At daybreak on December 28, 1943, a worn and well-traveled merchant ship converted into a troop carrier left New York Harbor, part of a large convoy bound for Britain. Among its passengers were Jean Claude; his brother, Pierre; and a small group of other OSS agents under the command of a master sergeant. It was not the kind of transatlantic crossing to which the Guiet brothers were accustomed.
The OSS men were segregated from the rest of the ship’s company, confined for most of the twelve-day journey to a compartment without portholes on a lower deck. It was a big cabin, with green metal tables to port and starboard and a walkway down the middle. Each table had seating for eight, and meals were collected from the galley in pails, one pail per table. At breakfast, eight dollops of oatmeal would go into each pail, followed by eight hard-boiled eggs, then eight pieces of toast with jam. At dinner, the pail might contain eight servings of pudding on top of stew. The men would divide the food up at the tables using their mess kits.
They slept in hammocks slung three feet apart, swaying with the motion of the ship. In the daytime they were permitted on deck, where they could take in the reassuring sight of the convoy’s many vessels, but the chill usually drove them below before long. The only other place available for their diversion was a windowless box of a structure set up near the stern, with a small canteen but no furniture, where soldiers squatted and joined in never-ending games of poker and craps in a thick haze of tobacco smoke. Jean Claude would go there to buy cigarettes. Once he was invited to take part in a game of poker, but knowing nothing about the game, he lasted two hands before he lost his money and quit.
The midwinter Atlantic was rough, and many of the troops became seasick. Then the plumbing froze. During the fifteen hours it took to repair the pipes, sewage and vomit overflowed from the ship’s latrines.
About halfway across the ocean the engines quit. For five worrisome hours the ship wallowed in heavy seas. In case of torpedoes, the men stood on deck, in the bitter cold, wearing life jackets. A destroyer steamed in circles around them until the engines were restarted. The ship got under way again, and a day later it caught up with the convoy.
Several days after that, the ship was proceeding at dead slow speed through a dense fog bank. All at once the fog lifted, revealing the breathtaking sight of bright green hillsides and houses with red tile roofs. They had arrived in Greenock, Scotland. The troops disembarked on the quay, and Jean Claude had his first taste of English tea, in a cup handed to him by a woman in a Red Cross uniform.
Arriving by train in London, Jean Claude was picked up at the station by an American in an ammunition carrier and driven through the rain to Franklin House, a two-story mansion on the city’s western edge. The house had a long drive, ample grounds, and a pair of stone lions flanking the steps up to the front door. It was owned by an American shipping magnate—some of its furniture was made with timber taken from his ships’ luxury cabins—but during the war it was used by the OSS as its London reception center. Arriving just before dinner, Jean Claude was shown to a pleasant semiprivate room, and then he joined the assembled agents for drinks.
Franklin House was staffed by GIs, but it was informal and well appointed. The OSS men had no duties, their laundry was done for them, and they were served excellent meals at dining tables. Jean Claude had to get used to being waited on by men who outranked him.
After two days of this luxury, Jean Claude, Pierre, and some of the others were taken to an even grander estate, called Winterfold, in Surrey. This was not an OSS establishment, but rather the agents’ first point of contact with SOE—not that they knew anything about it at the time.
Winterfold, a Victorian pile on several hundred acres, was the site of SOE’s Student Assessment Board, which did the initial screening of recruits. Teams of psychologists, psychiatrists, and military officers evaluated each potential student’s intelligence, fitness, emotional stability, leadership qualities, character, and values, but they didn’t tell the students what they were doing or why. That’s because some trainees were bound to wash out, and SOE didn’t want them leaving with any knowledge of its methods, activities, or existence. Those judged unsuitable were sent for a sojourn at a comfortable country house maintained by SOE in the Scottish Highlands, nicknamed “the cooler,” where they were encouraged to forget whatever they had seen and go home. Men with clipboards followed the students everywhere, taking notes but seldom speaking. They even observed the trainees sleeping, to see whether they talked, and if so whether they spoke in English, which could be fatal to any mission in occupied territory.
Early on in the war, SOE put each recruit through four weeks of this evaluation. With D-Day approaching, and the need for agents growing ever more urgent, the program was officially reduced to six days. For Jean Claude’s OSS group it was three.
The first test, administered on their arrival just before teatime, involved looking at pairs of combinations of dots and dashes and determining whether they were identical. It was clearly a test of aptitude for Morse code. Jean Claude, with three months of Morse training and a slight propensity to show off, had no trouble with it. He learned later that some of the other OSS men did poorly on purpose, not wishing to stand out as potential wireless operators.
The next morning Jean Claude, along with five students he had not met before, was taken to a garden with a pond about thirty feet across. Scattered about the garden were odds and ends that might be found in an ordinary, if untidy, yard. The students were given a wooden crate the size of a footlocker, and a problem: They were to find a way to get the crate across the pond while remaining on the side they sent it from. The following rules would apply: the pond, though actually shallow, was to be considered unfordable. Swimming was not permitted, nor was walking around the pond. The men could use anything they found in the yard. The observer would answer questions before they started, but not after. There would be a three-hour time limit.
Questions were asked. What did the box contain? (Not pertinent, consider it classified.) Were the contents subject to damage by moisture? (Yes.) The observer started the clock.
Immediately, some of the men competed to take charge, a few of them loudly. Others stood to one side, contemplating the problem. Jean Claude and another man left the group and searched for useful items among the odds and ends lying about. From these it became clear that previous groups had tried to build a raft. They reported their finding back to the would-be leaders, who adopted the approach as their own.
With some fumbling and disagreement, the men made a raft that just barely kept the crate afloat. They still faced the problem of getting it across the pond. After some further argument they improved the flotation sufficiently to allow the smallest member of the group to stand on the raft. Then they debated how to use poles and lengths of rope to move the raft across the pond, unload the crate, and haul the raft back. They were just concluding that they could tie together shirts, undershirts, and trousers to make a sufficiently long rope when their time was up.
There was no debriefing. The men were told not to discuss the exercise even among themselves.
After lunch, Jean Claude and a different group of five OSS men were presented with a new problem. They were taken to a place on the estate’s grounds where a dirt road passed through woods, with a steep embankment dropping off on one side. The road, they were told, was a frontier. A pair of armed guards, dressed in proper German uniforms, patrolled it.
The problem was to get an eight-foot wooden ladder, designated “a critical item,” across the frontier and down the embankment without its movement being discovered. Attacking the guards was not permitted.
The OSS men conferred, collegially this time, and made a plan. They broke up into pairs to scout the “frontier” and determine the guards’ routine. The road, they found, formed a gentle arc, bending away from them. The guards would meet in the middle of the arc, chat for a few minutes, and then walk back to the ends, where their view of its apex was limited. It took the guards about five minutes to reach the ends, and once there they would look on up the road for about thirty seconds before turning around and beginning the return leg.
Jean Claude was in charge of the three-person team elected to carry the ladder (three in case one tripped). Two other men were dispatched to watch the guards and give signals when they stopped to look down the road before turning around. They had to wait, tensely, for several repetitions of the routine before the guards stopped at precisely the same time. Then Jean Claude and the other men scurried across with the ladder, unseen.
The observers wrote on their clipboards, told the men not to discuss what they had done, and said nothing else.
The next day, Jean Claude was taken to a complex obstacle course. He was told to cross a theoretical pool of acid by jumping along randomly spaced stumps, each six to eight inches in diameter. Crossing in one part of the course, where the stumps were close to the ground, was worth a certain number of points; crossing in another part, with stumps one to three feet high, was worth more. When he had made it across, the observers quizzed Jean Claude about the decisions he had made in picking his route. There were half a dozen such exercises, evidently to gauge his physical capabilities and appetite for risk.
On the final day, Jean Claude was given the following problem: You are part of an underground network, one of whose members has been arrested. There are some compromising papers hidden in his room. Find them and get them out.
The person who gave Jean Claude these instructions also played the part of a nervous, pushy member of the imaginary underground network. Jean Claude started to ask him questions, to gather background information. What was the relationship between them? What was the layout of the room? What was the quantity and size of the papers? The man professed to know nothing more and urged him on, even pushing him. He said he would act as a lookout.
Uneasily, Jean Claude followed his directions: up three flights of stairs and down a corridor to the second door from the end on the right. He found a room with a bed, a dresser, a desk, an easy chair, and several bookshelves, with many books and magazines lying about. He looked first at the undersides of drawers, as he had been taught at Area C. He was starting to search behind the books on the shelves when the lookout burst in and announced that the German police were coming up the stairs.
Jean Claude said that in that case, he would simply walk down the stairs as if he were a resident. The lookout objected: The concierge, he said, was with the Germans and would not identify Jean Claude as a tenant. Jean Claude proposed going to the far end of the hall and acting as if he were about to enter his own apartment; or alternatively, pretending to be a thief and going into any room that was open, burglary being a lesser offense than espionage. He realized that while he was talking, his lookout was hustling him toward a window. The man urged him to climb out through it, crawl along the roof past a dormer, and go down a fire-escape ladder that he said was just around the end of the building. Jean Claude had no better plan, and the man’s agitation flustered him, so he complied.
He crept along a small ledge that held up the gutters, three stories aboveground. When he reached the dormer he considered opening the window and going back inside, but it was locked and he didn’t feel that he should break it. The metal ladder was a problem, as there wasn’t much to hold on to. But Jean Claude made it to the ground, where he was met by a man with a clipboard, who made no comment.
Jean Claude felt like an utter failure. He hadn’t found the papers, and he hadn’t resisted the lookout’s instructions or insisted on more information. That, he suspected, was what the test had really been about: to see whether he would think for himself or do as he was told.
Jean Claude, Pierre, and the other OSS men were taken back to Franklin House. They spent the better part of a week in idle luxury, waiting for orders. Jean Claude spent much of his time exploring London via the Underground.
On the fourth or fifth day, Jean Claude was told to report to an address on Baker Street. It was a small, plain office building. In a sparsely furnished office on an upper floor, he was interviewed by several men, some in uniform, others not. They gave him forms to sign, verified that his spoken French was idiomatic, and told him he would be attending some special schools shortly. He was told he wouldn’t be returning to his OSS companions at Franklin House; he had no chance to say goodbye to Pierre. The brothers didn’t see each other again until the war was over. Jean Claude was told to check into a small, inexpensive hotel two blocks away from the Baker Street offices and to remain in contact through a kindly, efficient lady called Mrs. Norris.
Jean Claude left with the conviction that he was “in”—but in what, he couldn’t say.
In retrospect, Jean Claude believed that one of the men in the room was Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, the formidable head of SOE’s F Section. Buckmaster—who before the war was a senior manager for Ford in France, gaining vast knowledge of the country’s roadways and towns—made a point of meeting in person with every agent. And Philippe Liewer later told Jean Claude that while preparations were being made for Operation Salesman II, Buckmaster told the team members that he had found an American wireless operator for them.
Jean Claude spent several solitary days wandering around London. In the evenings he learned his way around the blacked-out streets. He didn’t have the money or the nerve to respond to persistent and numerous overtures from the Piccadilly Commandos, as the West End prostitutes were called, so he retired to his hotel room alone.
Then one afternoon he was instructed on short notice to board a train for Morar, Scotland, for advanced commando training.