Agent Josephine, page 44
As Simmel noted on the opening pages of the book, ‘This novel is based on first-hand information.’23 In fact, the book is a thinly disguised treatment of Hans Müssig’s wartime adventures, carried out by Simmel’s protagonist Thomas Lieven. It includes sections detailing Lieven’s relations with ‘Major Maurice Debras… of the Deuxième Bureau’ – Captain Jacques Abtey – and with Josephine Baker, whose real name is used by Simmel. Lieven first meets her at Château des Milandes and later in Marseilles, when Josephine saves his life in the most dramatic fashion. At Lieven’s first meeting with Josephine he cooks her a meal in the château’s kitchen – he was a celebrated gourmet – and apologises when serving it, as so many ingredients are lacking in wartime. She tells him, teasingly, not to worry, for: ‘It can’t always be caviar.’24 It is Josephine’s phrase that makes the title of Simmel’s book.
The book includes an account of how Lieven is recruited by the Deuxième Bureau, to operate a fabulously clever currency manipulation scheme, running suitcases of cash to Belgium, Switzerland and other countries, so raising millions of dollars for the cash-strapped French security services – their slush fund. It includes an account of Lieven’s winter 1940 Lisbon mission with ‘Major Debras’ – Abtey – wherein Lieven is imprisoned due to a passport faking scam, in which his partners were the consul of a South American country living in Lisbon, plus Lisbon’s top passport forger. It relates the shocking tale of Lieven’s later arrest by the Gestapo, his interrogation, and how he strikes a deal with them to ensure his survival by engineering black market stings to enrichen his new taskmasters.
By his own account, Simmel met Müssig prior to writing the book and interviewed him over several days.25 Indeed, Simmel claims that the tale told in It Can’t Always Be Caviar is wholly true, and that only certain names and other key details have been changed. It is also of note that Colonel Rémy – real name Gilbert Renault – the legendary French Resistance hero and prolific author, wrote a book about Jacques Abtey and Josephine Baker’s war years, entitled J.A. Épisodes de la vie d’un agent du S.R. et du contre-espionnage français. In it there is a lengthy telling of Hans Müssig’s story, which again closely mirrors that told in Simmel’s book. It is equally of note that Colonel Rémy and Josephine remained friends and mutual admirers for life, bound together by their shared history during the war years.26
Even when taken with a pinch of salt, Simmel’s book makes for a fascinating read. Unfortunately, it is long out of print, and the 1965 English language version – translated from the German by James Cleugh – is only rarely available from second-hand book sellers, and even then at a price that reflects its rarity. By his end-of-war actions, Jacques Abtey rescued Hans Müssig from a seemingly gruesome fate, without which Simmel’s account of Müssig’s – Lieven’s – exploits would never have been written. In 2019, Thomas Bürkle, a German economist and author who had become fascinated by Lieven/Müssig’s tale, carried out a detailed investigation into its veracities. He concluded that the story as related by Simmel is almost entirely true, that Mussig first met Josephine in 1940, when she was ‘in the service of the Deuxième Bureau [sic],’ and that Lieven/Müssig ‘remained to the end what he was throughout his life – uncatchable.’27
Jacques Abtey, Müssig’s saviour, had the one son, Jean-Louis, by his first wife, Emma Kuntz, and would have a second, Bertrand-Hugues, with his second wife, Jacqueline Cellier. She gave birth in Casablanca in 1948. Working for a few months in Paris with the SDECE in 1945, Abtey had returned to North Africa and would remain there for eight years, upon what appears to have been some kind of attachment to the French intelligence services. In 1946 he appears to have been in charge of overseeing ‘US arrivals’ in Morocco. But by late 1947 the SDECE would deny that Abtey was serving as one of their agents, concluding that his ‘current activities in Morocco are considered very suspicious’.28
SDECE in Morocco would go on to suggest that Abtey had somehow gone rogue, serving as some kind of freelance agent working with his old friends Si Mohamed Menebhi, the son of the former Grand Vizier, and Moulay Larbi, cousin of the Sultan of Morocco. He was labelled as an adventurer who was liable to immediate arrest. By 1949, SDECE had disowned Abtey: ‘Mr Abtey does not belong to the D.E.C. [shorthand for SDECE] and can in no way be covered by the Service.’ In several of the reports on Abtey’s supposedly wayward activities at this time, he was accused of using high-level political contacts to oil the wheels in North Africa, and his name is at times misspelt as ‘Astey’.29
Whatever aspersions may have been cast, Abtey seems to have come through largely unscathed. In 1953 he would return to France, and thanks largely to the support of his former chiefs in the Deuxième Bureau, including the then General Louis Rivet, he would be re-instated to the French security services. Seconded to the Direction des Études et Fabrications d’Armement (DEFA), he took control of security of a top-secret facility, the Laboratoire de Recherches de Saint-Louis (L-RSL). There, one hundred-odd German scientists, mostly high-level physicists, were working for DEFA, continuing to develop the kind of ground-breaking rocketry and related armaments that they had done at their previous posting, at the Nazi-era Hermann Goering Ballistic Academy.
When General de Lattre de Tassigny’s French forces had advanced into Germany, they had overrun the German facility, securing those high-level physicists for the post-war French armaments industry. The scientists lived in Weil am Rhein, a town lying on the German side of the River Rhine, but in what was then the French zone of occupation of Germany. Abtey would take up residence himself in that town. Each morning the scientists would be bussed to work across the Rhine, to the L-RSL laboratory. In 1956, Germany became a sovereign nation again, and the French and German governments signed a treaty whereby the L-RSL laboratory became a Franco-German joint venture. It is known to this day as the French-German Research Institute of Saint-Louis. In helping broker this partnership, Abtey was assisted greatly by his old comrade from North African days, General Billotte.30
Still troubled by what Abtey believed were powerful enemies within the French political establishment – they nursed grudges dating back to his Second World War service – he found himself posted to a sinecure, and not for the first time since his wartime service had ended. Unable to endure life in such a banal position, in 1959 Abtey secured a posting to the Military Centre for European Studies, in Paris, serving as a lecturer and examiner in the Superior War School, German language section. But after two decades’ service in the French security services, Abtey felt underwhelmed and as if he had been abandoned and betrayed. He sought retirement in March 1961 at fifty-two years of age.
In April 1958, Abtey had received a letter informing him that he was to be granted the Légion d’Honneur, and also that he would be promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. By Abtey’s own account neither of those decisions appears to have been ratified, and among other slights this underpinned his decision to retire. The official French service files held on Abtey seem to contradict this, several stating that he was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur on 7 August 1959. Abtey states he rejected the decoration, in large part because there was no citation making mention of any of his war service, which he found both unacceptable and deeply insulting.31
What is abundantly clear from a close reading of Abtey’s post-war government files is that significant and on-going efforts were made to disavow his wartime service, particularly that prior to the date when it was ‘regularised’, in Morocco, in the spring of 1943. It is also clear that some of Abtey’s superiors had concluded of him that he was only fit for ‘special services’ type work, and that there was little scope to use such skills in peacetime, when France was no longer embroiled in a world war.32
Sometime after his retirement, Abtey would explain away his ‘missing years’ – those from 1946–1953, in North Africa – by stating officially that he had been on a personal assignment at the behest of the then French president, Vincent Auriol. The president, who knew of Abtey due to his wartime service with the Deuxième Bureau, had given him a special mission in North Africa, which had been overseen by none other than the president’s own head of security.
As such, Abtey had served in North Africa in some kind of grey role – in ‘clean air, on a civilian mission’, as he would describe it – during which time he had on occasion reported directly to the French president. That would explain why the SDECE and French military security had no record of him working to their orders or as one of their agents, and why they had concluded that he had somehow ‘gone rogue’. It would also explain why and how his return to France in 1953 saw him quietly taken back into the French security services, and in spite of the apparent missing years.
Still, Abtey believed – and the files suggest with ample justification – that he had enemies in the French political establishment. Their enmity led directly back to Abtey’s war work, but the cause and effect of this lie beyond the scope of this book. Abtey chronicled this in his French government files (some of which were only released to the public in 2020). To be forced into early retirement after all he had done for France, for the Allies and for freedom, left Abtey feeling ‘disgusted, and doubly so: I was one of the very first F.F.L. [volunteers for Free France] – the only active officer of the Deuxième Bureau to have joined the F.F.L. as early as 1940…’ Certainly, his wartime service alone meant he deserved far better.33
In 1949 Abtey had penned a memoir of his wartime service, or rather an account of both his and his famous fellow agent’s wartime adventures, entitled La Guerre Secrète de Josèphine Baker – The Secret War of Josephine Baker. (In this and his subsequent book Abtey relates chapter and verse concerning the Hans Müssig story.) There is a well-understood rule in the French secret service that no agent, nor Honourable Correspondent for that matter, should write about or otherwise publicise his or her secret work until at least three decades have passed, and preferably not at all. Although the book is somewhat elliptical and often couched in coded, veiled language, it doubtless ruffled feathers.
Having retired from the French secret service in 1961, Abtey must have felt he was free to say more. That same year he published a new account of his and Josephine Baker’s war years, written with/by Colonel Rémy (Gilbert Renault). Colonel Rémy’s book – J.A.: Épisodes de la vie d’un agent du S.R. et du contre-espionnage français – is published only in French and alas is long out of print. While Rémy’s account is more forthright and revealing than Abtey’s 1948 telling, it still falls short of full disclosure, and no doubt both men were aware of the expectations of secrecy by which Abtey at least was still bound.
In 1967 Abtey (co-)authored a third account of his wartime exploits with the French security services, entitled 2ème Bureau Contre Abwehr – Deuxième Bureau Against the Abwehr. A fascinating and detailed account concerning his service with the Deuxième Bureau, which ended in the summer of 1940, many of the missions covered are pre-war, so the thirty-year secrecy rule would have been largely over. The book is co-written by the former Abwehr agent Dr Fritz Unterberg Gibhardt, the same individual who, during the run-up to the war had orchestrated French Navy officer Aubert’s treachery, including the betrayal of the French naval codes. Incidentally, this book also includes a detailed rendering of Hans Müssig’s early wartime adventures.
In 1951 Josephine Baker had asked Abtey to travel to the USA, to support her in her fight against segregation and to clear her name of the accusations of communist leanings. He would do just that, testifying to her long fight for freedom in the Second World War on behalf of the Allies, and her unbending commitment to struggle for justice no matter what the cost might be. This was but one of many instances in which the two wartime colleagues and lovers would work closely together, supporting each other in their lives, their careers and their adventures and misadventures.34
Shortly after his retirement, Abtey seems to have taken Josephine up on her 1949 offer, that she would always keep a house for him at Château des Milandes. In 1962 he went to live there, and took up a part-time profession as an artist, painting any number of pictures of the château itself (among other subjects). At least one of those paintings he signed ‘J. Brad’ – short for James Bradford, as a nod to the wartime cover name that the British Secret Intelligence Service had given him in the autumn of 1941. After the war Josephine had written of how, of all her partners, Abtey was the one that she truly loved and with whom she should have settled down.35
Josephine and Jacques Abtey were truly inseparable, that was until she sang and danced her last shows at the Bobino, going out as she had fully intended, in a blaze of euphoria, showbiz success and light. Indeed, in 1957 and again in 1958 Josephine had written to her French Government contacts on Abtey’s behalf, in support of his on-going attempts to get all of his wartime service regularised and his wartime role properly recognised. Her intervention seems to have had some effect. By 1959 the then French prime minister, Michel Jean-Pierre Debré, who served under President de Gaulle from 1959 to 1962, interceded on Abtey’s behalf, investigating the apparent ‘career prejudices that he may have suffered… without any well-founded grievances…’36
In March 1999 Jacques Abtey passed away, just a few months short of his ninetieth birthday. He was at that time living in Sarlat-la-Canéda, a beautiful and historic medieval town in the Dordogne, founded around a Benedictine Abbey, Sarlat Cathedral. Sarlat lies a short drive away from Château des Milandes, although of course for the last thirty years of Abtey’s life it was no longer owned or lived in by Josephine Baker. He was survived by his wife, Jacqueline, and Bertrand-Hugues, their son.
Needless to say, alongside Josephine Baker, Jacques Abtey is one of the standout heroes and individuals of courage and grit who dared all in freedom’s cause, as related in these pages.
Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale CMG MBE would forge a long and distinguished career post-war with the Secret Intelligence Service. Typically, he refused to take an office in SIS’s Whitehall headquarters, as the atmosphere and outlook was intolerable as he saw it. Instead, he was able to establish a small private office near by, which he furnished with rich oriental rugs, a portrait of the British King and the Russian Tsar, plus a beautifully crafted model of a Russian destroyer of First World War vintage. Among many other intelligence coups, following General de Gaulle’s resignation in 1946 – which was due to a political row within the post-war French Government – there was a shake-up of the French intelligence services, and Dunderdale provided the bridge between the old guard and the new recruits, as far as the SIS was concerned.37
In recognition of his wartime efforts on behalf of the Allies, Dunderdale was awarded the French Légion d’Honneur, the Croix de Guerre Avec Palme and the American Legion of Merit, a military award granted by the US Armed Forces. He would separate from June Ament-Morse in 1947, and in 1952 would marry Dorothy Mabel Brayshaw Hyde, the daughter of James Murray Crofts DSC. They lived near London until her death, in 1978. Theirs had been a happy marriage, and upon her death Dunderdale decided to start afresh. He moved to New York where he had a group of old friends. In 1980 he married Deborah McLeod (née Jackson), of Boston, Massachusetts. There were no children from any of the marriages. Dunderdale would die in 1990, in New York, of natural causes, aged ninety-one. His wife Deborah would pass away three years later.
Much of Dunderdale’s post-war intelligence work remains untold, due to the intense secrecy that enshrouds SIS activities. However, the role he performed to win the intelligence war in France, North Africa and the wider region – not to mention his Enigma coups – was so masterful that in 1965 Admiral John Henry Godfrey CB, the Director of Britain’s Naval Intelligence from 1939–42, wrote to Dunderdale, in praise of his long years of service. ‘Starting in a humble capacity you have chosen to become an elder statesman, continuing to work almost full time after official retirement… In this respect the country has been fortunate in being able to retain your services, and make use of your unique gifts, specialised knowledge and wisdom over nearly half a century, an achievement which you share with very few…’38
Citing their ‘four years of close collaboration during World War Two,’ Godfrey praised Dunderdale’s ability to survive the ‘vicissitudes’ of so many decades of outstanding service, after which he was ‘still actively employed on the retired list, enjoying your work and the esteem and confidence of your Chief and colleagues. They have acquired the habit, after years of experience, of leaning heavily on your shoulder – and, of course, a shoulder cannot be leant on unless it is offered.’ Admiral Godfrey was also Ian Fleming’s boss during much of the war, and is reputed to be the basis of the character known as ‘M’, James Bond’s boss in the early novels.39
As late as 1991 the then chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Sir Colin Hugh Verel McColl KCMC, would write, in memoriam – it was a year after Dunderdale’s death – praising ‘the outstanding contribution made by one of its best-loved and respected officers… I like to think that generations of our staff will… hear the story of Biffy’s historic contribution to this Service’s work and so be set an example which they shall be proud to follow.’40 High praise indeed.
Stephen R. Hill, the biographer of Boodle’s – the London club that Dunderdale shared with Ian Fleming, and which is portrayed as ‘Blades’ in the Bond books – would say of Dunderdale: ‘He was undoubtedly another hero incorporated into the myth of James Bond, embracing espionage, underwater activities and sheer style, with his mission duly accomplished with whatever it took.’ On that last note, there is an ornate silver bowl that commemorates Dunderdale’s service, which has pride of place in the mess at Fort Monckton, SIS’s training base located near Gosport, on the south coast of England, which is known simply as the No. 1 Military Training Establishment.
