The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (26 page)

Then I met Patricia Génève, Maurice Southgate’s daughter, and I saw the whole picture in a different light. She and her brother have since become friends of mine and have
told me that they knew virtually nothing about their father’s wartime activities. He refused to talk about them or give his children any indication of what he had done. That is not unusual:
many agents were reluctant to share their experiences and by doing so relive the clandestine role they had played. From what Patricia told me at the time I had the impression that her father was
remote, almost withdrawn at times, and could be very taciturn. And I asked myself: was it unresolved anger or bitterness at what he must have felt to be the unjust choice Yeo-Thomas had made? Then
Patricia and her husband, Marc, who has taken a great interest in his father-in-law’s wartime activities, enlightened me.

‘It was Papa’s choice,’ Patricia said. When talking with Hessel she had discovered a lot she didn’t know about her father. Hessel told her that on arriving at Buchenwald,
Southgate had discovered a group of Polish prisoners to whom he had taught English in London before being infiltrated into France and he immediately gravitated towards them. ‘Don’t
worry about me,’ he had apparently told the other members of the group, ‘I can manage. You look after yourselves.’ The Poles had hidden him and kept him safe when the others were
executed. So there was no question of his being part of Yeo-Thomas’s escape plan.

‘Professor Foot wrote that your father came back a broken man, which would not be surprising considering what he had suffered. And you say your father could be remote, almost
withdrawn,’ I queried. ‘Do you think he was suffering the after-effects of all he had gone through during the war?’

‘Not at all,’ Patricia smiled. ‘He may have been “broken” when he returned, but he had certainly recovered by the time my brother and I were born. He wasn’t
really remote, just naturally reserved, like all Englishmen. As far as we could see, there were no unpleasant after-effects. When the war ended, he went home to his wife and picked up their life
where he had left it in 1939. My parents were married in 1937, but because of the war they had to wait ten years before they had children, so when I arrived in 1947 and then my brother was born
shortly afterwards, he was immensely proud and took a great interest in us. It was always Papa who plaited my hair every morning before I left for school. And when our daughter was born he and she
were inseparable. He took her everywhere with him. No, Papa seemed to be a very happy, contented family man.’

‘If you don’t think he suffered any consequences from his wartime activities, why do you think he was reluctant to talk to you about them?’

‘I may be wrong,’ Patricia’s husband interrupted, ‘but I have the feeling that my father-in-law was still working “behind the scenes”. He had connections with
the British embassy and was responsible for gathering the names and keeping in touch with British nationals living over here whom he should inform and arrange for their evacuation if ever there
were another crisis. This was during the “Cold War” period.’

It seemed to be a plausible answer. There is no official verification of this, but if it were the case that Southgate had never really abandoned his wartime training, then he wouldn’t be
the only member of SOE to do so!

I only met Maurice Southgate once, at a lunch party here in Paris in the mid-1970s, well after the end of the war. He seemed normal enough, charming in fact, without any outward signs of
psychological damage.

Without making comparisons or wishing to be critical or judgemental, but remembering the traumas some people had lived through and survived, one cannot help wondering whether, as far as Suzanne
Deboué and Mlle Fontaine are concerned, wallowing in what can only be described as their self-imposed misery and refusing to face up to reality was really a luxury they indulged in and may
even have enjoyed. Had they perhaps lacked what we used to call good old-fashioned ‘guts’, and should they have been told that, even though knocked down by life’s blows, they needed to
‘pick themselves up, dust themselves down and start all over again’?

We can only conclude that some survive, and some do not.

SOE was not a large organization, and recruitment was mainly by word of mouth, therefore it could pick and choose those it accepted for training. Perhaps that was its strength.
Unlike de Gaulle, SOE was not interested in a prospective agent’s present or former political opinions. The general was terrified of a communist takeover in France once hostilities ended, and
refused to consider any candidate who had, or had ever had, communist leanings. SOE looked for qualities in a candidate such as intelligence, discretion, determination. To them, these were what
mattered. Their political opinions, past or present, were of no interest. When recruiting future agents they also needed to be sure that they had not volunteered for the ‘wrong reasons’
– to escape from an unhappy marriage, a broken relationship or perhaps from a desire to commit suicide as honourably as possible. This was the case of George Millar.

George returned to England after serving in the Middle East to find that the wife he adored had left him for a naval officer. In despair, he volunteered for SOE. But during the long training he
met and fell in love with the woman he later married, and no longer wished to ‘honourably’ end his life: he now had a reason to live! He could have turned back, changed his mind,
refused to leave: but he didn’t. He was parachuted, in uniform, into France after D-Day as a member of a ‘Jed’ team, to help the resistance and to stir up trouble. He managed to
do it very well and survived. At one time he lived for several hours – or was it days, I can’t remember – in a sewer! I believe Michel de Bourbon-Parme, a descendant of one of the
last kings of France, was part of George’s team. Michel was incredibly handsome. I thought he was twenty-two but apparently he was a hardened veteran of nineteen. He’d put up his age
and volunteered at sixteen, there being no way the authorities could check his age, since his birth would have been registered in France.

George looked unbelievably English, one couldn’t mistake him for anything else, with his blond hair, blue eyes and fresh complexion so, before he left, his hair was dyed black. But when he
returned it had grown and now half was golden and half black – he looked like a two-flavoured blancmange! After the war George wrote a highly successful book entitled
Maquis,
recounting his experiences as a ‘Jed’. I typed the first rough draft, about a dozen pages, which he later worked on and expanded into his bestseller.

Some did inevitably ‘slip through the net’. Perhaps Cecily Lefort was another one of them. An Englishwoman, she was married to a French doctor who, when France fell, despite her
protests, insisted that she leave for England. But she was desperate to return to France and be reunited with her husband. She joined SOE and, after having trained as a radio operator under the
codename ‘Alice’, was sent to work for Francis Cammaerts’s Jockey
réseau
in the Drôme, far from Paris, where her husband had his consulting rooms. In June
1943, just as the Prosper group was about to explode, she and Noor Inayat-Khan arrived by Lysander at one of Déricourt’s chosen landing grounds outside Paris.

Was ‘Alice’ another one of Déricourt’s victims? She may have been trailed, as Noor was trailed, from the time she arrived all the way down to Marseilles, her first stop
before joining her
réseau
in the Drôme. ‘Roger’ said later that, after a very short time, he realized she was quite unsuitable for the work and, had it been
possible, he would have had her sent back. According to him, she was very frightened and apprehensive about her mission, nervy, pessimistic, convinced from the start that she would not survive. Had
she had some premonition, or perhaps a warning? She may well have contacted her husband before making her way south. We don’t know with whom, if with anyone, she had been in touch in Paris.
Sadly her fears ended by being justified: she was arrested three months after her arrival in France, tortured and finally executed at Ravensbrück.

How had she slipped through the net? I don’t know. I do know that Buck often trusted his intuition, his ‘feeling’ about a student’s capabilities, even when the
instructors from the various schools they had attended gave an adverse report. Perhaps that was the case with Cecily Lefort. On the other hand, the reports sent back to him about Francis Cammaerts
were far from reassuring. He was described as pleasant, hard-working, having an easy contact with the other students on the course, but totally lacking in the initiative and the necessary
leadership qualities required of an agent. But, in spite of this, Buck backed him, and he left for the field. Full marks for Buck’s intuition. Cammaerts returned from France covered in glory.
He was one of F Section’s finest agents.

As already mentioned, the head of MI6 and his close associates disapproved of SOE. They didn’t care for our guerrilla tactics They resented this ‘upstart’
army composed of amateurs who behaved in a nasty, noisy, ungentlemanly fashion – making bangs, killing Germans – and they did everything in their power to frustrate and hinder
SOE’s efforts, sadly, themselves often resorting to ‘ungentlemanly schemes’ in order to achieve their goal. In this, they were ably assisted by General de Gaulle, head of the
BCRA. Malcolm Muggeridge once remarked that MI6 and General de Gaulle’s joint hatred of SOE was stronger that their hatred of the Abwehr (the German intelligence unit). And Winston Churchill
was reported to have said that, of all the crosses he had to bear during the war, the Cross of Lorraine (the symbol of the Free French) was the heaviest.

In this tangled web of tensions, antagonisms and rivalries, one might almost say SOE’s problem was that it did not belong to the Ministry of Defence, or the ‘War Box’, as it
was then known. So, as we were not their responsibility, they did nothing to help us. We were the responsibility of the Ministry of Economic Warfare, not under the control of the British Military
Intelligence Service, and answerable only to Winston Churchill. The Foreign Office could perhaps have helped or protected us, but unfortunately MI6 was an important player in their hierarchy, and
MI6, disliking us so intensely, refused to cooperate in any way. They saw SOE as an upstart army seeking to usurp them. But they were wrong. SOE had no desire to usurp them. We were fighting a very
different war from them, a war far removed from the velvet-glove policy of bona fide espionage.

SOE was Churchill’s ‘baby’, and Churchill was the supreme authority. Since we were under his protection, as long as he was in power not even the combined efforts of MI6 and
General de Gaulle were able to remove us from the scene. But, after the war ended, Churchill was no longer in power. At the general election in July 1945 he was ousted, and SOE lost its
protector.

Unfortunately the spirit of unity and the
entente cordiale
that characterized F Section did not stretch to our links with General de Gaulle’s BCRA. Although both organizations
were working to free France from Nazi occupation and oppression, they did not work together. On the field level, members of F Section were on friendly terms with their opposite numbers in the BCRA.
It was General de Gaulle who was the problem. Having refused to accept Pétain’s armistice with the Germans, the general had decided to continue the fight from a base in England,
prophetically stating in his now historic call over the airwaves of the BBC on 18 June 1940 that ‘France had lost a battle, but had not lost the war’, hence his idea that he was
incarnating France, not a defeated nation, but a future victorious country.

At first, Winston Churchill admired de Gaulle’s courage and determination. When Pétain signed the armistice with Hitler and France fell under German domination, he sent a plane to
evacuate the general and his family to England. ‘General, you are all alone,’ Churchill declared. ‘Well, alone, I stand with you.’ (‘Vous êtes tout seul. Eh
bien, je vous reconnais tout seul.’) On 2 August, on Pétain’s orders, the Permanent Military Tribunal at Clermont-Ferrand not only stripped Colonel (acting General) Charles de
Gaulle of his military titles and his French nationality, but also confiscated his property and condemned him to death for treason, for deserting his country for a foreign power in time of war.
Churchill immediately gave both the general and his staff all the help and assistance they needed, not least by allowing him access to the French Service of the BBC.