Game of Spies: The Secret Agent, the Traitor and the Nazi, Bordeaux 1942-1944
Under the terms of the armistice signed by Pétain, France was divided by a demarcation line – in practical terms, an internal frontier – running from the Lake of Geneva to the Pyrenees. This separated the northern, occupied zone – a virtual annex of Germany – from the zone non-occupée, governed by Pétain’s Vichy government in the south. In the Bordeaux region the demarcation line ran along a north–south axis forty kilometres east of the city, and encompassed in the German zone not just the great port itself, but also the entire Atlantic coast south of the Médoc peninsula. Security along the Atlantic coastline was further supplemented by a ten-kilometre-deep zone interdite from which all French citizens were banned, unless in possession of a special pass.
The Germans acted swiftly to take control of the occupied zone, not least by requisitioning a number of key addresses in the French capital, most infamously 82–84 Avenue Foch (soon rechristened by Parisians ‘Avenue Boche’). Here they established the headquarters of the main state security organisations – the Abwehr (officially the spy service for the German army); the Gestapo (which from mid-1942 would be responsible for all intelligence-gathering on Resistance movements in occupied territories); the Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP), the police arm of the Abwehr; and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), reporting directly to Heinrich Himmler at his headquarters in Berlin. The SD was originally tasked to root out domestic dissent in Germany, but it soon also expanded its activities into the occupied territories, establishing a strong intelligence presence in Paris and Bordeaux, where it would increasingly use the Gestapo as its action arm for arrests and interrogation.
At 11 a.m. on 28 June, less than a fortnight after de Gaulle left the city, the newly appointed German commandant of Bordeaux and its region, General von Faber du Faur, entered his new residence in the city, an imposing townhouse on the Rue Vital Carles. Here the préfet of the Gironde presented him with a magnificent welcoming bouquet of flowers in a fine cut crystal vase.
The city which formed the heart of the general’s new command was – and still is – one of the most beautiful and venerable in all France. Lying along a crescent-moon-shaped curve of the Garonne river (from which the city gets its nickname, the ‘Port de la Lune’), Bordeaux had been a port since Roman times, shipping iron and tin from its quays; in later centuries, slaves, coffee, cotton, indigo and agricultural products were added to the trade. But the most valuable of all Bordeaux’s commodities – and central to the region’s wealth and dignity – was wine. From the great clarets of the Médoc, to the Graves and Sauternes of the Garonne valley, to the cognac grapes of Charentes – Bordeaux’s rich hinterlands of vineyards made the city affluent, proud, and uncompromisingly mercantile in its outlook.
In the pre-war years the entire port area had been rebuilt and renovated, from the working district of Bacalan at the northern end, south along the sweep of the Quai des Chartrons, to the elegant parks and apartments near the city centre. The most modern cranes were installed, a small-gauge railway was constructed, new warehouses were established, tarmac was laid in place of cobbles and a brand-new tram system was inaugurated to link the port to the rest of the city. Bordeaux was, at the fall of France, not only one of the most beautiful, but also one of the most modern ports in the whole of Europe. On still days a thin diaphanous haze, caused by the incessant bustle of the great port, hung over the city. In stormy weather, the wind funnelled down narrow streets, whipping the harbour into white-topped rufflets and sweeping fallen leaves from the city’s plane trees into drifts along the gutters and neat piles in the sheltered corners of alleyways and squares.
Back from the waterfront, the city of 1940 was little changed from the previous two centuries. Its imposing centre, dominated by the town hall, the eighteenth-century Hôtel de Ville, boasted impeccably manicured tree-lined squares, fine restaurants and elegant frontages. These led to broad boulevards radiating out towards the port’s trading and residential quarters. Beyond the main roads, this was a city of little restaurants, cafés, scurrying markets and narrow cobbled streets, lined with shops and first-floor apartments. Here a cacophony of humanity jostled with a jumble of cars, vélo-taxis, bicycles, lorries, barrows and horse-drawn carts.
The city’s political landscape was also one of contrast. During the 1930s, communism found a strong foothold amongst France’s intellectuals and working classes. Most of the dockworkers, who lived in the city’s crowded Bacalan quarter – where the restaurants were as rough as the wine they served – were, if not communist, then communist sympathisers; as were the cheminots (the railway workers) and the post office workers. In the countryside, too, especially in the Landes region lying between Bordeaux and the Pyrenees, communism and socialism had strong roots. Many of the Bordelais, however, regarded communism with a fear amounting almost to paranoia – seeing it as some kind of modern reincarnation of the sans-culottes of the French Revolution. A secret British wartime report observed that ‘[amongst] the upper bourgeoisie [there is] an apprehension of Russia and a real fear of the former French Communists and of the mob … [they believe that] only evil can come to France from the disorder which would follow the coming to power of the extreme left’.
Those in charge of mercantilist Bordeaux were above all pragmatists. What was good for trade was good for the city. Foreigners came and foreigners went. But if trade (and especially the wine trade) went on, the city prospered, whoever was in charge. The city’s bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie embraced the politics of conservatism and of ‘order’. Among these classes, right or centre-right views were dominant, extreme right nationalism not unusual, and anti-Semitism commonplace.
‘England’, regarded by some in France as the centre of modern Jewry, was often thrown into this mix of political foes. ‘The English, the yids, the capitalists, these are the true enemies of France which is threatened, like every other country, by the Bolshevik sword of Damocles,’ declared one local right-wing activist of the time. When it came to anti-Semitism, Bordeaux was by no means unusual in the France of the 1930s and ’40s. ‘The Jewish question was a subject of lively discussion in France at the time,’ one respected French commentator wrote. ‘There was a strong resurgence of anti-Jewish sentiment in the period before the war and during the years of the Vichy government.’
Von Faber du Faur did not waste time imposing his rule on the city. He laid on a grand military parade through the streets of Bordeaux, designed not just as a spectacle, but also as a show of force. The salute was taken by, amongst others, Erwin Rommel (who requisitioned a nearby château for holiday use). On 1 July 1940 a curfew, enforced by armed soldiers with dogs, was imposed between 2300 and 0500 hours, with curfew-breakers risking long terms of imprisonment or forced labour. All clocks were advanced one hour to match German time. All firearms, including hunting weapons, had to be handed in to the local mairies; all official notices (including street signs and administrative requests) had to be in German as well as French, and the swastika emblazoned on a red banner was hung outside all principal official buildings. Controls were introduced on traffic in the Gironde estuary and on all major road intersections and railway stations. In time, German oversight would be extended to cover the postal service, telecommunications, newspapers, cinemas, cultural events, agriculture (including, inevitably, wine), commercial transactions, the refining and distribution of petroleum products and the passage of goods and people over the demarcation line into Vichy France. Laws were passed to require farmers to give up a percentage of their produce to the German occupiers – though in most cases, thanks to peasant cunning, these were honoured more in the breach than the observance. German soldiers were under strict instructions to behave politely towards the French, and mostly did. But the terms of occupation were clear. On 10 October 1940 the city’s military administration published a decree stating: ‘Anyone who gives shelter to a member of the British Forces will be condemned to death.’
Almost overnight, it seemed, the German authorities also established an iron grip on the region, turning the whole of the Gironde estuary and the Médoc peninsula into one gigantic military base. Concrete pens were constructed in Bordeaux harbour to house the German submarines engaged in the deadly business of cutting the Atlantic lifeline on which Britain depended to save it from starvation. Italian submarines also had a base in the city. The Bordeaux quays were fortified with concrete pillboxes, a system of interlocking trenches and underground bunkers. This would soon also become the base for a small fleet of converted merchantmen which – fast, lightly armed and German-crewed – acted as blockade-runners, bringing in vital raw materials from Japanese-occupied territories in the Far East.
The Atlantic beaches running south from the mouth of the Gironde, considered a likely place for an Allied invasion, were fortified with a network of defences, including heavy coastal guns in thick concrete casemates; searchlights; numerous machine-gun nests, and a small fleet of riverine patrol vessels. Some 60,000 German troops were stationed in and around Bordeaux. By the end of the war, this would include two infantry divisions, a Panzer division and an army headquarters. A Luftwaffe force of 150 aircraft was assembled at Mérignac airport and on small local airfields. Kriegsmarine units were brought in to protect the Gironde and the coastal waters of the Gulf of Aquitaine.
The city itself was soon crammed full of German troops and dotted with a profusion of headquarters for the major military units, which jostled with buildings housing the German harbour authorities, civil government and the various security organisations charged with keeping order. A requisitioned passenger liner, the Baudouinville – last used by the Belgian cabinet when they took the fateful decision to surrender – was brought to Bordeaux and tied up along the quay at the Place des Quinconces as overflow billeting for German and Italian troops. There was also an array of soldiers’ brothels and watering holes: the Lion Rouge nightclub was specially reserved for Wehrmacht officers, the Côtelette for Abwehr intelligence officers, and the Blaue Affe (the Blue Monkey) for ordinary soldiers.
For most citizens of Bordeaux, shortages now became a way of life. The price of baby milk rose by fifty per cent; fish was limited to one tin of sardines per month and sugar was almost unobtainable. Even saccharine tablets were rationed to a hundred pills per person for every six months. Shopkeepers had to accept the Reichsmark at an exorbitant fixed rate of exchange and butchers were prohibited from selling meat on Wednesday and Thursday, with Friday reserved for horsemeat and tripe only. Most metal came from recycled stock. Leather was only available on the black market, or with an official authorisation; gloves and belts were difficult to find and most shoes had only wooden soles. There was a severe shortage of elastic (though this did not affect the availability of ladies’ suspenders, one British secret agent noted, cheerfully). German soldiers had priority on public transport, and horses were used extensively. Real coffee was such a valuable commodity that it became an article of barter, with most cafés and restaurants serving a roasted acorn substitute christened ‘café Pétain’. Unsurprisingly – and very quickly – a flourishing and all-pervasive black market was established, as the French population in both town and country tried to find ways round these new discomfitures in their daily lives.
Despite this – and contrary to the early hopes of the intelligence community in London, who claimed that ‘occupied Europe was smouldering with Resistance to the Nazis and ready to erupt at the slightest support or encouragement’ – secret feelers put out by the British and the Free French reported that the ‘spirit of Resistance’ in the city was depressingly frail. ‘Bordeaux was not a town for Resistance. It was more a town for collaborators. Most of our activity was outside Bordeaux,’ one early British agent concluded.
It was not long before a climate of suspicion began to infect Bordeaux city life. People tended not to speak to each other in the streets and tried to avoid speaking at all to those they did not know for fear of agents provocateurs and collaborators. One commentator said, ‘Neighbours reported confidentially on one another. People were denounced for anti-German sentiments and for listening to foreign news broadcasts.’ Another, describing the attitude of the average Bordelais, reported, tartly: ‘[They believed] their duty as patriotic Frenchmen was more than adequately fulfilled by listening to BBC London in their slippers in front of the fire,’ adding, ‘influenced by German propaganda [the Bordelais] were terrified of Communism and of losing their money’.
Though they found German rule irksome, the people of Bordeaux were, for the most part, content to continue with their lives quietly and as best they could in the circumstances. The great biannual spring and autumn fair took place as usual in the Place des Quinconces. Photographs from 1940 show unarmed German soldiers mingling with local crowds on the fairground rides. That year, as every year in the past, the Amar Circus – complete with lions, elephants, tigers and clowns – made the journey from Paris to play to full houses on the Bordeaux quays. La Petite Gironde, a broadly collaborationist Bordeaux daily newspaper, advised that the proper attitude to the occupation should be to ‘understand and be resigned’ – a proposition which many in the city followed.
Even when the Germans began a drive against the city’s Jews, sentiment in the city remained largely unmoved. On 27 August 1940, a Jewish man, Laiser Israel Karp, was summarily condemned to death for raising his fist at a German parade. On 17 October a notice was issued requiring all Jews and Jewish enterprises in the city to register. Five days later, 5,172 Jews and 403 Jewish businesses had complied. Early in 1941, Jews were banned from seventeen public places in the city, including all parks, theatres and cinemas and many schools. A year later the Vichy authorities in Bordeaux hosted a travelling exhibition with a strong anti-Semitic theme. Entitled ‘The Jews and France’, it proved a huge success in the city, attracting 60,000 local citizens through its doors.
During the course of 1941, however, as the German occupiers reacted to provocations and attacks with increasing ferocity, the mood in Bordeaux – as across the rest of France – began to shift. On 20 October the German military commander in Nantes was assassinated and the following day the weighted-down body of Hans Reimers, an officer in the Wehrmacht, was discovered in Bordeaux harbour. Hitler insisted on responding to these ‘outrages’ with maximum severity, overruling appeals from German military commanders in France for a more restrained response. In Bordeaux, fifty civilian hostages, most of them suspected communist sympathisers, were taken to the old French military camp at Souge, fifteen kilometres west of the city, and executed. They were the first of 257 ‘Resistance martyrs’ who would die before German firing squads at Souge before the war was over. More attacks were followed by more reprisals and, as French outrage grew, the ranks of resistants began to swell.
In November 1941, a special French police brigade under the command of a ruthless pro-German Frenchman called Pierre Napoléon Poinsot, was established in close cooperation with the German authorities to tackle the new threat. His first act was to launch a major drive against the communists. In sweeps, notably in the Bacalan quarter of the city, and in a number of rural communities in the Gironde region, hundreds of suspects, men and women, were arrested and incarcerated in an internment camp at Mérignac.
By now executions and deportations had become an established part of the German system of control and repression. According to secret British estimates, across France a total of 5,599 people were executed and 21,863 deported in the last quarter of 1942 alone. Resistance organisations started to spring up in Bordeaux and its hinterland. Some of these were small, personal and informal. Others were part of larger information-gathering networks. Many were under the control of foreign intelligence services, notably the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS – also known as MI6), the Free French in London and the Polish secret service. By the end of 1941 there were no less than nine of these foreign-controlled spy networks tripping over each other in Bordeaux and the Gironde. In addition there were also numerous smaller ‘private’ Resistance fiefdoms, such as the one run by Raymond Brard, the head of the Bordeaux port fire brigade, whose network was based on the membership of a weight-lifting and ‘Gironde wrestling’ club in a city backstreet.
One of the first of these ‘private’ initiatives was established at the end of August 1940, just ten weeks after de Gaulle left France. Its founders were two neighbours who lived on the Bordeaux waterfront.
Jean Duboué, a strikingly handsome man of imposing build with a strong face and a direct, challenging gaze, was already an established figure in Bordeaux. Forty-three years old when the Second World War began, this was not Duboué’s first conflict. He had been wounded in one of France’s bloodiest calvaries of 1914–18: the battle of the Chemin des Dames. A self-made man, Duboué had left school in Bordeaux aged twelve to work down the coal mines of the Basque Country. Returning to Bordeaux, he began a new career as a restaurateur, managing the Grand Café du Commerce et de Tourny, one of Bordeaux’s most prestigious restaurants. From here he branched out with his own businesses. One was the Café des Marchands, a modest restaurant and boarding house frequented by dockers and travelling salesmen on the Quai des Chartrons. By the end of the 1930s, Duboué’s businesses were doing well enough for him to purchase a country retreat southeast of Bordeaux, where he, his wife Marie-Louise and daughter Suzanne spent every weekend and most holidays.
His co-conspirator, Léo Paillère, recently demobilised and an ex-captain of infantry in the First World War, was, at fifty, older than Duboué. A man of distinctly right-wing tendencies, Paillère lived with his wife Jeanne and their five sons next door to the Café des Marchands.
During late 1940 and early 1941, Duboué and Paillère set about recruiting a number of friends as agents. They gathered intelligence on German positions, troop movements, weapons and ships in the port – especially the blockade-runners and submarines. The intelligence was smuggled out of Bordeaux by Suzanne Duboué (sixteen years old at the time and known in the family as ‘Mouton’, or ‘lambkin’ in English). She took the secret reports to a restaurant owner called Gaston Hèches in Tarbes, 140 kilometres south of Bordeaux. Hèches then passed them along a clandestine escape route he controlled, over the Pyrenees to the SIS representative in the British consulate in Barcelona. When this route was closed, or too dangerous, Suzanne carried the intelligence hidden in a basket across the border to the Spanish Basque coastal town of San Sebastián, where the British consulate doubled as the gateway to another escape line and courier service to Madrid, Gibraltar and London.
The Duboué–Paillère reports on German activity first began to reach London early in 1941, the year which was, for Churchill and the British, the annus horribilis of the war. The heady days of solitary defiance and the Battle of Britain were over. Now British forces were engaged in a long struggle of retrenchment and attrition, and losing on all fronts: in the Atlantic, in the deserts of North Africa, on the plains of Russia and against the Japanese in the Far East. Churchill knew that after Dunkirk it would take time – probably years – to turn the tide. He knew too that if Britain was not to retreat into passive defence, then apart from RAF attacks on German cities, his only means of carrying the war to the enemy was through clandestine and unconventional warfare.
In 1940 he created three new organisations to wage this secret war: Combined Operations, charged with conducting commando raids on the European coastline; MI9, tasked with helping escaped Allied prisoners and downed pilots to get back to Britain; and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), established in July of that year and ordered, in Churchill’s inimitable words, to ‘set Europe ablaze’.
Staffed mainly by amateurs in the spying game, the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’ (as SOE swiftly became known, after their headquarters near Marylebone station) were regarded by Britain’s professional spies in SIS with a sniffy disdain, bordering, when occasion arose, on murderous enmity. Malcolm Muggeridge, himself an SIS officer, commented: ‘Though SOE and SIS were nominally on the same side in the war, they were, generally speaking, more abhorrent to one another than the Abwehr was to either of them.’
Operationally, SOE was run by a regular army brigadier, Colin Gubbins, and was an autonomous organisation which, for cover purposes, pretended to be part of the War Office. It was divided into country sections for each of the occupied countries of Europe – except for France which had two country sections: F (for France) Section, staffed mainly by British officers, and RF (République Française) Section, staffed mainly by the French. Both sections sent their own agents into France, but their approaches were entirely different. The British-run F Section favoured small discrete spy networks built on independent ‘cells’, which had no contact with each other. This, they hoped, would limit the damage of penetration and betrayal. The French-run RF Section acted mainly as a logistics organisation for de Gaulle’s Free French spy service in London, the BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignement et d’Action). Unlike F Section, it preferred large, centrally controlled networks, more akin to an underground army.
SOE was nearly a year old and under considerable Whitehall criticism for delivering little of value to the wider war effort at the time that Jean Duboué’s intelligence started to arrive in Baker Street. Up to this moment almost all the secret agents SOE had dispatched to France had been sent to the Vichy zone non-occupée. Suddenly, here was an opportunity to get involved in the spying business, not just in the occupied zone, but also, given Bordeaux’s role as a submarine base, in an area of real strategic importance to the battle of the Atlantic.
SOE decided to send a secret agent of their own to Bordeaux to see what was going on.
Robert Leroy was in many ways an unsuitable person for such a pioneering and precarious mission. A former marine engineer from the Brest area, Leroy’s SOE training reports describe him as ‘shrewd … [but] suffering from the weaknesses of his class – a proneness to alcoholic indulgence and women’ – and add, in a comment which tells us more about SOE’s snobbery than it does about Leroy’s table manners, that he was ‘out of place in an Officers’ Mess’.
Under the codename ‘Alain’, Robert Leroy was landed from an SOE ‘ghost ship’ on a beach at Barcarès near Perpignan on the night of 19 September 1941. His orders were to make his way to Duboué’s contact, Gaston Hèches in Tarbes, and thence to Bordeaux, where he was to liaise with Jean Duboué, get a job in the port and assess the possibilities of attacking the German submarine pens. Unfortunately, the explosives Leroy was supposed to take with him somehow got lost during the landing, leaving him with no option but to set off on his mission without them. His journey to Bordeaux appears to have been both leisurely and bibulous, for he did not reach the city until mid-November, leaving behind a trail of debt and unpaid bar bills.