All the King's Men (23 page)

Suttill slept very little. On some nights he preferred to stay on the streets, risking arrest for breaking the curfew and then turning up at a colleague’s flat at dawn and collapsing with exhaustion. Ironically, as he was out pacing the streets, struggling with his fears about the network’s security, Boemelburg and Kieffer were invariably awake too and the lights at Avenue Foch blazed deep into the night. On Saturday, 20 June, without informing anyone Suttill left his flat and moved to a small hotel in the Rue Mazagran, up in St Denis. It is indicative that he should
have sought security close to his communist contacts in the working-class streets of the so called ‘Red Belt’, and forsaken the Parisian West End.

The final decision to move in on the PROSPER group was made as a consequence of a series of events that occurred ninety miles south of Paris. On the night of 15/16 June, two Canadians, Frank Pickersgill and John Macalister parachuted to a reception organized by Culioli, who then took them to the same house that had sheltered Suttill. Sturmbannfuhrer Bauer, the SD commandant in Blois, had a signal from Kieffer warning him to be on the look-out for PROSPER, whom he was certain would parachute into the Sologne any day now, ‘or may already be there’.

The SD were already conducting a profitable
ratissage
in the area, attempting to stamp out the unprecedented resistance activity. Each night dozens and dozens of containers of equipment rained down from the sky and virtually everyone on the road after curfew was invariably engaged in resistance. Around midnight on the 20th, a small truck was halted at a road block near Dhuizon. Inside the cab was one of PROSPER’s sub-organizers, Roger Couffrant, and the local garage mechanic, André Habert. In the back, the Germans discovered nine containers of arms and explosives hidden under a layer of straw. The men were dragged out of the truck and beaten unconscious on the spot. A little later the same night the local school teacher, another PROSPER soldier, was arrested on his way home, after having disposed of a load of material. He recalls his interrogator saying, ‘We weren’t looking for you or your stuff. We were looking for someone arriving from England.’

Operation COCKADE was driving loyal British and French men and women to run the most horrendous risks. Buckmaster and his colleagues in F Section were doing no more than they’d been ordered, ‘to prepare for D-Day’, while out in the field, the unidentifiable ‘little people’ were
throwing themselves into what they believed would be their proudest moment.

Early the following morning, Culioli set off for Paris in his little Citroën, with Yvonne Rudellat and the two Canadians. As they approached Dhuizon they were confronted by the same road block that had caught Couffrant and Habert the night before. Miraculously, they had no trouble and passed through to the next checkpoint at the gates of Dhuizon. At this stage the two Canadians were ordered out of the back of the car, while two SD men got in and ordered Culioli to drive up to the Mairie. The Canadians followed on foot.

At the town hall the four from the car were taken to the Assembly Chamber where sixteen other prisoners, men who’d been arrested the night before, stood silently together. Culioli convinced the SD he was a local forestry official and he and Rudellat were allowed to go. They sat in the Citroën outside waiting for the Canadians, and worrying whether their hopeless French accents would convince the SD. Suddenly an officer stepped out of the Mairie and asked them both to come back inside. Culioli didn’t wait, he put his foot down and raced the little machine as fast as it would go. The Germans took up pursuit in a couple of powerful French Fords, drew up within a few metres of the Citroën and opened fire.

The windscreen was shattered, the tyres exploded and Rudellat slumped forward against the dashboard with bullets through her head and shoulder. Culioli swerved the car towards a brick wall, but missed and skidded into a field where he was flung out of the vehicle. The SD arrived and pummelled him with rifle butts and the steel-capped toes of their jackboots. Back at the Town Hall the SD unwrapped a parcel that had been discovered in the car. It was addressed to a non-existent prisoner of war in Germany and inside it they discovered some radio crystals and four notes. One was inscribed ‘
Pour Prosper
’, two others ‘
Pour Archambaud
’ (Gilbert Norman) and a third ‘
Pour
Marie Louise
’.
²³
SS Sturmbannfuhrer Ludwig Bauer telephoned 84 Avenue Foch and asked for Kieffer. He read the contents of the messages and when Kieffer passed the information on to Boemelburg, he simply replied, ‘Yes, bring them in.’

The day the arrests had begun down in the Sologne, Saturday, 20 June, Francis Suttill had moved to the little hotel in St Denis and then taken the train down to Grignon to see the Balachowskys at the Agricultural College. He claimed to be looking for fields for the gliders that would come with the invasion. In truth he just needed to talk with people whom he felt would understand his anxiety. He missed the society that had gathered in those grounds. Madame Balachowsky recalled that at lunch he revealed his anxieties about the rest of the group, saying that he had lost faith in GILBERT, and felt ‘haunted’ by the others, who seemed oblivious to the danger around them. He felt utterly lonely and abandoned.

After lunch, Suttill and Madame Balachowsky walked together under the fruit trees. The blossoms had all fallen and early apples were ripening at the uppermost reaches of the trees. Madame Balachowsky mentioned to him the name of a woman, Madame Monier-Vinard, who had organized an escape service from France, through Gibraltar to Britain, and was in regular radio contact with London. She would probably handle his communications if he felt he could not trust GILBERT, or anyone else for that matter. He thanked her for her generosity but said there was no point. The Germans, he felt certain, had an agent in Baker Street.
²⁴

They travelled back to Paris together and as they parted company outside the Gare Montparnasse, he repeated his certain fear: ‘The Germans seem to have known all our movements for some time now.’

On Sunday the 21st Suttill went to the Gare d’Austerlitz to meet Culioli and the Canadians. He had also arranged a rendezvous with Déricourt and brought with him two
passengers for Britain – Richard Heslop, organizer of a network in the Savoyard Alps, and an RAF pilot named Taylor who’d been shot down. Déricourt took the couple to one side and told them to return that evening to get the train to Amboise.

Meanwhile, Suttill waited at the entrance for Culioli and the Canadians. When they failed to turn up he was not alarmed and resolved to return at the same time the following day. When they failed to arrive on the Monday he presumed the worst.
²⁵
At one o’clock he turned up at Armel Guerne’s flat, alone but agitated. Andrée Borrel arrived a little later and during lunch watched her commander deteriorate into an ever more distressed and irrational state. The cracks were widening; the trusted ones were disappearing and yet they still had to hold out for another two and a half months. Finally Suttill crashed his fist on the table and declared, ‘if there were not an Allied invasion soon, he and Norman would provoke one, by calling out the entire network, which would cause all the others to rise up in its wake’.
²⁶
It was symptomatic of his deluded state that he believed this would force the Combined Chiefs to accelerate their invasion plans. Perhaps it is just as well he never knew just how cheaply PROSPER stock was being traded in London that summer.

The following day, Tuesday the 23rd, Suttill decided to get out of Paris and travelled down to Triechateau, near the ancient town of Gisors. He met with George Darling, an organizer who worked closely with Culioli. Suttill needed to know if there had been any precise news of Culioli and the Canadians. Darling confirmed his worst fears.

In Triechateau, they had a safe-house that belonged to Darling’s fiancée, Madame Guepin. Rather than return to Paris, Suttill decided to stay the night there. He looked so tired and wretched that Madame Guepin wondered whether he wasn’t very ill. ‘I can’t tell you what weighs on me,’ he replied. ‘But it’s not my health.’
²⁷

As Suttill tried to get to sleep, listening to the trains that ran all night up to Dieppe, Kieffer’s men in Paris finally moved in. At precisely midnight, several black Citroëns pulled up in the Avenue Henri-Martin. Some fifteen plain-clothes men emerged and began to surround number 77, on the corner with the Boulevard Lannes. When all were in place a young Rottenfuhrer knocked on the door of Nicholas and Maud Laurent, another couple on the fringe of the network, and asked for Gilbert Archambaud (ARCHAMBAUD being Gilbert Norman’s codename). When Norman came to the door he found half a dozen Lugers trained on his head. Upstairs Kieffer’s men found Andrée Borrel asleep in bed. The Laurents, Norman and Borrel were bundled into the cars and driven to the Avenue Foch and were taken upstairs to the cells.

Down in Blois, Pierre Culioli and the two Canadians had been interrogated constantly since their arrest. Having been shot in the knee after he attacked one of his guards, Culioli was later stripped and chained to a bed where he was beaten around the groin and face with a large buckled belt. On the Tuesday he’d been driven up to the Avenue Foch and was lying, almost comatose, in a neighbouring cell when Borrel and Norman were brought in.

About one thirty on the Wednesday morning, another squad arrived at PROSPER’s hotel in the rue Mazagran and awoke the terrified patronne, Madame Fevre. They demanded her register and found the name François Desprée, Suttill’s pseudonym, recorded against room 15. Madame Fevre told them that Monsieur Desprée had been away for a few days. They took the spare key and decided to wait.

That same morning, the 24th, Suttill rose early to catch the 7.00 am train to Paris, where he had a number of meetings to attend. After breakfast, Madame Guepin accompanied him to the station at Gisors to see him off. Suttill knew he would not see her again and after saying their farewells, he twice returned to embrace her. At about
ten thirty, he approached the Hotel Mazagran, cautiously looking for any signs that would suggest it was being watched. He entered quietly, not disturbing the patronne, and climbed the stairs to his room. As his key rattled in the lock, three SD men drew their pistols. Suttill swung the door open and then stood there, framed in the doorway, slowly raising his hands above his head. It had come at last.
²⁸

XIII
Consequences

The news of PROSPER’s arrest was signalled to Berlin by midday and passed on to Adolf Hitler before he sat down to dinner. Kopkow immediately sent congratulations to Boemelburg with a request that he be kept informed of the interrogations.

How had the SD known where Suttill was staying? Neither Gilbert Norman nor Andrée Borrel spoke a word to their interrogators for more than two days. No one else knew. Except, perhaps, for Déricourt. The last time Déricourt and Suttill had met was on the morning of 21 June, at the Gare d’Austerlitz when Heslop and Taylor, the two homeward-bound passengers, were introduced and told by Déricourt to return to the station that evening. They did, but Déricourt did not. Heslop and Taylor went to ground again and awaited an explanation. That night, over the field at Poce-sur-Cisse, Squadron Leader Verity circled in vain, looking for the reception lights.

Déricourt never gave a reason for his absence, but he did have to contact Suttill again (the only man who knew where the passengers were hiding), to re-schedule the operation and ensure the passengers would come to the same rendezvous the following day. Which they did. Then it was Verity’s turn to miss the party, having suffered a generator failure over the Channel.

The following night, that of the 23rd/24th, the night Norman and Borrel were arrested, Déricourt’s operation was finally completed under the silent gaze of the SD’s
agents. Out of Verity’s Lizzie had come Robert Lyon, on his second mission to the ACOLYTE network, and a Free French agent called Colonel Bonoteau. Both men were followed to their destinations. The SD eventually lost track of Lyon, but Bonoteau was arrested that same morning.

Meanwhile Suttill and Norman were undergoing their calvary. It was not uncommon for prisoners to have to withstand some tough punishment during their interrogation at the Avenue Foch. Though it was not, in the strictest sense, a torture chamber, there were a number of instruments for enthusiasts to use to extract information: rubber or wooden truncheons, thin leather whips – rather like riding crops, knuckle-dusters and, of course, the standard issue jackboot. Suttill’s interrogation began in the presence of SS Feldwebel Josef Placke, who was relieved by SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Karl Langer and he by one Dr Josef Götz. These men were not responsible for any beatings, but maintained a presence while others did the heavy work. It lasted for three days, during which time Suttill was not allowed to eat, drink, sleep or even sit. Sometimes Kieffer conducted the interrogations and on one occasion SS Standartenfuhrer Knochen himself engaged in the breaking of PROSPER. In a separate room, Gilbert Norman underwent the same treatment in the presence of SS Hauptsturmfuhrers Scherer, von Kapri, Ruhl and Vogt. Boemelburg remained aloof from the entire procedure.

What Baker Street expected of its captured agents was that they would hold out for at least 48 hours, giving enough time for contacts to disappear. They were not expected to keep
absolutely
silent, a principle proceeding from the view that no intelligence that any SOE agent held would ever be worth a human life. Suttill and Norman had already agreed their scale of values, and it was understood that information about
materiel
would come low on the list. To all their colleagues they had given the same instructions, ‘Don’t try to hold out. Give them something. A little at a time, but don’t give them everything.’
¹
For three days
Norman, Suttill and Borrel spoke not a word. In fact Borrel never talked at all.