Spy Princess (27 page)

Accompanied by Goering, Ribbentrop and Hess, the Führer surveyed the scene in the forest. The site included a statue of Marshal Foch, a wagon-lit that had been there during the surrender, and an inscription condemning ‘the criminal pride of the German Empire’. These Hitler looked at with an expression of ‘hate, scorn, revenge, triumph’.
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He stayed only a few minutes to hear the preamble to Pétain’s Armistice read out and left after the German national anthem had been played triumphantly on the spot. His troops then blew up the slab with the inscription, razed the entire site and towed away the wagon-lit to Berlin.
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To Hitler, it symbolised the victory of the Third Reich and revenge for the defeat in 1918. The Gestapo then chose to have their headquarters on Avenue Foch to rub further salt into the wounds.

The German word ‘Gestapo’ was the abbreviation for Geheime Staats Polizei or Secret State Police, the organisation founded in 1933 by Goering and controlled by Himmler. The Gestapo was the most hated branch of the German forces, notorious for arresting people who were never seen again. Such was the fear of the Gestapo that Parisians would say that a person had been taken to the Avenue Foch rather than mention that they had been picked up by the Gestapo. The job of arresting agents was the responsibility of the Gestapo. It overlapped with the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the party security service, as both were divisions of the Reichssicher-heitshauptamt or RHSA, the SS-controlled security service. There was little difference in practice between the two departments and in Allied eyes they worked as one.
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Both their officers and non-commissioned officers were all members of the SS, Hitler’s crack bodyguards. At the Nuremberg trials the two bodies were indicted jointly.

The three buildings of numbers 82, 84 and 86 Avenue Foch were occupied by the SD and the Gestapo. It was to no. 84 that captured F-section agents were sent. Heading the Gestapo team at no. 84 was Sturmbannführer Josef Kieffer.

Number 84 was a magnificent building with high ceilings and a wide marble staircase leading to the upper floors. On the fourth floor were Kieffer’s office and residential quarters. One of the large rooms with a grand chandelier was used as the office while at the back of the house were the bedroom and kitchen and a hall with a white wooden staircase running up to the fifth floor. Here there were a few small dark rooms originally meant to be servants’ quarters. The Gestapo had converted them into seven mini prison cells. Two slightly larger rooms to the front of the house on this floor were used by the guard and the interpreter, Ernest Vogt. There was a bathroom and two lavatories, one of which was used by the prisoners.

Escorted by four guards, Noor was taken straight up to the office of Ernest Vogt on the fifth floor. When they had arrested her, Cartaud and Vogt had collected a notebook with her codes and messages in it from her bedside table. It was the one that Viennot had asked her to destroy. They had also seized her radio set. It was a prize haul for the Gestapo.

Noor was still shaking with rage when she was led to her room. She faced Vogt’s questions with fierce resistance, telling him over and over again that she would say nothing, no matter what. Vogt, however, continued to fire questions at her. Who was she working with, who did she meet every day, who were the people that provided her with safe houses? Noor remained stubbornly silent, and Vogt finally decided to send her to her room. Noor asked if she could have a bath.

This was an unusual request, but thinking it was better to go along with her, they agreed. But the guards left the door slightly ajar so they could keep an eye on her. At this Noor let loose another temper tantrum, saying she wanted to undress and have a full bath and she would not tolerate the guards looking at her. Vogt, thinking all the while that it was better to humour a feisty prisoner like Noor, agreed and asked the guard to shut the door.

Within seconds, Noor had climbed out of the bathroom window and was standing on a narrow gutter which ran underneath the attic windows. She walked like a cat, holding on to the tiles for support. Noor had always been sure-footed, clambering on to roofs in the past to hook up her aerial. She had wasted no time in making a bid to escape.

Vogt, not entirely comfortable with having to leave Noor alone, went to the lavatory next door and looked out of the window. He was shocked to see Noor standing on the gutter. She was making her way towards his window, unaware that he was there.

He didn’t want to distract her and make her lose her footing. A fall from here meant certain death. Instead he waited till she reached the window and then said quietly ‘Madeleine, don’t be silly. You will kill yourself. Think of your mother! Give me your hand.’
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She looked shocked to see him, hesitated and then grasped his extended hand. Vogt pulled her in by her shoulders, head first, and marched her to her cell. Defeated, Noor sat down on the narrow bed and broke down. She cursed herself, crying that she had been a coward and should have allowed herself to fall and die rather than be captured. She was almost hysterical with anger and frustration. Finally Vogt decided to bring her colleague Gilbert Norman to see her. Ever since his arrest with Andrée Borrel and the Laurents in June, Norman had been kept a prisoner at Avenue Foch. Noor was surprised to see him. Vogt asked Norman to try to calm Noor down and tell her there was no need to commit suicide. Norman did his bit, telling her, as he had told other agents he had met at Avenue Foch, that the Germans knew everything and there was no point in trying to hide anything.
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It did not make the slightest difference.

Seeing Norman apparently quite comfortable in Avenue Foch made Noor even more angry. She refused to cooperate with Vogt and remained silent. After a few hours had passed, a guard brought Noor lunch, but she refused to eat it and later refused dinner as well. Vogt was trying hard to placate her. He ordered her to come for dinner to his room and offered her English tea and cigarettes. She accepted the tea and smoked the cigarettes furiously, but hardly touched the food.

Vogt now started playing the psychological games which he used to demoralise prisoners. He showed Noor that they had managed to decipher her codes from her notebook. He also showed her copies of the letters she had sent to her mother by the August Lysander, along with copies of her reports and letters to F-section. Vogt tried to give her the impression that the Germans already knew a lot, so it was pointless trying to hide anything. Vogt tried to make Noor believe that the Germans had an informer in Baker Street so she would feel even more vulnerable. He told her that he knew Maurice Buckmaster was their head, that they trained at Beaulieu in Hampshire (he even pronounced it correctly as ‘Bewley’) and that she had done her parachute training in Ringway in Manchester, and showed her aerial photographs of some of the schools. Noor had not done parachute training so this bit of information was wrong. Nevertheless, Noor was shocked to learn that the Germans knew the details of their training schools. It had the desired effect.

‘You must have an agent in London!’ she gasped. Vogt let her think they did.
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He questioned her till midnight but got nothing out of her. Finally he decided to call it a day.

The next morning the interrogation began again. Vogt showed Noor the copy of her messages and demanded to know who the people mentioned in them were and what they did. Once again Noor remained silent. He then told Noor that some of the people may have helped her in small ways by providing a room for the night. If she didn’t give the names, these innocent people too would be arrested, as they would eventually round up and arrest everyone. Vogt was a skilful interrogator who had mastered the tactics. While at Avenue Foch he wore civilian clothes so as not to appear too threatening. But there is a photograph of him in full SD uniform standing at Avenue Foch with the rest of the staff. On one hand he talked tough; on the other hand he tried to confuse Noor and hoped his gentle persuasion would make her open up. But Noor gave out nothing. Her stubborn streak matched Vogt’s persistence and the German repeatedly drew a blank.
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Kieffer had the help of a radio specialist, Josef Goetz, who played a dangerous radio game with London called
Englandspiel
. Once the Germans had captured the wireless sets they could easily use them to transmit back to London. All the sets came with their own special crystals which were tuned to a certain frequency to contact London for incoming and outgoing messages. Goetz studied the style of transmission of the operators and successfully imitated it, coming on the airwaves on the same frequency and giving London the impression that the agent was transmitting from the field. Initially Goetz worked on his own, then as the game got larger he was assisted by Joseph Placke, Von Kapri and Werner Ruehl. Each had three or four decoy transmissions on hand during the time when the radio game was running.
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Together they sent false messages to Baker Street and demanded equipment and reinforcements, which the Germans seized. They could also use the radio game to find out the location of SOE agents and set traps to capture others. Goetz had successfully played back the wireless sets of the two Canadian agents, Macalister and Pickersgill, and later that of Norman. These had led to the arrests of Jack Agazarian and Robert Gieules. Goetz now tried to work on Noor. He took Noor down to his office trying to get her to reveal her security checks and some of the technical side of her work. Once again he faced a wall of silence. True to her word, Noor said nothing.

Goetz, however, had Noor’s past codes from her diary and her radio set and crystals. He used this to transmit to London and started a radio game called Operation Diana. He even imitated her particular style of transmission. On 17 October, the Germans sent a message on Poste Madeleine: ‘My Cachette unsafe. New address Belliard. Hundred and Fifty Seven rue Vercingetorix, Paris, Password de la part de monsieur de Rual. This perfectly safe. Good bye.’
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At the receiving station at Grendon, the signals operator noted that the true security check was present but the bluff check had been omitted. Though Noor had not returned on the full-moon mid-October Lysander, London was not alarmed. They replied that they had received the new cachette address. Leo Marks had always taken a special interest in Noor, and followed her messages closely. Up till the end of September he had noticed that her transmissions were flawless, with all the security checks intact, and was secretly very proud of her. He had told the operators at Grendon that he had given Noor a special security check and they should watch her wireless traffic very closely and look out for it. But the girls at Station 53a had not noticed.

Noor, however, had remembered her extended briefing with Marks in London and what he had told her about her special security check. He had told her not to use a key phrase containing eighteen letters. If she ever did so, he would know she had been captured. In her first message through Goetz, Noor had sent a transposition-key eighteen letters long. Later, Marks saw the message and noticed Noor’s cry for help. He immediately took it to Buckmaster and said he thought Noor was a prisoner, but Buckmaster did not believe him. He said he intended to continue the two-way traffic.
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This decision would lead to further fatalities for F-section agents. Marks prayed that Noor’s coding had just been a lapse, but in his heart he knew that she had sent him her special security check and he feared the worst.

London was, however, slightly guarded from now on. Goetz asked for twelve containers of supplies and received only one. The Germans knew that without the security check, the messages were not foolproof and they would soon be discovered.

Vogt now adopted a different tactic. He tried to make Noor relax, talking to her about unrelated things, sometimes about her family. But all he learnt was that her name was Nora Baker. Noor once again gave out the name she had told the Balachowskys and others in the Prosper sub-circuit who thought that Nora Baker was her real name and Jeanne-Marie her cover name. Noor had concealed her real identity even from those she was closest to in the circuit. She did not want to reveal that her real name was Inayat Khan, because she did not want the Gestapo to catch up with Hidayat who was still in France and use him or his children as hostages to make her speak.

As time went on without Noor being tortured, she slowly lost her fierce attitude to her captors at Avenue Foch. Vogt in particular played up to her, trying to be the friendly face of the Gestapo. He would talk to her every day trying to learn anything he could. Noor spoke about her mother and Vogt could gather that she was very close to her.

Sometimes he called her for dinner to his room to extract information. But Noor never dropped her guard, and though they discussed many things, she never let slip any details about her operations or the people she worked with. Sometimes she chose her words carefully and revealed a trivial fact which she knew he would know already and which was of no use to anybody. Later in their sworn statements, Goetz and Kieffer both said that no arrests were made as a result of Noor’s capture as she revealed nothing.

Vogt later told Jean Overton Fuller that he had never met anyone like Noor and he admired her courage, bravery and kindness. He once asked her whether she sometimes felt that she had wasted her life by joining the service and that her sacrifice had been in vain since they had mopped up three-quarters of the French section. But she replied that it did not matter. She had served her country and that was her recompense.
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Noor was not an easy prisoner. She demanded things. She asked for fresh clothes, toiletries and paper and requested that someone go to her residence at the rue de la Faisenderie to collect them. She thought Solange would know that she had been arrested and sent a note asking for the things to be given to the ‘bearer’. Solange, however, did not know that Noor was a prisoner. Taking advantage of this, Vogt sent Pierre Cartaud to collect the items, pretending to be a member of the French Resistance so that he could gather some more information and possibly trace other agents. Sure enough, Cartaud saw Garry and his wife at Solange’s flat on 17 October and came back and reported this to Vogt. The Garrys had moved out of their own flat after they heard of the arrest of Madame Aigrain and were trying to get a flight to England. They had come to stay at Solange’s flat hoping to get a message about their flights on 16 October. The very next day they were spotted by Cartaud, who had called with one of Noor’s notes. Cartaud, Vogt and three other Gestapo officers now returned to the apartment where the Garrys had just finished breakfast and arrested them. They were taken to Avenue Foch. Noor had no idea about these arrests. Neither did Solange, because she had left the flat earlier. She thought the Garrys had left suddenly, as they often did.