All the King's Men (32 page)

On the 11th, Déricourt was driven to the Northumberland again. On this occasion, MI5 were represented. Sporborg was advised that his questioning should ‘in no way press Déricourt in case he is
soured
’.
²⁷
Patiently, he proceeded in the only way left, by putting certain points to Déricourt and asking him to comment. It was no longer an interrogation.

A day or two later, Henri and Jeannot decided to take a walk along the river to find some form of distraction. Just as they left the Savoy, Henri decided it looked like rain and went back upstairs to fetch their umbrella. When he opened his door he found two gentlemen with a large box of tools making ‘repairs’ to their telephone. Déricourt apologized for disturbing them and left them to get on with their work.
²⁸

Meanwhile Sporborg and John Sentor pored over all the evidence they had on Déricourt and tried to find a path through what was admissible and inadmissible. It seemed to Sporborg absolutely ridiculous that if MI6 knew of Déricourt’s connections with the Germans, they should prevent SOE coming to the proper conclusion and having the man interned. Sporborg asked for MI5’s opinion, which they gave in very uncertain terms. ‘Although it is only fair to say that GILBERT makes a good impression under interrogation, and that his antecedents seem to be remarkably unexceptional…’ (Unexceptional antecedents? In the past six months, MI5 had sent four separate reports to SOE about Déricourt’s contacts with the Germans. What made them change their mind?)

…we should if the decision was entirely [ours] regard the case against him as serious enough to prevent him from undertaking any further
intelligence work
outside this country
²⁹
[author’s italics].

One would presume that MI5 were aware that ‘intelligence work’ was not what SOE had employed Déricourt to do. Either the officer who wrote that up had lost his concentration or MI5 knew more than they were telling. At any rate, MI5 had effectively recommended precisely what Claude Dansey had wanted. SOE were forced to admit that Déricourt had ‘no case to answer’ but at the same time, on the advice of MI5, Sporborg decreed that he would not be sent back. Buckmaster was furious. So was everyone else in F Section, but there was nothing they could do. Normally, SOE agents who had finished their service were sent up to a country house at Inverlair in the Scottish highlands, where they were provided with suitable cover stories before they re-entered the outside world. Nothing of the sort occurred with Déricourt; instead he and Jeannot settled down to life at The Savoy.

Whenever Boemelburg was up to Paris on business he would call in to see Dr Götz at Avenue Foch, to hear of any news from Déricourt. There never was any. As the weeks became months, Boemelburg became resigned to the fact that he was unlikely to hear from Déricourt again. Sitting with Götz one day, Boemelburg sighed, ‘Ah well. That’s the last we’ll see of the two millions.’ Götz thought for a moment and then ventured, ‘That’s exactly the price of a property he wanted to buy down in the Midi.’
³⁰

At the café in the Rue André des Arts, business was a bit slow since Déricourt had left. In fact they did no more operations at all. In April a confusion over code-words led JuJu to believe the Germans had rumbled the place. (Kieffer had known about it from the start.) She radioed through Watt that they wanted to be brought out and it was agreed. Rémy preferred to stay in Paris and was ordered to lie low.

On 5/6 April, Charles, JuJu and André Watt climbed into a Lysander and were brought out safely. While the latter was in London, he and Déricourt met for dinner and chatted harmlessly about business. Déricourt never explained why he had not returned to France.

To discourage similar contacts, the Déricourts were moved to the Swan Hotel at Stratford upon Avon, then to a place in Birmingham and finally to a flat in Barons Court, in London’s western suburbs. SOE were finished with Déricourt and had re-directed their attention to the preparations for what promised to be the real invasion. Déricourt took no part in that operation, but he did have one more brief role to play in the war. He had been put in touch with de Gaulle’s intelligence service, the BCRA, where he’d been recommended as a skilled pilot. He made a number of useful contacts there, and with the Free French preparing for the liberation they were keen to have him. Unfortunately, MI5 would not clear him until well after the invasion had taken place. At the end of August, he resigned his RAF commission and was assigned as a Free French officer to a top secret Allied communications squadron. He was given a very high security classification and attached to the staff of the French Military Commander, General Koenig. In October and September, Koenig’s mission was to make contact with all the Resistance groups; Déricourt, flying an Auster light aircraft, was responsible for flying Koenig or his staff to their rendezvous.
³¹
On 9 September 1944, Déricourt’s war came to an end. While on a low-flying reconnaissance mission he crashed near Chateauroux and was nearly killed. He was rescued by some farmers who eventually got him to the hospital at Issoudun where he was examined and found to have a ruptured lung, eight fractured ribs, a fractured skull and lacerated liver. He was transferred to Orléans and then finally up to a liberated Paris where he spent some months recuperating.
³²
Déricourt always maintained that he was shot down by a column of Germans, but there was a rumour at the time that it had been some of the Resistance taking their revenge. The official report stated that he had flown into some power cables.

Towards the end of May 1944, Dr Götz was handed a list of BBC messages. Götz recognized immediately they were
the ‘alert’ messages for the invasion. He informed Kieffer and was told to send a written report to the German High Command in the west. Each night they listened for the ‘B message’ that would signal the invasion was scheduled for the following day. Götz had by that time compiled a list of fifteen messages that were meant for fifteen separate circuits. These had come from a number of sources, some from captured agents. Many came from Déricourt, who had handed them over to Boemelburg in the back of his Citroën. On 5 June, the messages were all there – action!

‘That’s it. It’s the invasion!’ Götz cried. He telephoned headquarters, then sat down at the typewriter and tried hard to compose his report. He felt he was part of history. The report was sent to Kopkow and to military headquarters. By the time Götz went to bed, he felt confident they had won the war. Many of the messages Götz had received were real; some were designed to distract attention;
none
of them were heeded. Götz’s report was not opened until the morning of the 6th, and by then it was too late. The military had been warned by the SD too many times about invasions in the past.

One other legacy of 1943 became evident during the weeks and months of fighting after D-Day. Almost daily, Götz had to plant bright red pins into a map of France to represent acts of sabotage. The centre and south of France was awash with the red markers, while the north – the great belt that had been covered by PROSPER – was almost clear.
³³
SOE never succeeded in re-establishing a presence in the north on the scale or significance enjoyed by Suttill. The SD had it under control.
³⁴

In the summer of 1945, when the war in Europe was over and people once again had time to stop and reflect, Harry Sporborg began wondering about that GILBERT thing back in 1943. Why, he wondered, had MI6 shown such intense interest in Déricourt while he was still in France, but then ‘lost interest and were notably unhelpful in the
investigation into Déricourt’s activities after his recall in February’? Sporborg finally managed to see Claude Dansey before he retired and he asked him about ‘that man Déricourt’. Sporborg didn’t record what Dansey told him, but he did recall this:

Claude Dansey. You knew full well he never told you the whole of any story. I rather liked the old boy, though deception came second nature to him. There was no doubt whatsoever in my mind that Déricourt was being employed by MI6 for functions which were outside SOE’s sphere of operations and knowledge. Make no mistake about it, MI6 would never have hesitated to use us or our agencies to advance their own schemes, even if that meant the sacrifice of some of our people.
³⁵

But that’s not what it said in the official record. In October 1945, the British Government under Clement Attlee announced that the SOE would be wound up and closed down by the end of the year. All the files and records were handed across to MI6. The cover-up had begun.

XVII
Trials

Not everyone was keen to rush out into civvy street the moment they closed the doors at SOE. Vera Atkins, who became Head of F Section in June 1944, felt particularly badly about the decision to liquidate. Atkins felt very strongly that before the books and files were closed for good, there was much that still had to be accounted for. Her major preoccupation was the fate of the Section’s women agents who had not returned. There were twelve in all. Atkins spent many frustrating months lobbying various authorities to get permission to go to Europe and track down the threads of these lives cut down in the service of F Section. Through a great deal of persuasion and a tiny degree of threat, Atkins got herself attached to the United Nation’s War Crimes Commission which allowed her access to the files on hundreds of German prisoners and the opportunity to interview most of them.

In Berlin Atkins did the rounds of the various agencies, from Military Intelligence to the Red Cross, gathering information; then she finally drove down to see the War Crimes Investigator at the Rhine Army HQ at Badenhauser. Through him she was put in touch with the camp commandants of Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and so on. Gradually she was able to cross each name off her list.

The final account of PROSPER people is very incomplete since most of the SS’s and SD’s records have not survived. However, the fate of the key figures in the network has been well catalogued. Andrée Borrel was given a
fatal injection and then incinerated at Natzweiler in July 1944. Yvonne Rudellat recovered from her wounds only to succumb to typhus at Belsen soon after it was liberated; Noor Inayat Khan was kept in chains at Pforshiem and then sent to Dachau where she was shot; Gilbert Norman, John Macalister, Frank Pickersgill, Johnny Barrett and Dubois were hanged at Gross Rosen in September 1944 – as was Robert Benoist, though he was arrested in a different operation; Francis Suttill was hanged at Sachsenhausen in March 1944 as were Cohen and Jean Worms. Of the hundreds more arrested in the country, there is no account.
¹

In the course of her investigation, Atkins found herself in the pretty little German town of Gagenau. There, she had the opportunity to interview one Josef Kieffer who was being held for the murder of a unit of SAS men. They sat opposite each other at a simple table and proceeded through the details of how each woman was arrested and when she was deported to the concentration camps. Suddenly, in the course of their conversation, Kieffer mentioned the word Déricourt. Atkins looked up from her notes.

She quickly recalled the French pilot they had employed during 1943 to arrange Lysander pick-ups and who had been so unfairly accused by Frager and others of having dealt with the Germans. She asked Kieffer about Déricourt. He explained that he, GILBERT/Déricourt, had given them a great deal of information about PROSPER and other networks, which they had been able to use most successfully. When the full import of what Kieffer had said sank in, Atkins asked if Déricourt had actually been working for Kieffer. ‘No. He was not my agent, he was Boemelburg’s agent. He was BOE/48.’

After all this time, months of interviewing some of the worst criminals of the war, the last thing Atkins expected to feel was shock. But this was still business. She took a separate statement in which Kieffer explained the relationship
with Déricourt in detail and she had him sign it. It was then sent to the War Crimes Commission in London.
²
It was standard procedure for these reports to be handed on to the relevant government authority involved in the pursuit of war criminals. Déricourt had been employed by a British service, so the report was passed to MI6.
³

At the time Vera Atkins was engaged in her investigations, Déricourt was putting together a new career as a pilot with Air France, for whom he regularly flew the Paris to London route. Having recovered from his crash, Déricourt had taken his unauthorized and fabricated Flight Logs to Air France, and been accepted straight away. Rémy Clément, Léon Doulet and Robert Marotin were all there too. But whereas most Frenchmen were trying to re-create order in a world that had too long been turned upside down, Déricourt was of course doing his best to exploit the chaos.

France during the first half of 1946 was a country on the brink of civil war. The national uprising that had so long been heralded as the prelude to the invasion, now threatened – long after the liberation – to tear the country apart. Until October 1945, de Gaulle had effectively governed France under the constitution of the Third Republic. At that stage a referendum produced an overwhelming vote to abolish the old constitution and start again.

The National Assembly was dominated by left-wing parties, the most influential being the Communists, a party which had displayed a singular unity throughout the occupation. De Gaulle had been determined to create within the new constitution a Presidency with wide executive powers. The Communists in particular were opposed to any formula that created a President that was anything other than a mere ceremonial head. An extraordinary constitutional situation existed however, for although the politicians were set for a long process of conciliation, out in the country the Communists still had at large secret armies that had been armed and trained during the war by
the SOE – and by PROSPER in particular. So long as the threat remained of what they saw as a de Gaulle dictatorship, the Communists refused to disarm. Five years of clandestine warfare had forged a national conscience bent on intrigue and distrust. From the moment of liberation de Gaulle had determined to crush the Communists. Conciliation had failed so he resorted to methods with which he was more familiar. He resigned over the constitutional impasse and while the Assembly debated, he plotted. Many of his old cronies from the wartime intelligence services were now in key positions of the re-formed Deuxième Bureau, though regrettably bereft of funds.