Madeleine's War (20 page)

He put down the phone.

“Is this genuine, or a prank?”

“I think we have to assume it's genuine. They obviously know about what's happening in Normandy, and that their days in Paris are numbered.”

“It could be someone playing silly buggers.”

Just then there was a knock on the door and G. came in. She had another piece of paper with her. She just said one word before going out again. “More.”

I took the paper.

I passed it to Hilary.

He hunched over it, running his fingers through his hair. “This is awful,” he breathed. “We thought one or two circuits were penetrated—yes. But Paris is the French headquarters of the Gestapo; and we had no hint that the Rennes circuits were compromised. This is…this is a
catastrophe
. I must tell upstairs.”

“And I must tell our agents, to keep clear of their circuits—unless of course it's too late. They must all disappear. Anyone in the Paris or Rennes ambit.”

A thought struck me. “How is Rondin doing?”

Hilary nodded. “Fine. Good.”

“Is he still independent?”

“I told him he could contact Proctor circuit once the invasion had begun—”

“No! We must tell him to hold off, at least until he gets the go-ahead from us. And the same goes for Madeleine. She's nowhere near Paris, but
all agents not yet integrated into the Resistance must hold off until we know how far this goes.”

I stood up. “It looks as though Robert Wingate was right, and we have a mole somewhere in SC2.”

Hilary shook his head. “That doesn't bear thinking about. We'll need to go back over transmission transcripts, to see when and how they first became…well, not kosher.” He looked up. “I'll brief Grieves later today, and I'll cope with Rondin. This doesn't change your job—we must let every agent know the invasion has started. But you're right—tell them to steer clear of any circuits until we know more. And you'll see to Madeleine, right?”

I left him and returned to the typing pool, where, during the rest of that day, Tina Ridley and I briefed seventy-nine out of our total of one hundred and sixteen agents on the new situation. We were in the office until one the next morning.

By the time I went home that night, by taxi because the tube had stopped running, there were thirty-seven agents we hadn't heard from. One of them was Madeleine.

“
IT BEGGARS BELIEF
,”
GROWLED THE HONOURABLE
member for Stafford South, whose name I hadn't caught. “It beggars belief,” he said again for those who hadn't heard him the first time. “It beggars belief that the Gestapo should have penetrated one of our most secret defence initiatives in this war—and got away with it for so long.”

Cries of “Hear, Hear” and “Shame” were heard from both sides of the House of Commons. Some members stamped their feet.

“I call upon the secretary of state for war to dismiss the officer in command of this operation, and replace him with someone who can do the job properly, and I call upon you, Mr. Speaker, to lift the reporting restrictions on today's session of Parliament.” The member for Stafford South was not a big man, but he did his best to seem substantial. “God knows, this failure does very little credit to our secret services, but we are not going to capitalize on the early successes of the brave invasion forces unless we learn to look disaster in the eye, recognize it as such, and then act promptly to eradicate the defects that have been identified.”

He sat down.

Hilary turned to me and pulled a face. We were sitting in the gallery of the House, in the seats reserved for civil servants, looking down at the chamber.

It had been just over a week since the invasion. The assault was going well enough. Bayeux had been captured, despite fierce fighting in Normandy, and our troops were sixteen miles from Cherbourg. Major roads were being taken, lost, and retaken. It had emerged that the beach landings had been postponed by twenty-four hours at the last minute on account of the weather, which had since improved markedly.

That was all good news.

What was much less good news was that thirty-one of our agents in the field—fourteen women and seventeen men—had still not been heard from. We simply didn't know what had happened to them, but of course we feared the worst. It seemed that as many as nine circuits might have been penetrated by the Gestapo, before they advertised their breakthrough on D-Day. Seven of those circuits were in and around the Paris region, while the others stretched west, to Poitiers, Tours, and Nantes—barely thirty miles from St. Nazaire and Crossbow, the circuit Madeleine had been preparing to contact the last time she had been in touch.

We
had
heard from Madeleine, but not in a way that settled my nerves.

The day after the invasion G. had brought me the decoded version of a message from Oak. It read:

And then it just stopped.

It was a genuine message—her true check, the ninth word, was misspelled, as it should have been—but then it just stopped, in mid-sentence, mid-word. That didn't mean Madeleine had been captured, but it did mean that she had been interrupted in the middle of sending her message. But she might have escaped when she saw that her whereabouts had been discovered. She might have retreated, knowing that escape was more important than completing what she had to say—she could always do that later.

Except that she had not been in touch since her incomplete message, now over a week ago. And we hadn't had a chance to warn her to steer clear of
all
circuits.

I was beside myself with worry.

What am I saying?
A week without any contact, a week when the news was dominated by the fighting in France, when we were constantly hearing from agents in the field, moving around, facing new and perilous conditions, a week of German cruelties as their troops, under increasing pressure, took it out on the surrounding population, one massacre or outrage after another—people shot, tortured, and raped.

And still no word from Madeleine.

Nothing.

Day after day, every time I was in the office, every time the teleprinter clattered into life, I stood over the machine until the stuttering stopped, ripped off the paper myself, and took it to the decrypters, and waited there, holding my breath, while it was decoded, hoping that the message was from her.

It never was.

She was the best of her bunch, as I kept telling myself. She would surely have spotted if she was being followed, she would have sought out a place to transmit her messages that was safe, where she could see anyone approaching, where she had an escape route to hand.

She would know that we had received a truncated message from her. That we would know something sudden had occurred. That we—I—would be worried. So she would, as soon as she could, try to send us another message to say that she was all right.
If she could
.

But she hadn't.

On the other hand, she had almost certainly abandoned her transmitter, so how could she send us a message? She couldn't unless…unless she contacted the local circuit. But if she had done that, she had almost certainly walked into a trap. Because of the way she had abandoned her own message, we hadn't had a chance to alert her to the danger of contacting the local people.

If she had spotted that the local circuit had indeed been penetrated—as she was quite capable of doing—then she was alone in France, without the surrounding cloak of safety that a circuit would have provided, and without a transmitter and even, conceivably, without her bicycle, which she might have had to abandon.

She did have her cyanide pill with her. That was another source of worry.

Devastating as all this was, and wrecked as I privately felt, those weren't my only problems.

A couple of days before, Hilary came back from a meeting with his superiors, at which he was told that the
Daily News
had somehow got hold of the fact that many of our circuits had been penetrated by the Gestapo.
How
this information had escaped no one knew, though Hilary said that General Grieves privately suspected MI6, which had been suspicious of SC2 ever since its inauguration.

For the time being, under the fourteen-day rule, military censorship prevented this information from being made public at least for two weeks:
the censor at the Ministry of Information was clearly worried about the effect the news might have on military and civilian morale.

But then the Opposition, which was of course represented in the wartime coalition cabinet, had called a debate in Parliament to discuss the matter. Despite it being wartime, and the government being a coalition, several days were still set aside for motions the Opposition wished to discuss.

Although Parliament debated security issues in secret in wartime, members who thought certain key issues should be made public could appeal to the Speaker to allow the press to print the proceedings without waiting the usual fourteen days.

“The member for Newcastle, Easington.”

I didn't know his name either, but he was a tall, lanky individual with a mop of dark hair and rough skin. He was about fifty-five and a Labour Party member.

“Mr. Speaker,” he said. “Mr. Speaker, I am astonished and saddened by what we have heard in this House today. For an organisation like SC2 to be penetrated…Well, such things, though regrettable, do happen in wartime. I fought in the Great War of 1914 to 1918 and that was known for
terrible
mistakes. So I am not going to stand here and condemn an organisation that, for all we know—and it is not our job to know—has done excellent work over the past four or five years.”

He turned from addressing the Speaker, Douglas Clifton Brown, to the government front bench, where Anthony Eden, the secretary of state for war, was seated.

“But what I cannot forgive, and do
not
forgive, is the fact that no one—
no one
—spotted the penetration. This dereliction of duty, this appalling complacency, all the more abject since it took place in the dangerous run-up to the invasion, defies belief—as my learned colleague has just said.”

He turned back to the Speaker.

“As you know, Mr. Speaker, this House is very divided on how much of our proceedings should be made public. Personally, I do not think you can make hard-and-fast rules about what the public mood will bear and what it will not. But I fall into the camp which holds that you cannot hide everything from our fellow citizens, who are sacrificing so much in this war. Had the invasion in France not gone so well—so well that His Majesty the King has been able to visit our troops in Normandy—then I am not so sure that it would have been a good idea to release information
about German penetration of our secret services. But, since our forces are now, as I understand it, about to cut off the Cherbourg peninsula, I concur with the honourable member for Stafford South and urge you to lift reporting restriction on this debate.”

Competing cries of “No! Rubbish!” and “Hear, hear!” spread around the chamber.

“Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker…” The member for Newcastle, Easington, remained standing and the noise died away. “I give two reasons for taking the view that I do. One, unless we are prepared to release the bad news with the good—as His Majesty's Government have done throughout the war—our propaganda loses its bite. The citizens of Britain expect to be treated as adults and this is no time to change that stance—”

“Hear, hear!”

“Secondly…secondly, Mr. Speaker, at the same time as we announce this failure publicly, the minister for war must also announce that heads have rolled. Only if heads roll, only if the relevant officials are shamed, only if someone bears responsibility for this fiasco, will performance improve in the future—and I remind honourable members of the House that although the invasion is going well for the moment, the war is a long way from being won.”

The member for Newcastle, Easington, drew himself up to his full height and buttoned his jacket. “So I say, Mr. Speaker, lift the reporting restriction on today's debate, but I also call upon the secretary of state for war to exercise the powers of his office and relieve of their duties those responsible for this shambles.”

He sat down.

“Hear, hear!”

“The minister for war!”

The Speaker, Douglas Clifton Brown, was the MP for Hexham. He was difficult to make out under his copious wig of office, but from what I could see he looked terrified that he might soon have to make a decision.

The secretary of state for war, Anthony Eden, stood up. Good-looking, debonair, with a small, immaculate silver moustache, he oozed self-confidence.

“Mr. Speaker, as honourable members will have seen, I have listened to the debate today closely, following my opening statement. I have to say that I regret that members opposite have concentrated on the failures of SC2 which, after all, I did highlight in my opening remarks. At the same
time, they have ignored and overlooked the fact that, thanks to some nimble thinking on the part of certain members of SC2, we were able to use the fact that some circuits had been penetrated by the Gestapo to mislead our enemies about where the invasion would take place. That is no small achievement, and I would like to pay tribute here to the men and women who have made the work of SC2 so profitable in the past. I…yes…?”

Another member was standing up, and the minister for war, in parliamentary terms, “gave way,” and sat down.

The man standing was small and fat and sweaty. I had no idea which constituency he represented.

“On a point of information, Mr. Speaker, the minister for war refers to ‘men
and women'
of SC2. The fact that women were being used at all by SC2 is news to many of us. Can the secretary of state tell us why women were being used in such dangerous circumstances and how many of them, in total, have been used as agents in the field—and, as a result of Gestapo penetration, how many are missing?”

“Hear, hear!”

The minister of war was on his feet again.

“I am obliged to the member for Salford North,” he said. Parliamentary protocol always amused me. From the minister's tone of voice there was no love lost between him and the member for Salford North, but you would never be able to tell that from
Hansard
, the official report of proceedings in Parliament, when it was eventually published. “Women have been used in SC2 since 1942—”

“No!”

“Really?”

“Extraordinary!”

A ripple of excitement went around the House. This
was
news.

I was surprised. Had these politicians no idea about how the real world worked?

“Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker.” Eden waited for the hubbub to die away. “Mr. Speaker, they are used for the simple reason that, in France, all men, all males between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five, must either work in war-related industries, or in the fighting forces on the enemy's side. They are forcibly sent by the Germans to Germany, again to work in war-related industries. It follows, therefore, that women find it easier to act as couriers, as wireless transmitters, even as sabotage agents. They don't stand out.”

He looked directly at the member for Salford North.

“To answer the honourable member's specific point, Mr. Speaker, there
are, at this moment, exactly thirty-seven women agents in SC2, three of whom have been killed and fourteen of whom are missing.”

There was a silence in the chamber. The honourable members did not know how to digest this news.

“One other point, Mr. Speaker. I agree with the member for Newcastle, Easington, that the penetration of SC2 by the Gestapo was a catastrophe, an unacceptable disaster. But I also reiterate that the situation was, to an extent, turned around. Thanks to the swift thinking of several senior people in the French section of SC2 command, some of our penetrated circuits were used, as I have said, to send false information to the Germans about where, exactly, the invasion would take place. We have evidence that, as a result of this misinformation, many German troops were kept in areas of France well away from Normandy—on the Atlantic coast, for instance—and were therefore not on hand to help repel our forces. To an extent, we managed to turn a catastrophe into partial victory.”