All the King's Men (26 page)

One of the first items Bodington dealt with, was the confusion that was often created over Déricourt’s codename. GILBERT had often been mistaken for Gilbert Norman and vice-versa, so Déricourt had to be re-christened. Someone with a secret sense of humour plumped for CLAUDE.

The most pressing problem to deal with, however, was the question of Gilbert Norman’s radio transmissions. During the course of Baker Street’s conversations with Dr Götz, they had asked
Norman
for ‘a contact address where friends could reach him’. Götz duly supplied one. Baker Street then signalled to Bodington, through Agazarian, the details for a rendezvous with Norman at ‘Madam Ferdi-Filipowsky in the Rue de Rome’.
²⁶
The SD were amazed at how audacious, not to say foolhardy, London could be in sending Bodington into the field. Both Kopkow and Kief
fer wanted him; Boemelburg was oddly indifferent. But Kieffer must have sensed he was onto a hiding to nothing, that Déricourt would surely protect Bodington. Nevertheless, Kieffer had his orders from Berlin, and he had to persist.

Naturally Déricourt protected Bodington. They both knew Norman was under arrest. They knew the transmissions were coming from the SD. They knew the address in the Rue de Rome would be a trap, but Baker Street was clinging to the possibility that Norman was still at large. Why? Why should Baker Street have any doubts about whether Norman was arrested? Why had London requested a contact address and then passed it to Bodington, if they hadn’t wanted the address tested? A rendezvous was made for 30 July. Bodington hadn’t actually been ordered to turn up, but it was clear Baker Street expected someone to go. There were many more subtle ways of testing the authenticity of Norman’s transmissions but Baker Street hadn’t thought of any and Bodington was damned if he was going to test the bloody address, so – they sent Agazarian. His arrest was as swift as it was predictable.

Another piece of business that had to be dealt with was the purchase of a small bar in the Rue St André des Arts, near the Place St Michel. Déricourt wanted a proper establishment that could be used as a mail-drop and contact point for escaping personnel. Bodington had brought a sizeable contingency fund and a substantial part of it was used to buy the bar. Charles Besnard, being a lawyer, would look after the purchase, and he and Julienne would run the place. One evening, while Bodington was at Besnard’s place to finalize the details, Charles took the opportunity to air his anxieties about Déricourt. Bodington listened intently.

Besnard claimed he did his best to ignore the work Julienne was involved with, but he was naturally protective and couldn’t help but wonder sometimes precisely
what was the nature of Henri’s operation. He had noticed that Déricourt appeared to have regular contacts with the Germans, which naturally seemed an odd thing to do, given that he was supposed to be working with the Resistance. Bodington asked Besnard what Julienne knew.

‘She knows he has contacts with the Germans. She says he’s seeing old friends from before the war and that he’s doing a black market in oranges. She doesn’t suspect anything else, she believes in him completely.’

Bodington asked Besnard straight out, what he believed. He replied, ‘Déricourt is, in my opinion, a double agent acquainted with both parties.’

Bodington didn’t see any point in fudging an answer, Besnard was an intelligent lawyer. ‘I know that Déricourt is working with the Germans. I encouraged him to do so.’

Besnard was naturally a little taken aback, but Bodington told him ‘not to worry about it, London has recommended it’.
²⁷

Besnard shrugged and shook his head, but if that was what London wanted Henri to do, who was he to question? It was agreed that it would be the wisest thing not to disturb Julienne’s ignorance.

Bodington actually got around quite a bit during his visit and saw a number of people. One person he had to meet with was Henri Frager, the DONKEYMAN organizer. It was a conference he’d put off for as long as possible, having been warned by Déricourt from the outset that Hugo Bleicher had an agent within the DONKEYMAN group. A meeting with Frager was a potentially lethal operation, further complicated because Frager himself had no idea his network was compromised. Frager was an honest and devoted officer, but highly excitable and often given to fits of temper. He would not have been easily convinced that his lover Roger Bardet was also a German agent. And besides, Bodington wouldn’t have been able to tell him without giving away his source.

Before Bodington and Frager finally met, Frager had
been primed with highly damaging information about Déricourt. On 12 August, an extraordinary meeting took place between Frager, Roger Bardet and Hugo Bleicher. The German was introduced as ‘Colonel Heinrich’, a dissident Abwehr officer keen to be rid of the Nazis. This Colonel Heinrich confided in Frager that the SD had a most valuable agent within SOE’s Paris circuits. ‘
Gilbert, l’homme qui fait le pick-up
.’ This fuelled Frager’s already smouldering suspicions and seemed to explain much that had occurred that summer. Colonel Heinrich was quite frank with Frager, and admitted his motive was the Abwehr’s fight with ‘those people at Avenue Foch’.

When arranging the meeting between Bodington and Frager, Déricourt went to considerable lengths to evade Bardet and Bleicher, by employing Vera Leigh, a courier in the INVENTOR circuit, as a ‘cut-out’, a go-between who could not compromise anyone. Just as Bodington expected, he was subjected to a fierce tirade against Déricourt. ‘GILBERT,’ Frager pronounced, ‘is an agent of the Sicherheitsdienst.’ It wasn’t what Frager said that concerned Bodington, but the vehemence with which he said it. Frager threatened that unless Déricourt was taken out of the field, he would send a report to Baker Street himself. Bodington said that he would include Frager’s remarks in his report.
²⁸

Bodington immediately warned Déricourt that Frager knew about his contacts with the SD and that he would doubtless repeat the accusation to Baker Street. Déricourt was never in any doubt where Frager had received the information but all he could do about it was to ask Boemelburg to intervene. This Boemelburg did in no uncertain terms. Bleicher was ordered to present himself before Boemelburg at the earliest possible moment. The elderly Nazi didn’t mince his words, repeating himself again and again to emphasize that GILBERT must remain inviolate and that, if necessary, he would demand further orders from Berlin to protect BOE/48. Whatever placatory
noises Bleicher might have made at the time were quickly swept away by his actions, for within days he ran into Bardet and Frager again, and ‘Colonel Heinrich’ gave Frager even more intelligence on Déricourt.

‘You spoke to Bodington about GILBERT?’ Bleicher enquired.

‘Of course.’

‘Then Bodington warned GILBERT about you.’ Frager could not understand why Bodington had revealed what Frager considered to have been a strictly confidential conversation.

‘How do you know this?’

‘From the SD, where else? Oh, by the way, you should know that he is no longer GILBERT, but CLAUDE. That is also from the SD.’
²⁹

Bodington’s own position had begun to look a trifle exposed by now and Besnard recalled noticing just before Bodington’s departure, that he looked a man consumed by some internal struggle, ‘like two people within the same skin’. It must be said that, throughout the course of Déricourt’s operation, great pains were taken by Bodington and others to protect Déricourt’s integrity, while Bodington’s probity seems to have been neglected.

There is a (probably apocryphal) story that before Bodington returned to London, he and Déricourt dined secretly with the one they referred to as ‘
notre ami
’ at his château in Neuilly. Unfortunately, it is now too late to confirm this story though there is evidence that Boemelburg boasted of it to some of his colleagues.
³⁰
Within a few weeks half the SD interrogators at Avenue Foch were making the same boast to their victims.

In 1982, Colonel Reile explained that just before Bodington’s departure, during a rare consultation with the SD, the Nazis proudly revealed that they knew the date of the ‘1943 invasion’ and argued against the pursuit of Bodington. ‘Bodington was in France a few days [weeks] before the invasion and it was decided not to arrest him
because they [the SD] felt the English would conclude we were aware of the date of the invasion.’
³¹

On the night of 16/17 August, Bodington was shepherded down to the field near Pont-de-Braye, to a rendezvous with Claude and Lise de Baissac. The great SCIENTIST network, so closely associated with PROSPER, was also disintegrating. Their story was remarkably similar to PROSPER’s.

A network claiming to have some 11,000 fighting men and women, strategically placed in the west and embracing the Biscay coast, it had been an obvious choice for exploitation. Since June, de Baissac’s group had received nearly 121 aircraft loads of equipment; that is nearly two thousand containers of arms and explosives – three times as many as had been sent to PROSPER. During the first weeks of August, SCIENTIST received BBC messages indicating that the invasion was on for September.
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But in July, just at the time the PROSPER network was being swept from the field, the Germans began to move in on SCIENTIST. By the time the de Baissacs were clambering aboard the Lysander, the Germans were making hundreds of arrests throughout their region.

All three passengers snuggled together in the cramped fuselage, each preoccupied. Bodington spent most of the journey running through his head the outline for one of the least ‘enlightening’ reports in the SOE canon.

In that report he dealt with the arrest of Agazarian by claiming that both of them had had their doubts about the address at Rue de Rome, but it had been agreed they would ‘toss for which of them would go’, and Agazarian lost. (The question of Agazarian’s arrest and subsequent death was one that dogged Bodington for some time. Long after the SOE had passed into history he was interviewed about his trip to France. This time he was able to volunteer the information that following his arrest, Agazarian had withstood the most punishing treatment and not said a word.
Where he had obtained that information was not revealed.)

As to Frager’s accusation that Déricourt was an agent of the SD, Bodington concluded (rather disingenuously) that it was highly unlikely, as he himself had not been arrested while he was there, and so Déricourt must have been sound. He went on, ‘I can say here and now that GILBERT’s (Déricourt) organization, which consists of three people, has not the slightest possibility of being infiltrated and that the Germans obviously do not know the real identity of GILBERT.’
³³
[I cannot explain why Bodington persisted in referring to GILBERT when it was he who had informed Déricourt that he was henceforth CLAUDE.] Bodington’s report bolstered Déricourt’s reputation and went a long way towards fending off future slings and arrows. But unfortunately Déricourt was soon to lose his friend at court. Only a matter of weeks after his return from France, and somewhat mysteriously, Bodington moved to the Political Warfare Executive (PWE). The official record states that Bodington took up the post to ‘lecture soldiers on conditions in France’.
³⁴

While Bodington had been away, Dansey and ‘C’ were making use of the material Déricourt had given them during his secret trip in July. He had provided details of the SD’s sweeping arrests throughout the Loire, Normandy and Pas-de-Calais regions, just as they’d been described to him by Boemelburg. It provided Menzies with invaluable ammunition for a campaign they were about to unleash on the SOE. This goal – which was also Dansey’s – was to have the organization finally abolished. On 26 July, Menzies sent a note to Sir Charles Portal to be read to a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff Committee of the War Cabinet.
³⁵
The purpose of Memo CX 108, ‘based on reports from most secret sources, on the situation of certain of the Resistance groups in France’, was to direct opinion towards MI6’s view that the SOE had no proper control over its affairs in
France and ought to be restructured as a sub-section of MI6. A copy of Memo CX 108 was sent to a highly embarrassed Gubbins, by then the Head of SOE, who recovered quickly enough to challenge Menzies’ view ‘that at the present moment Resistance groups are at their lowest ebb and cannot be counted on as a serious factor unless and until they are rebuilt on a smaller and sounder basis’. Gubbins countered by claiming that the ‘groups under [our] own direct control have not been penetrated by the enemy to any serious extent’.
³⁶

Gubbins had fallen into a trap. On 1 August, a Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee pronounced that on the basis of Memo CX 108 and despite Gubbins’ protestations, they were forced to the view that SOE had been less than frank in their reports about their situation in France. Moreover, because the JIC had been obliged to learn the truth from MI6, they felt doubly disappointed with SOE, who had a responsibility to keep them and the Chiefs of Staff informed. After reiterating the tenet that wherever the two organizations’ interests coincided, MI6’s should always prevail, they concluded that if SOE and MI6, ‘formed part of the same hierarchy … under the Ministry of Defence, we cannot believe that the information regarding the situation in France would have failed to have reached the Chiefs of Staff before now, nor that when it did reach them they would have had only half the story’.
³⁷

They went on to recommend the Chiefs of Staff to consider just such a reorganization. The SOE were not only fighting for survival in France, but in Whitehall too.

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Cockade