part0006

To appreciate the urgent need for an SIS air ferry service in and out of Tangmere, it is necessary to return to the early summer of 1940, which marked the abrupt end of the phoney war and the onset of a trauma of unprecedented breadth and depth throughout northern Europe. France was still recovering from the 1914-18 war, a conflict which had devastated its northern regions and killed or wounded one in twenty of its population. But then, at least, the theatre of war had been confined to a limited area. Now, inhabitants of towns, villages and countryside hundreds of kilometres from any previously disputed borderland were fleeing ahead of a German army that had burst through all their defences and which was advancing across their homeland at alarming speed.

It had taken only six short weeks from the moment Hitler, on 10 May, had launched his three-pronged attack on Holland, Belgium and France to the ignominious signature of an armistice with Germany by Marshal Philippe Pétain’s hastily-formed Vichy government on 22 June. With Paris swathed in swastikas, grey uniforms in control as far west as Brest, Nantes and La Rochelle, and the French army in disarray with nearly 300,000 killed or wounded and seemingly abandoned by their allies, most French could see little alternative other than to make peace with the invaders.

The terms of peace included annexing the majority of Alsace and Lorraine to the Reich as well as placing the Nord and Pas de Calais départements under direct German rule. The rest of France would be divided by a demarcation line subjecting three fifths of the country to German occupation, including all the major financial and industrial centres and the entire Channel and Atlantic coast. France was still allowed to control the area to the south and east of the line, where the remnants of her army and air force were to be withdrawn and demobilized. Meanwhile, 1,600,000 French troops, captured during the invasion, would remain indefinitely as prisoners of war in German camps. Only the French navy, the fourth most powerful in the world, was still at large, its Atlantic-based ships having sailed for North Africa (and a few to England) before the Germans had reached Brittany .

A whole range of emotions swept the French nation at the signing of the armistice. There was impotent rage, despair and widespread fear at how the German occupiers would behave. To many, there was also a sense of relief; the fighting was over and their interests would now be in the care of a hero of the previous war, Marshal Pétain, who, they believed, would have the strength and guile to protect them from the worst effects of their country’s violation. Some felt that France almost deserved a period of humiliation following two decades of weak and corrupt inter-war government and that, once Great Britain was defeated — a foregone conclusion in the opinion of most — the occupiers would withdraw. The sense that the British had betrayed them with the evacuation of its troops at Dunkirk was almost universal in France.

There remained in France, however, numerous sparks of defiance amid the submissive gloom, and however much animosity those who could not accept defeat felt towards perfidious Albion, they understood that while Britain was still free, she offered a lifeline for resistance against Hitler. Many thousands of French servicemen had fetched up there not through choice but because they were part of the Dunkirk evacuation or had been diverted from their return from the Norway campaign to avoid surrender. Others, though, civilians and servicemen alike, made a conscious decision to leave France, feeling that the only way to save their country was to offer their services to the only European power still holding out against Germany. Many more stayed put in France and hoped, as the occupation continued, that they would find an effective way to subvert and weaken the enemy regime.

Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle was a man whose pride would never countenance the defeat of France. This 49-year-old cavalry officer had led one of the few successful counter-attacks on the German advance in May 1940 and was afterwards sent to London by the Paul Reynaud-led government to broker, in desperation, a declaration of union with Churchill, whereby Britain and France would become a single power with a united army to combat Hitler. When, having secured an agreement, he returned to Bordeaux (the government’s temporary home), he found Reynaud had been replaced by Pétain and an armistice with Hitler about to be signed.

His defiant attitude was now utterly unwelcome in government circles, so, on 17 June, accompanied by several cases of secretly acquired confidential files, he boarded an RAF aircraft bound for London. He felt that Britain, for the time being, was the only practicable platform from which to carry on the fight. Bereft of any meaningful resources and any legitimate claim to lead a French retaliation, he was nonetheless already planning his campaign to rally his fellow exiled servicemen under a Free French flag, and eventually to set up an alternative to the Vichy government in one of the African colonies, whence liberating forces could be launched onto the French mainland. At the same time, he would, through any means at his disposal, begin the task of encouraging and harnessing the sentiment of defiance against the occupation wherever it existed across the political spectrum inside France, and to build a strong resistance ready to complement the efforts of the liberators when they arrived. His famous, if sparsely received, radio broadcast from London on the day after his arrival there, deploring Pétain’s dishonourable capitulation and assuring his countrymen (with meagre evidence at that time) that the immense forces of the free world would soon be drawn into the war and crush the enemy, marked the beginning of his obsessive war-long crusade to ensure France played a creditable part in her own deliverance.

If the shock felt in Britain at the fall of Holland, Belgium and France was less traumatic than for those who actually found themselves under Nazi rule, the realization that no bulwark of defence other than the English Channel now lay between them and the might of the German army was a new and frightening sensation. At least, unlike the French, the majority of the British army was not behind German barbed wire thanks to the miraculous evacuation of 198,000 troops of the British Expeditionary Force, together with 140,000 French and Belgian servicemen from the beleaguered beaches of Dunkirk in the last days of May 1940. But any comfort drawn from such a triumph of muddling through soon dissipated as the real threat of a German invasion settled on every citizen. If France felt betrayed by Britain, the British were generally equally outraged at the willingness of the French to make a deal with Hitler, allowing him to turn his undivided and hostile attention towards their shores.

Even so, there was an element of public feeling, echoed within the corridors of power at Westminster, so impressed by the ferocity of the German war machine, that an armistice of their own with Hitler appeared the only possible way to avoid catastrophe. However, this option was never remotely entertained by the newly appointed prime minister of the all-party government, Winston Churchill. He had constantly opposed all efforts at appeasement prior to the declaration of war, telling Neville Chamberlain in the House of Commons, ‘You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.’

He was under no illusion, however, about the growing vulnerability of his country; all means of attacking Britain’s defences and supply lines had been massively strengthened by the fall of France, Belgium and Holland. Forward Luftwaffe bomber and fighter bases in these occupied territories would now bring cities other than just those in the south east under the threat of bombardment. The German U-boats, already proving a scourge to British merchant shipping in the Atlantic, would now have far greater range, stepping off, as they could, from west coast ports of France. The same ports would also offer much greater freedom of activity for Germany’s new and ferocious battleships such as the Bismarck and the Tirpitz .

The mood of stubborn national defiance against these adversities, aroused in part by Churchill’s remarkable oratory and bulldog bearing, emboldened the young pilots of the RAF as they fought the crucial battle for air supremacy through the heat of the summer. It also steadied Londoners, bereaved and homeless, when the long-awaited blitz was eventually unleashed in September and it persuaded many citizens that they could play a part in the defence of their country, be it through donning a Home Guard uniform at the age of fifty or by turning a lawn into a vegetable patch.

That is why, on 14 July 1940, when a small but proud parade of General de Gaulle’s Free French soldiers progressed down Whitehall, past the Cenotaph, to mark Bastille Day, they were heartily cheered by onlookers who recognized, in spite of catastrophe in France, that the spirit of ‘never surrender’ was still alive in some of its countrymen. It was for the same reason that Churchill had agreed to give financial and practical support to de Gaulle when he was approached by him a few weeks earlier with his supremely optimistic proposal to begin the battle to regain France from a suite of scruffy offices on the Thames Embankment. The British prime minister recognized the need of those with fight still in them to rally under a flag unsullied by capitulation and understood how de Gaulle’s vision of a strong and co-ordinated resistance movement would at least disrupt the Nazi occupation and could greatly assist any eventual invasion.

More immediately, there was a desperate need for intelligence. By its hasty abandonment of France, Britain had lost nearly every means of discovering where Hitler was assembling troops, preparing embarkation points and building forward airfields. Lack of such information would make defending against a German invasion even more difficult. Aerial reconnaissance could never supply sufficient detail and although, in May 1940, the geniuses at Bletchley Park had achieved their first triumph by decrypting the Luftwaffe’s version of the Enigma code, military intelligence from occupied France was very difficult to come by.

The Secret Intelligence Service, known also as MI6, faced some dire challenges when France fell. The service’s reputation among the military and government ministers was not good. They had doubted and failed to pass on intelligence received about Hitler’s imminent invasion of Belgium and Holland and also ignored accurate warnings of the Germans’ attack on France via the Ardennes. Even when first class intelligence became available to them through their Bletchley decrypts, their chief, Colonel Stewart Menzies, so successfully disguised the source of the information that its recipients took it to be coming from just another dubious SIS agent on the continent and gave it very little credence. This obviously changed once they knew the source, but the misunderstanding did little to enhance the credibility of the SIS in spite of their breakthrough with the Enigma code.

The Nazi advance had also deprived the SIS of most of its well-established stations and intelligence networks in the European capitals. Their operations were thus confined to the neutral countries with Madrid, Lisbon, Berne and Stockholm offering the only means of passing information in and out of the continent. But next to nothing was coming from these stations about what was happening in France during the early days of the German occupation. The service made attempts to collate information brought back by British servicemen who, for one reason or another, had missed the Dunkirk evacuation, but who had evaded capture and got home by their own initiative. There was some assistance from the Polish intelligence service which, from their headquarters-in-exile in London, was running an embryonic network in the unoccupied south of France. They would later set up a successful second network in Paris, codenamed Interallié , but for the moment their operation consisted of little more than two military wireless operators who had escaped the invasion of Poland and who had managed to build a rudimentary transmitter with which they made regular contact with their Madrid embassy. The shared information wasn’t much, but it was the sum total of the SIS’s radio links with France.

It fell largely to Colonel Menzies’ assistant chief, Claude Dansey, to re-establish undercover lines of communication from France and other occupied countries. Already well into his sixties at the outbreak of war, Dansey, calloused by a career in espionage and counter-espionage since the 1914-18 war, carried an air of hostile secrecy and harboured a deep mistrust in and contempt for most human beings, not least the agents he ran, all of whom, he believed, had their price. He constantly clashed with his opposite number, Valentine Vivian, who ran the service’s counter-espionage section and also contributed to the rancour which existed between the SIS and its more glamorous independent offspring, the Special Operations Executive.

The idea of setting up a ‘dirty tricks’ department within the SIS first occurred in the build-up to war in 1938, when the need to attack an enemy other than by conventional military means was identified. D (for ‘destruction’) section was duly formed and, by July 1940, it boasted a complement of 140 officers, almost twice the number in the main body of the SIS. Several of their attempts to sabotage the German advance on Scandinavia and the Balkans had come to naught, but that did not deter Churchill and the war cabinet from wishing to strengthen their subversive arm in Europe. The result was the creation, in July 1940, of a new, independent ‘instrument of war’, the SOE, to come under the direct jurisdiction of the Labour politician, Hugh Dalton, minister of economic warfare in the coalition government. To the considerable resentment of its chiefs, the SIS had lost control of its sabotage department and therefore its monopoly of clandestine work overseas. This meant that in France, for instance, agents for both organizations would be operating in the same territory with very conflicting objectives. While an SIS agent wished to disturb the authorities as little as possible as he quietly gathered intelligence, the SOE, especially later in the war, was creating havoc through sabotage and assassination — setting Europe ablaze, to use Churchill’s metaphor.

Both organizations had very similar requirements in getting personnel in and out of enemy territory and would necessarily share the various methods of clandestine transportation set up by the RAF and Royal Navy. However, considerable care was taken to keep agents of the two organizations apart, with individual missions dedicated either to SIS or SOE. The same separation was observed during training in Britain, much of which, such as parachuting and encryption, was given at the same establishments. This is also why different arrangements were necessary for agents waiting for their opportunity to fly back into Europe.

If the SIS felt emasculated by the loss of its D section, its officers knew that they still had a massive task ahead if they were to satisfy the war cabinet’s insatiable demand to know what Hitler was up to, especially in occupied France. Dansey was faced with a particular dilemma with the fall of France: should he attempt to re-establish contacts with individuals from the pre-Pétain French intelligence service, many of whom were now attached to the Vichy government? Or should he assume that these were all now agents of collaboration and instead invest in a completely new network recruited from those Frenchmen and women who had fled the occupation, so demonstrating their moral opposition to Nazi rule? In the event, he decided to do both.

Before the war, Dansey had been asked to lead a top secret intelligence network, known as the ‘Z’ network, which, unknown even to senior SIS personnel, was running a parallel effort to gather information from inside Nazi Germany, using commercial enterprises rather than diplomatic functions as a cover. His second-in-command in this organization had been a former Royal Navy torpedo officer, Kenneth Cohen, and it was he whom Dansey now appointed to form and operate new networks, some of which would work directly for the SIS and others via de Gaulle’s Free French movement. Cohen, who had left the navy in 1935 and was recruited into the ‘Z’ network in 1937 after a short spell of working for an electrical contractor, was of a calm, tactful disposition, the perfect foil to his abrasive boss. Meanwhile, the task of reviving the Vichy contacts was assigned to Commander Wilfred (‘Biffy’) Dunderdale, formerly the SIS’s station chief in Paris who was well acquainted with the old French intelligence regime and in a good position to pick up the threads now connected to Vichy. Dunderdale was an urbane individual, fond of the luxuries of life, who had apparently so impressed Ian Fleming when the future author visited Paris as a new recruit to the SIS, just before the city fell, that he immortalized several of his traits in the character of James Bond. Kenneth Cohen was perhaps a little less in awe of his opposite number and described him as ‘a genial expense-account salesman’.

The division of labour was not an easy one to keep and led inevitably to friction between Cohen and Dunderdale over who had first call on whom among French intelligence officers. If problems of demarcation led to disputes in the SIS French section, they were nothing in comparison with the mistrust, the conflicting purposes and personal animosity which coloured the dealings between the British and Free French intelligence services. The fact that they needed each other in order to function at all was the only thing that kept them together .

Charles de Gaulle may have found London to be the most convenient base for his Free French cause, but he never gave his British paymasters any sense of being a comrade in arms in the fight against Germany. He would not necessarily have shared the view of many in occupied France that it was only a matter of time before Great Britain fell in the same way that France had fallen, as he had observed the pugnacious attitude of his hosts at first hand. But he knew very well that Britain could not defeat Nazism unaided and that she relied on American involvement almost as much as France did to ensure her freedom. De Gaulle’s greatest fear of all was that Frenchmen would play no part in their country’s eventual liberation, leaving a population tainted by submission and collaboration and bereft of all self-respect. Such a wasteland would be a breeding ground for left-wing extremism, as he saw it, especially if the only spontaneous resistance against the occupiers had come from the communists.

With these concerns uppermost, de Gaulle set about establishing the intelligence wing of his Free French administration. Although he was to rely entirely upon the British Foreign Office for the wherewithal for its operation, his objective was already diverging from that of his SIS sponsors. Both envisaged the establishment of networks of resistance in France, but, whereas the SIS saw the networks’ role simply as one of intelligence-gathering to help the British armed services defend their country and plan an eventual offensive, military espionage was of secondary importance to de Gaulle. In spite of his army background, his motive for building a resistance movement was political as well as practical. His networks would encourage strong anti-collaborationist sentiment in France and ensure that, come the liberation, the Free French banner was held high by the heroes of the maquis.

The man de Gaulle chose to run the 2e and 3e bureaux (intelligence and counter-espionage) of his administration was the 29-year-old army engineer, Captain André Dewavrin. It was an extraordinarily bold appointment considering he knew nothing about this man other than what he had gleaned from him during a brief and typically icy interview at his St Stephens House headquarters. It seemed to be enough for de Gaulle to know the man had been trained at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, had fought in the Norway campaign prior to the fall of France, happened also to be qualified in law and spoke fluent English. The fact that he was an innocent in the world of intelligence-gathering did not deter the general from making the appointment on the spot.

The truth was that experience of any kind was extremely scarce among those volunteering to join the Free French. Of the 50,000 French soldiers who found themselves in Britain after the armistice, only 1,000 opted to join de Gaulle. Most of the rest, including nearly all the senior officers, preferred to return to their families in Vichy France and undergo demobilization. Dewavrin himself, hereafter referred to by his widely-used codename, Passy, had wavered until the last minute between offering his services to de Gaulle and sailing with a corps of French soldiers, led by General Emile Béthouart, to carry on the fight from Casablanca. As he sat at his desk in a tiny office on his first day as chief of intelligence, he must have wondered whether he had made a foolish choice.

All he knew of secret services was what he had read in novels. De Gaulle could afford him nothing to pay for men or equipment and he knew very little about the motley collection of volunteers from whom he was to choose his personnel. He began by recruiting officers and NCOs who, like him, had fought in Norway and whose morale was therefore less damaged as they had not been in France to experience defeat. One of his very first recruits, Lieutenant Maurice Duclos, a genial giant, gourmand and womanizer, would soon distinguish himself by his courageous undercover work in France. However, he and another swashbuckling early appointee, Captain Pierre Fourcaud, had, before the war, both belonged to an outlawed fascist movement known as the cagoulards , whose tactics included subversion and political assassination. Duclos had even been imprisoned for his involvement. Their past would weigh heavily on Passy and, indeed, de Gaulle later in the war, when detractors of the Free French would accuse the movement of far right-wing motivation, preparing to impose draconian rule on the newly liberated France.

Whether by accident or design, however, de Gaulle had found a smooth, if ruthless operator in Passy. The latter was quick to realize, when the SIS made their first approach to the Free French to ask if they could use some of their men as intelligence agents, that he had an invaluable bargaining counter with which to advance his general’s cause of building networks. He had the French-speaking manpower while the British had the means in the form of money, radios, false papers, transport and operatives in the neutral countries. Even when a marriage of convenience was agreed, Passy had to persuade the British of the value of networks. The SIS was all for sending agents into France to go themselves, unaided, to observe and gather intelligence. Passy argued, on the whole successfully, that the information would be far more accurate and valuable if it were acquired by network members, such as port officials, whose everyday jobs took them close to sensitive areas. It meant, of course, a longer wait for intelligence, which did not worry de Gaulle, and it served his purpose admirably of building a resistance movement.

Passy did make some elementary mistakes as well, even if they were only to harm his dignity. He knew it was important that his real name and that of his early recruits should be hidden, not least to protect their families back in France. But he did not know the golden rule that you kept the initial the same when you gave someone a code name, so the choice of random Paris Metro stations such as Passy, St Jacques (Duclos’ code name), Barbès (Fourcaud), Bienvenue and Corvisart seemed bizarre to his British counterparts. So did the civilian disguise Passy chose for himself: a morning suit and shiny bowler hat from Moss Bros, something he quickly realized made him appear like a grotesquely overdressed bank clerk and far more incongruous in the hot July sun than he was in his French army uniform.

In his memoirs, Passy is full of praise for his ‘Uncle Claude’ Dansey, who, he says, guided him through many other potentially more damaging pitfalls during his formative weeks and months as head of French intelligence. It was probably just as well that this unlikely friendship grew up between two such wintry personalities as there would be several occasions during the war when the two services might otherwise have ceased to co-operate. In his role of helping to build new sources of intelligence from France, Kenneth Cohen was the person with whom Passy dealt on important matters. Again, considering their purposes were often at odds, the two men understood each other well, Passy particularly respecting Cohen’s discretion, intelligence and analytical ability.

That is much more than can be said for his opinion of the man Cohen put in charge of the day-to-day running of his French section, an English salesman who had been living in Bordeaux and whom Passy referred to as ‘Crayfish’. It is very likely that he was the same man as the Major ‘J’ whom Renault and Pineau would later find so tiresomely controlling. Passy remarked on him that, ‘Never in my life have I met such a narrow-minded, misguided and Francophobic individual. He would lie to us incessantly, trying always to corrupt our agents and forever sowing divisions and chaos.’

Maybe this is why Passy had no compunction in exploiting the demarcation dispute between Cohen and Dunderdale by working closely also with the latter. He saw this as a means to gain additional resources and influence which would not have come his way via a single SIS intermediary, particularly not Crayfish.

The greatest cause of friction between the Free French and British intelligence services was the battle for control over agents. To the British, Passy and his embryonic service only represented one somewhat shaky potential source of information from France. Both Dunderdale and Cohen were briefed to look elsewhere for French agents who could work directly under their control as officers of the SIS. Much to the dismay of Passy and de Gaulle, they did this by a sifting process instituted at the old Royal Victoria Patriotic School on Wandsworth Common, MI5’s interrogation centre for foreign refugees. Any likely candidates among the ‘cleared’ French nationals, unless they insisted on being put in touch with the Free French, were passed to an SIS representative and offered the opportunity to join the war effort back in France, working for His Majesty’s Secret Service.

Kenneth Cohen also successfully moved in to take direct control of what would become the ‘Alliance ’ intelligence network in France, one of the most widespread and successful of the war. It was particularly galling to Passy that it was one of his first agents into France, Pierre Fourcaud, who had established contact with its founder, Commandant Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, who was first to see such a vigorous organization bypass the offices of the Free French. Loustaunau-Lacau, well connected with many in Vichy who had also been at army college with de Gaulle, sent details back to London via Fourcaud, not only about his nascent network, but also how he intended to whip up anti-German feeling in France through a movement he called Spirale . With the professed connivance of Pétain himself, he would circulate subversive literature and asked for similar leaflets to be dropped by air over France under the Free French banner. De Gaulle bridled at his old comrade’s involvement with Vichy and also at his unrealistic request for 20 million francs to help him execute his plans. Loustaunau-Lacau’s reaction to the news of de Gaulle’s unwillingness to support his movement was to sever all links with the Free French and deal only with the British, who were only too keen to nurture his intelligence network.

If such manoeuvres led Passy and his team to mistrust the British, the feeling was mutual. The SIS, with its obsessive secrecy, looked upon de Gaulle’s intelligence service as an amateurish band of misfits whose cavalier attitude to security threatened every one of their joint operations. Cohen’s post-war recollections described them as :

... gossip-ridden but informative characters. This very much mixed bunch both in politics and merit, ranged from burning and saintly patriotism (e.g. Rémy, and St Jacques) to the brave, able but distinctly unsaintly Passy. But they included also, alas, adventurers and the odd traitor, i.e. ‘Howard’, who was housed to our shame by ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale, and which led to the Muselier scandal and eventual imprisonment for Howard (de Gaulle would have had him shot. Passy’s remedy was, probably, torture).

The Muselier scandal followed de Gaulle’s abortive expedition to Dakar on the West African coast. The General was determined to establish his Free French headquarters on French colonial soil sooner rather than later and had identified Dakar as the optimum place, not least because the gold reserves of the Banque de France were stored there. There were indications that, unlike most other French African colonies, French West Africa might be persuaded to change her Vichy allegiance and join the allies. Thus, in September 1940, de Gaulle set off with 8,000 troops and an escort of eighteen Royal Navy warships, including an aircraft carrier and two battleships. The attempted peaceful landing and negotiations of 23 September ended in a bloody sea battle between the British and Vichy French navy, the latter of which had been given wind of the attempted surprise expedition and bolstered their defences with six extra warships prior to de Gaulle’s arrival.

The mission’s failure was put down largely to loose talk by the French involved in its planning, which reached Vichy in time for them to forearm. Clearly, the British were furious and even more so when, three months later, they were shown documents which established that the head of de Gaulle’s own armed services, Admiral Emile Muselier, had deliberately leaked the expedition’s plans to Vichy. Churchill immediately ordered Muselier’s imprisonment, only to learn a few days later that the incriminating documents had actually been forged by the same two men, ‘Howard’ and Colin, working in Passy’s department, who had originally reported the supposed treachery to MI5. As these two men had been originally recommended to Passy by the SIS, the French assumed that they were agents of the British, bent on disrupting the Free French organization for some inexplicable reason. To the British, who denied any such duplicity, it was just another example of the ill-discipline and divided loyalties which existed in the Free French camp.

The vexatious affair led to one of de Gaulle’s many short-lived embargoes on dealing with British intelligence and made him all the more determined that any intelligence coming back from his agents in France should be channelled through his officers first. However, he soon had to accept that his networks relied entirely on British facilities, and operating compromises were reached. These included an agreement that while agents’ reports of a political nature could be in a code decipherable only by the French, military intelligence transmitted via the Bletchley listening post was to use the British codes for instant decryption and use by the armed services. Kenneth Cohen kept a vivid recollection of this horse-trading episode:

I remember one ‘fencing match’ with de Gaulle in particular, where I think I was insisting on our right to hold the Free French codes, which he vehemently denied. At this stage there was a good deal to be said for our view. The FF Deuxième Bureau was hardly in existence, and partly suspect. We had to carry all the operational tasks — parachuting, false papers, submarines, MTBs [Motor Torpedo Boats], W/T55 etc. and might be expected to wish for some say in the choice of objectives and personnel, (i .e . Vichy squabble or RAF targets!). Finally, there were risks of leakage such as may have occurred over Dakar. De Gaulle would have none of this and practically threw me out of his room saying that my stand ‘atteint notre souveraineté ’ [violated our sovereignty]. (He was a cashiered one-star general at the time)! I could not help a slight smile. ‘Vous me prenez à la légère ’ [You do not take me seriously], he remarked as we parted, ‘mais vous verrez ’ [but you will see].

But by the end of 1941, in spite of all the mistrust and struggle for control between the two secret services, their joint achievement had been to send twenty-nine intelligence agents into the field with twelve radios making regular contact, six of which had been established by the incomparably dynamic agent, Gilbert Renault (Rémy), whose story unfolds later in the book.