Eight days after Roger Landes’s arrival in Bordeaux, German tanks smashed through the flimsy barriers which marked the demarcation line and occupied Vichy France.
Operation Attila was triggered by the Allied landings in North Africa and the German realisation that they were now vulnerable to invasion, not just on France’s northern Channel coastline, but on its southern Mediterranean one as well. From this moment, Pétain and his government, who had enjoyed a measure of genuine autonomy up to now, became little more than German puppets.
The German invasion of Vichy France also marked the beginning of a new phase in the French Resistance and in the activities of SOE. Now there was no need for squeamishness in unleashing what Baker Street euphemistically referred to as ‘crackers and bangs’ (i.e. sabotage) wherever and whenever London wished. On 13 November 1942 Baker Street sent out a message to circuits across France calling for ‘sabotage immediately and on as large a scale as possible’. These were accompanied by specific instructions to de Baissac to take ‘action against all shipping that used the port of Bordeaux’.
Events immediately started to move at an increasing pace.
On 18 November, a week after the German invasion of the zone non-occupée, Victor Charles Hayes, a pharmacist and dental mechanic whom SOE had turned into an explosives expert, was parachuted into a site just south of Tours with instructions to make his way to Bordeaux. Thirty-four years old, balding, short in stature (five foot four), with a tendency to plumpness, Hayes (known to all as Vic) looked like a comfortable country lawyer or bank manager of the day. After the armistice he had fled France for Spain, where he had taken a boat to Liverpool, leaving his wife, Raymonde, and their baby daughter to follow him on a later ship. On his SOE training course, he heard that both had been drowned when their ship was torpedoed in the Bay of Biscay.
Vic Hayes arrived in Bordeaux on 28 November to find his explosives already waiting for him. They had been parachuted in a week before when, at the third attempt, a Whitley bomber dropped four containers to the Coirac reception committee. They were packed with sixty pounds of explosives, twelve Sten guns, twelve revolvers, sixty-six hand grenades and fifteen small clam mines, suitable for attacking coastal craft and cutting railway lines.
Around the same date, a Slade School of Art graduate, fluent in French, Italian, Spanish and German, cycled into Tarbes and made her way to Gaston Hèches’s restaurant. Mary Herbert, alias ‘Claudine’, known to her friends as ‘Maureen’ and travelling under the identity of ‘Marie Louise Vernier’, was, at thirty-nine, the oldest of the Scientist team. A woman of pronounced Catholic views and a trusting character, she was pretty rather than striking, with a tall, willowy figure, blue eyes, a face enlivened by a winning smile and hair so fine that it had a natural aptitude for disorder. Mary Herbert had been stranded in Plymouth earlier in the month with Landes, waiting for a flying boat to take them to Gibraltar. In the end, she and four other agents had been infiltrated into France by submarine and fishing boat, landing fifteen kilometres southeast of Marseille on the same night that Landes was parachuted into Bois Renard. Her orders were to join the Scientist network as Claude de Baissac’s courier.
Gaston Hèches installed Mary Herbert in one of the third-floor bedrooms above his restaurant, where she passed the time waiting to hear from Bordeaux by embroidering handkerchiefs and table linen for the Hèches family. On 22 November, Robert Leroy, now demoted to courier and rechristened ‘Robert the Tipsy’ by his Resistance colleagues, arrived in Tarbes with orders to smuggle Herbert over the demarcation line. She left her expensive leather handbag with one of Hèches’s daughters (‘too sophisticated for my new life’) and accompanied Leroy to a village near Bordeaux, where de Baissac was waiting for her.
Yvonne Rudellat, sent down from Tours to warn de Baissac of his courier’s impending arrival, now busied herself with finding accommodation for her newly arrived colleague, eventually settling on an apartment in the same road as de Baissac’s flat.
As Scientist’s courier, Mary Herbert was responsible for arranging de Baissac’s meetings, carrying his messages (often in a matchbox, hidden beneath the matches, or between the pages of a novel) and transporting Landes’s radios around the city. On one occasion in Bordeaux, struggling off a Paris train with a hefty case containing a wireless set, a German naval officer stopped her and demanded to know what was inside. She was moving flats, she replied. It looked heavy, the German suggested – and offered to carry it for her to the tram. He was rewarded with a charming smile and a mildly flirtatious ‘thank you’ for his trouble.
It was in the nature of Mary Herbert’s job that she and Claude de Baissac spent a lot of time together, often late at night when she picked up or delivered the day’s messages. Sometime around December 1942, the two became lovers.
Roger Landes spent the first weeks of November 1942 making further attempts to get through to London. He tried several locations in the city, but always with the same result; he could hear London, but they could not hear him. Eventually Marcel Bertrand suggested an empty villa which he owned, in the Bordeaux suburb of Cenon, a middle-class district situated on an escarpment above the city, on the east bank of the Garonne. The house, which was located in a sunny spot and had four bedrooms, was what the French call a pavillon and the English refer to as a bungalow. It was perfect for Landes’s needs. The front-door lock could only be opened in a certain way, so that it was detectable if a stranger who did not know the lock’s eccentricities attempted entry in the owner’s absence. There was a sizeable urban garden surrounded by high walls in which were set two doors, each giving access onto a different street. Best of all (and in what would become Landes’s trademark habit of hiding ‘in plain sight’), the house lay almost in the shadow of a powerful medium-wave radio mast serving the nearby headquarters of the German anti-aircraft batteries in Bordeaux. Landes knew that the tiny sliver of a signal from his little short-wave radio would be completely hidden from Gestapo detector vans among the forest of powerful German transmissions from the much larger station next door.
Landes moved into the villa in the second week of November 1942, spreading the word amongst his neighbours, most of whom were billeted Germans, that he needed an airy house because he was recuperating from tuberculosis (an impression reinforced by his hacking smoker’s cough). This cover story had a double advantage. It explained why he lived by himself, while at the same time discouraging neighbourly inquisitiveness. He transmitted to London from the kitchen table and kept his radio set, when not in use, under his bed. His transmission schedules and ciphers were hidden in the garden shed, while six spare crystals, each on a different frequency, were buried in a tin box in the kitchen garden.
On 15 November, after some aerial adjustments, Landes finally succeeded in getting through to SOE headquarters, ‘strength 3 to 4’. Scientist was, at long last, in direct touch with Baker Street. There would be no need for Rudellat to make any more hazardous journeys from Tours, or for Suzanne Duboué to travel to Tarbes with de Baissac’s reports hidden under the shopping in her basket.
Aware that the Germans knew that an irregular lifestyle was a tell-tale sign of a secret agent, Landes always followed the same daily routine. He left his house at 9 a.m. and went for a long walk. When he was sure he was not being followed, he collected his messages and cleared his letterboxes. The afternoons were spent in a local cinema, sleeping. Returning home around 5 p.m., he would have an early meal and then, after dark and with all the blinds pulled down, he began his transmissions to London, often continuing until late into the night.
With his radio operating, Landes now needed to find himself a courier to carry messages to and from Claude de Baissac. He chose Ginette Corbin, the pretty cousin of young Henri Labit, who had died in agony in Langon rather than be taken prisoner. What Ginette did not know at the time was that Roger Landes had fallen for her at their first meeting, but kept his feelings secret. After the death of Labit, he would explain to her later, he did not wish to involve her and her family in more pain. But there was another reason for his reticence. He regarded serious long-term emotional involvements as dangerous to security. They were for after