All the King's Men (15 page)

Déricourt had to remain to deal with the bicycles and took a later train that got him into Paris after lunch. From his point of view, Operation TRAINER had been a success.
^b
He found the agents were on the whole fairly at ease with him. His professionalism seemed to create a sense of confidence and in that mood many of them were very talkative. In fact the whole operation had been quite exhilarating. It seemed as though the business might have its moments. Back at the ‘Coll Moll’, the hotel in Avenue Colonel Moll, Déricourt collapsed on his bed and slept through until the following morning.

Within days of the March operation, there was another meeting with Boemelburg – a kind of re-appraisal, with a view to formalizing the situation. At that meeting Déricourt provided Boemelburg with a detailed description of everyone who had travelled in on the Lysanders. Boemelburg asked him if he knew anything about PROSPER, to which Déricourt replied that he had heard it had something to do with the invasion.
¹²

The relationship that developed between these two men was one of the great partnerships of the secret war. From the beginning it had all the hallmarks of something that would endure, and it was significant not for what it
involved but for what it did not involve. It was the experience of most senior officers at the Avenue Foch, and Boemelburg especially, that coercion was not an enduring basis for any intelligence contract. It built up resentment and threatened the security of everyone involved. Coercion was fine for the short term when immediate results were the essence of the contract, but it did not hold any promise for the future. Money had traditionally been essential to these arrangements and it was well known that the SD had almost unlimited resources. But here, too, Boemelburg was remarkably circumspect. He did not trust anyone whose motives were purely profit. Like Dansey in London, he knew not only the value of money but also its worth. If every man had his price, then it was extremely unwise to base an understanding on the vagaries of the free market.
¹³
On the other hand, the SD were also extraordinarily correct and they would have been equally suspicious of anyone who would not accept any money at all. SD archives reveal that, unlike most of their informers, Déricourt did not receive a regular salary, though of course he did accept the odd bit of largesse that came his way. (There is a massive archive of signed receipts which the SD extracted from all their informers, which now rests in the vaults of the French DST in Rue Saussier. It is guarded as though it were a national secret – which it probably is.)

Déricourt was officially identified as BOE/48 – Boemelburg’s 48th agent. Soon after that meeting, Boemelburg introduced the name GILBERT (synonymous with BOE/48) to a few of his colleagues at Avenue Foch, most notably to his immediate subordinate, Josef Kieffer. Boemelburg had already placed GILBERT within the larger context of the expanding phenomenon known as PROSPER. Déricourt’s confirmation of PROSPER’s strategic position guaranteed the relationship would proceed from first stages. But here lay a fundamental flaw in the way the Germans operated their double agents. The man who made the initial contact always became the
controller – it was a matter of some personal pride. But it was also a critical error, for the controller then lacked the objectivity to run his agent wisely and his judgement was often biased when analysing the intelligence he received. In Britain, it had long been appreciated that ‘doubles’ were a volatile species and were passed on by those who had made the first contact to professional controllers who were more dispassionate. In Déricourt’s case there was the prospect, for Boemelburg, of information that would be immediately verifiable. So upon that basis their mutual trust grew.

What, then, was Déricourt’s role? Why was he there and what was he doing? German and French archives confirm that he entered into an arrangement with the Sicherheitsdienst in February 1943. Before examining motives, it is worth making one small point here about the issue of money. British authorities have always claimed that Déricourt did what he did for financial reward. He was paid by SOE to organize Lysander operations and was paid again by the Germans for delivering intelligence on those operations. Of course he was a ‘Déricourist’, as his friend Clément once described him, but if he went into the arrangement with the SD just for money, then he didn’t do particularly well by it. Taken over the course of his entire mission, the money Déricourt earned from the SD didn’t amount to much more than any typical black-marketeer earned during the course of the war. In fact, it was a matter of some resentment with Déricourt that he didn’t do a good deal better.

Whatever Déricourt’s private motives may have been, his approach to the SD was, in fact, carried out on instructions from Claude Dansey. Karl Boemelburg was the highest-ranking SD officer in France. (Above him was the SS officer Standartenfuhrer Dr Helmut Knochen, who reported directly to Himmler.) Boemelburg reported directly to the head of counter-espionage and counter-sabotage at the RSHA in Berlin, Horst Kopkow. Boemelburg
was the most important counter-espionage officer in France. If it were possible to win the hearts and minds of the SD in Paris, then it would be a tremendous advantage to Dansey’s own intelligence operations. If Déricourt could get an insight into the SD’s operations, it would be a coup comparable to deciphering their ENIGMA codes.

But how would Déricourt get any information out of Boemelburg? Surely the SD weren’t going to sit down with Déricourt and discuss their operations. Of course not. The basis for Déricourt’s operation rested upon the old maxim that questions are far more revealing than answers. Dansey’s real objective was to
discover what Boemelburg wanted to know
. It was a classic double-agent operation. First a British agent approaches the Germans and offers to pass them information about British operations, and then gives them material that could be quickly verified and evaluated. Once that had occurred, their expectations would begin to rise. ‘If he can deliver information about X, perhaps he may know something about Y.’ As their confidence grows, coupled with their appetite for information, their questions become more expansive, more greedy – more direct: ‘Have you heard anything about a wireless operator who was travelling down to the Jura?’ ‘Do you know anything about a group up near Compiègne?’ ‘Can you find out something about a certain doctor in Toulouse?’ ‘Do you know of any contacts of the Abbé in Tulle?’

Like the French, the Germans never imagined SOE and MI6 to be two separate organizations. They were simply seen as different departments of something called ‘British Intelligence’. Boemelburg’s pre-eminence in the SD’s counter-espionage operations meant that his enquiries covered a wide range of networks, some of them Dansey’s. Déricourt would make a careful note of all Boemelburg’s questions and send it to one of Dansey’s contacts. In London, a patient process of listing, collating and cross-referencing those questions would gradually
reveal what the enemy already knew, what he needed to know, what were his preoccupations and, most importantly, what were his priorities.

A steady stream of this material would enable London to create an extremely clear picture of the SD’s operations in France.
¹⁴
Of course there was a price for this information. Just as with ULTRA, Dansey’s freedom to act on this intelligence was restricted by the risk that such action might compromise its source. For example, an enquiry about a group near Rennes would reveal that an operation was being conducted against the SOE’s PARSON reseaux. Whether Dansey alerted SOE to that fact depended upon the result of his weighing up the value of saving PARSON against the risk of compromising his source. For if Boemelburg decided to arrest PARSON and found they were no longer there, he would naturally conclude there had been a leak and eventually Déricourt would no longer be trusted. The same calculation would also have to be made if the intelligence concerned one of Dansey’s own groups. Intelligence about the enemy’s counter-espionage operations always presents the dilemma of how to use it. Do you take evasive action – or somehow exploit the situation? There was of course another price to pay for this operation: Déricourt’s answers. The more Boemelburg’s expectations rose, the more answers BOE/48 would have to deliver. Some of these answers could be deceptions, others would have to be verifiable.

How did Déricourt communicate with Dansey? There were at least two routes. The first was through a particular bank teller at a branch of the Credit Lyonnaise in the Rue Caumartin. He was a ‘mail drop’ left over from the Z Organization. The second was through PAUL, the barman at the Bar Lorraine in the Place des Ternes, who came on the scene in 1942.
¹⁵

But was it really possible that a senior British intelligence officer would feel it was worthwhile jeopardizing the lives of other British officers for the sake of an intelligence
advantage? Harry Sporborg, the deputy head of SOE, was in no doubt: ‘Make no mistake about it, MI6 would never have hesitated to use us or our agencies to advance their schemes, even if that meant the sacrifice of some of our people.’
¹⁶
It was common practice in war for a commander to sacrifice some of his men to gain some strategic advantage. At Dunkirk the British Army took over 68,000 casualties in rearguard actions while nearly 340,000 men made it safely off the beaches. However, Dansey’s game actually threatened an entire operation. Would that have been worth the sacrifice?

Trying to make sense of a personality as complex as Dansey’s is all the more difficult because he entrusted so little to paper. At the beginning of 1943 it probably made sense to his vindictive way of thinking that it was worth giving a little SOE information away in return for some insight into the SD’s operations in France. The problem was, and Dansey must have been aware of it, how to restrict that information when Déricourt was operating on his own over 150 miles from London. There is good evidence from the German side that for some time the information Déricourt gave away was pretty insubstantial and that it was the
promise
of what he might give that made him so attractive. It is the
modus operandi
of all double agents to provide thin material to begin with, coupled with an undertaking to deliver the earth tomorrow.

But that was the problem with this operation. It was Boemelburg who was asking the questions and it would be he who effectively set the stakes. On the other hand, Dansey had no qualms about exploiting an organization he absolutely despised. If Déricourt was going to be any good to Dansey, then he needed to win Boemelburg’s absolute confidence. That would be bought with first-rate, verifiable information – and the only information Déricourt had that was worth anything was what he knew about SOE operations.

As far as MI6 were concerned, this particular operation was one of Dansey’s private enterprises, probably known to no more than two of his most trusted associates. But despite his obsession with secrecy, a thin trickle of information about his activities would occasionally leak out and inevitably appal the new breed of young intellectuals that hovered about the dingy corridors at Broadway. One of those wartime recruits from the academic world, Hugh Trevor Roper, now Lord Dacre, described Claude Dansey as ‘an utter shit; corrupt, incompetent, but with a certain low cunning’. Malcolm Muggeridge, equally damning of him, added, however: ‘He was the only true professional in MI6. The others at the top were all second-rate minds.’

Unfortunately for SOE, they had few friends at court. Most MI6 officers still considered them a bunch of undisciplined amateurs who were more a danger to themselves than to the enemy. Added to which, everyone was terrified of Dansey and would never have dared blowing one of his operations. Now that the fuse was lit, they would just have to wait and see.

IX
An Eastern Influence

The war was not fought in separate isolated corners but on a wide canvas where events at one end had a direct effect on events at the other. Déricourt was originally planted amongst SOE’s French networks just to provide intelligence on the SD, but soon he would be involved in a different operation. The game in Paris was about to be altered by the changing circumstances some 1600 miles to the east. There the real war, the war that had occupied the lives of tens of millions of people, was being fought on the frozen fields of Russia. Along a 600-mile front, 200 German divisions faced more than 300 Russian divisions. Over 5 million men waged war on a scale that defied the imagination. By that second winter, the Russian army had lost nearly 8 million men and the civilian population had suffered almost as badly. That was where the war was being fought and lost.

In 1942, Hitler redoubled his efforts in a bid for total victory. Each month, his armies brought him closer to that goal; in the Kerch Peninsula, the Crimea, Sevastopol, the Donets Basin, Rostov, the Kuban granaries, then turning in the direction of the Caucasus the Germans seized the Maykep oilfields. The roll call of Russian defeats sent signals of doom to the strategic planners in Whitehall. If the Russians capitulated, the Germans would have nearly 200 divisions to deploy in the west, making an Allied return to France a very distant prospect. Allied strategy to date had been to put as much strain as possible on German resources, in the hope that the enemy would outstretch his lines of supply.

In the west, the German Commander in Chief, Von Runstedt, had over 50 divisions at his disposal which, unless there was a real threat of an Allied invasion, could easily be re-deployed to the eastern front. Fifty extra divisions on the Russian Front would have made the difference between victory and defeat. Stalin appreciated the situation as well as anyone, and had peppered Churchill throughout the year with the persistent and ever more desperate demand, ‘When will you open up the Second Front?’