Spy Princess (32 page)

Vogt was asked to identify the woman who stood before him in court as the ‘Renée’ he had mentioned in his sworn statement. He admitted she looked a little different and had put on some weight. He said he had met her once more after Noor’s arrest as she had called the office and demanded the rest of the payment that was due to her. He said he had told her that she would have to come to the office of the treasurer and show her identity card before she could collect the money. Though she was reluctant to undertake the formalities she did so and he read the name on her identity card. It said ‘Renée Garry’.
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Renée Garry denied it was she who had made the call that betrayed Noor. Marguerite Garry, who had known Noor well, and who was now a widow, said Renée was a possessive sister and did not like the attention being shown to Noor. She said Renée was also jealous of Noor because she, Renée, was in love with Antelme but Antelme had no time for her after he met Noor.

Renée Garry was asked if she would have liked to have sent her brother to his death. She replied, ‘No’.

The sole witness for the defence was Gieules, who had unknowingly been sent by Noor on the orders of London to meet the Gestapo. Still holding a grudge against her for something that was no fault of hers, he said Noor was in touch with double agents and was not conscious of security. The defence also produced a letter in court written to Renée Garry by Maurice Buckmaster after the war, thanking her for her support of members of the organisation.

On the basis that her brother too had been captured by the Gestapo after Noor’s arrest, and that the only witness against her was a Nazi, Renée was acquitted. Vilayat said he could never bring himself to forgive her, though his Sufi faith demanded that he do so. He said he could forgive the German soldiers who carried out orders but not the person who betrayed his sister. The conflict always remained with him.
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On the German side, Sturmbannführer Hans Josef Kieffer was tried before a British military court at Wuppertal on the charge of having passed on an order (which had come from Berlin) for the execution of a party of uniformed soldiers captured in Normandy in August 1944. Kieffer called John Starr as a witness to say whether he had seen any prisoners at Avenue Foch being tortured. Starr said he hadn’t seen any himself. But when he was asked whether he had seen all the prisoners brought to Avenue Foch, Starr had to say no. He could also not speak for other prisoners held elsewhere. Kieffer was executed.

For some time after the war the SOE was kept under wraps. Little was revealed about its organisation and methods, which were all kept strictly classified under the Official Secrets Act. SOE itself was closed after the war and much of its material lost in a fire that broke out in the Baker Street office. It was only when the war crimes tribunals of Wuppertal began in May 1946, that the first wave of publicity began. The trial of the prison officers of Natzweiler brought out the stories of the agents who had been killed by lethal injection. Though the victims were not named, there were reports that the girls were not quite dead when they were put in the crematorium ovens. It caused an outrage. Newspapers carried headlines saying that British women had been burnt alive.

It was the first time the British public became aware that women agents had been sent into the field on dangerous missions. Some asked what the justification for it was. In 1958, the journalist Elizabeth Nicholas investigated what had happened to her friend Diana Rowden, whose name she read in the papers as one of the thirteen women agents who had died in France. Their names were mentioned (for the first time) in a plaque dedicated in their honour at St Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge in 1948. Nicholas went on to publish her book
Death Be Not Proud
about seven SOE agents in the war. It was she who revealed the identity of the fourth victim at Natzweiler, Sonia Olschanezky. Without Nicholas’s pioneering work, the fourth victim may have gone unnoticed and her family would never have known what happened to her.

By 1952 Jean Overton Fuller’s
Madeleine
had been published. Fuller went to Paris to trace what had happened to her friend Noor and met her friends and the Germans who held her in captivity. Noor’s story led her to research other books about the SOE in France. Both
Double Webs
and
The Starr Affair
caused a stir. In these Fuller spoke for the first time about the radio game played by the Germans on the captured wireless sets which led to agents, arms and money being dropped straight into the hands of the Gestapo. She also claimed that England was aware of the games and wilfully carried on the deception so as to distract the Germans. Both Nicholas’s and Fuller’s books led to the impression that innocent girls had been sent to their deaths in France by the SOE. They had allowed the radio game to go on and sacrificed agents. While it was true that England did play the radio game back to the Germans, it was not till the spring of 1944 that this started, when Baker Street realised that the Germans were deceiving them.

Why London continued to send agents when there were doubts that a circuit may have been blown is hard to explain. Once again, the reason was that in the fog of war, they sometimes did not stick to the strict rules of security checks, thinking the agent may have dropped the check in a moment of carelessness or hurry. Buckmaster himself said it was not possible to be watertight in imposing these rules as agents could forget to give their security checks if they were transmitting under very difficult conditions. Yet there is no denying that there were serious mistakes, for which Noor and her colleagues paid a heavy price.

When Gilbert Norman had been captured and the Germans forced him to send radio messages, he used only his bluff security check to warn London that he had been captured. Not only did London ignore the dropping of the security check, but Maurice Buckmaster himself actually replied to Norman telling him that he had forgotten his security check and to be more careful next time.
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This was a crucial lapse of security which was to prove disastrous. How Buckmaster could have sent such a note when the very purpose of the bluff security check was to establish whether an agent had been captured, showed fundamental flaws at the highest level in F-section. The note revealed to the Germans that there were two security checks and they put further pressure on captured agents. Since Norman’s arrest had been reported by Noor, as well as by Cohen and Dowlen, it was incredible that such a message should have been sent at all. It also showed poor lack of coordination in Baker Street. Norman was said to have been so distressed at the way his message was received that he started cooperating with the Germans. They successfully continued to play back Norman’s set and that of Macalister, sending Agazarian, Gieules and Dutilleul straight to the Gestapo.

Noor too, had been sent by her chiefs straight to the Germans, when they had told her to meet two agents at Café Colisée. She had had a narrow escape, but had come face to face with the Gestapo who from then could identify her physically. For ten months from July 1943, the Germans ran four
Funkspiele
(wireless games) with captured F-section transmitters. Later, in February 1944, they played Noor’s set and captured France Antelme, Madeleine Damerment and Lionel Lee. Once again Buckmaster had ignored Leo Marks’ warning that Noor may be in German hands, with fatal consequences.

Buckmaster had also been sent a telegram from Berne on 1 October 1943 from ‘Jacques’ saying:

Sonja returned from Paris 25th reports Ernest Maurice and Madeleine had serious accident and in hospital. Maurice is Barde. Madeleine is w/t operator. If you go ahead on pick up plan I could tell on receipt of photograph whether genuine or Gestapo Maurice. Am trying to get further information via Sonja.

Buckmaster replied:

Have had apparently genuine messages from Madeleine since 25th therefore regard Sonja’s news with some doubt. Can you give us estimate of Sonja’s reliability?

The original message was sent by Jacques Weil of the Juggler circuit, who had escaped to Berne after the Prosper debacle. The ‘Sonja’ in the message is clearly Sonia Olschanezky, his courier and fiancée, who was lying low in Paris, and who was later killed at Natzweiler. Though the warning was wrong as Noor was never hospitalised and was not caught till mid-October, it nevertheless should have put London on guard and made them examine her messages more carefully. This, again, Buckmaster did not do, despite Noor sending out her distress special security check after capture.

It took F-section six weeks to realise that Norman had been arrested and the messages coming from his wireless were false. When London realised the game the Germans were playing they started playing the same game back to them. They continued to drop arms and cash to the Germans, giving them the impression that they had not tumbled to their deception. This gave the SOE time to build new circuits which the Germans did not get to know about. It also gave the Gestapo a false sense of security. Besides, London could find out where the Gestapo had their local reception committees organised.

Goetz and his assistant, Joseph Placke, were delighted at the large amounts of cash they received (about 8,572,000 francs or nearly £43,000),
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but SOE felt it was a loss worth incurring. By distracting the Germans, Maurice Buckmaster hoped to build new circuits in south Normandy of which the Germans knew nothing. These were the Headmaster and Scientist circuits which played a crucial role in the area before D-Day. But by then many of his top agents had been captured.

In April and May, Himmler, Goering and Hitler are said to have discussed the radio game. They had been wondering when they should tell London that they had captured some of their best agents. Hitler thought this blow should be delivered to them at such a time that it disarmed them completely. But by then Baker Street, too, was in on the act. Resistance had been planted firmly on French soil. The sacrifice of the wireless operators, who suffered the highest casualties in the field, would be simply remembered as their contribution to the war.

Apart from the controversy over the radio games, there was also the belief that the SOE had protected double agents like Déricourt for their own ends, exposing their own agents to the Gestapo. Jean Overton Fuller, was, however prepared to give Déricourt the benefit of the doubt, saying he had carried on a deliberate deception of the Germans and given them some secrets to win their trust. In exchange, he had managed to secure the evacuation of many agents back to England. Déricourt managed to charm and convince Jean Overton Fuller that he was not just a double agent but a triple agent reporting to someone else as well as Buckmaster. The third group, he implied, was MI6.

In June 1948, Déricourt faced a military tribunal in France accused of betrayal of agents. But F-section’s Nicholas Bodington appeared as a witness in his favour saying he not only knew that Déricourt was friendly with the Germans but ‘also how and why’. He claimed he was doing it for a reason and he would trust his life to Déricourt. When Bodington visited Paris in July 1943, Déricourt had arranged his safe passage. This could be the reason Bodington had infinite trust in him. But according to the Germans (Hugo Bleicher of the Abwehr), Déricourt had arranged for Bodington’s stay and safe passage with German help, precisely so that Déricourt would get the full support and trust of the SOE. The extensive SOE files on Déricourt reveal that they mistrusted him, had him watched and even tried to bug him, but in the end they let him get away. The files reveal that the SOE also mistrusted Bodington, but again did little about it.

Goetz had said that Déricourt had dined with him and Karl Boemelburg (the head of the Paris Gestapo based at 82 Avenue Foch), the last night before he left Paris. He also said that Déricourt made copies of all the letters that went on his Lysanders and passed them on to Boemelburg.
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Déricourt had informed Goetz about the place of transmission of his own radio operator, so that the German wireless-detection squads would not arrest him. He suggested Déricourt was Boemelburg’s agent, and the latter had ‘complete confidence’ in him.

Déricourt’s photocopies of the letters no doubt demoralised British agents, including Noor, by giving the impression that there was a traitor in London. Both Kieffer and Goetz said they had got information from Déricourt. Other agents in the field, like Henri Frager of the Donkeyman circuit, had had their suspicions about him,
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but in the end it was the word of Bodington, an F-section chief, versus a Nazi, and Déricourt was acquitted. One of F-section’s most controversial double agents walked free. He died in a plane crash in 1962.

There were strong allegations that each one of Déricourt’s flights was watched by the Germans and the arriving agents were followed. Despite all these suspicions, Déricourt had been retained by F-section, leading to questions in many minds about the SOE’s game plan. Since it was Déricourt who had greeted the Lysander flight of 16 June carrying Noor and her colleagues, could it be a surprise that all four agents would die on their mission? Many of these questions remain unanswered.

What was beyond a doubt, however, was that though the SOE made many costly slip-ups back home, their agents in the field had done exemplary work. According to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, the contributions of the SOE had shortened the war in Europe by six months.

According to SOE historian M.R.D. Foot, it was the necessity of war that led to the radio game and the greater goal of deceiving the Germans and securing the Normandy landings. It was unfortunate that by the time London started playing the game back, they had already lost many top agents. The need to fight a force like Hitler had led to unusual methods. Mistakes were made in the heat of the moment, but the ultimate victory had been achieved.

Foot thought it questionable that agents like Noor were sent into the field without finishing their training, but the exigencies of the hour demanded a radio operator and she had to leave. ‘To the question why people with so little training were sent to do such important work, the only reply is: the work had to be done, and there was no one else to send,’ wrote Foot.
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