In the final weeks of May 1944, London had the curious distinction of being the world capital of trickery and deception. The Allied military, having chosen Normandy’s beaches as the site for the D-Day invasion, devoted stunning amounts of manpower, money, and imagination to the task of fooling the German High Command about it.
The strategic puzzle was this: The Nazis had fifty-nine divisions, each made up of fifteen to twenty thousand men, in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The Normandy landings—Operation Neptune—would be the largest seaborne invasion in history, but the Allies were going to need crucial days, even weeks, to get soldiers ashore and build up the troop strength for a breakout. If the Germans managed to move enough tanks and infantry to the beaches in time, the invasion would fail.
The solution was not to try to conceal the Normandy operation altogether, but to persuade Hitler that it was merely a feint, and that the main force would be coming ashore elsewhere. To this end the Allied strategists, using fake radio messages and leaks through German double agents, created an entire fictitious army—the First United States Army Group, or FUSAG—massed around Dover for a fictitious landing at Pas-de-Calais, directly across the Channel. They put up phony mess tents, made dummy jeeps and planes out of wire and canvas, and planted bogus wedding notices for make-believe GIs in local newspapers. They built rubber tanks to deceive German spotter planes; a few real soldiers moved them around at night and used special rollers to create phony tank tracks.
They created another fictitious force, the British Fourth Army, based in Edinburgh, and spread the word that it would join with Soviet forces for an invasion of Norway. For this they generated spurious radio traffic about topics like ski bindings and cold-weather engine maintenance.
When they found an Australian actor who looked a lot like Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the Allied commander, they dressed him in one of Monty’s uniforms and sent him to Gibraltar and Algiers. The hope was that Germans would spot him and conclude that a Mediterranean invasion was planned as well.
This vast campaign of misdirection was code-named Operation Bodyguard, a name taken from a remark that Churchill made to Josef Stalin: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” While it unspooled in a critical (and successful) game of strategic bluff, Jean Claude, in London, prepared for D-Day with a deception of his own: becoming a counterfeit Frenchman.
From an SOE staging area, Jean Claude was hustled around to secret facilities in plain-looking buildings devoted to the “activation” of secret agents. He was asked formally whether he was prepared to proceed, and when he assented he was given a physical exam and asked to write a last will and testament. The gravity of his situation began to sink in.
He was escorted to an old, derelict-looking warehouse where tailors with strong foreign accents coached him in choosing appropriate French civilian clothing. He selected underwear, socks, handkerchiefs, shirts, trousers, shoes, and a jacket, and was told to come back in several days to pick them up. When he did he found that all the items had been aged somehow. On close inspection they were not at all worn out, but they looked as if they had been lived in for a long time and laundered often. The shiny new leather jacket and the shoes had lost their gloss and stiffness and become scuffed and broken in.
The day after choosing his wardrobe, Jean Claude was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army as a corporal, and within the hour was promoted to second lieutenant, the lowest officer’s rank. All SOE agents were given some kind of officer’s commission in the hope that if they were captured, they might receive better treatment under the terms of the Geneva Convention than if they were enlisted men. As a practical matter it probably made little difference, because of the infamous Commando Order issued by Hitler in October 1942. That order stated: “From now on all men operating against German troops in so-called Commando raids in Europe or in Africa are to be annihilated to the last man. This is to be carried out whether they be soldiers in uniform, or saboteurs, with or without arms; and whether fighting or seeking to escape.” The order was issued in secret, and only twelve copies were made, suggesting that the German commanders knew it constituted a war crime long before it was so judged at the Nuremberg trials.
In Jean Claude’s case, capture would probably not mean immediate execution in any event. As a wireless operator he would likely be subject to the full horror of a Gestapo interrogation to make him give up his codes and contacts. In the circumstances, a much better protection than an officer’s commission was a strong cover story, and Jean Claude’s was prepared with elaborate care.
To minimize the chance of slipups under questioning, many elements of his story were close cousins of the truth. His name was changed from Jean Claude Guiet to Claude Jean Guyot. (He practiced his new signature, with a little flourish underneath, over and over.) The date on his false birth certificate was his actual birthday, March 15, though he was aged by seven years. Moving his birth year back to 1917 made it plausible that he had been discharged from the French military in 1940, as a corporal, having served with the 81st Battalion of the Alpine Fortress Infantry. His papers showed that before joining the army he had lived with his family in Lons-le-Saunier, a town he knew intimately, having attended the lycée there the year he and his brother had been stuck in France.
The fictitious Monsieur Guyot, after his discharge, lived at 22 avenue du Maréchal Pétain in Bourg-en-Bresse, another town Jean Claude knew from his youthful travels. In April 1943 Guyot moved to Toulouse, where he resided at 30 rue Denfert Rochereau and was employed as an office boy by Jean Leygue, an agronomy engineer. The work didn’t agree with him, and he was now on the road looking for another job.
Guyot’s fictitious parents bore the same given names as Jean Claude’s own. The father, René, died in 1930. Guyot’s mother, Jeanne, had taken up with several lovers and become a severe alcoholic. Guyot believed she was living in Senlis, but he no longer had much to do with her.
Jean Claude was given a portfolio of forged paperwork to support this story: Guyot’s birth certificate, work certificate, identity card, food and clothing ration cards, and demobilization papers. The documents bore varied handwriting, an assortment of inks, and Jean Claude’s fingerprints where appropriate.
Jean Claude spent long hours over many days internalizing his alter ego’s biography, drilled by SOE instructors. They filled him in on details of places Guyot would have known about, like the Marseille train station, which he would have passed through on his discharge from the army. Twenty-five years later, when Jean Claude saw the station for the first time, he remembered it vividly.
In free moments during these busy weeks in London, Jean Claude relaxed by playing volleyball with other agents back at the staging area. He and a man called Bob, playing hard games on opposing teams, struck up a friendship. Bob was about Jean Claude’s age and spoke English with a pronounced French accent. He was a sportif, a natural athlete. The two began spending time together at the staging area—Bob seemed to have quite a lot more free time than Jean Claude did—and though they didn’t disclose any personal information about themselves, conversing in French they found that they had much in common, particularly an easygoing outlook on life.
On May 21, the day after he received his second lieutenant’s commission, Jean Claude was about to head out to buy his new uniform when he was summoned to Baker Street. He was shown to an office—a nearly bare space, as usual—where a man in a British major’s uniform introduced himself as Charles Staunton. Major Staunton appeared to be in his late thirties and was slightly shorter than Jean Claude. He had an olive complexion, an amicable expression, and alert eyes that bulged slightly.
They began their interview in English. Jean Claude was struck by the major’s aristocratic diction—and astonished, consequently, when Staunton switched to French and spoke it with an obviously native Parisian accent. They conversed in French about generalities, and after a time Staunton expressed relief and satisfaction that Jean Claude was clearly a native speaker too, unlike many other candidates he had interviewed. He said that Jean Claude seemed to fit his requirements, and that he was confident they would work well together. Jean Claude asked Major Staunton if he was a Frenchman, and he allowed that he was. Then he invited Jean Claude to lunch.
They went to a restaurant in Soho, a long, narrow, very noisy room crowded with mainly French military personnel. They found a table, and in short order they were joined by a tall man with a Clark Gable mustache in a Canadian captain’s uniform, his cap set at a jaunty angle. Jean Claude was surprised to see that it was his new friend Bob. They pretended not to know each other at first, but soon dropped the charade. Bob and Major Staunton conversed like old friends, in French, which Jean Claude thought must be some kind of security breach considering the uniforms they wore.
Then a fourth person joined their party, a very attractive young woman in the uniform of an officer of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Introduced to Jean Claude as Corinne, she clearly knew the other men well. She was small, a few inches over five feet, with long dark hair, a high forehead, and eyes that seemed to squint a little. Her movements were lithe and graceful, and her French was fluent, though to Jean Claude’s ear it had the faintest trace of an English accent that might catch the attention of a very suspicious listener.
They had a pleasant lunch amid the restaurant’s hubbub. Jean Claude felt himself gently drawn into their circle. Staunton no doubt had been thoroughly briefed on his background, but he gave no sign of it. Corinne was irreverent, insouciant, and fond of jokes. Jean Claude divined that Bob had had something to do with his being invited there.
Nothing was said about it, but Jean Claude had just joined the Salesman team. Major Staunton was actually Philippe Liewer. Bob was Bob Maloubier, now fully recovered from his chest wound. Corinne was Violette Szabo.
WITH ONLY A FEW DAYS left before his scheduled departure for France, Jean Claude got his jump boots at last. He received his officer’s uniform too, though he didn’t get to wear it, as the trousers took the better part of a week to tailor. The uniform, along with the boots, went straight to an SOE facility for storage during his “absence.”
Jean Claude was asked to write four or five postdated letters that would be sent to his parents. He arranged for his pay to be deposited in an account at Chase National Bank in New York. With Mrs. Norris, he went over the proper use of his forged ration books.
Jean Claude’s radio set was checked over thoroughly. He was given tiny one-time pads to carry in the hidden compartment in his wallet; the radio set included a small pair of scissors for cutting off used lines of code. He was also given his security signals—special characters that he was to include in every coded message to let London know that he was not transmitting under duress.
He was issued a worn-looking suitcase, into which he packed his French clothes.
He was offered an L-pill. He declined it.