Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (63 page)

Tell me about Prosper, said Vera, who had waited patiently for the right moment to ask Kieffer about Francis Suttill. Suttill was the most important French Section agent to fall into Kieffer's hands, but so far he had not been mentioned at all. More than anything, Vera had wanted to ask Kieffer for the truth about the Prosper collapse.

“I remember that in the summer of 1943 I started the drive against Prosper,” he told her. “Prosper was arrested in his house after the house had been watched.”

“How did you know the address?”

“Possibly through Boemelburg. Possibly we did get Prosper's address through Déricourt. We watched his flat for fourteen days. One day he walked in. We would never have caught him otherwise.” After Prosper was caught, Boemelburg had passed to Kieffer copies of Prosper's mail, which Kieffer, in turn, passed to an officer named August Scherer, who first interrogated him.

“I remember that Scherer was very happy to have all this material to use in the interrogation against Prosper. And Prosper was astonished that we knew this and that.” Soon after Prosper, Archambaud and Denise (Andrée Borrel) were also arrested.

“Prosper, however, did not wish to make a statement,” said Kieffer. “But this was not the case with Archambaud, who had not the integrity of Prosper and made a very full statement.”

They talked about Prosper for some time further. How had the Gestapo learned of the locations of all the arms dumps, after the arrests of Prosper and Archambaud? How did they seem to know exactly which resistance men had worked with the Prosper circuit? Did Kieffer offer Prosper a pact under which lives would be saved in return for information? Did Horst Kopkow in Berlin agree to the pact? Or was the story that Prosper had done a deal with Kieffer just that—a story told to break the confidence of other agents?

All these questions Vera asked, and she considered Kieffer's answer carefully in each case. But few of the answers were noted down. The words exchanged about Prosper were part of the “private” conversation, and nobody else needed to know. So when Vera drafted a terse two-page deposition for Kieffer to sign, it contained little information at all on Prosper.

Kieffer signed the statement in bold, slanting script, and below his name Vera signed her own pinprick signature.

For more than fifty years the formal deposition that resulted from Vera's interrogation of Hans Kieffer was kept secret. When it was finally made public with the opening of the SOE files, it contained the bare minimum
of information. Given Kieffer's importance to SOE's history, this thin little offering was hard to believe.

I had found other ways of piecing together something of what was said during this encounter. Vera had jotted notes, and in her private papers were two additional statements taken from Kieffer, one on Nora and one on Bob Starr. I had also picked up many comments made by Vera over the years about the meeting.

The puzzle about the formal statement was not only its brevity, however, but also its ambiguity. Vera abhorred muddled writing. Annie Samuelli, her Romanian friend, told me how, as a young secretary in Bucharest, Vera was much sought after because of the clarity of her writing; people often asked her to improve their own letters or prose. Jerrard Tickell once described the words in Vera's minutes or notes as “a neat little row of scalpels.”

Yet the deposition Vera took from Kieffer was a masterpiece of ambiguity. Furthermore, it was clear from the early drafts that she had deliberately constructed the ambiguities herself.

Nowhere was the statement more ambiguous than on the question of whether Prosper made a pact with Kieffer. Kieffer was evidently a man who liked making pacts. Vera had taken a detailed three-page statement on the “pact” he made with the agent Bob Starr, which was of far less importance to F Section history. Yet the word “pact” does not appear in connection with Prosper. All Vera recorded was that, although Prosper “did not want to make a statement,” the information Kieffer had received from Déricourt “was put to very good use in the interrogation of Prosper.” What use was this information put to exactly? Vera must have asked Kieffer. But she did not give us his answer.

Clearly Kieffer admired Prosper more than he did Gilbert Norman, saying Norman “had not the integrity of Prosper,” which left open the possibility that Prosper, unlike Norman, did not talk at all. On the other hand, Vera chose Kieffer's words for him carefully, saying Prosper “did not want to make a statement.” She did not say that he did not make a statement once he was persuaded, perhaps, that it might save lives.

The deposition Vera took from Kieffer fitted a familiar pattern; throughout her postwar investigation she had shown a reluctance to pass
on details of what she found. Sometimes her reasons for silence were understandable. The families of the victims were told the bare minimum, perhaps in the belief that they would be spared pain. Vera often chose not to pass on all she found out of loyalty to Buckmaster. But her readiness to manipulate information for less admirable reasons—for example, to cover her own mistakes or the mistakes of SOE—had also been evident.

By the time Vera saw Kieffer, in January 1947, bitter controversy was raging in France over whether Prosper had sold out his loyal French followers in a futile bargain with the enemy, causing hundreds of needless deaths. By guarding what Kieffer said for herself, Vera was depriving Prosper survivors of the truth, and the bitterness would always remain. Furthermore, she was letting down Francis Suttill's own wife and sons. After the war a slur stuck to Suttill's name. No open accusation was ever made against him by Vera or Buckmaster, but their silence on his case was somehow worse. Margaret Suttill sensed that her husband had been blotted out of SOE's history, and she blamed Vera. “My mother hated Vera Atkins,” said Anthony Suttill. “She felt others had been helped after the war but she had not.” To make matters worse, Margaret Suttill never received confirmation of her husband's death and always expected he might come back.

Over the years Margaret Suttill's anger deepened. If any word was said against her husband, she went into a rage. So embittered did she become as she watched other SOE heroes and heroines fêted in postwar years, she refused even to talk of her husband to his two boys, who grew up knowing nothing of their father. “My only memory of him is a bare bottom,” said Anthony Suttill, who was a baby when his father left for the field. “I suppose I must have been in a bathroom with him as a toddler and that is what stuck in my mind.” Francis junior, born in 1940, had no memory of his father at all. It was only after their mother died in 1996 that the sons were able to start to get to know their father. They began to find little remnants of his life hidden around the house. In an airing cupboard Anthony found a box of negatives containing scores of tiny pictures, and they turned out to be little portraits of his father, each with a slightly different expression. Suttill's two sons also started trying to find out what had really happened.

Talking to them in a London pub, I heard how they had just found out about the trial of Sachsenhausen camp staff held behind the Iron Curtain in 1947. They had discovered that at the trial evidence was given about their father's execution, but it was still not clear if he had been hanged or shot. “I know that at other camps, when they hanged the agents, often they just hooked them by the collar to a meat hook so they were slowly throttled,” said Francis, looking at Anthony, who winced. “I know my brother doesn't like me to talk about it like that, but that is how it happened. Even when they killed them, they wanted to humiliate them as much as possible. The story about one agent being taken to his death with a German guard of honour because he had been so brave is obviously total rubbish.”

Vera's failure to record any detailed testimony from Kieffer on the question of Henri Déricourt was even harder to fathom than her silence on Prosper, especially because—as she was well aware when she met Kieffer—Déricourt had just been arrested by the French.

At about the same time as Kieffer was captured, the French charged Déricourt with treachery and held him in prison in Fresnes while they prepared a case against him to be heard before a military tribunal.

Any evidence from the senior Sicherheitsdienst officer Déricourt worked for would, as Vera knew, be of vital importance to the French prosecutor's case. And Vera had learned enough detail from Kieffer virtually to guarantee Déricourt s conviction. Kieffer had confirmed in the most credible terms that Déricourt was BOE 48, Boemelburg's forty-eighth agent. He had also confirmed that Déricourt passed agents' mail directly into German hands. And he had confirmed that he and his officers knew about every landing from England organised by Déricourt. Yet Déricourt s name appeared only twice in the formal deposition that Vera took from Kieffer and was mentioned almost in passing.

Then I discovered that Vera had been building up her own file on Déricourt. She showed it to Francis Cammaerts, the former F Section agent, in early 1947.

Cammaerts had told Vera he was intending to speak in his defence at Déricourt s trial, and Vera tried to discourage him. “As far as I was aware, Déricourt was a very good thing,” Cammaerts told me. “Nobody had ever
told me otherwise. Then Vera took me aside. She didn't say anything. She just took me into a room quietly and showed me a file on him and then left me to read it. It didn't take me long to see that he was a double.” So what happened to the main body of Kieffer's evidence against Déricourt?

When the trial of Henri Déricourt did eventually take place, in Paris in June 1948, it was a travesty of justice. By then Kieffer lay buried in an unmarked grave. He had been convicted of the SAS murders at a British military trial in Hameln in June 1947 and was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint, the last British hangman. Bob Starr had testified in court to Sturmbannführer Kieffer's humane treatment of F Section prisoners at Avenue Foch, but his words carried no weight.

Had anyone suggested it, British prosecutors could easily have offered to defer Kieffer's execution to allow him to give evidence against Déricourt. Contemporary papers showed that war criminals were often “loaned” to others for trials and then returned for sentence or execution. However, at no point, apparently, did the British suggest making Kieffer available for the Déricourt case, and at no point, it seemed, did the French request him.

Furthermore, when the military tribunal convened to try Déricourt, there was no statement from Kieffer—not even Vera's paltry deposition—before the court. And most extraordinary of all, there was nobody from SOE to give evidence against the accused. The only SOE staff officer who appeared at Déricourt s trial gave evidence in his defence.

Much to everyone's astonishment, Nicholas Bodington made an eleventh-hour appearance, telling the military tribunal that he personally had been in charge of Déricourt s work in the field and vouching for his total loyalty. He said that Déricourt s contacts with the Germans were known about in London and were fully authorised for counterespionage purposes. As a result of Bodington's evidence, Henri Eugène Déricourt performed his greatest con trick yet and walked away from his military tribunal a free man.

Once again Déricourt and Bodington appeared to be acting in tandem, and nobody seemed to know why. Diplomats in London were so perplexed by Bodington's appearance that they asked an MI6 officer based in the embassy in Paris to make enquiries among former F Section
people and come up with an explanation. In reply a fellow diplomat and former SOE man, Brooks Richards, said Déricourt's evidence “bears no relation whatever to the truth as it was known to F Section in London” and that it was “fresh evidence of his unreliability” and “a piece of perjury.”

Vera made her disapproval of Bodington's appearance in the court quite clear in later years, when she often told a story of how she “cut” Bodington as a result of it, saying, “I don't know you, Nick,” and then never spoke to him again. Nor, it seems, did anyone else ever speak to Bodington about his French trial appearance. Damned by former colleagues as a “perjurer,” he ended his career as a subeditor on the Western Morning News and died in 1974.

Yet in many ways the mystery of Bodington's apparently unauthorised appearance at Déricourt's trial is perhaps a red herring. The more important question is why nobody from SOE or from the government appeared in an official capacity to present evidence against the man they now knew had hastened scores of British agents to their deaths. Perhaps the Foreign Office refused to countenance any official presence at the trial for fear of ruffling French sensitivities at a time when Britain was trying to heal postwar rifts with the French. De Gaulle had always been deeply suspicious of SOE and its real intentions in France. French men and women who worked with British-run SOE circuits were accused by de Gaulle of being mercenaries, and after the liberation of 1944 he had, on occasion, even ordered SOE agents off French soil. For a representative of SOE now to appear officially in a French court—especially when it meant washing dirty British linen—might have been considered both unwise and embarrassing. And yet there were no British papers to show that this was the Foreign Office view. French records on the affair remain closed.