For my father’s seventieth birthday I gave him a laptop computer. It was March 15, 1994. Growing up I had sensed that our family life was unusual, but I didn’t understand how or why. I asked my father to write his life story—just for the children, and especially the grandchildren. He resisted, claiming that his personal history was ordinary and wouldn’t interest anyone.
But he began to write, and before long he was so absorbed that my mother grew frustrated with his focus on “that damned machine.” When we visited he would give me a stack of three-and-a-half-inch diskettes for safekeeping, with instructions not to open the files until after his death. Dad had the usual septuagenarian’s issues operating his laptop, and, leaning over his shoulder to show him one function or another, I began to get glimpses of what he was setting down—not his autobiography, but an account of his secret war.
When he was done he gave my sister and me paper copies of his manuscript. About the same time, in the late 1990s, some of the official files pertaining to his service began to be declassified. In 1999 I received a phone call from England from a person looking for Mr. Guiet. I asked what the call was about, and was told that a museum would be opening to honor the memory of a secret agent my father had served with—Violette Szabo, a name I had learned just recently from the manuscript. My wife, Carol, and I took Dad to the museum opening, where he was reunited with Bob Maloubier. Dad also had an intensely moving meeting with Leo Marks, SOE’s codemaster. The two men had known each other well—Marks had been on the receiving end of many of my father’s coded transmissions, learning his “fist”—but until then they had never met face-to-face.
A year later we took my father back to the site of his wartime mission, the Haute-Vienne region in France. Dad told stories, I took notes. In Sussac a man on a bicycle figured out what we were doing and invited us to follow him to the home of a woman who had been active in the Resistance. She remembered a young American radio operator, and after asking Dad a lengthy series of careful questions she decided that yes, this must be him. Phone calls were made, and meetings were quickly scheduled with other veterans of the Resistance, who told more stories. For their contributions to this book, I am grateful.
Together with my coauthor, Tim Smith, I would also like to express thanks to our dear mutual friends, Claudine and Roger Parloff, who introduced us to one another and sparked this collaboration. We are also grateful for the assistance of David and Carole Harrison, who provided copies of original SOE documents; to Rosemary Rigby MBE, founder of the Violette Szabo Museum; and to Ken Rendell and Paul Cook at the International Museum of World War II, which is now the repository of Jean Claude Guiet’s original OSS and SOE documents, photographs, and memorabilia. It has been an honor, while researching this book, to make the acquaintance of James Edgar, my father’s old comrade in arms, and his wife, Valerie.
Our thanks are due also to Scott Moyers, our editor at Penguin Press; to his eagle-eyed associate, Mia Council; and to our perspicacious agent, Kris Dahl at ICM.
On a personal note, I, Dan, would like to thank my sons, Peter and Eric Sakadinsky for their decades of support, help, and patience, on behalf of this story; Olivia Sakadinsky for her excellence in editing and research assistance; and most of all my wife, Carol, who undertook this endeavor and shared in its lengthy journey of discovery, and without whom this book would never have been completed.
And I, Tim, would like to thank my wife, Jennifer, who fills my days with sunshine.