Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (62 page)

Kieffer said he had got to know many of the agents well, and he had tried to ensure they were treated fairly. He talked almost affectionately about the “English gentlemen,” as he called some of the agents. He had found the English more “honourable” than the French, he said. It was obvious from the way he talked that Kieffer had his favourites among the prisoners and one of these, as Vera knew, had been John “Bob” Starr. Vera asked Kieffer to tell her about Bob and his work at Avenue Foch.

“I very soon recognised Bob's real talent for drawing,” Kieffer told Vera, “and I gave him more and more work to do of this kind, which, however, mainly consisted of illustrations and designs from which he, as a member of a hostile power, was unable to learn anything and then possibly divulge and betray it.” He had allowed Bob to go back to his Paris flat to collect his painting materials, on condition he gave his “word of honour” not to escape.

“Bob was in a cell directly next to the guardroom where a four-man guard was permanently present. Any escape seemed to me at that time to be out of the question. After I was convinced that Bob would not escape, I gave him drawing tasks that had to be kept secret. Because he knew so much, I impressed upon the guards again and again that however affable and obliging Bob might be, his lodging was to be carefully guarded.”

In the next weeks and months Bob was even used for “wireless plays,” said Kieffer, explaining that Bob checked messages to make sure they were in typical English. “It was by means of this activity that Bob gained a great insight into our counterespionage work and got to know numerous arrested agents,” said Kieffer. “It was precisely at this time that the capture of the woman W/T operator Madeleine took place.” Vera showed Kieffer a picture of Nora, and he recognised her as Madeleine but said he had never known her real name.

“She told us nothing. We could not rely on anything she said. I cannot remember her real name, but I am sure in this she also lied to us,” said Kieffer, as if her refusal to cooperate still infuriated him even now. Kieffer had never won Madeleine's trust or respect. It was obvious to Vera that Nora had never fallen for Kieffer's tricks. Unlike many other F Section
agents, she seemed to have treated him with contempt from start to finish.

In the end, Kieffer said, he asked his senior interpreter, Ernest Vogt, who was good at setting people at their ease, to try to befriend her. Vogt had spent hours talking to Madeleine and learned more than most. She was treated extremely well and was even served English tea and biscuits, which she refused, although she accepted the English cigarettes. But Nora's stubborn refusal to cooperate never weakened. It was also evident to Vera that, although Nora had maddened Kieffer, he had also greatly admired her courage.

“One night,” continued Kieffer, “at about three in the morning, I was awakened in my room by the guard to say Bob and Madeleine had escaped. They, with the French resistance leader, Colonel Faye, had broken through the iron bars in the cells leading to the window of the ceiling and they climbed up on to the flat roof. By means of strips of blankets and sheets, knotted together, they let themselves down on to the balcony on the third storey of a neighbouring house and there smashed a window and entered the apartment. Had they not been recaptured, it is assumed that all the radio plays which were in full swing would have been finished.”

Starr had described this incident on his return to London, saying Kieffer was in such a rage after the escape attempt that he made all three of them stand against a wall on the fourth floor of Avenue Foch to be shot. But Kieffer had hesitated and in the end ordered them back to their cells.

Kieffer now told Vera that after the escape attempt he was indeed angry and had insisted that the three give their word of honour not to escape again, but only Starr agreed. “It was difficult for Bob to make amends for the mistrust which had surfaced against him with us.” So he had talked to Starr about what had happened and had been persuaded by him that he had not really broken his word of honour because, as Kieffer then realised, his word of honour first time round had been given only in relation to a specific case: “namely that he would not escape while travelling to his flat to get his painting materials.”

However, Kieffer added: “First of all I completely dispensed with
Bob's assistance for some time because he had disappointed me too much by his escape. I talked with him about the reasons for this escape, whereupon he told me that Madeleine had approached him with the escape plan and that if as a woman she had the courage to escape and had succeeded in doing so, she would have made life impossible for him in England had he not displayed the same courage as a man.”

Soon Kieffer and Bob made a pact and became friends again. “I let him do this work again only after he had given me with a handshake his explicit word of honour in the presence of witnesses that he would not undertake an attempt to escape again and that he would also not work against us.”

According to his second wife, Starr was bitter about his treatment by Vera and Buckmaster after the war. When eventually he returned to London from Mauthausen concentration camp after getting out on a Red Cross convoy, he found nobody to meet him and discovered he was being blackballed. He wrote a long report for HQ about everything he learned inside Avenue Foch, giving details of the radios the Germans had played back and describing how they had done it. He said he had gathered all the information with a view to passing it to London if he managed to escape.

But Starr's report completely disappeared. “All his life he would say, ‘What happened to my report?' but he never found out. I don't think they wanted people to know what it said,” said his wife.

“And he had learned so much. He was always trying to get information, not to give it. He was somebody who knew how to play the game. Yes, he checked the spellings and made Kieffer's drawings pretty. Kieffer was delighted. And Bob respected Kieffer. Kieffer and Bob even stripped off one day and swam alone in the pond at Avenue Foch. You have to be open and honest with somebody if you see him in his nudity like that— two men just swimming together. You understand?”

Her husband, she told me, had always said that if there had been real suspicion of him, there should have been a trial in England. He should have been accused. “He just wanted it to be clear.” But there was no trial.

“They found it easier just to tell people he was a traitor. But Kieffer saluted my husband when the death penalty verdict was given at his trial. Kieffer would not have saluted a man who was a traitor to his country.”

There was to be no pact, however, with Madeleine, continued Kieffer to Vera. He explained that Madeleine and Colonel Faye were then immediately sent from Avenue Foch to Germany. “They refused to give their word of honour not to attempt further escapes.”

Vera asked Kieffer where he had sent Madeleine. “She went to Karlsruhe, and later I heard she had been sent to Pforzheim because the prison in Karlsruhe was overfull,” he explained. She then asked him why he sent Nora to Karlsruhe in the first place and why he had sent the other women there later. He said he wanted Nora to be somewhere he could reinterro-gate her further if necessary, as they continued playing back her radio after she was sent away. The jail in Karlsruhe was well run, and he presumed the women had remained safe there until the end of the war, he told Vera.

“It was nice for you to select Karlsruhe for the women for your convenience, since you happened to live there,” Vera replied. “It was nice for you to have an excuse to return from Paris whenever you felt like it.”

Vera then told Kieffer that Madeleine had been held in chains throughout her time in Pforzheim. That was harsh, he admitted, but it was important to understand that she was considered a “dangerous” prisoner because of her escapes. He himself had requested that she be put in restraints to prevent further escapes. If she had escaped again, she would certainly have been shot. Most Gestapo officers would have shot her after her first attempt.

Then Vera told Kieffer that Madeleine and other women he sent to Karlsruhe had been taken to concentration camps, where they were killed. Kieffer looked up, quite obviously surprised. He began to cry. Vera told him: “Kieffer, if one of us is going to cry, it is going to be me. You will please stop this comedy.”

Next Vera asked Kieffer to tell her more about the other agents, and he mentioned others who had refused to cooperate with him: Antoine—
the Mauritian France Antelme—and Bertrand—the Canadian Frank Pickersgill—who had tried to escape and been shot.

On the whole Vera found Kieffer to be frank, but when she asked specifically for names of prisoners whom he had “turned” and persuaded to work for him, he looked uncomfortable. Most more or less helped, though not necessarily voluntarily, he said. “Most were made to feel they had nothing to lose because we knew so much already.” Archambaud (Gilbert Norman) had helped a lot, he said eventually. In the end there were many who helped because they felt they had no choice.

“The French Section had no traitors then?” asked Vera, now prompting Kieffer to volunteer the information she was sure he had. “There was nobody who willingly betrayed us?”

At this Kieffer suddenly looked up, surprised. “You are asking me if there was a traitor in your ranks? But why are you asking me? You know yourself there was one. You recalled him to London—Gilbert.” Suddenly Kieffer was not at all uncomfortable. Clearly he had no qualms talking about Gilbert, because he was not one of his informers. “He was [Karl] Boemelburg's agent,” he told Vera. “For Boemelburg in fact he was more than an agent. He was a friend going back a very long time. And Boemelburg alone dealt with him. He had the symbol BOE 48. BOE for Boemelburg. He was Boemelburg's forty-eighth agent.”

“And who exactly was BOE 48?” Vera asked.

“Well, I think you know,” he said, observing her curiously. “Of course you know. It was Henri Déricourt.”

Here at last was the credible confirmation Vera had for so long sought of the treachery of Henri Déricourt, alias Gilbert. All other evidence against Déricourt had been viewed by MI5 and by Buckmaster as tainted or open to alternative explanations. Even Dr. Goetz might have been protecting his own position in some way. But now Vera had Kief-fer's testimony that Déricourt was working for the Germans. His evidence was more valuable than that of any other witness, not only because he knew more, but because, on the traps of the gallows, he had nothing to lose by telling the truth. For ordering the deaths of the SAS soldiers, Kieffer knew he would almost certainly be hanged.

What exactly was Boemelburg s arrangement with Déricourt? Vera then asked.

Kieffer didn't know how Boemelburg had come to know Déricourt. “Boemelburg was very secretive about Gilbert,” he said. He had come to understand, however, that under his deal with Boemelburg, Gilbert offered to show him the agents' mail and to inform him of any landings that were taking place coming from England. In return Boemelburg agreed that the landings should take place undisturbed. Gilbert also insisted that the agents should not be followed from the landing fields and that if arrests were to be made, they should be at an agreed distance. Generally, Kieffer told Vera, agents were only shadowed and not arrested, in order not to implicate Gilbert. He had his own wireless officer, and generally he told the Germans where he was transmitting from so that they did not arrest him.

“Was he paid?”

“Boemelburg gave him a lot of money. Boemelburg wanted to buy Gilbert a property; his grand dream was that Déricourt would tell him the date of the invasion. Boemelburg thought Déricourt was his ‘super ace,' ” said Kieffer, an expression Vera had also heard from Dr. Goetz. “He arrived with masses of papers that had to be photographed so we could use them in interrogations. Everything had to be photostatted very quickly in the night. Then I kept the papers in my safe.”

“When was Gilbert's mail first used?”

At first he had not attached a great deal of importance to Gilbert's material, Kieffer said. Then he added: “It was, however, put to very good use in the interrogation of Prosper.”