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1 ‘THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY SECRET AGENT I EVER MET’
At the end of January 1942, following a request from Combined Ops, MI6, Britain’s Secret Service, asked the BCRA – the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action, intelligence section of ‘Free France’, the exile regime in London presided over by Gen. Charles de Gaulle – to seek information about Bruneval. The enquiry did not mention Operation Biting, because Free French security was notoriously porous. It merely sought details of the defences around certain German installations in upper Normandy. The planners already had access to pre-war holiday photographs and postcards of Bruneval beach and cliffs, long since gathered following a BBC public appeal for such images after Dunkirk, covering the entire coastline of France. This yielded thirty thousand images immediately, and eventually ten million. For the raid, however, they needed much more, and thus caused a wireless signal to be dispatched to de Gaulle’s principal organizer in north-west France, later known as ‘Colonel Rémy’, though Gilbert Renault never held a uniformed command in his life.
Renault was an impassioned follower of the general. But his daring and initiative were not matched by discretion. Rémy’s survival in Occupied France was even more miraculous than that of most secret agents in enemy-held territory. The mission to Bruneval to which he now committed two of his men, in response to London’s request, nonetheless proved one of his finest hours of the war, and became a small triumph of intelligence-gathering.
Two years later, when Allied victory was obviously assured, the French Resistance would experience a surge of recruits, indeed a tidal wave, generated by people eager to identify themselves with the winners. In 1942, however, many months before Stalingrad, Hitler’s fortunes appeared at their zenith. While few French people welcomed the German occupation of half their country, with a puppet Vichy government ruling the other half, most saw no choice save to collaborate. The Germans had not then introduced the hated STO – Service du travail obligatoire – which from February 1943 forced 600,000 French workers to join a million PoWs labouring in Germany, while STO evaders fled to the maquis.
Many French people disliked and resented the British. After the wildly inaccurate RAF bombing of the Renault factory outside Paris, which killed 367 French people, Résistant Jacques Lecompte-Boinet recorded his housekeeper saying, with the same bitterness that many of her compatriots had displayed after the 1940 destruction of the French fleet at Oran: ‘The English are pigs, just like the Boche – always happy to trample on poor people.’ Only a small minority of French men and women displayed in 1941–42 the inclination, as well as the extraordinary courage, necessary to reject acquiescence in their fate – collaboration; instead, to assist the Allied cause.
London’s January 1942 Bruneval request was transmitted via one of the three Free French wireless-operators then active in the German-occupied regions. On receipt, Renault passed it to one of the network of amateur spies – they were all amateurs then – whom he had recruited and now managed. What followed represented the fruits of long and mortally dangerous labours, since the fall of France. His personal vicissitudes were, in significant measure, those of Resistance at large. Anyone who knew his history might have been forgiven for believing it was more likely the Bruneval quest would fail than that it should succeed.
The principal personalities of de Gaulle’s movement were, from start to finish, almost all misfits, the ‘awkward squad’. In the words of Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigerie, they were the ‘mauvais coucheurs’ and ‘farfelus’ – literally the ‘poor sleepers’ and ‘charlatans’. Relatively few of society’s ‘haves’ were willing to risk their possessions as well as their lives to work against the Germans and the Vichy government, presided over by Marshal Philippe Pétain, with their many organs of surveillance, control and repression.
Resistance instead recruited many doctors, teachers, peasants, trade unionists. ‘None fitted the conventional picture of the respectable good citizen,’ wrote the famous historian of the Occupation Henri Amouroux. The characters of many ‘rendered them perhaps ill-adjusted to a normal profession in a normal world at a normal time’. There were also practical considerations. The point is often missed that to be a committed Résistant deprived a person of their job, and thus of an earned income. Until later in the war, when large sums were made available to subsidize those who participated actively, it was hard for people at the bottom of society, with families to support, to give up everything to work for the cause. ‘At the beginning of 1942,’ wrote the later network leader Jacques Lecompte-Boinet, ‘Resistance was still, and for a long time to come, ill-organised. The Résistants (if we can give them that name) were obliged to fund themselves and to spend without taking heed of the cost in time and money.’
Gilbert Renault was born at Vannes in 1904, eldest of ten children of an academic. A devoted Catholic, he became also a right-wing monarchist, for a time antisemitic, albeit also anti-German. All his life he sulked on Bastille Day, which he believed to commemorate a national tragedy, the fall of the Bourbons. His pre-war career was heroically unsuccessful in every department save that of procreation. In 1929 he married Édith Anderson, daughter of a Scottish immigrant, with whom he had an eventual nine children. He worked for some years in banking, serving briefly in Gabon. Returning broke from Africa, he and his wife lodged in her parents’ house. He occupied for a time a humble role in insurance; was sometimes reduced to selling household belongings, including Édith’s piano.
Then he made an essay into film financing, where his most notable achievement was to turn down French rights in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which might have made his fortune. He travelled to Spain during its civil war, forging friendships with prominent Franco supporters that later proved important. His only financial success – a near-lifesaver – was that in 1938 he won the big prize, half a million francs or around £5,000 sterling, in the national lottery. But his most recent biographer Philippe Kerrand observes that at the time of the German invasion of France, Renault ‘lacked all social status … means even to put a decent roof over the heads of his family’.
The pivotal moment of his life came in June 1940, when he and his brother Claude made an abrupt decision not to remain at home as the German panzer juggernaut swept towards Vannes, but instead to hasten abroad, abandoning Édith, again an expectant mother, together with his eight children, to the care and support of her parents. He later claimed that both brothers were always committed to go to England, but some evidence suggests their preferred option was to head for French North Africa, had not the only available means of escape from Nantes, their nearest accessible port, been the Norwegian cargo boat Liste, bound for Falmouth, where it berthed on 22 June, four days after France surrendered. Renault and his fellow fugitives sobbed unashamedly as they pored over English newspapers reporting Pétain’s decision to quit the war: ‘We were betrayed, dishonoured.’ Then, he recorded later, ‘a hand touched my shoulder and I turned to see an old woman who looked like a caricature from Punch, with a huge flowery hat and wearing a pince-nez. She smiled upon me and said: “Don’t worry, my boy. Everything will be alright.” Her expression was so kindly that I could not help myself smiling back. She then insisted: “Have a cup of tea”.’
Renault was thirty-five years old, an unimposing, portly figure who had held no paid employment for over a year and was equipped only with a salesman’s patter and wildly exaggerated self-importance. Once arrived in London bent upon offering his services to de Gaulle, who had raised his exile standard just a few days earlier, in his famous broadcast to the French people on 18 June, the newcomer nonetheless expected to be received with open arms. Instead he was bussed with his fellow travellers to the Camberwell centre where MI5 screened refugees. He was eventually freed to travel to the home of a connection in Gerrard’s Cross, where he lingered for a week, a restless guest.
Consumed with impatience and enthusiasm, he presented himself at the temporary headquarters of Free France, St Stephen’s House in Westminster. There he met for the first time another remarkable personality, twenty-nine-year-old career soldier Captain André Dewavrin, a former instructor in fortification at the military college of St Cyr. Dewavrin himself had met de Gaulle for the first time only a week or two before, when he was quizzed by his new chief about his personal history. Strikingly boyish, even innocent, in appearance – and thus belying a notably enigmatic and even mysterious personality – the captain possessed three qualities deemed indispensable to aspiring members of de Gaulle’s court: patriotism, brains and an impassioned personal commitment to the general, who told another early ‘rallier’ in those days: ‘Nous commençons à zéro.’
At the conclusion of this, their first meeting, de Gaulle said tersely to the young career soldier: ‘Bien. You will be my chief of intelligence. Au revoir. À bientôt.’ Dewavrin saluted, and their conversation was terminated with the general’s accustomed brusqueness. The captain adopted a nom de guerre borrowed from that of a Paris metro station: ‘Colonel Passy’. He then set about conducting job interviews with prospective recruits who knew no more and no less about the business of intelligence than did their appointed chief. Dewavrin addressed his task, in de Gaulle’s own later wondering words, ‘with a sort of cold passion’. He became one of a handful of men who remained mainstays of Free France for the rest of the war.
And now here was Renault, an unknown figure newly arrived from Vannes, offering to return to the continent as a secret agent, a role for which he had no qualifications whatsoever, unless one counted the Catholicism which three-quarters of de Gaulle’s early adherents professed. Renault described how the young officer ‘fixed me with his cold blue eyes’ and demanded why he thought he might make a spy. He replied limply: ‘I have worked in business. I have a lot of contacts who could be useful. I know a lot of radio broadcasters.’ The older man admitted later: ‘I was making up my story as I went along.’ In truth, Renault’s most significant selling point, especially in the eyes of the British Secret Service which must facilitate and fund any mission that Dewavrin sponsored, appears to have been his pre-war connections among Spanish Francoists. At a time when it was extremely difficult to infiltrate agents direct into France, Renault could travel to neutral Spain on a civilian flight. Dewavrin finally sent this eager volunteer back to his temporary quarters in Buckinghamshire, saying that he might hear more.
In the weeks that followed, Renault formed a chance acquaintance with Maurice Schumann, later to be dubbed ‘the voice of France’, who was then making pioneering Gaullist broadcasts for the BBC’s French Service. On the evening of 21 July, Schumann invited Renault to deliver a personal message to his wife over the air waves – anonymously, of course, to protect her security. The words chosen by this new recruit to Free France were as theatrical as was much of the rest of Renault’s life: ‘Today it is more than a month since I held you in my arms for the last time … I have since often asked myself if it was not my duty to return to protect you not only from the Germans, but also from worse enemies: those French people who are now seeking to create a new regime modelled on a monstrous one. [Yet] we have here [in London] a Chief. Under his orders, we shall prevail.’
By an astounding chance, at the dinner table of Renault’s mother-in-law’s home in Vannes, an almost disbelieving Édith heard the broadcast; received the message. She had already endured much at the hands of her rackety, improvident husband. It would have seemed absurd then to prophesy that Gilbert had taken the first step towards becoming a national hero. Claude Dansey, deputy head of the British SIS, later described this new recruit as ‘the most extraordinary secret agent I ever met’. Though, heaven knew, it did not seem so at the time, after half a lifetime of backing losers Renault was now placing a huge stake – his own life – on one of the longest-priced outsiders of the twentieth century, who was to become one of its most remarkable winners – Charles de Gaulle.
Dewavrin soon recalled Renault to his office. The embryo spymaster told the visitor that he was to get his wish. He was to return through Spain to France, charged with creating networks capable of securing military intelligence. Renault was instructed immediately to seek from their respective London embassies Spanish and Portuguese visas, which were granted. Then the embryo agent-runner was given air tickets and money – a great deal of money, much more than his own wallet had held since he won the lottery.
Before Renault departed, he had a chance encounter with de Gaulle, his hero, on the stairs at Carlton Gardens, new headquarters of Free France: ‘Mon général,’ Renault introduced himself with grave formality. ‘I am one of your soldiers. I leave tomorrow on a mission to France, and seek the honour of shaking your hand.’ De Gaulle invited the stranger into his office, asked his name and personal history, finally stood up and took his hand. He smiled and addressed his disciple by the codename he had just been allocated: ‘Au revoir [Rémy].* I’m counting on you.’
When Renault, seven weeks after his arrival in London, departed by flying-boat from Bournemouth for Lisbon and thence Madrid, he had received instruction in ciphering messages, but nothing else – no lessons in the techniques and practices of espionage. He was not the first agent to be dispatched – that was Sergeant Jacques Mansion, who had landed in Brittany a month earlier – but he was to be among the pioneers, most of them doomed men. His departure had been delayed by twenty-four hours after he failed to satisfy British customs at Croydon airport of his right to quit the country with a large quantity of francs. He had been ordered to cross the Spanish border into France as swiftly as possible. After arriving in Madrid on 20 August, however, he lingered for three months, his sojourn punctuated by increasingly insistent demands from Dewavrin that he expedite his mission – for instance on 6 September ‘ABSOLUTELY INDISPENSABLE THAT YOU FIND WAYS TO GET INTO FRANCE STOP VERY URGENT TO CREATE RÉSEAU ABOVE ALL IN COASTAL ZONES’. In response, Renault pleaded logistical difficulties. He demanded more resources, including US dollars, local access to petrol and Philip Morris cigarettes. He sought to justify his protracted stay at Madrid’s eye-wateringly expensive Palace Hotel by submitting reports, mostly misinformed, on conditions in France gathered from fellow guests recently in the country, who claimed a German invasion of Britain was imminent. Each of Rémy’s message exchanges with ‘Passy’ was delayed in transit by a fortnight for passage through the British embassy in Madrid to Lisbon, and thence to London by diplomatic mail.
He forged one critical relationship in the Spanish capital: with the forty-two-year-old French diplomat Jacques Pigeonneau, who was to prove a pivotal figure in the communications of Resistance. His office – in Rémy’s grandiloquent words – ‘became a magnificent turntable between France and England’. Confident of Pigeonneau’s commitment to de Gaulle, Renault confided to him his own mission and even his ciphers. The diplomat did not betray him. Through the years that followed, Pigeonneau played an important role in assisting Resisters to pass between France and Spain, and in relaying agents’ dispatches.
Renault’s initial cover story held that he had been caught in London by an accident of war, and was now seeking reunion with his family. In Spain, this was modified for the ears of some acquaintances, to suggest that he proposed to resurrect his tenuous pre-war film-producing role, by making a biopic on Christopher Columbus. His exchanges with Dewavrin turned ever more irritable, even acrimonious. In his memoirs, Renault frankly admitted that apprehension, outright fear, caused him to hesitate about leaving the safety of Spain. Lack of training, of psychological hardening such as professional intelligence agents receive, helps to explain this prevarication.
His biographer Philippe Kerrand is almost contemptuous of such weakness, suggesting that no other wartime spies were guilty of it. This is untrue. Even some of the greatest agents took time-outs – SOE’s wireless-operator Denis Rake pursued gay relationships at considerable risk to his mission, and several agents paid with their freedom or lives for being distracted into love affairs. The great Richard Sorge’s lifestyle in Tokyo was famously louche. Renault was only one among many spies who showed themselves erratic personalities, to the exasperation of their handlers. Would any ‘normal’ man or woman have taken such work?
When Rémy belatedly crossed the frontier into Unoccupied Vichy France, he made contact with friends and sympathizers whose identities had been disclosed to him by London. He was soon announcing the creation of new networks which, in truth, pre-dated his arrival. Louis de La Bardonnie gave him critical assistance, especially towards passing into Occupied France by wading a stream and some energetic bicycling. De La Bardonnie was the real originator of a group Rémy later claimed as his own. As the latter gained confidence, however, he began to travel extensively around the country and meet many people, some of whom he had known before the war, others not.
His messages to London, in the absence of access to a wireless, had to be transmitted through couriers. The reports were still heavy on verbiage, light on accurate information: Dewavrin repeatedly demanded his agent should cite sources for unattributed assertions. His reports about, for instance, the effects of RAF bombing of German submarine bases in French ports, notably Bordeaux and Brest, were absurdly optimistic – claiming the attacks were ‘très efficaces’ – and flatly wrong. He suggested that German soldiers had been seen weeping in public places at the prospect of participating in the impending invasion of Britain. In March 1941, he stated that this operation would be spearheaded by 150,000 paratroops allegedly already training in the Ardennes. He constantly urged on London exotic schemes, for a landing on the Belle-Île-en-Mer, or bombing of German installations. Dewavrin felt constrained to warn his man that ‘a certain number of the reports you have sent us are manifestly false or exaggerated’. One of Rémy’s agents, naval officer Jean Philippon, much later acknowledged: ‘My informants were whispers, which I was obliged to accept as such. What was I myself, save a shadow?’
Nevertheless Renault and his networks then represented the principal intelligence sources of Free France. De Gaulle’s BCRA, like all espionage organizations, was compelled to cherish passionate hopes that its geese were swans, for lack of any other birds. Carlton Gardens became increasingly impressed, fascinated, awed by the sheer weight of Rémy’s reports – on the defences of Brest, petrol stocks at La Roche-Maurice, German works in progress at Bordeaux and Brest, and much else. Historians know that much of this data was wrong. Yet in those days when news from Occupied Europe was as trickles of muddy water from wells in the desert, Renault gave ever-growing comfort to Dewavrin and his comrades in London who in their almost pathetic gratitude conferred upon him superlatives – ‘magnifique’, ‘superbe’.
He was entrusted with ever larger sums of cash, for which he accounted sketchily, if at all. Some of the money was plainly spent on his family and lifestyle. All this was characteristic of many spies throughout history, and during the Second World War in particular. Their trade requires an addiction to deceits, so that even today it remains uncertain which side some agents were on. One among many reasons that the Allied high command so highly valued Ultra intelligence – the decrypts of messages dispatched by the German, Italian and Japanese high commands – was that these possessed an inherent credibility that could be matched by no ‘humint’ report from an agent in the field.
Renault was a remarkable man. His commitment to the cause was wholly authentic, his courage indisputable. His luck proved extraordinary, in surviving for so long in enemy territory when so many of his kin were caught. For instance, the Réseau Saint-Jacques, run by Maurice Duclos and covering the north coast of France between Brest and Dunkirk, was infiltrated and systematically destroyed by the Gestapo in the autumn of 1941. Rémy’s relative longevity is especially noteworthy, when he lacked all tradecraft. He was fantastically indiscreet, not least in frequenting the best hotels and black market restaurants, which Dewavrin urged agents to avoid because they were the haunts of Germans and collaborators. ‘The network inspired by [Rémy] was several times decimated by stupid blunders,’ wrote one of its veterans later. Kerrand marvels that ‘given the considerable risks he took, not always considered, it is extraordinary that [Rémy] had totally escaped the clutches of the Gestapo. It is yet more remarkable, that they did not establish even his true identity until April 1942.’
Renault’s several volumes of memoirs dwell euphorically on the glorious meals he contrived to eat, especially at Prunier in Paris. Thanks to British gold, his personal standard of living in Occupied France was much higher than he had enjoyed before the war. He committed acts of reckless insecurity, such as passing some messages through an intermediary known to copy them to the Vichy authorities. He exploited monarchist and Catholic connections, but later also opened a dialogue with communists whom most Gaullists shunned. Renault used his Francoist connections – friends of Hitler – to facilitate his frequent passages in and out of Spain.
His personal freedom, indeed his life, was at stake every time he met a new contact, which meant almost daily. Each held power to dispatch him towards Fresnes or Buchenwald from the moment he revealed his attachment to de Gaulle. Resistance was obliged to advertise, in order to secure the services of volunteers and people with access to information. But advertisement was mortally perilous for any man or woman who exposed themselves. Henri Michel, an early chronicler of France under the Occupation, observed wearily that ‘every network had its quota of traitors … Treachery was the daily fare of the Resistance.’ Jacques Lecompte-Boinet wrote later of the ‘avalanche of contagious illnesses’ to which he likened the chain of betrayals and arrests that broke up so many networks. Moreover, in 1941–42, and especially before US entry into the war, it seemed likely Hitler would win. After such an outcome the Führer’s enemies in France and elsewhere across Europe would be doomed. It deserves emphasis that while most of those who joined the Resistance in the years of Allied success, 1943–44, survived the war, many of the men and women who enlisted earlier perished.
Renault’s family life was extraordinary even by the standards of the time and place. Soon after entering France, with German authorization he contrived to convey his wife and children from Vannes to Spain. There, Édith lived in loneliness for some months before concluding, following the death of her youngest son as a toddler, that exile was unendurable. She returned to France and, in the autumn of 1941, to Brittany. In November, Rémy took the almost insane risk of travelling home to visit his loved ones. Soon afterwards, he moved the family to Nantes where – again, in defiance of rudimentary security – he visited them. His domestic existence lunged between pathos, tragedy and farce, as when he returned from one of many journeys to the hotel at Sainte-Foy in which Édith and his tribe of children were installed, to be met by three of them, Catherine, Cecile and Jean-Claude, who chorused: ‘We did as you asked us!’
‘What was that?’
‘To keep an eye on maman, of course!’
‘True enough. Was she good?’
‘Very!’ said Cecile.
‘Why “very”?’
‘She did not sleep with anybody,’ asserted this six-year-old.
Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigerie described Resistance as ‘a game at the same time both childish and mortally dangerous’. In the winter of 1941, Rémy and Édith decided their oldest children, twelve-year-old Catherine and eleven-year-old Jean-Claude, must be entrusted with the secret of their father’s work. He described how their eyes bulged as he spoke to them, and as he swore them to secrecy, tears ran down Jean-Claude’s cheeks. His father demanded:
‘Why are you crying?’
‘Because I am frightened.’
‘Frightened of what?’
‘Frightened of talking.’
And so those children might well be, shuttled around France from alleged safe house to safe house, in an atmosphere of relentless stress and yes, fear, which could not be dispelled by parental play-acting of Happy Families at Christmas and in leisure moments.
Yet Renault survived. He travelled hither and thither across Occupied and Unoccupied France; fostered networks of genuine sympathizers over a large area of the west and north-west. He belatedly secured access to a wireless-operator who set up shop in Saumur, on the Loire, with the usual cumbersome set of that period, weighing sixty pounds. Dewavrin and Free French headquarters in London had by now cast aside earlier doubts. They believed ‘Rémy’ was energetic, lucky and above all successful. Renault acknowledged in his own notably unreliable memoirs: ‘I was surprised to discover how good I was at lying.’ Some days, his copious messages to London contained valuable intelligence; more often, they did not. But in the country of the blind – and information reaching Britain about France remained very scanty in January 1942 – the one-eyed man was king. ‘Rémy’ had become almost a monarch.
He conferred on his networks the name the Confrérie Nôtre Dame – the ‘Brotherhood of Our Lady’, known in London as the CND – following a visit he paid to the church of Nôtre-Dame-des-Victoires. Jacques Soustelle, another leading light in Gaullist intelligence, wrote in 1984 that Rémy was ‘the foundation stone of our secret operations in France … one of the principal sources of our information – and thus of those at the disposal of the Allies – on the resources and movements of Nazi forces … Gilbert Renault passed from amateur status to that of a master.’
In the first year of his assignment, he travelled repeatedly to and from Spain; from Clermont-Ferrand to Toulouse; from Lorient to Pau; also to Lyons, Bordeaux, Vannes and most often to Nantes, where he rented an apartment. It was extraordinary that so many of Rémy’s reports reached Carlton Gardens safely, if slowly, when their transmission required passage through some fifteen hands before reaching Madrid via the French controller of customs at the frontier, thence to Jacques Pigeonneau, to the British embassy and thereafter Lisbon and the flying-boat shuttle to England.
Even when a radio set became available, transmitting initially from the home of Louis de La Bardonnie in May 1941 and later from Saumur, long dispatches, maps and sketches had to be transported physically to London, though from August of that year they were first microfilmed in Lyons. By early 1942, the Germans deployed twenty-four fixed stations and 143 interception vehicles in France in quest of unauthorized transmissions. For Renault and other directors of Resistance, only personal contact, often across many miles, could gather information, precipitate action.
Before leaving London, Rémy had selected two books as the basis of his personal coding process. The first was a novel he had picked up in the Charing Cross Road in July 1940, Le parfum des îles Borromées, a tale of adultery published in 1898, and also the more readily available Petit Larousse illustré, of both of which London retained their own copies. At the end of July 1941, the Saumur operator Bernard Anquetil – ‘L’Hermite’ – was caught by the Gestapo as a result of careless coding, for which Rémy was responsible. Anquetil was shot in October. After that Renault’s own codename was changed to Rémy from Raymond, since the Germans had accessed some earlier messages in which Raymond was mentioned.
De Gaulle’s Carlton Gardens mission perceived itself to be in competition not merely with the German enemy, but also with the representatives of Britain’s own secret organizations, whose very engagement in French affairs the general regarded as an insult to himself and the dignity of La Patrie. Foremost among these was SOE – the Special Operations Executive – charged by Churchill since 1940 with ‘setting Europe ablaze’ and thus addressing sabotage and preparations for guerrilla warfare, rather than intelligence-gathering. As for MI6, Britain’s professional Secret Intelligence Service in Broadway had almost no sources of its own in France, and depended overwhelmingly upon those of de Gaulle, hence its appeal to the BCRA about Bruneval. An often childish struggle persisted between SIS, SOE and Dewavrin, who ran agents in France but was dependent on British resources to fund, transport and communicate with them. As late as 2010, an official history of SIS maintained the legend – even perhaps the fiction – that Broadway ran such men as Gilbert Renault, a claim he, Dewavrin and indeed de Gaulle would have furiously contested from their graves. Meanwhile MI9’s personnel, both English and French, sought to aid escaping PoWs and especially expensively-trained airmen to return to England along secret ‘ratlines’.
In the autumn of 1941, not only did the range of Rémy’s networks increase incrementally, but the quality of their information improved. They were learning. Moreover, Rémy possessed the power that relatively generous funding from London provided, together with an authority derived from his ability to prove to doubters – sometimes through messages personnels broadcast by the French Service of the BBC – that he was an authentic emissary of de Gaulle. The BCRA judged that of its eleven networks operating in France, Rémy’s was the most important and best-organized, purveying information now garnered from the entire north-west coast between Normandy and Bordeaux.
Despite strictures about Renault expressed above, his shrewdness was manifest, and demonstrated in a long report on the general condition of France, submitted to de Gaulle and Dewavrin when he later reached London. ‘The overwhelming majority of the population,’ he wrote, ‘is passive, and has no intention of sacrificing its comfort or its ease.’ He wrote contemptuously of the ‘stupidity and selfishness’ of the bourgeoisie, ‘which is already responsible for so many misfortunes’, but excepted from his criticisms ‘the liberal professions – in particular doctors and teachers – who display much courage and among which I have personally formed bonds of inestimable worth. We should concentrate propaganda on workers, on the petit bourgeoisie, on coastal communities and peasants.’ He suggested the French Service of the BBC should name and shame collaborators. In the event this was done only seldom.
Early in December 1941, Renault met in Paris and recruited a new agent, forty-four-year-old former tank officer François Faure, to whom he gave the codename Paco, because of the man’s enthusiasm for all things Spanish. They held several long conversations, seated on a chilly, lonely bench in the Avenue d’Observatoire, at which the new recruit won Renault’s confidence by his calm maturity. Paco, in turn, introduced Rémy to several kindred spirits, almost all of whom had served in the armed forces. These included forty-three-year-old Roger Dumont, a doctor’s son who had been a 1917–18 fighter pilot. Before the war, this keen sportsman worked as director of France’s National Tennis School. In the course of a first meeting by the Porte Maillot, Dumont impressed Renault by his directness and enthusiasm. He had acquired some earlier Resistance experience with the so-called Kléber network, now defunct. Codenamed Pol, this new sub-agent was appointed the group’s specialist on aviation matters.
The spymaster was delighted to recruit such ex-officers, who had a knowledge of military affairs that he knew himself to lack. Nonetheless the risks were, of course, immense, of adding to the CND so many new names and faces, about which their chief perforce knew little. Most of those whom Renault met on this Paris visit were later caught by the Germans, deported or shot. On hearing of so-and-so’s arrest, wrote Renault, he himself often mused: ‘If he talks, there is likely to be a massacre.’ Yet some, before they met a fate which their inexperience of secret war made all too likely, rendered significant service to the cause of freedom.
Pol began painstakingly to compile order-of-battle charts for every Luftwaffe base in France, material that was confided to a suitcase stored at an alleged safe house in Paris, pending the next departure of a courier for Spain. Here was an example of the difficulty of providing ‘real time’ intelligence for London, when complex material could not be transmitted in radio messages that must be brief, to have any hope of escaping German detection. Renault devised a series of questionnaires to be passed to his regional agents, about the strengths and routines of their local German forces. Characteristically, he evoked the spirit of the Testament: ‘Ask, and it shall be given; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it will be opened to you.’ Material was now reaching him in such quantity he enlisted the services of his sister May, ‘Maisie’, as his secretary, a role she embraced enthusiastically.
He was much addicted to wearing a Basque beret, common enough in France, but he also affected a knitted sweater of a distinctive hue, which he had bought in London’s Lillywhites store in August 1940. He abandoned this latter with reluctance only in the winter of 1941, when he was warned the Bordeaux Gestapo had marked him out by his obviously English veston. Later in the war, London handlers for both the BCRA and SOE took pains to ensure their agents wore only French clothing.
At New Year 1942 Renault and his family sat down to lunch in the home of hosts near Nantes, whose cook triumphantly placed on the table a huge cake adorned with the Cross of Lorraine and the inscription ‘Vive De Gaulle!’ On 24 January, his Paris-based wireless-operator Robert Delattre received two important messages from London, addressed to Renault, requesting utmost detail on the Bruneval site.
This had already come to the CND’s attention. Two months earlier Roger Hérissé – agent Dutertre – had reported the presence of a new German installation, some fifty feet high, near Cap d’Antifer. His information was passed to Roger Dumont, who in turned mentioned it via his chief to London. As we have seen, aerial photography had already revealed this Freya array to Reg Jones and Scientific Intelligence. But Hérissé’s familiarity with the Freya’s erection at Bruneval meant that it came as no surprise when Dewavrin demanded further information.
In late January 1942 Gilbert Renault was under orders from the BCRA to return to London, taking with him scores of maps, reports and other intelligence material too weighty to be wirelessed or even couriered. He spent days in a rural safe house, awaiting the BBC message that would prompt him to seek a remote field near Rouen from which he would be picked up by RAF Lysander light aircraft. The rendezvous was repeatedly postponed, however, not least by poor winter weather. Moreover there had been a wave of German arrests of CND agents in Brittany, causing alarm throughout the network. At last it became obvious that it would not be possible to retrieve Renault during the January moon period; his passage to London must wait upon late February – entirely coincidentally, the appointed window for Operation Biting. Emotionally exhausted, he thus returned his family to Paris, where they shivered amid icy weather, lacking fuel for heating, spending their days perpetually clad in overcoats, lightened only by family meals at Prunier.
2 BRUNEVAL
The Bruneval interrogative messages from Dewavrin demanded information within an impossibly tight timescale – a mere forty-eight hours. Pierre Julitte, another BCRA agent serving in France since May 1941, once rebuked Passy for failing to grasp harsh facts of secret war on the ground, above all that the swift execution of orders was often rendered impossible by agents’ inability to use telephones or even the postal service, which were subject to German and Vichy interception.
Now, Renault was instructed not to risk his personal safety to visit upper Normandy. Whoever carried out the mission must, in the event of capture, tell the Germans he had been reconnoitring several coastal sites – ‘trois ou quatre emplacements sur côte’. The second signal from London requested specific details of machine-guns and strongpoints between the Bruneval cliff and the radar sites; number, age and alertness of German troops stationed in the area; together with pinpoints of their quarters.
Rémy studied the map of the area, and also his own agent’s report on the big new Freya array between Étretat and Octeville. He then discussed London’s signals at a meeting with Roger Dumont. He later claimed in his memoirs that the nature of the questions made plain that the British were considering a coup de main by commandos rather than a mere air attack on the installations, though this seems more likely to have been a product of after-knowledge. Dumont, the former airman, read London’s ‘shopping list’ in silence, then demanded quizzically: ‘Alors?’ The best way to be discreet, responded his chief, was not to appear to understand too much: ‘How much time do we need?’
Pol said: ask them for fifteen days.
‘Perfect. Tell me, who was the source of the original report [on the installation]?’
‘Roger Hérissé, a comrade. We call him Dutertre. He is a pilot, like me.’
Pol then departed, to seek out a friend named Charles Chauveau, codenamed Charlemagne, who chanced to be visiting Paris on business. Chauveau was yet another World War I air force veteran, a former instructor in navigation, who now owned a successful Le Havre garage and car dealership. His calling entitled him to an ausweis, a German pass permitting him to travel within the Channel coastal region – la zone interdite – to which access was forbidden for ordinary citizens. Now, Dumont told Chauveau he needed a lift to Normandy, and his friend proved happy to oblige. The two men set forth on a wintry 120-mile journey, a serious undertaking within the constraints of the Occupation. Le Havre’s Gestapo, commanded by Friedrich Maitz and staffed by functionaries named Ackermann, Krieger and Maille, whose names had become local bywords for terror, was intensely active. It was already responsible for a grim roll-call of executions of local patriots. Every traveller, with or without an ausweis, faced the constant hazard of being stopped by German checkpoints or patrols. Chauveau, forty-six, was driving a car which he had fitted with false number-plates such as allowed him to travel in the capital. As they headed out of Paris, he stopped at the city limits to replace his Havre plates, of which the number matched his ausweis. Only then did Dumont confide to his friend their exact destination. He asked if the garagiste was confident of getting them to Bruneval. ‘Easy,’ said Chauveau. ‘I know that area like the back of my hand.’
Reaching Le Havre, twelve miles south of Bruneval, the two men checked into a seedy hotel where no questions were asked about their identities, then shivered through the night fully clothed. In the morning, Chauveau went out to borrow snow-chains for the tyres of his Simca 5, because he knew they must traverse country lanes clogged by several inches of icy whiteness. Then they set forth for Bruneval, a hamlet nestling deep in a wooded valley – a cul-de-sac, from which its single street descended only to the beach, a half-mile below. They stopped at one of the village’s first habitations, its little hotel-restaurant, the characteristically Norman timber-beamed Beau-Minet. ‘I’ve known the owners for years,’ said Chauveau. ‘They are good people. Madame Vennier came from Switzerland, but they belong here now. They’ll tell us what we need to know.’ The Venniers fully justified his hopes, displaying astonishing courage considering that a German infantry platoon was billeted in their own hotel. Inside a quarter of an hour, Pol was fully briefed on the Luftwaffe radar technicians occupying the Gosset farm, on the plateau northwards, just inland from the ‘radio station’, together with details of the numbers of Germans manning nearby strongpoints. At that period of the war the atmosphere was relaxed, with local inhabitants moving relatively freely around the area on foot or bicycles, and indeed continuing to occupy cottages and houses within close proximity to German positions. The post commanding the immediate beach approach was a former villa named Stella Maris, now faced with sandbags as a machine-gun position. Dumont, with a courage bordering on recklessness, insisted he must view this for himself: ‘We must look at the sea.’
‘Consider!’ exclaimed M. Vennier. ‘Access is forbidden! There are mines everywhere!’ Dumont persisted. The two men walked boldly down the unmetalled track towards the blockhouse at the foot of the cliff, five hundred yards below the hotel. A sentry appeared at a knife-rest gate in its protective wire entanglements, and halted them. Chauveau disarmed the man’s wariness by addressing him in fluent German. ‘We’re only taking a stroll. I belong around here, but my friend is Parisian and having got this far he doesn’t want to go home without seeing the sea’ – invisible just around the corner of the deep defile in which they stood. The German hesitated, surprisingly unsurprised by these two middle-aged men ‘enjoying the view’ on an icy winter day, trudging through the snow. Chauveau continued: ‘We know we’re lucky to have got this far. Anyway, I wouldn’t dare to go any further. They tell us there are mines?’
‘Ja, ja! Minen!’
‘Would you maybe be so kind as to come on with us?’
‘Jawohl,’ said the good-natured, obviously bored sentry, making the biggest mistake of his career as a guardian of Nazism. He became their guide through the last yards of this perilous odyssey, showing them the way through the wire and supposed minefield. Dumont winked at Chauveau, who took the cue and offered the soldier a cigarette, causing him to turn his back on the sea to light it. The garagiste enthused, again in German: ‘This place was so pretty before the war … Ah! If you could have seen it then! Isn’t it a shame that you have to pass your days in this forgotten corner?’
The confused German responded: ‘Ja! Nein! Ja!’, while Chauveau’s companion sought to memorize every detail of the view before and below him. The sentry confided the vital information that there were, in reality, no mines on the cliff descent or beach below. The two Frenchmen departed amid mutual professions of goodwill. Back up at the Beau-Minet, Chauveau was delighted to encounter some of his own relatives, who could provide an alibi for his presence in the hamlet. The spies, justifiably exulting in the success of their morning’s work, drove a few miles to Gonneville where they stopped for a self-indulgent lunch at the Hôtel des Vieux Plats. Dumont’s bravado caused him to note the names of German officers listed in its visitors’ book. They then planned to inspect the German airfield at Bléville, but found the approach road closed by a barrier. The Parisian decided to remain a second night in Le Havre. Then Chauveau drove Dumont uneventfully back to the capital, where he reported to Renault. The CND’s chief recognized at once that the novice agent – for the airman had joined the network less than two months earlier – had done a superb job. They spent several hours transforming the information gathered at Bruneval into messages brief enough to be wirelessed to London by Robert Delattre, tapping at a morse key in his garret.
‘9-2-42 De Rémy (code A) no. 81 – Affaire Theuville – Stop – The path rises between high cliffs from a beach 22 metres wide [between the villa and the sea] and continues through Bruneval to the village of La Poterie stop 1. Beach and coast are not mined. 2. Two machine-guns in the first house above the beach [Stella Maris]. 3. Wired strongpoints 10 metres out from this house, covering the entrance to the road. At 100 metres then again 100 metres down the road are two wired positions two metres deep. 4. There are two machine-gun posts on each side [atop the heights] of the cliff defile. 5. 30 defenders, aged 35–40, under the orders of a senior NCO, serve three-week rotations.’
A second signal stated that these men had no special training; that a further five Germans occupied a second house, while twenty-five worked during the day on defences related to the batteries at Cap d’Antifer, sleeping overnight in the Beau-Minet. At nearby La Poterie a further sixty men of the same kind as those described above – given their average age, presumably second-line troops – were quartered in the school and mairie; ‘aucune méfiance’ signified that there was no sense of mistrust or apprehension among these German detachments.
Both these signals were received safely in London. They represented one of the more notable ‘humint’ intelligence successes of the war, a tiny operation perfectly executed by all those involved, and accompanied by almost incredible good fortune. There was the luck that Pol and Charlemagne carried out their journey without check or arrest. The two men then showed courage and ingenuity to seek out precisely the information COHQ needed, in order to mount its raid. The Germans displayed an insouciance and laxity most uncommon among Hitler’s forces, and of which more would be seen before the curtain fell on the Bruneval saga. Finally, Bob Delattre was able to dispatch the agents’ reports without a terrifying eruption of Germans bursting into the room where he transmitted, as happened to Resistance operators so often, and would soon befall him.
The wireless-operator was a twenty-seven-year-old teacher’s son from Boulogne. He had worked as a chemist’s assistant, been mobilized with the French Army in 1939, then escaped German captivity to join de Gaulle’s BCRA in London, by way of West Africa. He wrote to his parents before he embarked upon his mission to France: ‘What am I going to do? To fight. Not with machine-guns or cannon. But with my eyes, my ears, and a little of my brain. I set forth upon an existence in an environment polluted by the Aryan race. If I must die, dry your tears. Tell yourselves that my death has not been in vain. To fight for my country, for my family, for the freedom of peoples, is my only thought.’ He messaged the BCRA a month before he was betrayed and captured by the Gestapo in May 1942, dying under torture in Fresnes a year later: ‘I love the work that I do and hope we shall succeed in our tasks, which I perform in the hope that success will one day bring us liberty and peace.’ Which, indeed, they did, over the graves of Delattre and other men and women like him. As for Rémy, Gilbert Renault, if, in earlier days, there had been much about him that might be deemed absurd, there proved in France’s supreme time of trial to be much that was fine and good. It is unlikely Operation Biting could have been brought to success without him.
* For much of Renault’s first mission to France, his codename was Raymond. However, in this narrative to avoid confusion I adopt throughout the codename Rémy, by which he later became famous.