Paddy Ashdown - Game of Spies - The Secret Agent, the Traitor and the Nazi, Bordeaux 1942-1944

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

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 photograph © CollaborationJS / Trevillion Imanages

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

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008140847

Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008140830

Version: 2017-04-11

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.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Author’s Note

Maps

Prologue: The Execution

1 Bordeaux – Beginnings

2 Roger Landes

3 Friedrich Dohse

4 André Grandclément

5 A Happy Man and a Dead Body

6 Scientist Gets Established

7 A Visitor for David

8 Crackers and Bangs

9 Businesses, Brothels and Plans

10 ‘Je suis fort – Je suis même très fort’

11 A Birthday Present for Friedrich

12 The Wolf in the Fold

13 The Trap Closes

14 The Deal

15 Arms and Alarms

16 Progress and Precautions

17 The Battle of Lestiac

18 Maquis Officiels

19 Lencouacq

20 Of Missions and Machinations

21 Crossing the Frontier

22 Cyanide and Execution

23 Aristide Returns

24 ‘I come on behalf of Stanislas’

25 ‘Forewarned is Forearmed’

26 ‘This Poisoned Arrow Causes Death’

27 A Deadly Charade

28 The Viper’s Nest

29 Two Hours to Leave France

30 Nunc Dimittis

Epilogue: Post Hoc Propter Hoc

Acknowledgements

Dramatis Personae

Notes

Select Bibliography

Picture Section

Index

About the Author

Also by Paddy Ashdown

About the Publisher

‘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, André Grandclément 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 that’s 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 War’s most remarkable secret agents – Roger Landes.

And that is how this book began.

Since tracing Tito’s 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 Tito’s 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.