9

Betrayed!

MADELEINE DAMERMENT’S RETURN TO France had been delayed for weeks due to bad weather. The twenty-six-year-old with the round babyish cheeks and dark curly hair had received a briefer period of training than many other SOE agents, most likely because of her previous experience.

She had grown up in the Pas-de-Calais, where her father was head postmaster of Lille. After the German occupation her whole family was drawn into the Resistance, and she quickly became involved with the “Pat” evasion line, which ferried escaped prisoners of war and downed airmen through France and out through Marseille. Damerment had been credited with helping seventy-five British and American airmen by the time, late in 1942, the Gestapo closed in and she herself used the escape line to leave France. She quickly found herself being recruited by F Section and, on the night of February 28, 1944, she boarded a bomber to be dropped into northern France. She was code-named Solange.

Brave and intelligent, Damerment had a difficult task ahead. She and three others were being dropped east of Chartres, into an area known to be insecure, to find out what was happening to local networks and to establish a new safe network—a réseau—which would be key to the eventual invasion of France.

With her were France Antelme and a radio operator, Lionel Lee. All three dropped safely into the French countryside and began to gather up their parachutes. They could see figures coming across the field and guessed they were the reception committee from Phono, one of a number of subcircuits of the huge Prosper circuit, which centerd around Paris. Too late, they realized they were not. The shadowy figures were Gestapo men who had been waiting for their arrival. Damerment’s mission was over before it had begun.

A few weeks later, F Section received a message from another agent, whose code name was Madeleine. It stated that Antelme had been injured in the drop but all were safe. Madeleine was Noor Inayat Khan who, as a Russian-born princess of Indian and British descent, had one of the most exotic backgrounds of any SOE agent.

But it was not Khan at the controls of her radio transmitter that night. She had been captured in October 1943, a full four months before. The SOE’s networks in France were in shambles, but London did not know it. Or rather, it had refused to believe it.

In fact, the exceptionally courageous Khan had put a warning into the very first message she had sent under duress, a key phrase that signaled to code master Leo Marks that she had been captured. Marks told Buckmaster, but he refused to believe that his agent had been caught. Khan tried to alert London again in her next message, leaving out one of two regular security checks; the warning was dismissed as an oversight on behalf of Khan.

From then on there had been no more warnings: a Gestapo officer, Dr. Josef Goetz, had taken over her radio, allowing the Germans to arrange for Damerment, Antelme, and Lee to be delivered right into their hands.

After the three agents were arrested, the SOE was given a further opportunity to realize its networks were in danger. Like Khan, Lionel Lee was forced to send a message to London, and again the brave operator left out a security check in an effort to alert the SOE. Once more, the warning was ignored, until an uneasy SOE operations officer requested that the messages be reexamined. Finally, the missing security checks were noted and the SOE agreed to believe that Khan, Damerment, Antelme, and Lee were in German hands.

The web of deception that had unfolded over the previous twelve months had been simple in its execution but intricate in its effect on the agent network. It was the story not only of a double agent’s coldhearted deceit but also of missed opportunities for the SOE to see when its plans for a large and powerful network were imploding.

Agents in the field had in fact tried to raise the alarm about the Prosper circuit more than a year earlier.

Courier Andrée Borrel, a working-class Frenchwoman with a nose for action and adventure, had arrived in France with Lise de Baissac in September 1942. Her role was to work for the circuit’s leader, Francis Suttill, whose own code name, Prosper, gave the network its name. Borrel used her intimate knowledge of Paris to not only carry messages but conduct acts of sabotage. Her skill and bravery encouraged Suttill to make her his second in command.

Posing as a brother and sister selling agricultural products, they made a formidable partnership. Constantly on the move, they recruited new agents, found farmers willing to receive air drops on their land, and sought out barns and buildings where arms and munitions could be stored.

The development of the Prosper network and its subcircuits meant that by the end of 1942 there was a substantial and well-organized agent network across the occupied zone of France. It had grown quickly, expanding out of Suttill’s Physician network. It had excellent support from the local French who, like the agents themselves, generally believed that the Allied invasion would come during 1943. By the end of May 1943, the Prosper network had received 240 containers of arms and munitions.

However, such networks could not be secure indefinitely, and with expansion came new faces and greater security problems. As more and more agents were sent in, very often their French language skills were no better than the average schoolchild’s, and couriers had to travel even longer distances and take greater risks to link between agents and deliver messages and supplies.

Francine Agazarian, a twenty-nine-year-old secretary from Narbonne with film-star good looks, had landed with her husband by Lysander on March 17, 1943, and was immediately carrying messages and explosives around Paris and into villages in the countryside. Very early on she found herself on a busy train traveling from Poitiers to Paris. “I sat on my small suitcase in the corridor, a uniformed German standing close against me. . . . Tied to my waist, under my clothes, was a wide black cloth belt containing bank notes for ‘Prosper,’ a number of blank identity cards and a number of ration cards; while tucked into the sleeves of my coat were crystals for ‘Prosper’ radio transmitters. The crystals had been skilfully secured to my sleeves by Vera Atkins herself before my departure from Orchard Court. My .32 revolver and ammunition were in my suitcase. The ludicrousness of the situation somehow eliminated any thought of danger.”

On June 21, 1943, Borrel, Suttill, and another member of the network met at an outdoor café near the Gare d’Austerlitz to wait for the arrival of four agents, including Yvonne Rudellat, who had spent almost a year working as an agent in the Loire Valley. The four never showed up.

Two days later Borrel and fellow agent Gilbert Norman met at his apartment near the Bois de Boulogne and worked into the night coding messages. Shortly after midnight there was a knock at the door and a shout, “Ouvrez! Police allemande!” A few hours later the Germans picked up Suttill. All three were taken to 84 Avenue Foch, the much-feared headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD)—the intelligence agency of the SS and a sister organization to the Gestapo—where Borrel showed fearless contempt for her captors and “a silence so disdainful that the Germans did not attempt to break it.”

Soon after, Gilbert Norman sent a message to London. He appeared to be working as usual. But in his message, Norman—considered to be one of the most adept and reliable of radio operators—had omitted one of his security checks. Buckmaster was alerted.

What Buckmaster did next not only was foolish but also signed Norman’s death warrant. He sent a message to Norman reprimanding him for forgetting the check. He not only ignored the warning but also alerted the Germans to the fact that Norman had tried to deceive them.

While Andrée Borrel had been required to spend every day on the move, in an almost continual whirl of activity, Lise de Baissac, who had landed in France with her, had to carry out a very different role.

Small in stature and reserved in character, de Baissac had impressed her instructors from the very start. “Intelligent, extremely conscientious, reliable, and sound in every way,” one stated. “Is quite imperturbable and would remain cool in any situation,” another reported.

Her mission was to remain quiet and underground in the university town of Poitiers, just north of the demarcation line. Here, she lived alone in a two-room apartment and provided a contact point for new agents. She found them shelter and contacts and made sure their identity papers were up to date.

Her life was largely a solitary one; her only regular contacts were an auctioneer and his family, who had Resistance links. She had no wireless operator or courier and traveled alone on her bicycle to meet people from other networks.

She had to be careful when approaching people she had known before the war to see if they wished to join her Resistance network, Artist. Sometimes people were interested; often they were not. Once, she saw a friend in a restaurant and invited him to work with her. “Definitely not,” he told her. “I have eight children to look after, four of my own and four of my brother’s who’s dead. I can’t put them at risk.” He never joined; she never asked him again.

The agents de Baissac worked with came and went, many going on to the north and east of her to the ever-expanding Prosper network. The only SOE friendship she would allow herself was with Mary Herbert, her brother Claude’s courier from the Scientist network, who brought her messages. Occasionally, de Baissac would go to a favorite café of Claude’s in Bordeaux to wait for him. She saw that Claude and Mary had become close and had started a love affair.

In February 1943 de Baissac met the newly arrived air liaison agent, Henri Déricourt, who said he liked many of the landing grounds she had selected and that he would use them. She found Déricourt efficient and courteous, even charming. She had no idea the sequence of events he was about to put into play.

By the end of May she had arranged the arrival of thirteen agents, including Francine Agazarian. With no radio of her own, she had had to use Prosper wireless operators to communicate with London. Both she and Claude, who visited Paris regularly, now had strong links to the Prosper network. In 1943 that was a dangerous relationship for any agent in France.

Born in Amiens, France, on April 28, 1912, Odette Sansom was the daughter of a First World War hero, Gaston Brailly, who was killed in Verdun in 1918. Her childhood had been filled with illness, including meningitis, which made her blind for a year. By her teens her parents were both dead and she was sent to a convent to be educated. At seventeen she had refused the offer to be trained as a nun and left the convent. Two years later she had met and married an Englishman, Roy Sansom, who was running a boardinghouse in Boulogne. In 1939 he had brought her and their two daughters to England. He had joined the army, and she had gone to live with her mother-in-law near Bath in Somerset to await the birth of her third child. In 1941 she had responded to requests by the War Office for people to send photographs of France. Her photographs encouraged the War Office to see her as a potential recruit to the SOE. She was interviewed by Jepson, and she became a member of an SOE women’s course in May 1942.

She developed a fearsome reputation during training for an almost defiant strength of character. “Her main weakness is a complete unwillingness to admit that she could ever be wrong,” noted one instructor. Buckmaster added with some admiration, “She did it her way and that was it.”

Sansom was motivated by patriotism but reluctant to volunteer for operations because of her children. “I left England with a broken heart and I knew that nothing else that could happen to me would ever be that painful; it never was,” she recalled.

In the final stage of training, on her parachute course, she was injured and was ruled out of being parachuted into France—the SOE would have to deliver her some other way. Sansom arrived in France around the same time as Andrée Borrel, Yvonne Rudellat, and Lise de Baissac. She landed on the Mediterranean coast east of Marseille on October 31, 1942, only days before the Germans sent their troops south into the unoccupied zone. She landed with Mary Herbert, George Starr, who would develop a key réseau to the southwest, and a radio operator named Marcus Bloom.

Sansom had been supposed to work in Auxerre but instead was reassigned to a réseau run by a dynamic young man named Peter Churchill, who was working hard to bring under control the large but unorganized Resistance group Carte, named after its leader André Girard’s code name. Sansom became Churchill’s courier and, eventually, his lover. They worked closely with a wireless operator named Adam Rabinovitz, code-named Arnaud.

The Riviera was a difficult place to work. Cannes was a playground, with a burgeoning black market. Marseille was a center for police activity, where there were regular roundups, rafles, to find people for forced labor. A transient population of people had fled from other areas of the country; Sansom felt many were too “ostentatious and flamboyant” for undercover work. Some résistants were too proud of their clandestine role, as if wearing a label to say they were members of the Resistance. “I felt fear,” Sansom said. “I felt that anything could happen any time.”

Sansom’s uneasiness was well founded; things started to quickly go wrong. André Girard fell out with his deputy, Frager, so they got little done. Churchill then backed Frager, causing a rift with Girard. A résistant named André Marsac fell asleep on a train between Marseille and Paris and lost the suitcase he was carrying. Inside was a list of Carte members and contacts.

Finally, in January 1943, shortly after the Germans razed much of the old quarter of Marseille to the ground, claiming it was full of criminals, Peter Churchill’s network was blown.

The key figures managed to get away. Churchill, Sansom, and Rabinovitz headed to the Haute-Savoie and the beautiful countryside around Lake Annecy. They made the waterside village of Saint-Jorioz their base and hooked up with a strong existing Resistance force. Among them was a man named Roger Bardet who, it was said, had escaped from a camp in Germany. Sansom did not like him at all.

In March, Churchill and Frager were picked up by a Lysander and flown to England to seek guidance on the split between Girard and the Carte group. By the time Churchill returned both he and Sansom were in the jaws of a trap.

Many of the female agents who had arrived in France during late 1942 and early 1943 had been arrested by that summer. The massive expansion of networks, seen most vividly in Prosper, was about to implode in a sordid, intricate web of betrayal and double-dealing. Henri Déricourt—the SOE’s air liaison agent—was at its heart.

Having arrived in France in January 1943, he had made contact with an old acquaintance, Karl Bömelburg, a high-ranking SD officer in Paris. Déricourt now became a double agent, listed by the SD as agent number 48.

Déricourt’s betrayal had devastating consequences. Through his role as organizer of SOE flights into France he met leaders, couriers, and wireless operators. They included Andrée Borrel and Lise de Baissac. Déricourt reported to the SD on agents’ arrivals and where they went. Each time he reported back to Bömelburg there were further, more detailed, requests for information.

The Nazis were certain that the Allies were planning to land in France some time during the summer of 1943. In April, at a secret meeting in an apartment in Paris, Bömelburg told Déricourt he wanted advanced warnings of agent drops and pickups so that his men could observe them. This enabled the SD to watch a network develop, trapping new couriers and résistants as they joined. An operation near Amboise involving two Lysanders was watched by SD agents.

Meanwhile, Déricourt met and spent some time with Prosper, Francis Suttill. If the agent network was like a spider’s web, there was now a predator hiding at its very center.

Despite the SD’s apparent control of the situation through the double agent Déricourt, the Abwehr made the first key arrest. The German army’s intelligence department, which had an enmity-filled rivalry with the SD, had been holding the list of names André Marsac had lost in the suitcase on the train. That spring the Abwehr moved to arrest Marsac and find out who and what he knew. It had come to believe that the long list of Carte names were actually those of members of the massive Prosper network, which both the Abwehr and the SD were keen to crack.

The Abwehr team was led by an innocuous-looking man in his early forties. With a longish nose and sly brown eyes, Hugo Bleicher’s corkscrew mind now came into play. He visited Marsac in Frèsnes prison and introduced himself as Lieutenant Colonel Henri, an officer representing an anti-Nazi group of German officers who wanted to make contact with Allied High Command. His story convinced Marsac, who wrote a letter of recommendation for the colonel and sent him south to Saint-Jorioz.

In April, Bleicher made contact with Sansom and repeated the same story. He wanted a flight to London to discuss terms for peace with Britain. He told her he had arrested Marsac to save him from the Gestapo. Sansom was suspicious and afraid. To make matters worse, Roger Bardet, whom she deeply disliked, met the colonel too. Bardet suggested he visit Frèsnes to see Marsac and to confirm the German’s story.

This he did, urging Sansom to schedule a Lysander pickup for Colonel Henri.

Sansom stalled, saying she could not get a plane until April 18. Bardet became angry and left. Sansom could not have known it, but Bardet was by now a key informer for the Abwehr. He was Bleicher’s man.

The SOE in Baker Street advised Sansom to cut all contact with the man calling himself “Colonel Henri.” Sansom rushed around Annecy telling members of the Resistance that they were in danger and should go into hiding, but she did not immediately do the same herself.

Peter Churchill returned from London, and they both made preparations to go underground. They were too late. Bardet had told the Abwehr that Churchill was back.

On the night of April 16, 1943, Bleicher and his men arrested them both. The network’s radio operator, Rabinovitz, escaped.

A week later, Bleicher struck again, arresting two sisters whose apartment in Avenue de Suffren in Paris was a meeting point for the Prosper network.

The arrests led nowhere immediately, and it was once again the SD, through Déricourt, that regained the upper hand in the Wehrmacht counterintelligence crackdown. In his role, Déricourt handled the SOE “airmail”—reports too long to transmit by radio that were instead written down to be couriered on Lysanders making agent pickups. Déricourt brought this “airmail” to the SD to be copied before it was taken on to a landing zone. This gave the Germans a detailed picture of the Resistance—its strengths, weaknesses, and locations where agents were in need of arms or support. The SD also continued to track the arrival of agents.

Vera Leigh, a forty-year-old dress designer who landed with three others on May 13, 1943, at a field in the Cher Valley, near Tours, was followed to Paris, where she was to set up a new réseau, Inventor, to work alongside the Prosper network. Leigh’s companions were Julienne Aisner, Sidney Jones, and Marcel Clech. Aisner was to be a courier, Jones an arms instructor, and Clech a wireless operator.

On June 16, four more agents were watched upon arrival. These included Diana Rowden, an English-born journalist whom the Germans followed to her destination, and Noor Inayat Khan who, as a radio operator, would try to alert the SOE to what was happening. They would be betrayed by Henri Déricourt.

Suttill already distrusted Déricourt and arranged his own return to France on June 12, 1943. Overburdened and exhausted by running such a massive network, he was convinced his network had been infiltrated by the Germans.

It was then that the SD moved in. It arrested résistants, uncovered hauls of arms, and followed lead after lead. This crackdown alerted the police to look for agents matching the descriptions of Yvonne Rudellat and Pierre Culioli. They were the first agents arrested. Next came Borrel and Suttill.

By the end of August 1943 the Germans had made fifteen hundred arrests. More followed, including Noor Inayat Khan and Frager. A network designed to organize and unite Resistance in readiness for the key event of the war in the west—the invasion of France—had ceased to exist. But Vera Leigh’s network had so far survived.

Vera Leigh had been working hard as a courier for the developing Inventor réseau in Paris since she arrived by Lysander on May 13, 1943. Although born in Leeds in the north of England, Leigh had been adopted, while still a baby, by a rich American who had racehorse stables near Paris. While only twenty-four she had created her own dress design company and became a society figure in the French capital. She had fled the city after the occupation and worked with the Pat evasion line with Madeleine Damerment and Virginia Hall in Lyon. Like Hall, she became a wanted figure by the Germans and fled over the Pyrenees, eventually reaching Britain, where she joined the SOE. A crack shot, she was known for a fast mind and pleasant manner. She worked closely with another SOE agent, Julienne Aisner.

From the time she had landed by moonlight she carried messages, wireless components, and sabotage materials across Paris, and, well-known there from her dress design days, she began to meet people from her past life, including some who had been involved in the “Pat” line.

Since her arrival back in Paris, the SD—thanks to Déricourt’s betrayal—had known all about her. The SD and Abwehr were waiting for the other Resistance networks to develop so as to make their final haul even greater in number.

In the end it was the Abwehr, looking to match the SD’s success with Prosper, that moved in. On October 30, Leigh was drinking coffee in the Café Mas near the Place des Ternes with another résistant when German officers strode in. At their head was Sergeant Bleicher. He walked straight to their table and placed them under arrest.

Under interrogation at 84 Avenue Foch, the SD’s Paris headquarters, Leigh stuck to her cover story, that she was a milliner’s assistant named Suzanne Chavanne. But the Germans already knew the truth. Inventor had been created under their gaze. All its members had been arrested by the end of December.

Despite their close connections to the Prosper network and to Déricourt, three agents managed to slip the net.

Claude de Baissac was in Bordeaux, where his Scientist network was not only gathering vital information on German activity in the area but also carrying out many audacious acts of sabotage. His courier, Mary Herbert, had been considered by some to be almost too fragile for the rigors of the clandestine life, but she had thrived, using her bicycle and the train to liaise with agents and résistants over a wide area, and to meet up with the third agent in their group, Lise de Baissac, Claude’s sister.

Mary and Claude organized a series of sabotage attacks on Bordeaux docks, a port packed with submarines and cargo ships bringing supplies for the German war effort. They helped mastermind the destruction of a key radio station for Admiral Dönitz’s Atlantic U-boat fleet, a power station supplying Luftwaffe airfields near Marignac, and transformers powering antiaircraft batteries in the area.

When the Germans’ tightened security made further sabotage virtually impossible, they concentrated on reporting on the Reich’s naval movements.

Herbert was a shy and quiet but fiercely intelligent thirty-nine-year-old. De Baissac was abrasive, proud, and determined. Their burgeoning love affair had been an attraction of opposites.

In spring, news began to trickle through from Paris about the Prosper arrests. De Baissac had met a number of the agents on visits to the capital—trips on which he had taken Herbert with him. Meantime Lise, holed up alone in Poitiers, remained the first point of contact for many Prosper agents arriving in France. It was on a visit to Lise that Mary revealed she was pregnant. Herbert changed her identity and moved house. Already members of her network had been arrested.

The danger was creeping closer. And, even without Déricourt’s betrayal, the Germans had found another way to infiltrate the Scientist network: they had a local informer. A right-wing Resistance leader named André Grandclément had been persuaded by a German officer that only by working with the Nazis could he save France from the Communists. Suddenly, the SD were finding carefully hidden arms dumps and agents were being arrested.

In August 1943 London recalled Claude de Baissac. It is not clear if he knew Herbert was pregnant. He decided to take his sister, Lise, and not Mary with him, reasoning that Lise was in greater danger.

When London sent a replacement leader, Roger Landes, Mary realized Claude would not return. When she confided to Landes that she was pregnant, he wanted her to return to London. She refused and continued to work as a courier.

Landes realized that Grandclément’s betrayal was already devastating; he had turned in an estimated three hundred résistants to the Germans. The network could not recover from such a loss.

Toward the end of November, Landes took the now heavily pregnant Herbert to a small private nursing home in a suburb of Bordeaux and left her money for her survival. She must cut all links with the Resistance to ensure the safety of her and her baby, he told her. Then he brought together a group of surviving Resistance fighters and headed for the Spanish border.

The following month Herbert’s baby was born by Cesarean. With thoughts for her lover, she called the girl Claudine. Now, with the intuition of a trained spy and the protective instinct of a mother, she set about creating a new and safe life for her and her child. Deliberately neglecting to give the nursing home a forwarding address, she went to one of the flats formerly used by Lise de Baissac in Poitiers. She took on a new identity and bought ration books and papers for her child from the black market.

Then, in February 1944, the Gestapo arrested and questioned everyone in the apartment block. They kept Herbert in custody, believing she was Lise de Baissac. Herbert stuck to her new cover story, that she was visiting from Alexandria in Egypt—she spoke Arabic, one of the languages in which she was fluent—and that she did not know Lise. Her insistence—and the fact that the Germans found it hard to believe that a British agent would have a baby—convinced her interrogators.

After two months, Herbert was released. She rescued Claudine from an orphanage and went to live with friends in a country house, no longer an agent but an anonymous young mother concentrating on bringing up a baby in an occupied country.

The women who arrived together on June 16 included Diana Rowden, the daughter of a British army major, who had spent a great deal of her life in France and Italy. She had attended schools in Sanremo, Italy, and Cannes on the French Riviera, and continued her education at Manor House School in Surrey. She had become a soft-spoken teenager, retiring and rather stocky, with reddish hair and a pale complexion.

In 1933 she returned with her mother to France and enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris. After graduating, she embarked on a career in journalism. On the outbreak of the war she joined the French Red Cross. When France fell she was separated from her mother, who had fled to Britain. Rowden remained in France until the summer of 1941, when she finally escaped through Spain and Portugal to England, where she joined the WAAF. Her language skills—French, Portugese, and Spanish—resulted in her being assigned to the Intelligence Branch. From there was but a small step for the headhunters to recommend she should be enlisted in the SOE. Her training reports spoke of “high intelligence,” “well motivated,” and “strong hatred of the Nazis.” More than one instructor’s reports spoke of her leadership qualities.

Always a tomboy when she was a child, she was now in her late twenties, fit and athletic. After her arrival in France, she set off for the Jura and a hotel in Lons-le-Saunier.

Baker Street had high hopes for Acrobat, the network she was joining. The Resistance in the area was strong. But Déricourt’s betrayal had ensured the SD followed her all the way to her new home.

However, when members of the network were arrested, Rowden escaped and moved east to act as a courier for another network. Together with her comrades she came up with a new development in Resistance sabotage: blackmail. The family of the Peugeot car factory in Sochaux, which was being used to make tank and aircraft parts, was approached and persuaded to create an explosion to put the facility out of action.

While Rowden appeared to have given the SD the slip, the continuing betrayal of Déricourt meant that the Germans were confident they could locate her again. In November the double agent had supervised the arrival of five agents on a Hudson aircraft. One of the men was assigned to work for Rowden. He was apprehended and persuaded to give details of where he was to meet her.

The house where Rowden was staying resembled a Swiss chalet with a wooden balcony and a cobbled road outside. She met the “new agent” in the village of Clairvaux and began to walk him up the hill to the house. As they walked he flashed a flashlight behind his back. They went inside and, a short while later, a résistant standing on the balcony saw three cars rushing up the hill.

Rowden managed to hide wireless crystals in a cot where a baby was sleeping, but the game was up. She had become another victim of Déricourt, although by giving the SD the runaround for three months, she had carried out valuable Resistance work.

After months in captivity and torture at the SD headquarters on Avenue Foch, she was sentenced under the “Nacht-und-Nebel-Erlass,” the Night and Fog Decree. It was the code name to an order of December 7, 1941, issued by Hitler.

The decree directed that persons in occupied territories engaging in activities intended to undermine the security of German troops were, upon capture, to be brought to Germany by “night and fog” for trial by special courts. To friends and relatives they simply disappeared; no official information about the prisoners would be released.

On July 6, 1944, Diana Rowden was transferred to the men’s Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. With her were Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, and Sonia Olschanezky, a twenty-one-year-old Jewish woman who had worked for the French Resistance and been recruited in France by the SOE. Olschanezky, who had refused a chance to escape to Switzerland when Prosper began to collapse, had also been betrayed.

The four were taken one by one to an isolated hut, ordered to lie down on a bed, and told they were to be injected against typhus. Instead they were given a lethal injection of phenol. Their bodies were then dragged to an oven for cremation.

Vera Atkins investigated their deaths immediately after the war and concluded, “It appears that at least one of them was still alive when she was pushed in the furnace.” It is possible it was twenty-four-year-old Andrée Borrel; a Polish prisoner who witnessed the scene at the furnace said the woman scratched the face of the camp executioner and screamed, “Vive la France!”

Cecily Lefort had traveled south to act as courier to agent Francis Cammaerts. Lefort was London-born, forty-three years old, and of Irish descent. Before the war, she had married a wealthy French doctor and settled on the Brittany coast. She had loved sports and sailing in the couple’s yacht. When the occupation came, British nationals had had to leave France.

When she returned by Lysander for the SOE, she headed south to where Cammaerts had developed Jockey, a large network of independent groups stretching through the Rhône valley and along the Riviera.

In July 1943 the Allies invaded Sicily in preparation for moving into Italy. The SOE decided to increase the amount of arms being dropped into the southeast of France, and Lefort organized a reception party for a massive drop of supplies on August 13.

Working with Pierre Reynaud, a sabotage instructor, Lefort took part in a number of operations to damage railway lines, power stations, and industrial targets.

The Resistance activity drew a corresponding increase in German retaliation. Cammaerts, one of the most security-conscious of all SOE agents in France, warned the network to stay away from particular places, including Montélimar, where they had their former headquarters. Reynaud and Lefort ignored the warning, and on September 15, 1943, they visited a local Resistance leader at his home in Montélimar.

The SD had received a tip-off from an unknown source and surrounded the house. Reynaud and the résistant escaped, but Lefort was found hiding in the cellar. Her Gestapo interrogators broke her alibis, but she refused to give away any of her comrades. Thanks to her courage and to Cammaerts’s own security measures, Jockey survived.

Lefort did not. She arrived at Ravensbrück toward the end of 1943. During a routine medical examination in the hospital block, a doctor diagnosed stomach cancer. He operated and put her on a diet of porridge and vegetable soup. She was monitored, seemed to improve, and was returned to the main camp.

In February 1945 she was moved to a subcamp called the Jugendlager, the “youth camp,” which in fact was the extermination annex created to increase the number of gassings. One prisoner later testified that the desperately ill Lefort had volunteered to move to the camp as she thought it was a rest place where she would be spared roll call. Lefort was so sick that she was picked out for extermination almost immediately on arrival.

With her Asian lineage and background as a musician and author of children’s stories, Noor Inayat Khan was an unlikely agent to be chosen for SOE work in France. But she was keen, brave, and fluent in French, and Buckmaster believed in her. Most of all, she volunteered at a time when F Section had desperately needed more wireless operators. She was assigned the code name Madeleine and the cover of being a children’s nurse. She would work in the network known as Phono in an area to the southwest of Paris, centerd around Le Mans.

She made her first transmission on June 20, 1943, from the grounds of the Agricultural Institute at Grignon, using Gilbert Norman’s radio. She did not receive her own radio until the following month.

Within a week of her arrival, the Resistance network Prosper began to disintegrate around her. And Suttill, whom she had just met, had been arrested. So too were Norman and Borrel. Khan headed to the institute and found the Germans making more arrests. She and her leader, Emile Garry, laid low. In the middle of September, having moved house again for safety, Khan radioed London to try to tell them Prosper was collapsing. She was the only radio operator at work in Paris.

But the Germans were picking up her signal loud and clear. At first their detection finders could not locate her, but they could tell from her “fist”—the way she tapped out her Morse code—that this was a single operator handling a large amount of material.

Twice Khan’s courage and quick thinking helped her escape capture. Once, two Germans on the Métro became suspicious of her heavy suitcase and challenged her. She explained it contained a cinema projector, and they believed her. Soon after, she was asked to help two Canadian airmen, of whom she immediately became suspicious. She abandoned them. Her intuition was right: they were German agents.

The Germans let it be known, through the network of criminal gangs they used as thugs and informants, that they would pay 100,000 francs for information leading to Khan’s arrest. Senior SD officers said they were willing to pay out ten times as much. SD headquarters received a phone call, a woman’s voice telling them she could give them the radio operator’s address in return for the reward. SD agent Ernest Vogt headed to the address and was shown around Khan’s apartment. He flicked through her notebooks and found her wireless. One man was left in the apartment; others stood around in the street outside, trying to appear inconspicuous.

On her return Khan saw them immediately and melted back in the crowd. Alone, without her codes and wireless, she agonized over what to do. She waited until she thought enough time had passed for those watching the building to leave, and slipped inside.

Inside her apartment the SD man arrested her. She fought back so violently that he had to call reinforcements. She was taken to the fifth floor of the building at 84 Avenue Foch where, to calm her, Vogt agreed to her request for a bath. Once inside the bathroom she scrambled out of the window onto a ledge and onto the roof. But there was nowhere to go.

And so her interrogation began. SOE instructors had noted that she was not a good liar. Now she admitted she was a WAAF officer named Nora Baker but refused to say anything else at all. One SD officer reported, “She is impossible. I have never met a woman like her.” Sturmbannführer Josef Kieffer, the man in charge of SD investigations into SOE agents in France, told Vera Atkins after the war: “We got absolutely no new information out of her at all.”

Déricourt had already told the SD what they needed to know. Now they had Khan’s wireless and code books too, which they could use in their radio game of pretense—the Englandspiel, the “English game.” The Germans had been playing a similar game to devastating effect in the Netherlands, forcing a captured agent of the SOE’s Dutch section to continue to transmit as if he were still free. More than fifty SOE agents would be captured during the deception.

The SD played the game with Khan’s set for two months, by the end of which time she had tried another escape and been sent by train to Germany.

Suspecting that Khan might be in German hands, the SOE devised a series of personal questions for whoever was operating her radio. It took some time for the replies to come, and they seemed correct. Somehow, during hours of interrogation, Khan must have given away enough personal information to allow the Germans to fool the SOE.

The SOE checked the responses with France Antelme, who knew Khan. He agreed the responses appeared to have come from her and that she appeared to be operating freely. This miscalculation led the SOE to believe Phono was still operating, and it resulted in Madeleine Damerment, Lionel Lee, and Antelme himself dropping straight into the hands of Josef Kieffer and Ernest Vogt on the night of February 28, 1944.