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      An hour before departure, the RAF dispatcher, who would now escort Landes all the way to the moment he jumped, helped him into voluminous parachute overalls covered with pockets. These contained a folding shovel, a parachutist’s knife, a small flask of rum, a compass, a torch, a .38 Luger automatic, some Benzedrine tablets and a tin of emergency rations. On top of his overalls Landes wore a single-piece camouflaged parachute smock, buttoned up between the legs and closed by a zip at the front. On top of that came his parachute and harness, secured by two straps passed over his shoulders and two more under his buttocks. All four straps were clipped into a quick-release buckle on his chest.

      Thus, trussed up like a chicken, and carrying his parachute helmet, Roger Landes was led to a converted Halifax and installed in the back, along with a sleeping bag, a flask of coffee laced with rum, a brown paper bag containing sandwiches and four metal cylinders packed with his radios, weapons and ammunition. The dispatcher checked that his charge was comfortably installed and advised him to get as much sleep as he could. There was a long cold night ahead.

      Sadly, it was all in vain.

      There was no sign of the promised reception committee at de Baissac’s new Moulin de Saquet site. Landes, remembering what had happened to de Baissac and Peulevé, declined the offer to drop blind and the aircraft turned for home. Three further attempts were made to parachute Landes into France, but all were frustrated. (One because the wrong Morse recognition letter was sent by the reception committee; one because an incautious owl flew into the engine of Landes’s Halifax; and one because of a signal miscommunication.)

      Finally, at 1.40 a.m. on 1 November 1942, after yet another cancelled drop and an attempt to fly him to Gibraltar and send him by fishing vessel to the southern French coast, Roger Landes, codenamed ‘Actor’, alias ‘Stanislas’ and carrying the false identity of ‘René Pol’, landed at Bois Renard, near the village of Mer in the Loire valley. Parachuted in with him that night was Gilbert Norman, his colleague from the SOE wireless school at Thame.

      Buffeted by strong winds, Landes and Norman had had an uncomfortable journey as their Halifax made its way south across France. To offset the wind, the Halifax pilot took his aircraft down to a spine-chilling 150 metres for the jump. Norman went first; then Landes.

      As the dark bulk of the aircraft passed away over Landes’s head, he felt the sharp jerk of his parachute opening. A moment or so later, he was down – in the middle of a muddy field. Looking around, he found himself alone with the sound of the Halifax fading away into the darkness. No reception committee, no lights, no Gilbert Norman: no one and nothing in sight. He stripped off his jumpsuit and buried it – along with his parachute – and started to consider his options. Perhaps he would have to make his own way to Bordeaux?

      He decided to hide in some bushes and wait to see what would happen next. Ten minutes later he heard the sound of Norman’s voice softly calling his alias: ‘Stanislas, Stanislas.’ He emerged to find Norman accompanied by a slender man with a slightly ridiculous Hitler moustache: it was Pierre Culioli. Raymond Flower, the head of the Monkeypuzzle reception team, should have been there, but he had become so frightened of almost anything that he could not be relied on and so Culioli had taken his place.

      The real cause of Flower’s petrified condition, however, was far worse than Culioli knew. Flower had convinced himself that both Culioli and Rudellat were Gestapo agents, and had sent to London for cyanide tablets to kill them both. The lethal tablets to do the job were contained in a special unmarked package which Norman had been given that night, with firm instructions that they were to be delivered personally into Flower’s hands only. In the end, the killing never happened because the petrified Flower could neither bring himself to do the deed nor persuade anyone else to do it for him. In reality, Culioli and Rudellat’s supposed ‘treachery’ was no more than the product of Flower’s fevered imagination. Nevertheless, Culioli’s survival, whether justified or not, would cost Gilbert Norman, his colleagues in Paris and the whole of SOE, very dear in the months to come.

      That night Culioli took Landes and Norman to the house of a local mayor, who also happened to be Culioli’s father-in-law.

      The following morning there was a knock on Landes’s bedroom door. Suddenly wakened from a deep sleep, the new arrival from London sat bolt upright and shouted: ‘Come in!’ – in English. Fortunately, Landes’s early morning caller was not the Gestapo, but his host, come to collect him for the next stage of his journey to Bordeaux.

      After breakfast, Norman left to take up the role of radio operator for the new Prosper network in Paris, headed by one of Landes’s ex-Wanborough colleagues – the young ‘Ivanhoe’, Francis Suttill. Norman took the morning train to Paris with his ‘guide’, Francis Suttill’s courier, Andrée Borrel. Small-boned, dark-complexioned and twenty-three years old, Borrel was an ex-Paris ‘street urchin’, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and worked in an escape line before fleeing to London in 1941, making her the most battle-experienced of any of the Prosper or Scientist agents. One of the first women to be dropped into France, she had arrived in late September, with orders to join Suttill in Paris.

      As Borrel and Norman made their way to the station, Landes was loaded onto a cart which, with him at the reins, carried him in lonely state to a nearby farm. Neither SOE’s training, nor Landes’s city life in Paris and London had equipped him with the skills to drive a horse and cart. But luckily, as he explained afterwards, ‘the horse found its own way home. Though it was a very strange feeling being on a public road, full of uniformed Germans, when only the night before I had been in England …’

      At the farm, Landes was surprised to find the jumpy Raymond Flower, together with Flower’s radio operator Marcel Clech and two of SOE’s most important women agents, waiting for them and a merry party in progress. Landes, who never relaxed his obsession with security, later complained that it was ‘more a social event than a business meeting’. He was of course right. If the farm had been raided that night the Gestapo would have netted Landes, Rudellat, Flower, Clech and Lise de Baissac, Claude de Baissac’s sister, who had been parachuted in a month previously and was on her way to establish a new SOE circuit in Poitiers.

      At six o’clock the following morning, 2 November, Landes set off on foot for the local station, while Rudellat and Lise de Baissac followed separately on bicycles, each with a suitcase strapped to a carrier rack. Rudellat’s suitcase contained Landes’s radio and revolver, which she was to carry for him to Bordeaux. (It was not her first experience of carrying compromising articles. She had already become famous in Baker Street for cycling round Tours distributing sticks of dynamite to the Resistance from a stock hidden in her underclothes.)

      The three secret agents took the train to Tours, the two women sitting together in one carriage and Landes separately in another. At Tours, Lise de Baissac caught a train south to the Charente, where she had contacts to meet. Rudellat had her own flat in the town, but decided that, as a single woman with an inquisitive landlord, it would attract too much attention if Landes stayed the night with her, so she directed him to a small hotel near the station. The two agreed to meet the following morning in the station buffet and catch the early train to Bordeaux, travelling as a married couple. In case the rendezvous failed, Rudellat gave her ‘husband’ the address of the Café des Chartrons, before they parted.

      Checking in to the hotel that evening, Landes made a mess of writing his new name on one of the five forms he was required to complete in order to register. He amended it as best he could, hoping the manager wouldn’t notice.

      The following day, 3 November, there was no sign of Yvonne Rudellat at Tours station. Landes had no option but to continue the journey to Bordeaux by himself. Now he was totally on his own. They had told him in training to invent a cover story for every journey, so as always to have a convincing explanation for what he was doing. Over time, this would СКАЧАТЬ