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

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      6

       SCIENTIST GETS ESTABLISHED

      At 1.15 a.m. on 30 July 1942, above the town of Nîmes in southern France, the sky was starlit, with a full moon and scudding clouds driven on a boisterous mistral. In truth, the wind was too strong for safe parachuting, but the risk of a jump tonight had to be balanced against the risk of flying a second sortie down the length of enemy-occupied France a few days later. As he flew south over Nîmes, Pilot Officer Leo Anderle lowered his Halifax to 2,000 feet and, spotting the little village of Caissargues, its canal sparkling like a ribbon of tinsel in the moonlight, warned his two passengers, Claude de Baissac and Harry Peulevé, that he was running into their target and they should get ready to jump. He made a first pass over the drop site, a deserted aerodrome, while his co-pilot flashed the agreed recognition signal. There was no response from the reception committee on the ground. Anderle made a second pass and then a third – still no signal. He was nervous now that he was spending too long in the area – and drawing too much attention.

      He passed a message to his passengers. They had two options: abandon and turn for home, or drop blind on a field nearby and take pot luck. The two secret agents decided that they had come this far and did not want to go back. Anderle brought the big aircraft down to 500 feet and began his final run, choosing an open field west of the deserted aerodrome.

      De Baissac got into trouble almost as soon as he jumped. His parachute opened with a sharp jerk, pulling his left shoulder out of the harness. To make matters worse the brown cardboard suitcase strapped to his left leg had somehow broken free in the turbulence of the aircraft slipstream and become entangled in the parachute rigging above him. He tried to disengage it but couldn’t, thanks to the buffeting of the wind, which now carried him along at an increasing pace. Then it was too late. The ground was coming up fast to meet him. He crashed into the soil of France awkwardly and on one leg, spraining it badly. With some difficulty, he gathered his parachute in the strong wind, peeled off his jumpsuit, dug a shallow grave and buried both. Picking up his case and, dressed now as any wartime French traveller, he set off to find Peulevé.

      It was eventually Harry Peulevé’s cries which drew de Baissac to him. He had suffered an even worse landing and was lying in a ditch with a broken leg. The two men agreed that there was no option. De Baissac would have to continue alone, without his radio operator. Peulevé would wait until dawn, then drag himself to a nearby farmhouse and throw himself on the mercy of the local population. De Baissac buried his colleague’s parachute, jumpsuit and wireless, and limped off to Nîmes railway station, arriving not long after the curfew was lifted at five in the morning.

      Two weeks later, in the second week of August 1942, Claude de Baissac – codenamed ‘Scientist’ after his network, known in France as ‘David’ and travelling under the false identity of a publicity agent named ‘Claude Boucher’ – arrived at Tarbes station, close to the Pyrenees. He had not had a trouble-free journey. At one stage his papers had been checked by a suspicious Vichy policeman.

      ‘And how long have you been here?’

      De Baissac – who had fled the country for London just months previously with his sister, Lise – insisted that he had always lived in France and was on business.

      ‘Your papers are obvious forgeries. Tell London to be more careful in future!’

      It was the second time in a matter of weeks that SOE had put the life of one of their agents at risk through a careless mistake in documentation. The difference between Henri Labit’s death and Claude de Baissac’s survival rested only on the good fortune for de Baissac that his flawed papers were first exposed to a sympathetic French official, rather than a hostile German one.

      De Baissac made his way from the station to Rue Avezac-Macaya near Tarbes cathedral, where he found Gaston Hèches’s restaurant and guesthouse, a substantial four-storey building with rooms on the top floors where ‘guests’ awaiting passage over the Pyrenees were accommodated. Entering the restaurant, de Baissac found a large, beamed, ground-floor room, full of rough tables and the chatter of Hèches’s lunchtime clientele. A huge cast-iron stove belching smoke occupied almost the full length of one wall, presided over by a small man so stricken with rheumatism that he could barely move his head or walk without the aid of two sticks. This was Gaston Hèches, the patron of the establishment, which he ran with his wife Mimi and their two daughters. To the casual eye this was no more than a thriving country restaurant in a market town. But behind the façade, the building performed a second, more secret, function. It was the local headquarters for the Édouard line, one of SOE’s most successful escape lines over the Pyrenees. By the end of the war it would also become the base for a highly successful sabotage network, also run by Hèches.

      De Baissac installed himself at an empty table and waited for the opportunity of a quiet word with the patron.

      ‘I am a traveller and I am looking for Édouard,’ de Baissac said, using the password sequence he had been given by London.

      ‘Where are you coming from?’ Hèches asked, following the script.

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