Ashdown - Game of spies - the secret agent, the traitor and the nazi, bordeaux 1942-1

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by William Collins 2016

Text Paddy and Jane Ashdown Partnership 2016

Extract from As I Walked Out One Evening the Estate of W. H. Auden,

reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd

While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the author and publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future editions.

Maps by John Gilkes

Cover photographs Susan Fox/Trevillion Images (spy); Imagno/Getty Images (cyclist); Shutterstock.com (all other images)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008140823

Ebook Edition September 2016 ISBN: 9780008140830

Version: 2016-09-01

To the young men and women whose lives were changed in Room 055 of the Old War Office Building in London and ended in the death camps of Nazi Europe.

O look, look in the mirror,

O look in your distress:

Life remains a blessing

Although you cannot bless.

O stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.

It was late, late in the evening,

The lovers they were gone;

The clocks had ceased their chiming,

And the deep river ran on.

From As I Walked Out One Evening

W. H. Auden

The three main characters of this book Roger Landes, Andr Grandclment and Friedrich Dohse appeared as fleeting shadows in my book A Brilliant Little Operation, the story of the Cockleshell Heroes raid on Bordeaux in 1942. And thats the way they would have remained had it not been for a chance email from a friend. Richard Wooldridge, who I had got to know while researching my Cockleshell heroes book, runs the remarkable little Combined Services Military Museum at East Maldon in Essex, of which I am a sometime patron. He had been gifted some documents which had come to light after the death of the owner of a house called Aristide in Liphook, Hampshire. The papers had first been passed to a retired gentleman in the Isle of Wight, who asked Richard if his museum could provide a home for them.

Recognising the name Aristide from the work we had done together, Richard contacted me and asked if I would be interested. I was, but, due to pressure of work could not visit the museum myself to look at the archive. So my colleague and collaborator in this book, Sylvie Young, made the journey to East Maldon and brought back around 400 photographs of letters and papers from the museum. It soon became clear that what we had was the personal archive of one of the Second World Wars most remarkable secret agents Roger Landes.

And that is how this book began.

Since tracing Titos progress across the mountains of Bosnia (mostly on foot) and reading the remarkable accounts of F. W. D. Deakin and Fitzroy Maclean, who marched with Titos partisans, I have always been fascinated by that part of the Second World War in which Britain supported, fostered, and sometimes even created, bands of freedom fighters (the Germans called them terrorists) dedicated to the liberation of occupied Europe.

Looking back today, it seems to me extraordinary that our besieged little country commited so many of its young men and women and so much of its resources to secret and extremely hazardous operations to free the countries of Europe, which we have now chosen to be no part of. It seems extraordinary that a nation which today does less than any other member of the European Union to help those fleeing the misery of war, was, so short a time ago, their only refuge. After the shock of the Referendum result, I still cannot bring myself to believe that our country, which has now turned its back on solidarity with our European neighbours, was then so much their last hope that, from the alpine pastures of Norway to the mountaintops of Greece, those desperate for freedom from every nation in Europe gathered on moonlit nights to listen for the tiny reverberation in the air which would tell them that the dark shadow of an RAF Halifax from London would shortly pass over them, with its largesse of weapons and its message that they were not alone.

Of course, I know that that is the romance of the story. I know that there is more to it than that. There are legends, and myths, and very black deeds as well as brilliantly shining ones; and cowardice along with courage, and stupidity too, and vanity a lot of vanity and, it must be said, a good deal of betrayal as well. How could it be otherwise, since the basic ingredient of these stories is how ordinary, untrained, unsifted, unselected and unprepared individuals faced the great questions of life and death, which most of us have never had to face in our carefully pasteurised, cotton-wool worlds?

Fortunately, there is now a new mood amongst historians of the Resistance and especially the French Resistance. A much more granular picture is emerging. The role of women is, at last, coming to light. The failures and betrayals are being analysed, as well as the triumphs, and a much more objective view about the overall achievements and lack of them is beginning to appear. This is especially so in France, where the fashion for debunking the Resistance may now even be distorting the picture in the opposite direction.

The role of organisations such as the Gestapo in the story of the European resistance movements remains, on the other hand, a monochrome black. Little has been written in popular form about how the Gestapo worked, how it fitted into the German hierarchy and especially about the individuals involved. In the popular imagination, Klaus Barbie the Butcher of Lyon is the model for a Gestapo officer, and it is assumed they were all more or less like that. But of course they werent. It is time for a much more rounded description of what life was like then, not just for the secret agent operating in enemy territory, but also for the German security apparatus dealing with this so-called terrorist threat, bearing in mind that in our age too we are faced with challenges which are, in practical terms even if not in moral ones, not totally dissimilar.

Following up on the leads in the Aristide archives, we stumbled across the fact that Friedrich Dohse, a Gestapo counter-espionage officer in Bordeaux, had written his memoirs (the only such ones in existence, I believe). These covered the period when his overriding priority was to catch British SOE agent Roger Landes. The opportunity now presented itself to write something which gave both sides of the story.

The third person in the triumvirate at the heart of this book is Andr Grandclment. He was responsible for one of the most controversial betrayals in wartime France. Much has been written on him, but little about his psychology and the deeper reasons for his betrayal (if that, indeed, is what it was).

In this book I hope to give a picture of those times seen through the eyes of these three men three enemies who all lived and operated in wartime southwest France. In these pages, I trace their lives, almost on a day-to-day basis, over the two and a half years from the early months of 1942 to the final liberation of Bordeaux in August 1944.