Agent Josephine, page 11
The terms of the Armistice were draconian in the extreme. With 92,000 French soldiers dead, 200,000 wounded and 1.5 million set to become prisoners-of-war, France was to free all German captives and to turn over all refugees with known anti-Nazi sympathies. The French nation was to pay 400 million francs a day to the occupying power, and anyone with the temerity to start any kind of a resistance movement was to face the death penalty.41
Even as the Armistice came into effect that 25 June morning, Paillole, Abtey and comrades swore an oath to continue the struggle against the invaders.42 But how on earth were they to do so? The task that lay before them was daunting, especially as the vast majority of the French people backed Pétain: anything to save the country from further death and ruin. That meant the Deuxième Bureau would be operating among a largely hostile population, pitting Frenchman against Frenchman.
Chillingly, the Armistice was to be policed by the Waffenstillstandskommission – the Armistice Commission – based in the city of Wiesbaden, a hundred kilometres the German side of the border. Its agents – including Gestapo and SS – would flood into the newly conquered territory. In Paris, SS Commander Karl Boemelburg, the Chief of the Gestapo in France, declared: ‘This country must be bound and gagged. We need 30,000 agents here in the shortest possible time.’ Daily, the stranglehold tightened. This was the start of the ‘long night’ for France, as the nation was sucked into a web of darkness.43
Not only was the Deuxième Bureau fragmented and broken, but Paillole and his colleagues had lost all contact with their closest allies, the Secret Intelligence Service. The British ‘remained alone in the struggle’, Paillole would write, and somehow a means needed to be found to reach out to them and to forge the partnership anew.44 Under the terms of the Armistice, the French security services were supposed to answer to the Vichy state. Officially, that left agents of the Deuxième Bureau allied to their erstwhile enemies. Unofficially, things were quite different.
‘We are and remain at war with Germany,’ Paillole insisted. Regardless of the position of the Vichy regime, the struggle would continue. Paillole and his comrades would have to act beyond the rules, subverting their own leadership. Their only guide would be their consciences, as they stepped outside the law of the land, truly becoming ‘rebels’.45 Fortunately, they had a secret fund from which to bankroll such shadow operations. Thanks to the Abwehr’s payments made to Aubert, the French Navy traitor, plus dozens of other special agents, they would use Germany’s own money to fight it.
Anyone engaged in this battle was playing a deadly game. The chances of getting caught were all too obvious, for they would be operating under the enemy’s very noses. Even so, the HCs – at least, those who remained steadfast, courageous and committed – would have to be reactivated. They would need to be truly exceptional individuals, for now they would be forced to operate in a world of fractured allegiances, plagued by betrayal, deception and mistrust. They would need to be blessed with iron nerves, unimpeachable moral standards, and be willing to risk all for the cause.46
Upon first being recruited as an Honorary Correspondent, Josephine Baker had been promised by Jacques Abtey: From now on, you are one of us. It certainly didn’t feel that way in late June 1940, as she licked her wounds and tried to regroup in Château des Milandes. She had been sucked into the nightmare that had engulfed France, losing all contact with her unit; her band of brothers; her Deuxième Bureau comrades. Yet she remained determined to fight on.
In many ways the Château was a natural setting from which to plan for insurrection. The name itself, Milandes, is steeped in myth. It is formed from two medieval words, ‘mi’, meaning middle, and ‘lande’, meaning wooded countryside; the château set in the midst of dense woodland. The family of François I de Caumont – the Caumonts were a legendary French warrior dynasty – had built the castle and bequeathed its name. Above the window beside the ornate entrance they had carved a Latin inscription: ‘LAN MCCCCIIIIXX ET IX FUREN COMENSADES LAS MILANDES DE CASTLENAU’ – in 1489, the castle was founded and named Milandes of Castlenau (presumably an archaic spelling, for the local commune is called Castelnaud-la-Chapelle).47
François I de Caumont was a foremost landowner, lord and knight. In 1542 he was assassinated at Milandes by rival French noblemen, part of a long history of religious wars, assassinations, poisonings, kidnappings and associated skulduggery which were rife. Variously a seat of both Catholics and the Huguenots – protestant reformists – the château had played host to some of the nation’s wealthiest families. In 1622, Jacques-Nompar de Caumont, then Milandes’ owner, was appointed Field Marshal of all of France by King Louis XIII. Fifteen years later, the French king still hailed de Caumont – then all of seventy-nine years old – as ‘the most experienced and able captain of the realm’.48
Yet de Caumont would also be criticised – in verse – for supposedly betraying the Huguenot cause: ‘God saved you by grace, and maybe for reproach… Reproach by making you the slave of your foes.’49 The slave of your foes – those were sentiments that resonated powerfully in a France reeling under Nazi occupation. Fittingly, Milandes bristled with fearsome gargoyles – intricately carved dragons, demons, hunting dogs – plus the heraldic shields of the Caumont family. The venerable château seemed forged in implacable stone… for war. Now, it was home to the world’s most famous woman of colour, who hungered to fight.
Josephine had studied the castle’s martial traditions and the centuries of rich history.50 She would add her own deeply personal touch, a nod to the roots of her ancestors’ long history of struggle in the USA. Her grandma, Elvira, had been born into slavery on a tobacco plantation, in Holy Springs, Arkansas. Tearfully, she’d told an infant Josephine stories about the slave days. ‘I adored Grandma,’ Josephine remarked. ‘The songs she sang as she rocked me to sleep… told of freedom that would someday come.’51
As a child Josephine had been ostracised by her mother, who resented the fact that she had become pregnant with her at such a young age. Carrie had conceived when she was just nineteen years old, and she blamed Josephine for bringing about a premature end to her dancing career. As Josephine would remark later in life, her mother had sometimes told her that she wished she hadn’t been born. The young Josephine was foisted onto her grandmother, with whom she was close. Each Sunday, Elvira would pull on her best flowery dress and a huge hat with a hole in the top, through which her bun was supposed to poke, and they’d set off for church. Josephine loved those outings, for grandma was so cheerful she made everyone smile.
It was from Grandma Elvira that Josephine received what love there was to have. Elvira was forever baking cornbread – an easy-to-make corn-based recipe, popular in the Southern USA, whose origins are rooted in Native American culture. She’d spread the fresh-made cornbread thick with jam, so Josephine could munch away while she told stories. Elvira loved relating them just as much as her granddaughter loved listening. She’d cover all the classics – the Three Little Pigs, Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood – but Josephine’s standout favourite was Cinderella. The image of Cinderella, sweeping up the ashes and tempering her grief and loneliness with the conviction that one day she would win through by her own efforts, struck a powerful chord.
But at times, Grandma’s tales would become emotional, as she reminisced about her great-great-grandparents, who had been brought to the USA from Africa to face a life of slavery. She’d round it all off with uplifting Bible stories and songs, telling of freedom after oppression, of happiness after grief, of sunshine after rain. In memory of her Grandma Elvira and of her family’s long history of emancipation, Josephine would grow a tobacco plant just by the entrance to her château. It was a nod to another struggle in freedom’s cause: the summer of 1940 fight against the Nazi invaders.
As if drawn to her need to wage battle, a makeshift crew of would-be resisters coalesced at Milandes. There was Joseph Boué, a French Air Force captain, his uniform discarded but his hunger to battle on undimmed. There were the elderly Laremie couple, whose sons were being held as POWs behind German barbed wire. There were the Jacobs, the Belgian Jews rescued by Josephine from the shelter beneath L’Église de la Sainte-Trinité, who offered thanks to God that France had been their saving grace… so far. Most interestingly, there was Emmanuel Bayonne – dark-haired and dark-eyed, officially an officer in the French Navy, but secretly an agent of the Deuxième Bureau, and a close colleague of both Abtey and Paillole.52
All they needed – all they hungered for – was the means to wage war.
CHAPTER SIX
It Can’t Always Be Caviar
One man had managed to get out of Paris carrying with him with the ultimate prize, in terms of securing the means to continue the fight against a seemingly invincible foe. In doing so, Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale had pulled off one of the greatest intelligence coups of the entire war.1 Once hostilities had been declared, Britain’s Paris spymaster had been given a very particular set of orders: ‘Establish and enhance contact in future occupied countries, prepare for guerrilla warfare, foment insurrections and develop destructive devices…’2 Dunderdale certainly had prior form.
In 1918, he’d helped investigate the killings of Russia’s Romanov Imperial Family: the emperor, his wife and five children had been shot and bayonetted to death.3 In Turkey, he’d managed to spirit the Turkish ruler, Sultan Muhammad VI, into exile, aboard the British battleship Malaya, prior to which he’d had to pay off the sultan’s harem in gold sovereigns.4 Later, in Paris, he’d debriefed the first high-level defector from Soviet Russia, Boris Georgiyevich Bazhanov, one of Stalin’s assistants. Bazhanov had provided such a trove of intelligence that Moscow had ordered him eliminated.5
Germany relied upon a top-secret device of ground-breaking technology to encode its communications – the Enigma machine. Looking something like a typewriter crossed with a rudimentary computer, the Enigma relied upon an electromechanical rotor mechanism to scramble the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, plus a series of codebooks to interpret cyphered messages. It was used by all branches of the German military, and Berlin believed it to be so secure as to be unbreakable. The Polish had felt otherwise, and at their top-secret cypher school they’d managed to build an exact replica of the Enigma, and to partially break Nazi Germany’s codes.6
With the fall of Poland, their cypher teams had fled to Paris, taking their precious technology and codebooks with them. They had been welcomed as guests of French intelligence, and with a permanent SIS liaison officer on hand, plus a 24/7 teletype link – a hotline – to London. During the long months of the Phoney War, the Polish cypher team cracked ‘hundreds of messages’, which were ‘intercepted day and night’.7 But when France looked set to fall, the Polish team and their Enigma machines were in dire jeopardy.
Dunderdale had convinced his French colleagues that only one course of action lay open to them: somehow, they had to spirit the precious technology and codebooks to London. Employing a good dash of skulduggery, Dunderdale had masterminded an operation described by Gwido Langer, chief of the Polish Cryptographic Service, as ‘one of the most significant SIS actions during the war’, though Dunderdale, typically, would describe the mission as ‘peanuts’ compared to some of his later wartime exploits.8
In his Paris rooms Dunderdale had had a special French safe fitted into one wall, which was manufactured by a famous firm of safe-makers and which could only be opened by a ‘unikey’ – a solitary key unique to that device. Dunderdale persuaded his long-standing colleague, Gustave Bertrand, Chief of the Deuxième Bureau’s Section des Examens, its cryptanalytical unit, that the Polish Enigmas and their codebooks should be secreted there, for safekeeping. He would give Bertrand the unikey, as a guarantee that they were inviolable and secure.9
Dunderdale had worked closely with Bertrand for nigh-on a decade, visiting both London and Warsaw on the trail of the Enigma secrets. In truth, his safe was actually a SIS replica made to order in England, with a secret back door lying on the far side (actually, a redoubtable piece of equipment not uncommonly used by agencies like SIS). Having accessed it via a staircase, Dunderdale was able to extract the Enigma machines and the codebooks, place them in a suitcase – now a ‘diplomatic bag’, of course – whereupon he caught a train post-haste to London. He would arrive triumphantly at King’s Cross station, to be met by the chief of SIS, Stuart Menzies himself.
Once the precious booty was delivered to Bletchley Park, headquarters of the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS), it provided ‘an astounding breakthrough’ which ‘shortened the war – and saved countless Allied lives – by perhaps three or four years.’10 Having escaped France with his diplomatic case stuffed full of priceless booty, Dunderdale was determined to return. Sure enough, during the dark summer of 1940 he would stand shoulder to shoulder with his French comrades, and he would only leave for Britain at the last possible moment, when Menzies ordered him to do so, and no excuses.11
Some accounts of this incredible episode have Dunderdale sharing with Bertrand the dramas of the Enigma coup, and of them both spiriting the booty to London. One thing is for certain: despite his piratical streak, Dunderdale was renowned for being a true and constant friend, and he very likely had brought Bertrand in on the whole thing (in which case the deception involved in the rear-door trickery with the safe may not have been necessary). Either way, by summer 1940, from Norway in the north to the tip of Italy and France in the south, the Axis were triumphant. With Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Channel Islands, Poland, Czechoslovakia and France having fallen, a shroud of darkness had descended over Western Europe. While the Enigma success would enable a beam of light to be shone into that void, it would remain so secret that very, very few would ever know.
To all appearances the darkness – the evil – reigned complete.
A few days after Josephine and company had gathered at Château des Milandes, the first signpost on the road to resistance materialised, beamed across the airwaves via their wireless set. On 18 June 1940, via a BBC broadcast from London, a relatively obscure army officer spoke to the French nation. At the time General Charles de Gaulle was little-known, even in France. An arch-proponent of armoured warfare, ironically his writings and theories on the use of tanks had been read by Hitler, inspiring the Führer’s concept of blitzkrieg, even as they had been dismissed by de Gaulle’s superiors in France.12
A matter of days before making his historic broadcast, de Gaulle had managed to spirit himself aboard an aircraft bound for Britain, knowing that Pétain’s rise to power only boded ill. By the time he took to the airwaves in an impassioned plea for the people of France to rise up and fight, he had the full backing of Winston Churchill. Indeed, the British prime minister and the leader of what would become known as the Free French had much in common, despite the differences – the deep well of rancour – that at times lay between them.
On one level a brilliant and inspirational visionary, de Gaulle abhorred the fact that France had fallen so spectacularly, forcing him to fall back on the charity of the old enemy, Great Britain.13 As he made his historic speech, he was well aware he was exhorting a divided population to fight. But as Churchill put it, de Gaulle was now the torchbearer of ‘the honour of France’.14 Even before de Gaulle’s arrival, Britain’s wartime leader had hatched a most incredible plot to enable the French to continue the struggle.
On 16 June 1940 – just days after the fall of Paris – Churchill had put before Parliament a proposal entitled the ‘Franco-British Union’, something that had been under consideration for many months.15 As Churchill put it: ‘In this crisis we must not let ourselves be accused of lack of imagination.’16 This seemingly unimaginable deal would see the two countries – or at least the unconquered parts of France, including her extensive colonies – merge politically, economically and defensively, in order to prevent them from falling under Nazi dominion, which would mean ‘subjection to a system which reduces mankind to a life of robots and slaves’.17
Britain’s Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Franco-British Union. To succeed, ‘the gesture must be immediate,’ de Gaulle had counselled. He telephoned the French prime minster, Paul Reynaud, who refused to believe that such a proposal was even under consideration, until de Gaulle passed the receiver over to Churchill. The two leaders rushed to board a train and then a ship bound for France, to sign the deal into law, but the proposal would die a sudden death before the French legislature. Pétain’s damning reaction was to declare that Britain was finished, and that any Franco-British Union would be a ‘fusion with a corpse’.18
Churchill was left downhearted but unbowed. ‘Whatever you may do,’ he told the French leaders, ‘we shall fight on forever and ever and ever.’19
It was in similar spirit that de Gaulle seated himself before the microphones in that BBC studio, to make his 18 June 1940 call to arms. Britain’s newspapers would acclaim the extraordinary prescience of de Gaulle’s words. ‘Nothing is lost,’ he intoned, ‘because this war is a world war. In the free universe, immense forces have not yet swung into operation. Some day these forces will crush the enemy. On that day France must be present at the victory. She will then regain her liberty and her greatness. Such is my goal, my only goal.’20
At Château des Milandes, twelve chairs were arranged on the terrace, facing the radio, as those stirring words rang out. Whatever jamming methods the Nazi occupiers might have employed, they were not yet powerful enough to stop the BBC from getting through. In a direct appeal to the hearts of French men and women everywhere, de Gaulle declared that honour demanded they fight. ‘France has undertaken not to lay down arms, save in agreement with her allies. As long as the Allies continue the war, her government has no right to surrender to the enemy.’21
