8

Jean Claude stood anxiously in the Beaux Arts lobby of the Willard Hotel, directly across the street from the White House, at 12 P.M. sharp. He noted that other people in the lobby—some in uniform, others in civilian clothing—seemed to be waiting for something too, glancing out the windows now and then.

At 12:15 a large army truck pulled up outside. To Jean Claude’s amazement, nearly everyone in the lobby filed out onto the sidewalk and began boarding the truck, talking shop, handing their passes to the driver. They were returning from weekend leave. It struck Jean Claude that whatever this clandestine service was, it wasn’t all that discreet. He boarded too.

After an hour’s ride the truck turned down a dirt road, passed through a security gate, and pulled up at a collection of rustic structures built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, which until recently had been a summer camp for low-income kids from Baltimore and Washington. Jean Claude would learn later that the OSS called this place Area C, for communications; it was the training site for wireless operators. It had new classroom and mess-hall buildings, but the sleeping quarters remained in their original condition: cabins with six cots each, windows with screens but no glass.

The passengers stepped down from the truck and the returning trainees drifted off, leaving Jean Claude standing with a small group of his fellow new recruits. They were taken to a classroom for orientation. The first rule, they were told, was anonymity: They were to address each other by first names only; ranks would not be mentioned. When several of the new men pointed out that their names were stenciled on their duffel bags, they were told to put the bags in the bottom of their foot lockers, out of sight. They were instructed to change into fatigues and report back in twenty-five minutes.

Escorted to a cabin, Jean Claude claimed a cot, changed his clothes, and buried his duffel bag in the unlabeled locker at the cot’s foot. He returned to the classroom for more briefings that covered, in a general way, what OSS training was to be about.

When the orientation was done, Jean Claude stepped out the classroom door—and bumped straight into his brother, Pierre. Stunned, they both said “excuse me” and pretended to be strangers. A third man accompanying Pierre, who knew both brothers from college—the OSS was a very small world at that point—went through the charade of introducing them to one another by their first names.

It was an odd way for the brothers to learn that they had been recruited into the same top-secret organization, but it was probably intentional. Before reporting to Area C, each man had been granted a short leave and gone home to Northampton. Their leaves didn’t overlap; Jean Claude’s began one day after Pierre’s ended. During Jean Claude’s leave, Jeanne, their mother, told him that Pierre had mentioned that he would be stationed in the Washington area. Jean Claude replied that he would be too—of course never mentioning anything about the OSS. Jeanne expressed delight that her boys would be able to see each other in D.C.

Pierre Guiet (left) and Jean Claude just before beginning their training at OSS Area C, whose protocol obliged them to pretend to be strangers.

What the Guiet brothers didn’t know was that their mother had a secret of her own. Sometime in early September 1943—weeks before the brothers began their OSS training—a man described by Jeanne as “a general” had visited her at home in Northampton. Over afternoon tea, the man asked Jeanne how she would feel about having both of her sons recruited into a secret group to undertake dangerous work overseas in the war effort. Jeanne begged the general to take Jean Claude, but not her firstborn son, Pierre. The visit concluded with no commitment other than the general’s assurance to Jeanne that her request would be conveyed and considered.

After the war, Jeanne told the story to Jean Claude without regret or defensiveness, explaining that in the region of France she came from, the eldest son was, by tradition, simply more highly valued than his siblings. She also said she believed that the general was Wild Bill Donovan. The story is family lore, and there is no official record of the general’s visit or of deliberations about deploying the Guiet brothers. But in the end, Pierre served the OSS in the relative safety of an office in London.

At Area C, Jean Claude and Pierre were assigned to the same cabin—a situation that left Jean Claude scratching his head once again about OSS security. They saw little of each other, though, as they trained in different groups.

Jean Claude’s three months at Area C were a far cry from his basic training. The OSS wanted its agents to be able to operate without orders—to think and act independently. At Area C there was no marching or saluting. In the mornings the men were awakened at 6:15, not by a drill sergeant’s harangue but by popular music, often contemporary show tunes like “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin,” played over the P.A. system.

The physical training was tough, intense, and scary, so for the sake of fitness and morale, the food was superb, at least for the military. The mess officer had been a restaurateur in Boston. He brought in fresh ingredients from the marine base at Quantico—chops, steaks, real eggs, produce—and prepared them to restaurant standards. He had his own bakery, and in the mornings the men had hot Danish and doughnuts. Huge refrigerators in a corner of the mess hall were stocked with food for them to take at any time.

The camp had pistol and rifle ranges, an obstacle course, a trench for grenade practice (to absorb shrapnel), and radio facilities. Paramilitary training covered weaponry, field craft, demolition, close combat, and “silent killing.” In retrospect, Jean Claude viewed the curriculum as “the equivalent of a college survey course” in deadly skills: “We were introduced to many subjects but developed any real expertise in none.”

It’s possible that even many years afterward Jean Claude didn’t fully grasp the high level of training he received. “A Major Fairburn of the Shanghai police taught us elements of hand-to-hand fighting,” he recalled, “and how to use the Fairburn knife.” That would actually have been William E. Fairbairn, one of the most fearsome martial artists who ever lived. He was sent by London to teach the OSS men how to fight dirty.

Fairbairn, a smallish, humorless, bespectacled Scotsman, had indeed served for more than thirty years in the Shanghai Municipal Police, battling gangs in the city’s red-light districts. His arms, legs, torso, face, and hands were scarred from more than six hundred street fights, according to police records. He studied boxing, wrestling, savate, jujutsu, judo, and Chinese martial arts, and combined elements of them into a fighting method of his own, which he called Defendu. “I teach what is called ‘Gutter Fighting,’” he said. “There’s no fair play; no rules except one: kill or be killed.”¹

By the time he arrived as an instructor at Area C, Fairbairn had acquired the nickname “Dangerous Dan” and had developed, among other things, the bulletproof vest, the riot baton, and the Smatchet, a “smashing hatchet” with a heavy leaf-shaped blade that some commandos reportedly found more useful than firearms for killing enemies at close quarters. His most famous invention was the one he taught Jean Claude to use, the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife, which he devised with a fellow Shanghai policeman, Eric A. Sykes. It was issued to British commandos and to OSS agents, and today it is featured in the insignias of special forces units around the world. The knife is a finely balanced dagger with a blade of seven inches more or less, depending on the production run. The length was chosen to leave several inches at the business end after the knife is thrust through a heavy coat. The blade is narrow, and slim enough to pass between ribs.

Jean Claude was taught to kill a person silently, thus:

Sneak up behind the target and place the left hand over the mouth. Shove the knife blade into the brain stem, just below the base of the skull. Give the handle a quick twist to ensure instant death. Leave the knife in place, to avoid blood spray, while lowering the body silently to the ground. Remove the knife and move on.

The Area C recruits practiced with dummy knives that had blades of stiff rope, rubber being scarce in wartime.

Fairbairn taught the men to fight without weapons, if necessary, using feet, knees, and elbows—but not fists. Open hands were much better, he said—the edge of the hand for slashing a neck, the base of the palm for smashing a nose, the thumb for gouging an eye.

Firearms instruction was another case of unlearning basic training. Fairbairn encouraged the men to forget about standard target marksmanship and instead practice “instinctive shooting,” firing a pistol from a crouch or on the run with a two-handed, stiff-armed grip. He taught them to fire off two quick shots, and not rely on one—a practice that has come to be known as a “double tap.” Using handguns of many calibers and nationalities, Jean Claude ran courses through the woods, shooting at targets as they popped up. Having barely made marksman at Camp Croft, he was surprised to find that he was rather good at this.

Many hours were devoted to guerrilla tactics, especially demolition. The men learned to handle black powder, TNT, plastic explosives, Primacord, and even flour—not actual flour, but a granular plastic explosive nicknamed Aunt Jemima. It looked like flour, and it could be pressed into shaped charges, but it wouldn’t explode without a blasting cap. Agents carried it in flour sacks, and if caught with it they could actually bake it into muffins without risk (unless they ate the muffins).

The commando training was interspersed with lessons in spycraft. Jean Claude was taught how to steam open envelopes, and how to pick locks (though he never got beyond the three-tumbler variety). He practiced making and reading maps. He was introduced to the use of dead drops and invisible ink. For one whole week, the men in Jean Claude’s group were told to invent a false identity for themselves and stay in character—Jean Claude put on a fake British accent. Twice the men were taken to the streets of Baltimore, once to practice tailing someone, and again to practice losing a tail. Jean Claude found it much harder than it looked in the movies.

The main subject of study at Area C, though, and the one that consumed by far the most of Jean Claude’s time, was Morse code. Secure communications underpinned everything the OSS did, and by the autumn of 1943 the agency was training as many radio operators as it could, as fast as possible. Jean Claude was one of about two hundred at Area C—many of them ham radio enthusiasts in civilian life—receiving what amounted to a crash course.

At that point the war was at full boil, all around the globe. Allied armies, having conquered Sicily, were battling up the Italian peninsula. U-boats were taking a dreadful toll on Allied shipping in the Atlantic. Allied bombers were smashing Berlin; in retaliation, the engineer Wernher von Braun was designing the long-range V-2 rocket, the “vengeance weapon” that would be fired at Allied cities. The U.S. Marines battled Japanese troops in the Solomon and Gilbert islands, while U.S. and Japanese ships fought sea battles in New Guinea. That autumn, each side held a secret conference at which momentous projects were laid out. In October, at the Posen Conference in Poland, Heinrich Himmler spoke to senior Nazi officials about the Reich’s plans for Europe’s Jews. He said:

“We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men—in other words, to kill them or have them killed—and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth.”²

The following month, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Josef Stalin held their first conference of the war, at the Soviet embassy in Tehran. The Allied leaders discussed campaigns in Yugoslavia and the Pacific, and the eventual creation of a United Nations. But the most important outcome was their joint decision to take a step Stalin had been pressing for since 1941: opening a second front against Germany by means of an invasion of France. The countdown to D-Day began.

As a rule, the American and British clandestine services operated in separate theaters of war. The OSS ran missions in China, Australia, Korea, and Finland, while SOE’s territory included the Middle East, East Africa, India, and the Balkans. In preparation for D-Day, however, the two services formed a joint command in London, known as SOE/SO, with SOE as the senior partner. It drew on the OSS for recruits, including wireless operators from Area C.

Jean Claude found Morse training a bit tedious compared with the sabotage and combat exercises, but he turned out to be adept at it. He spent hours in a classroom learning the Morse alphabet, then sending and receiving messages through a closed system off the air. His transmissions were recorded and checked for accuracy and speed. The goal was fifteen to twenty words per minute. The instructors started Jean Claude off at a modest speed, and then, little by little, they raised it. Each time he reached a specified words-per-minute rate he would have a moment of triumph—and then feel like a frustrated beginner all over again when the rate was increased and the transmissions came in faster than he could handle them. By the end of his three months at Area C, Jean Claude had reached eighteen words per minute.

Jean Claude had already been spotted by the recruiters at SOE/SO. A letter of appraisal in his OSS dossier states: “Starting from scratch his progress in radio work was considered very good, and with the further training you will give him he should be a first-rate operator.” It also states that Jean Claude “has given us the impression of being the brightest student in his class. He should distinguish himself in the field. . . . We believe him qualified to serve as a W/T operator and possibly as an organizer in France, and he specifically understands that he may be assigned to undercover work in that country.”

His OSS coursework having concluded, Jean Claude was promoted to corporal. He readied himself to be shipped overseas.