled and didn’t draw attention to herself by constantly appearing at the ticket office, where she would soon have been recognized.
Jacqueline also explained that there were always lots of German soldiers around the railway stations and on the train there was the constant risk of being picked out for questioning by plainclothes Gestapo officers. She described how during one rail journey a woman sitting next to her had been singled out for a Gestapo grilling, and been obliged to hand over her papers and handbag for scrutiny. She herself had always managed to avoid this, but she said that by the time she left France the controls were becoming much tighter and the searches more frequent. She advised the officer conducting her debriefing to make sure that new agents were told not to keep any incriminating papers on their person when traveling and to ensure that their personal documents would pass muster. She also mentioned that when she had traded in her fake identity card and obtained a genuine one, and had been asked to produce a photo for this, she did so but requested that the picture be returned to her so that she could give it to her fiancé, to ensure that the photo was not kept and that there was less likelihood of her being recognized sometime later. She felt more secure with the genuine identity card. She had been with Maingard on the Boussens–Toulouse–Tarbes train when he had been searched, Jacqueline said, but he didn’t have any problems because he had very good papers.
Jacqueline’s rail card.
As time passed she had found it more and more risky to take express trains anywhere. When she first arrived she used to travel from Toulouse to Pau on the Toulouse–Tarbes–Pau express, which left Toulouse at 10:20 a.m. and arrived in Pau two hours and ten minutes later. But increasingly the express trains were filled with plainclothes Gestapo men, often accompanied by uniformed officers, so when in Toulouse she usually got up early and took the slow train, which left at 5:20 a.m. and didn’t arrive until 11:00 a.m. It was a boring journey but at least the Gestapo avoided traveling on the slow trains.
When speaking about her colleagues, Jacqueline always called them by their code names. They were the only names she knew them by, and when she gave the officer conducting her debriefing information about people she had come across in the course of her work she didn’t really know whom she was talking about; nor did she know their links to other people. She recalled that she had heard about the fate of an agent called Alice, who had gone into a shop to speak to one of her contacts and the Gestapo had come in while she was there. Instead of remaining calm and just leaving the shop, she went outside in a hurry and then hid in the house next door. Although the neighbor let her in, she became worried when the Gestapo returned to the shop and told them where Alice was hiding. Jacqueline didn’t know Alice personally but thought that she was known to Southgate.
In fact Alice was Cecily Lefort, a 44-year-old British woman who was married to a Frenchman and lived in Brittany. She had volunteered for the SOE and had become the courier for the Jockey circuit, led by Francis Cammaerts. Southgate did indeed know her and had a slightly different story about her arrest, saying that she had been visiting a friend of her circuit leader when the Germans arrived and she was caught. Southgate had not been at all impressed by her: “She was the wrong type for the work, as she was conspicuously British in appearance and drew attention to herself by her behavior… her laugh could be heard a mile away…”1 She survived in this role for only three months and, after her arrest, was taken to Ravensbrück, where she died sometime in early 1945.
Another agent of whom Jacqueline had details had, unbeknown to her, already been discussed by Maurice Southgate in a report he had sent to London. Jacqueline told how, sometime the previous summer, possibly in June or July, she had received a message from an agent called Gaby, asking to meet her. Since the message had come via another agent she knew to be trustworthy, she had agreed to the meeting. Gaby told Jacqueline that she had arrived the previous week but had had no reception committee waiting for her. Not knowing what to do, she had gone to the address in Clermont-Ferrand that she had been given, probably 37 rue Blatin, and asked for Jacqueline. When the women met, Jacqueline agreed to take Gaby to Maingard in Châteauroux, where Gaby left her bag before going on to Marseilles to start her work as a courier for the Monk circuit. She didn’t retrieve her baggage for three months and when she returned to Châteauroux, she told Maingard that she wasn’t worried about her bag, which contained most of her clothes, as she was the “queen of the black market” in the southern French port. When she had spoken to Jacqueline she told her that she was a widow but then said that she had not been widowed. She told Maingard that she had been married and divorced three times, which was another lie. Had Southgate taken Jacqueline and Maingard into his confidence, they would have discovered that Gaby had given him yet another story. Southgate suspected, but was not able to prove, that she had embezzled the large amount of money given to her by the SOE to take down to the Monk leader, Charles Skepper. She certainly didn’t have any of it on her when she was taken to her circuit in Marseilles. She told Southgate that because she hadn’t had anyone to meet her she had buried the money, along with her parachute, on a farm near where she landed and took him to the farm to retrieve it. It wasn’t found, and the farmer and his family had no idea what she was talking about. Southgate even contrived to search the farm with another member of his circuit, both dressed as German officers, and it was clear to him that the farmer and his family were not lying. So was she an embezzler or had she simply mistaken the place where she had hidden the cash? No one ever discovered what had happened to the missing money.2 In March 1944, just before Jacqueline was brought home and the day after Charles Skepper was detained by the Germans, Gaby was arrested. The 27-year-old agent was executed in Dachau in September 1944. Her real name was Eliane Plewman and she was the sister of Albert Browne-Bartroli, who had arrived in France on the aircraft that had then taken Jacqueline’s brother Francis to England the previous autumn.
Jacqueline’s debriefing lasted for a long while. As well as talking about her journeys and the people she had met while in France, she described the sabotage raids undertaken by the circuit, and the supply drops that sometimes went wrong and left the agents either missing parcels or looking for those that had never existed. Satisfied that he had received all the information that she could give, the interviewer told Jacqueline that she would be passed on to another section, the training section, and that after she had had a rest, she would be undertaking a refresher course. He completed his report, noting that Jacqueline was “a very capable, intelligent, highly reliable woman, who has operated in the field for a considerable time with marked success.”3
Stuck in Paris with no circuit leader and no real work, Didi went every day to the house in Bourg-la-Reine and, at the times she had been allocated, listened for any incoming transmissions that might give her information about what was going to happen to her and to Maury, the wireless operator who had arrived in Paris just as Savy was leaving.
Then one day, a week or so after Savy’s departure, Didi received the message she had been waiting for: news of her next assignment. She and Maury were being transferred to a new circuit called Spiritualist. The best news was that it was in Paris. Didi had worried that she would be sent elsewhere and would have to search for new accommodation for herself and her wireless, but Spiritualist operated in the east of Paris and in the département of Seine-et-Marne. It was better news than she could have hoped for and she looked forward to meeting her new circuit chief. Although she had enjoyed working for Savy, it was by no means certain that he would be returning to France and Didi needed to keep busy.
Although both were from well-to-do backgrounds, Didi’s new boss, René Dumont-Guillemet (Armand), was about as different from Jean Savy as it was possible to be. While Savy had been a hardworking, serious lawyer, Dumont-Guillemet had been a playboy before becoming a Resistance fighter. Born in Lyons on 5 April 1908, he had had a privileged upbringing. Although he attended a good school, he wasn’t a diligent student and didn’t complete his studies. Instead he left school and concentrated on his sporting interests. He loved skiing, his favorite ski slopes being in the Jura mountains, and when he was a little older took up motor racing. Summer weekends were the times he liked the most, and he spent them all enjoying himself with his friends on the beaches of the Riviera and swimming in the Mediterranean. Eventually he decided the time had come for him to find some sort of work and, being a fan of the movies, he became a set designer, working for several film companies, including Paramount.
When the war began in 1939 he enlisted in the French Army but was demobilized in 1940 after the fall of France. He then started his own truck company, based in Paris, where he and his wife, Raymonde Rougeaux, lived in the rue de Monceau with their son, Michael, who was born in 1941. In the autumn of 1942 a prewar British friend, Sidney Jones (Elie), arrived by felucca to run a Resistance sabotage circuit named Inventor to be based in Marseilles, and Dumont-Guillemet was recruited to help him. The following year Jones suggested that his friend should be taken to London for SOE training. He left on 16 October in a Lysander of 161 Squadron, piloted by Flight Lieutenant McCairns. He had only one traveling companion on the trip, the chief of the Stationer circuit: Jacqueline’s boss, Maurice Southgate, known to him only as Hector.
While Dumont-Guillemet was in England his friend Sidney Jones was arrested, along with his courier Vera Leigh (Simone), both victims of the double agent Roger Bardet (whose presence at the departure of the aircraft in which Francis Nearne had come to England had caused such a heated argument). After his arrest Jones was sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was executed in September 1944. Vera Leigh died in the concentration camp of Natzweiler-Struthof in the Vosges mountains in France sometime in July the same year, along with three other female agents: Andrée Borrel (Denise), Diana Rowden (Paulette) and Sonia Olschanesky (Tania). All four women were given lethal injections and their bodies were cremated immediately. There is strong evidence that they were not all dead when they were taken to the ovens.4
After the successful completion of his training, Dumont-Guillemet returned to France to set up the Spiritualist circuit in Paris, accompanied by a wireless operator, Henry Diacono (Blaise), an Algerian-born British officer of Maltese descent. Part of Dumont-Guillemet’s remit was to unite the small factions that remained of the Prosper and Farmer circuits. Prosper had been based in Paris under the leadership of Francis Suttill, who had been arrested in the middle of 1943 and was to die at the hands of the Nazis in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1945. Michael Trotobas, the Anglo-French chief of the Farmer circuit in Lille, had been killed in a gun battle with the Germans in November 1943. In the absence of both leaders, the two circuits had become largely fragmented.
The former playboy Dumont-Guillemet had at last abandoned his hedonistic lifestyle and found an occupation in which he really believed. Perhaps because of his incomplete education and his energetic lifestyle, he was a man of action rather than words. He had returned from England with a few specific projects to attend to: arranging a mass breakout from Fresnes prison, which was his own idea and which he subsequently abandoned as being unworkable; kidnapping a German V-1 rocket engineer; a sabotage attack on the Bosch Lavelette works; and reestablishing contact with the members of the Farmer network in Lille.
The kidnap of the German V-1 rocket engineer was in the final planning stages when the Germans decided that they would move the man to more secure premises, so the kidnap attempt was ditched in favor of things more achievable. Undoubtedly the most important task given to Dumont-Guillemet was that of reestablishing contact with the Farmer circuit in Lille. This he managed to do, and it had enormous benefits to the Resistance groups in the north and east of France, where supply drops had become extremely difficult. Because Dumont-Guillemet had the means, via his truck company, to transport goods from the drops being made closer to Paris, the agents in the Lille area were able to maintain an efficient, strong Resistance network. This network contributed greatly to the destruction of German communications both up to and after D-Day, provided vital information about the V-1 rocket launch sites in the area and carried out many sabotage raids.
Dumont-Guillemet also had a task of his own. He had a burning desire to find out what had happened to his friend, Sidney Jones. While conducting some careful but extremely dangerous inquiries about the fate of Jones, he managed to uncover several double agents, whom he eliminated.
Because of his enormous energy and the large number of Resistance fighters he led, there was plenty of work for the wireless operators Didi, Maury and Diacono. Didi quickly reestablished her routine, sending messages to England from the house in Bourg-la-Reine. Although when she had begun transmitting from the Dubois house everything had been quiet in the area, after a few weeks she noticed that the number of Germans she spotted had increased, as had the direction-finding vans that they used to locate wireless operators. Maury, who had also seen and heard an increase in the number of Germans, agreed with Didi that it was becoming unsafe to continue using their former safe houses for broadcasting, so he began searching for another location. He eventually found a room in the west Paris suburb of Le Vésinet where, 20 years earlier, Didi’s elder brother Francis had briefly gone to school.
The new room was about the same distance for Didi to travel as it was to Bourg-la-Reine. Despite this, for a time Didi preferred to make her transmissions from the old, tried and tested location. Maury had already gone to Le Vésinet and had told her that the reception there was not too good. To try to ensure her own safety Didi always made certain that she arrived at the house with plenty of time to spare before her skeds (the planned times for receiving or transmitting messages). With the regular work that she was doing for Dumont-Guillemet she had become much more proficient at Morse code and could send a message very quickly. Whenever she thought about the danger she was in, she always believed that she would survive; she was sure she would never be captured. Her belief in God had helped her adjust to her lonely life and now that her position within the Spiritualist circuit was secure, she relished the life she was leading.
By the latter part of July 1944 she had sent a total of 105 messages and had been working for four months, more than two months longer than what was statistically believed to be the maximum time a wireless operator could operate safely. She had already stayed in Bourg-la-Reine for much longer than was safe; she knew that she couldn’t delay her departure for Le Vésinet any longer. Having made the decision to move she was given an urgent message to send for Dumont-Guillemet, and was again torn between her usual location and the new one. She decided to make this transmission the very last one from the Dubois house. She could get a good reception from there, whereas Maury was still having difficulties at Le Vésinet.
She set off, in the rain, for her last trip to Bourg-la-Reine on the afternoon of 21 July. When she reached the house she found that the district was in the middle of a power cut, so she decided to remain there for a while, hoping that the power would soon be back to normal. But it was off for so long that she missed her sked and chose to sleep there so as to be ready for her next one in the morning. When she awoke she found that the power was back to normal, so she retrieved the pieces of her wireless, quickly assembled the set and checked the aerial. Everything was in order and she began tapping out her message.
She had almost finished it when she heard the sound of a car engine nearby but had no premonition of anything untoward. As she completed the transmission, however, she was suddenly aware of shouting in the street and car doors banging. She rubbed clear a patch of condensation on the window—it was still raining—and was appalled to see several cars and men who could only be Germans streaming from them. She knew that the moment she had believed would never come had, in fact, arrived. It suddenly occurred to her that the first noise she had heard might have been a direction-finding vehicle, and she realized that it would only be a matter of minutes before the Germans would be banging on her door.