I stood with my father, Jean Claude Guiet, by a corrugated metal hangar at the Lons-le-Saunier airport in eastern France, watching a blue-and-white Cessna 182 make its final approach. Jean Claude did not allow the anticipation he felt to show in his expression. It was 9:00 A.M. on a sunny summer day that promised to build into a very hot Jura afternoon. A single tattered wind sock fluttered in the light breeze.
The Cessna was an old one, perfectly ordinary, except that someone had removed its transponder, the device that would have identified it to air traffic controllers. Its pilot was Bob Maloubier, a seventy-seven-year-old Frenchman wearing Ray-Bans and a handlebar mustache. In the copilot’s seat rode his friend and former wife, Catherine, a beautiful and easygoing woman some twenty years his junior.
Five days before, on June 24, 2000, Bob and Jean Claude had been reunited for the first time since the liberation of Paris in 1944. They had both attended the opening of a museum in Wormelow, England, devoted to the memory of Violette Szabo, an English secret agent who was a heroine of the French Resistance. Bob, who stood six foot four, wore a chest full of medals and ribbons. Jean Claude, who was five ten, wore none of his. Their handshake turned into a long embrace. “My God, Jean, you’ve gotten very old!” Bob said in French. Jean Claude replied, “I am still six months younger than you.”
The museum opening was a merry hubbub of war veterans, politicians, even a few movie stars, and the newspaper reporters and BBC film crew competing to interview them. It was no place for a real conversation. So Bob and Jean Claude agreed to have a private reunion at the little château where my wife, Carol, and I spend summers in Nevy-sur-Seille, a village of 250 souls in the Jura region. Bob would fly in from Paris, where he lived. They would have a chance to go over the extraordinary history they had shared with Violette, and also news about the fifty-six years since they had seen each other last.
We watched the Cessna descend toward the grassy airstrip bordered by white-painted rocks. My father’s face betrayed nothing. I was aflame with curiosity, especially as I knew that the wartime records of the unit both men had served with had finally been declassified. My father, a discreet, formal, French-born American—a perfectionist in all he did—had never spoken of things that were officially secret.
My thoughts drifted to the tin bread box that had traveled with our family everywhere the government-supplied moving vans took us during my peripatetic childhood. It was light gray, painted with pink hibiscus flowers. Wherever we lived—apartment, hotel, shanty, or house—the box would be tucked away in a hard-to-reach spot in my father’s bedroom closet. There was never any food in it—it gave off no scent of crackers, bread, or nuts. Rather it smelled faintly of rubberized plastic, with undertones of old leather and canvas. We children didn’t have to be told never to touch it; the box, it was understood, was strictly off-limits.
Opening it required considerable strength in the fingertips, I discovered at age five. We were living in a Quonset hut on Saipan that year, 1956. My parents and my older sister were outside on the beach, taking in a picture-perfect Pacific sunset. The tin bread box had been placed within my reach for once, on the Quonset hut’s floor among crates and suitcases, as we were preparing to move yet again. I got my fingers under the narrow, rolled lip of the lid, popped it, and peered inside.
I didn’t understand most of the things I found. The .45 automatic was not a mystery, to be sure; I removed it carefully, along with five full clips. There were three slim knives, about four to ten inches long, in leather sheaths with straps. There was also a length of wire with a wooden handle at each end.
There were thin pieces of paper, four inches square, titled Field Station to Home Station and Home Station to Field Station, with tiny type printed on them in sequences of five random letters. There were black-and-white photos, with scalloped white borders, of men roasting monkeys in a jungle.
I found passports and identification cards that bore my father’s photograph but names that were not his. There was a compass. A small green box, bound with a fat rubber band, contained narrow bits of metal with quarter-inch round wooden handles—a set of lock rakes, as I later learned. There were large silk squares imprinted with different countries’ flags, bearing messages in unfamiliar alphabets. The messages, I discovered much later, were variations on a theme: I am an American. Take me to the nearest Allied military office. You will be paid.
I put everything back into the box in the correct sequence and snapped the lid shut.
The Cessna kissed the runway, its wheels sinking a little way into the grass, and taxied to the hangar. Bob and Catherine climbed out of the plane and into our car. It was a short ride to the château, along the bank of the Seille River, through the village, through our gated wall, past our little vineyard and trout pond and up to the 250-year-old house. We settled on the terrace with coffee.
Bob began by asking Jean Claude, “What did you do after being dragged off to the airport by the MPs?”
He was alluding to their parting, in Paris, in September 1944. The two young men had survived their clandestine mission in occupied France, against long odds, and had made their way to the liberated capital. For four days they celebrated their good fortune, drinking, dancing, and dining in Paris’s very expensive, very good, black-market restaurants. They had no desire to report to their commanding officers just yet, and that meant eluding the military policemen who patrolled the city rounding up reveling soldiers. Jean Claude had two sets of papers, one French, one American, and he was perfectly bilingual. He was able to fool the French MPs by speaking only English when questioned, and the Americans by speaking French, but his luck ran out on day four when he was picked up by a joint French-American patrol. They took him in for questioning and ascertained his true identity. A few hours later an older man in civilian clothing arrived hurriedly and, escorted by two MPs, put Jean Claude on the next flight to London.
“I spent a few days at Baker Street,” Jean Claude replied.
Number 64 Baker Street in London was, at that time, the headquarters of an organization called the Special Operations Executive (SOE). The few people who knew of its existence nicknamed it the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Its operatives were sometimes called the Baker Street Irregulars.
For any reader unfamiliar with the Sherlock Holmes canon, the original Baker Street Irregulars were London urchins who, in several stories, did intelligence work for the great detective. The men and women of SOE were certainly irregular in many senses of the word, but it wouldn’t be quite right to think of them as spies. They were secret agents, to be sure, but they weren’t trained just for espionage. Their job was mayhem—sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines. As one SOE officer told the historian M. R. D. Foot:
“Our field operatives were for the most part temperamentally unable to regard Intelligence as anything but the essential prelude to action. To whet their appetites for action, by directing them to locate enemy activities or resources, and at the same time to forbid action, is akin to giving a lion a raw sirloin to play with but not to eat.”1
The two old lions conversing at the château were the surviving members of a four-person team that parachuted into Nazi-occupied France, near Limoges, on the day after D-Day. There they galvanized thousands of maquisards—rural bands of French guerrillas—to intercept German reinforcements and prevent them from reaching Normandy. Bob was a demolition specialist. Jean Claude was the team’s wireless operator, responsible for coded communications with Baker Street. They were not expected to survive.
Before they got into the details of their wartime mission, though, Bob and Jean Claude had some catching up to do.
Jean Claude told Bob that after his return to Baker Street he had been shipped home to Northampton, Massachusetts, where both his parents were professors at Smith College. Then it was off to California for jungle training with the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA precursor headed by William Donovan—“Wild Bill”—known as the father of American Intelligence. Jean Claude’s OSS team was sent to China to train tribesmen in guerrilla warfare against Japanese and Communist Chinese troops.
Bob told Jean Claude that he too had been sent to fight in the Pacific theater.
Jean Claude said the warfare he had witnessed while living among Kachin and Naga tribesmen had been especially savage. He had seen necklaces made of ears, and the shrunken heads of Japanese soldiers.
Bob stared quietly into Jean Claude’s face and said that he had seen similar things in Vietnam and Laos.
Jean Claude said that in China you could never really be sure who was friend or foe. Even the regular U.S. Army resented and distrusted the OSS men. Eventually hostilities became so great that the army filed court-martial charges against Jean Claude; Wild Bill ordered him to disappear for a month, and when he resurfaced he found the charges dropped.
Bob knew what that was like. He too had hidden out in a jungle, later in his career, when he managed to get crosswise with both the Corsican Mafia and the Mossad. He had flown the blue-and-white Cessna from France to a lumber camp in the Congo. That was how he had met Catherine, the daughter of a French foreign service couple posted to that country. They had two children, and remained close after their divorce.
As they talked, the two men switched languages from time to time—French to English and back again—occasionally testing one another with a phrase in Italian, Spanish, or German.
Jean Claude told Bob that after the atomic bombs ended the war, he went back to Massachusetts and reenrolled at Harvard. He graduated magna cum laude, obtained a master’s degree in Romance languages, and attempted to follow the family teaching tradition by taking a position in the French Department at Ohio State University. His first semester there he taught four classes, and it became clear that his perfectionism was going to be a problem: He flunked every student in every class he taught. The university put him on probation. The second semester he did it again, insisting, with documentation, that each student deserved a failing grade. It was something of a relief when he was invited to join many of his old colleagues from Europe and Indochina in the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency.
Bob had returned to France at war’s end with a severe case of malaria. Recovered after a few months, he helped found the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service, SDECE). For a number of years he operated a covert school for the SDECE in Austria, recruiting, training, and running agents in Russia and its satellites.
We opened a bottle of Crémant du Jura, a local sparkling wine, and strolled outside into the heat, glasses in hand. It was clear that Bob and Jean Claude were done with their summing-up: Neither man would ask for details of the other’s Cold War clandestine service, or volunteer his own.
We found shade under a huge sequoia. Bob turned to Jean Claude and asked him in a curiously loud voice if he ever had difficult dreams, dark memories, or bouts of anxiety stemming from their SOE operation in the Limousin region. Bob said that sometimes he had trouble sleeping. Jean Claude said he did too, recalling his terror of being detected and captured each time he switched on his radio set.
Bob asked my father if anyone knew how many maquisard fighters had been killed working for their team. Jean Claude said he didn’t have even a rough idea, but that it had to have been well over a couple of thousand. Their ghostly army, drawing fighters from eight departments of central France, had numbered about ten thousand at its peak. But these were citizen soldiers—farmers, teachers, shopkeepers, laborers—and their sacrifices were not recorded in any formal ledger. Records kept by SOE, scanty to begin with for security’s sake, were mostly destroyed by fire during and after the war.
Jean Claude stared down at leaves and branches and said quietly that every June 10 he took some private time to honor the memory of Violette. Bob nodded in agreement and pretended to search the horizon. This was their first opportunity to talk about these things, openly and legally, in more than half a century.
We walked back into the cool of the château. The church bells rang to mark the midi. The scent of Carol’s poulet et morilles au vin jaune came from the kitchen. We gathered at the dining table for a lunch that lasted all afternoon and into the evening, as Jean Claude and Bob reconstructed the astonishing story of their secret war.