‘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.
‘From Switzerland.’
‘And you are going to?’
‘To the United States.’
Shortly afterwards de Baissac met up with Robert Leroy, who had been sent to escort him across the demarcation line into the occupied zone. The two men had to wait for a few days while Hèches contacted a local priest who arranged for new documents to be forged for ‘David’. Finally, after paying off Leroy’s latest bar bill from the 100,000 francs de Baissac carried in a money belt, the two agents took the little one-track railway line north from Tarbes, which wound its way under a sweltering August sun, through 150 kilometres of pine forest and heathland, to Langon. At Langon their papers would have been checked on crossing the demarcation line, just as Henri Labit’s had been. Then they continued on the final leg of their journey to Bordeaux.
Arriving in the city at the end of August, de Baissac would have witnessed the aftermath of the first transportation of Bordeaux’s Jews. The French authorities in the occupied zone had wrestled with a demand to deport 40,000; eventually the German authorities accepted that the transportation should be limited to stateless Jews. Bordeaux was set a target of 2,000. That month the initial wave – 614 people, including, on Berlin’s insistence, their children – were taken from their homes and crammed into railway carriages at the Gare Saint-Jean. From here they were taken to a French internment camp, in a derelict housing estate at Drancy, on the outskirts of Paris, and then – though no one knew it at the time – onwards to the death camps of Nazi Europe.
In Bordeaux, de Baissac wasted no time getting started. A few days after his arrival Leroy introduced him to Duboué and the Bertrands at the Café des Chartrons. The café, a favourite haunt of dockers and labourers, was situated on the ground floor of a four-storey building with bedrooms on the upper floors and a rear entrance leading to the tangle of little streets and narrow ill-lit alleys of the working-class district of Bacalan. The café’s first-floor front windows directly overlooked Scientist’s primary target: the blockade-runners moored alongside the quay just a hundred metres away. It was, de Baissac decided, the perfect place for his headquarters. In return for a regular subvention of 8,000–10,000 francs a month, the Bertrands undertook to provide free daily meals to members of the Scientist network, and to give de Baissac access to the rooms on the first floor which could be used, without the need to fill in the usual police forms, by any who needed urgent refuge and by those visiting Bordeaux on Scientist business. What neither de Baissac nor the Bertrands knew was that two of Dohse’s agents lived less than 200 metres away.
The most pressing problem, having lost his radio operator, was how de Baissac was going to communicate with Baker Street. As a stopgap, Yvonne Rudellat was tasked by London to courier between Scientist and SOE’s nearest radio operator in Tours, 300 kilometres northeast of Bordeaux. It was by this means that, on 14 September 1942, de Baissac sent his first brief report to London informing them that he had established the Café des Chartrons as his headquarters and primary ‘secret letterbox’ in the city, and giving the details of his first parachute drop site at the Moulin de Saquet, close to the little hamlet of Coirac in the commune of Targon, sixteen kilometres east of Bordeaux.
On 19 September 1942, a further, more detailed report from de Baissac was carried from Bordeaux to Tarbes by young Suzanne Duboué. From Tarbes it was taken over the Pyrenees to the British consulate in Barcelona for coded transmission to London. It reported that Scientist was preparing sabotage attacks on the blockade-runners at the Quai des Chartrons: ‘Louis [Robert Leroy] is only waiting for the necessary material [explosives] in order to get on with the job. He can then work on the painting of the boats down in the hold. He has already informed you how he needed the goods [in small packages] which could easily go into a workman’s haversack.’
De Baissac had been too fast off the mark. On 7 October, Baker Street responded with alarm instructing him not to carry out any attacks until ordered. For the moment, Whitehall, not wishing to give the Germans any excuse for an invasion of the Vichy zone, had prohibited all sabotage in the occupied zone, unless it was completely untraceable to British hands. The time would come to take the gloves off. But it wasn’t yet.
Meanwhile, SOE urgently needed to find a radio operator to replace the injured Peulevé. Roger Landes, at the time enjoying some leave at Carlton Mansions after completing his wireless course, was the obvious choice. On 16 September Landes was recalled, promoted to lieutenant and told to prepare to be dropped onto the Moulin de Saquet site as Scientist’s new radio operator.
On the same day an instruction from German headquarters in Paris arrived at KdS Bordeaux. Forty-one Germans had been killed in Resistance attacks; under the German reprisal policy, two hostages would be executed for every German death caused by the Resistance. Eighty-two hostages chosen from those already in German captivity would now have to be shot. But the Germans in Paris could only find thirty-two ‘suitable’ hostages for execution. So Bordeaux would have to produce the extra fifty demanded by Berlin. Some suggest that this extra number was imposed on the city in retaliation for Bordeaux’s failure to find more Jews for transportation.
On the evening of the following day, 17 September, French communists threw a bomb into the Rex Cinema in Paris, killing one German soldier and injuring thirty. In response, Paris raised the number of hostages to be executed in Bordeaux to seventy. Friedrich Dohse contacted his chief, Bömelburg, complaining that the decision would serve only to increase hostility in the area. He suggested that, if the number could not be reduced, then at least the condemned should be taken to Paris for execution, rather than being shot at nearby Souge. But even the appeals of Bömelburg’s personal representative in Bordeaux were rejected. Dohse spent the next few days making summaries of the files of the most likely candidates for execution in local prisons and submitting them to Hans Luther for his decision.
At midday on 21 September, seventy coffins were delivered to Souge. They were followed that afternoon by seventy male hostages; most were communists and many were very young. They were executed by firing squad in batches of ten, in the gathering dusk, among the camp’s pine trees, that still autumn evening.
Luther attended the executions. But it was not the only thing he did that day. At 09.10 he sent a message to Paris: ‘In the morning, a transport consisting of seventy Jews left Bordeaux. The Jews have