In late February 1943, after roughly three months in prison, the British pilots with La Rochefoucauld heard that a man from His Majesty’s Government awaited them in the visitors’ room. The three inmates smiled. Quickly, the British men gathered themselves and made for their meeting, with Robert calling after them, Don’t forget me, and begging them to mention that he wanted to meet de Gaulle and join the Free French. A short while later, the pilots returned to the cell, smirking, and Robert soon found out why.
He was called to meet with the British representative. This was likely a military attaché, Major Haslam, who made frequent trips to the camp in 1943. Once La Rochefoucauld reached the visitors’ room, the Brit profusely thanked him “for all you’ve done to help my countrymen.” Robert was dumbfounded: What had he done? He’d served as the pilots’ interpreter, little more. But the representative went on and Robert figured the pilots had “grossly embellished my role.” He tried to set the man straight, explaining that though he was happy to know the pilots, and even befriend them, his passage through Spain had no purpose other than getting to de Gaulle and joining the Free French.
The Brit stared at him, not upset that he had been misled, but seemingly working something out in his mind. At last, he said he would do his best to grant La Rochefoucauld’s wish. “I thanked him with all my heart,” La Rochefoucauld wrote, “and once back in the cell, fell into the arms of the pilots.” A few days later, he got on a truck with the airmen and departed for Madrid and the British embassy.
They arrived at night, the Spanish capital so brilliantly lit it shocked them; it had been months since they’d seen such iridescence. At the embassy they ate a “top-notch dinner,” La Rochefoucauld wrote, “then we were brought to our rooms, the dimensions and comfort of which seemed incredible.” An embassy staffer told them they would meet with Ambassador Hoare himself in the morning.
After a proper English breakfast, each man had his meeting. Hoare was aging and short, with the look of upper-class British severity about him: his gray hair trimmed and parted crisply to the right, his dress fastidious, and his manners formal. Hoare was ambitious and competitive; his taut frame reflected the tournament-level tennis he still played. He had been part of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet, the secretary of the Home Office, and one of the key advisors to Chamberlain when he appeased Hitler in the Munich Agreement in 1938. Churchill dismissed Hoare when he became prime minister in 1940, offering Hoare the ambassadorship in Madrid that many in London saw as the old man’s proper banishment. Hoare seemed to wear this rejection in his delicate facial features and his searching, almost wounded eyes. Still, his mission in Madrid had been to keep the pro-German Franco out of the war, and he had done his job with aplomb. Spain remained neutral, even after the Allies’ North African landings in November 1942, and Franco continued to allow the release of British troops and Resistance fighters from Miranda.
Because of his ease with the French language, Hoare had been the man in Chamberlain’s cabinet to sit next to French Prime Minister Léon Blum at a state luncheon, the two talking literature, and now in Madrid he opened the conversation with La Rochefoucauld in similarly “perfect French,” the fledgling résistant later wrote. “He was indeed aware of my plans to join up with the Free French forces in London but, without rushing, without ever opposing my determination, he revealed to me a sort of counter project.” During the First World War, Hoare had headed the British Secret Intelligence Service in Petrograd, Russia—he may have even originated a plot to kill Rasputin—and still relished the dark arts of espionage. What would you say, Hoare asked Robert, to enlisting in a branch of the British special services that carried out missions in France?
La Rochefoucauld wasn’t sure what that implied, and so Hoare continued, revealing his proposition slowly.
“The British agents have competence and courage that are beyond reproach,” Hoare said. But their French, even if passable, was heavily accented. German agents found them out. So Great Britain had formed a new secret service, the likes of which the world had never before seen, training foreign nationals in London and then parachuting them back into their home countries where they fought the Nazis with—well, Hoare stressed that he could not disclose too much. But if the Frenchman agreed to join this new secret service, and if he passed its very demanding training procedures, all would be revealed.
The mystery intrigued Robert. It also tore at him. He had listened to de Gaulle for close to two years and lived by the general’s defiant statements to battle on. It had seemed at times that only de Gaulle spoke sanely about France and its future. But though he’d wished to be a soldier in the general’s army, what Robert really wanted, now that he thought about it, was simply to fight the Nazis. If the British could train and arm him as well if not better than de Gaulle—if the Brits had the staff and the money and the weapons—why not join the British? If Robert wanted to liberate France, did it really matter in whose name he did it?
Hoare could see the young man considering his options and asked, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-one,” La Rochefoucauld answered, which was not only a lie—he was nineteen—but revealed which way he was leaning. He wanted Hoare to think he was older and more experienced.
At last, Robert said he was honored by the offer, and he might like to join the new British agency. He wanted, however, when he arrived in London, to first ask de Gaulle what he thought. It was a presumptuous request, but Hoare nonetheless said such a thing could be arranged.
The next week, La Rochefoucauld flew to England.
When he landed, military police shuttled him to southwest London, to an ornately Gothic building at Fitzhugh Grove euphemistically known as the London Reception Center, whose real name, the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building, still didn’t describe what actually happened there: namely, the harsh interrogation of incoming foreign nationals by MI6 officers. The hope was to flush out German spies who, once identified, were either quarantined in windowless concrete cells or flipped into double agents—sending them back into the field with a supposed allegiance to the Nazis but a true fealty to Great Britain.
La Rochefoucauld’s interrogation opened with him giving the Brits a fake name—which may very well be why Robert Jean Renaud appeared in the Royal Victoria Patriotic files in March 1943. He also said he was twenty-one. He would come to regret these statements as the interrogation stretched from one day to two, and then beyond. Though he eventually admitted to the officers his real identity, that only prolonged the questioning, because now the agents wanted to know why he had lied in the first place.