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In the spring of 1944, outside the farming hamlet of Sussac in south-central France, an old water mill, long disused, rumbled back to life.

The mill was housed in a rock hut built right over a gentle stream feeding the Combade River. Screened by brush and trees, the hut looked abandoned from the dirt road outside, its windows frameless. In addition to its wooden waterwheel, though, the hut contained minimal furnishings—a chair, a table, two bedsteads with dubious mattresses, a stone sink that drained outside into a hedge. This was now the temporary home of a man identified in his official papers and ration books as Claude Jean Guyot.

Guyot’s documents showed him to be a twenty-seven-year-old French office boy employed by an agronomist in Toulouse. He was of medium height and build, though unusually fit. As if to dial back the striking effect of his looks—fine nose, strong chin, brown eyes set wide apart—the photograph on his identity card showed him with his necktie and collar awkwardly askew. His clothing was tailored in the contemporary French manner, down to the buttons and stitching. His spoken French was accentless.

SOE forged a French identity card for “Claude Jean Guyot” with Jean Claude’s actual birth date but a false birth year, and his real fingerprints, as well as a certificate of residence to verify his cover story. The documents passed muster when examined by the Nazis.

But he was, in fact, an American agent—the wireless operator for an elite team running a covert campaign of sabotage, subversion, and ambush against the German occupiers. His real name was Jean Claude Guiet; his real age was twenty. The slow turning of the old waterwheel was vastly improving his life expectancy—measurable, as he well knew, not in years, or even months, but weeks.

The Germans, by that late stage of World War II, had become very good at radio direction finding. The Nazi Funk-Horchdienst, or listening service, monitored the entire radio spectrum between 10 kilocycles and 30 megacycles from a facility near Paris. Any frequency in use anywhere in France showed up as a spot on one of three hundred softly humming cathode-ray displays there. If a new, unfamiliar spot appeared, its frequency would be called in to three direction-finding (DF) stations on the country’s periphery, which would fix on the signal instantly and pinpoint it within a triangular area about ten miles per side.

Then the hunt would begin. The first step was to momentarily shut down the electrical power grid, one substation at a time, in the zone identified. If the spot blipped off and on, it meant that the radio drew power from that substation. Then technical teams operating mobile DF stations, often carried in disguised laundry trucks but also sometimes in cars or small planes, would take over and narrow the field to within two hundred yards of the transmitter. Finally, if necessary, Gestapo men on foot, using sensors hidden under coats, antennae looped around their necks, eyes on meters disguised as wristwatches, would close in.

In 1944 the procedure, from the detection of a signal to the dispatching of DF vehicles, took as little as fourteen minutes.

Wireless operators were special prizes for the German military, as they were the vital link between Resistance fighters and the London spymasters who supplied arms, ammunition, and money by moonlight parachute drops. Captured agents were supposed to either swallow their L-pill (potassium cyanide, the L standing for lethal), or, if they could not, to remain silent for the first forty-eight hours of interrogation, giving their fellows time to get clear. The risk was never far from Jean Claude’s mind: His reason for being there was that the team’s previous radio operator had been captured months earlier near Rouen.

Jean Claude’s borrowed water mill was a superb spot for operating his wireless set—a medium-power suitcase transceiver—as it offered both concealment and an off-the-grid power supply. Helped by an electrician friendly to the Resistance, Jean Claude had disconnected the heavy millstone from the waterwheel’s shaft and propped it against the hut’s wall. Then the two men had rigged belts and wooden gears to the shaft, the last belt stretched tightly over a pulley driving a small generator. The system amplified the slow turning of the waterwheel to a rate sufficient to charge a pair of scrounged 12-volt car batteries, which powered the radio. A long copper wire, threaded through a cracked roof tile and strung up into the branches of a tree, served as an antenna.

Even so, Jean Claude knew he was in peril every time he switched on his set. DF trucks occasionally roamed the countryside. A small plane flew overhead with unsettling regularity (most likely a German courier, Jean Claude thought, but possibly not). Worse, one member of Jean Claude’s four-person team, Violette Szabo, had been captured and handed over to the Gestapo in Limoges. Who knew what information they might have extracted from her?

There was no question of curtailing radio transmissions, though; wireless traffic, like the tides, was determined by the phase of the moon. Only when the moon was more than half full was there enough light for the bombers from England to make nighttime parachute drops of war matériel. Then there might be four or five drops a night, each one requiring coded radio communication with London. For agents on the ground in France, as one later put it, “the moon was as much of a goddess as she ever was in a near eastern religion.”¹

Early one morning in July, as Jean Claude was preparing to leave the rock hut to help clear an especially large delivery from a drop zone nearby, he heard the sound of an engine. It was approaching fast, which in itself was alarming, as nearly all the French motor vehicles in the region had by that time been converted to run on charcoal, which reduced horsepower by about a third. Jean Claude peered through the hedge in front of the hut. Out on the dirt road he caught a terrifying glimpse of feldgrau, the German military’s shade of gray.

He hurtled through the empty window at the back of the hut, just as a truck carrying German soldiers pulled up in front. Jean Claude sprinted about twenty yards and dove for cover in some thick brush. Soldiers leaped from the truck and stormed in through the hut’s front door.