The Saboteur: True Adventures Of The Gentleman Commando Who Took On The Nazis

Still, at the appointed time, he found the strength to walk to the lobby. He saw the government official the Parisian had described. The two greeted each other; Robert tried to ignore any gooseflesh pimpling his neck. They sat down, the official opening the conversation lightly, with banal questions and asides. He was trying to feel Robert out, which began to put him at ease—the official was “extremely nice,” La Rochefoucauld later said. The two could only playact for so long, though. The Vichy man told La Rochefoucauld that a group was about to leave for Perpignan, a city in southeastern France near the border with Spain. The official had a friend there, someone Robert would meet and who would help him cross over.

The official gave La Rochefoucauld an address for the man in Perpignan—and then stopped Robert before he could write it down. He said La Rochefoucauld had to commit the address to memory. “I began to soak up this code of conduct,” Robert later wrote, “which was so necessary to what I was undertaking but previously not really in my nature.” The Vichy man said once Robert arrived, the Perpignan friend would in turn put him in contact with smugglers who moved other clandestine agents or downed British pilots into Spain. How La Rochefoucauld got to the safety of, say, a British embassy would be at the discretion of the smugglers. The Vichy official and La Rochefoucauld then wished each other well and Robert watched him leave the lobby.

The meeting apparently made him feel better because Robert later described the trip to Perpignan as “very pleasant,” free of the paranoia of Vichy. At the given address in Perpignan, a man in his thirties answered La Rochefoucauld’s knock on the door, greeting Robert formally and aware of his plans. The Perpignan man was, like the one from Vichy, also a civil servant secretly awaiting the fall of Pétain’s government, and insisted La Rochefoucauld make himself comfortable. It could be a while before the next trip across the border, he said. So Robert stayed that night, and then seven more: The man and his smuggler friends planned to take a few clandestine fighters at a time and were rounding them up, he said. On the eighth night the Perpignan man told Robert that the smugglers would traffic two British pilots desperate to make it to Spain. Robert would travel with these Englishmen across the border.

One day soon thereafter Robert and the man from Perpignan set out to meet the Brits and the smugglers who would guide them across. The Occupation and scarcity of oil in France—the Nazis demanded more of it from the French than Germany produced annually—had forced many of the French by 1942 to abandon their vehicles and live as if it were the nineteenth century. “Distances,” one observer wrote, were suddenly “measured in paces—of man or horse.” The people who kept a vehicle often retrofitted the engine so that a pump placed near the rear of the car, resembling the cylinder jutting up above a steam-engine train, could convert coal or wood chips into fuel in lieu of oil. That was what the man from Perpignan had: A rickety bus with what was known as a gasified tank grafted onto it, its cylinder rising high above the rest of the bus’s body. He and La Rochefoucauld traveled along the small roads snaking through the outskirts of the Pyrenees mountains, stopping at a modest village a dozen miles from Perpignan. They parked the bus and the man, pointing to the heavy forest around them, said they would walk from here. They set off through the woods and the sloping mountainside until they saw it, about three miles into their hike: the makeshift camp of a dozen mountain men. They were large, hairy, and not particularly clean, but after introductions they promised they knew the routes to Spain better than anyone. Before trafficking Resistance fighters, they’d moved a lot of alcohol and cigarettes across the border. La Rochefoucauld snorted his approval.

The French and sympathetic Spaniards had their preferred escape routes, and the British government even sanctioned one, through an offshoot of MI6, called the VIC line. But many border crossings shared a common starting point in Perpignan, in part because the city lay at the foot of the Pyrenees that divided France from Spain. A crossing through the range there, though arduous, wasn’t as demanding as in the high mountains, more than two hundred miles to the west. The problem, of course, was that the Nazis knew this too, and Spain was “honeycombed with German agents,” one official wrote. So if the Pyrenees themselves didn’t endanger lives, a résistant’s run to freedom might.

The British pilots arrived, noticeably older than La Rochefoucauld and not speaking a word of French. Robert’s childhood with English nannies suddenly came in handy. He said hello, and soon found that they were career soldiers, a pilot and a radioman, who’d been shot down over central France during a mission, but parachuted out and escaped the German patrols. They had hiked for days to get here. La Rochefoucauld translated all this and the group decided to let the exhausted English rest. They would set out the next night.

In the end, seven left for Spain: La Rochefoucauld, the Brits, and four guides—two advance scouts and two pacing the refugees. They took paths only the smugglers knew, guided by their intuition and a faint moon. The narrow passages and ever-steepening incline meant the men walked single file. “The hike was particularly difficult,” La Rochefoucauld later wrote. Vineyards gave way to terraced vineyards until the vegetation disappeared, the mountain rising higher before them, loose rubble and stone at their feet. As the night deepened, Robert could see little of the person in front of him. The people who scaled these mountains often misjudged distances, stubbing their toes on the boulders or twisting their ankles on uneven earth or, when the night was at its darkest, flailing their arms when they expected a jut in the mountain’s face that was nothing more than open air. This last was the most terrifying. Germans posted observation decks on the crests of certain peaks, which discouraged strongly lit torches and slowed or, conversely, sometimes quickened the pace, depending on whether and when the guides believed the Germans to be peering through their telescopes. The peaks at this part of the Pyrenees were roughly four thousand feet, and the descent was as limb- and life-threatening as the climb. The passage exhausted everyone. “Every two hours, we took a quarter of an hour’s rest,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. At dawn the group closed in on a stretch of the range that straddled the two countries, but didn’t want to risk a crossing during the day. So they hid out and waited for nightfall. When they resumed their hike, the going proved “just as hard, and increasingly dangerous,” Robert later recalled. The group nearly stumbled into view of a German post, etched into the night’s skyline. They detoured quietly around it, but then, having rejoined the route, saw another Nazi lookout, rising amid the shadows. So once more they redirected themselves, trying to be safe but also trying to take advantage of the darkness; they needed to cross into Spain before dawn. These were tense moments, moving quickly and silently and almost blindly, and all while listening for footsteps behind them. Eventually they made it to the Perthus Pass, a mountainous area right on the border. Nazi patrols were known to roam the grounds at all hours here. The group’s advance scouts went ahead and came back in the last small minutes before daylight. “The road is clear!” they said. With a rush of adrenaline and fear, everyone scurried across, into Spain.

Robert and the airmen laughed, euphoric. They were hundreds of miles south, but so much closer to London.

The guides said they needed to head back; smugglers out after dawn risked imprisonment. Everyone shook hands. The guides pointed to the road. “This will take you to a town,” one of them said.

Robert and the Brits set out, with a plan to get to the village, clean up somewhere, and take a train to Madrid without raising suspicion. Once there, they would cautiously make their way to the British embassy.

Though they had slept little and eaten sparingly, they walked at a good pace, full of life. They reached a thriving market town that morning; it was likely Figueres, the first municipality of any note across the Spanish border. They immediately discovered that it was crawling with police and customs agents. They were three men who had just climbed through the Pyrenees over two sleepless nights—“We looked more like highway robbers than peaceful citizens,” La Rochefoucauld wrote—and before they could find a hiding spot or a public washroom, two Spanish agents approached them on the street. The Spaniards were kind and one of them spoke French. Given their appearance and the toll the trek had taken on them, they felt that any story they might concoct wouldn’t sync with reality. So La Rochefoucauld tried an honest tack, to appeal to the officers’ intelligence. He said he had escaped from France with these British pilots, who had been shot down and fled to the border. The Spanish agents’ faces didn’t harden; they seemed to appreciate the honesty. But the lead officer told the men they had no choice but “to take you with us to the station.” In the days ahead, with Spanish bureaucracy in wartime Europe being what it was, La Rochefoucauld and the Brits went from one law-enforcement agency to another, and ended up at Campdevànol in Girona, twenty-five miles south of Figueres.

Robert Jean Renaud, La Rochefoucauld’s twenty-two-year-old French-Canadian alias, was booked in the Girona prison on December 17, 1942. The Girona authorities found Renaud’s case beyond their jurisdiction and on December 23, they transferred him and, according to La Rochefoucauld, the British pilots to a place even less accommodating: the prisoner of war camp in Miranda de Ebro.

Built in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, the concentration camp near the Ebro River in the homely flatness of northern Spain first housed Republican soldiers and political dissidents who defied Franco’s fascism. Its watchtowers, barbed-wire fences, and barracks in parallel lines across 103 acres of Castilian soil were designed with the help of Paul Winzer, a Nazi member of both the SS and Gestapo, then working in Madrid. Franco’s men understood cruelty as well as any budding Nazi. They shipped the Republican prisoners to Miranda in cattle cars, starved them, humiliated them, exposed them to weather conditions and savage guards and all the diseases that thrive in overly populated spaces. The twenty-two barracks, made to hold two thousand men, held 18,406 prisoners at one point in 1938. All told, an estimated ten thousand people died there during the Spanish Civil War.

With Franco’s victory in 1939 and the outbreak of World War II, the camp was converted into a prison for refugees fleeing Hitler’s Europe. Its political allegiances shifted and baffled both the Allied and Axis powers. One would think a Nazi supporter as fierce as Franco would listen to the Germans and allow them sway within the camp, considering an SS man built the place. But Spanish officials informed the Nazis that because they’d overseen the prison since 1937, they didn’t need any outside guidance. No German helped to direct it during World War II. And because of Franco’s friendliness toward Great Britain and the diplomatic dexterity of British ambassador Samuel Hoare, to whom the general listened, British prisoners at Miranda served shorter stints than nationals from any other European country.

But that didn’t endear the remaining Allied prisoners to the Miranda staff. It routinely complied with the German embassy in Madrid, which issued exit visas and repatriation documents for its “subjects,” the Czechs, Poles, and French who had fled the German occupation of their home countries.

In short, it was a bad time to be a Frenchman entering Miranda—which is why French-Canadian seemed such an inspired nationality for La Rochefoucauld’s nom de guerre Robert Jean Renaud. To say he was a Canadian freed La Rochefoucauld from a forced return to Vichy France, or from the more barbaric treatment the Miranda staff imposed on certain French nationals: the beatings and the exhausting, morally degrading forced labor.

None of this meant, however, that Robert’s stay in Miranda was enjoyable. After his and the Brits’ booking, the guards shoved all three in the same cell, which other political prisoners described as “cattle stalls” or “windowless huts.” It was little better outside their unit. Miranda was well beyond its capacity of 2,000 prisoners, holding 3,500 by the end of 1942. Everyone risked whippings or smaller humiliations from taunting guards. In January 1943, some prisoners began a hunger strike.

Every day the two British pilots wrote letters to their embassy in Madrid, begging for release. While they awaited a response, food was scarce and the three subsisted on little more than the morning’s slice of bread and conversation. The winter wind whipped through the airy barracks and inmates froze in their thin uniforms. Medical care was inconsistent, and when doctors did perform rounds they often asked that hot irons be pressed onto inmates’ dirty clothes, to kill off the lice. Scabies and diarrheic diseases, which prisoners called “mirandite,” were rampant. Rats attacked the camp dogs in broad daylight. To visit the latrines at night “necessitated a good deal of courage,” the British spy and Miranda survivor George Langelaan wrote, because there the same great rats “fought and squealed furiously, regardless and unafraid of men.” Sleep came fleetingly. The guards on night patrol sporadically shouted Alerta!, either to make sure other guards were awake or to torture dozing inmates. In the morning, everyone stood outside for roll call and on Sundays they marched by the commandant and his officers who were clustered around a Nationalist flag on a miniature grandstand. The Miranda staff, dressed in their Sunday best of white belts, white epaulets, and white gloves, formed a band, and the prisoners walked behind it in time to music. This amused the elderly officers in their large silk sashes. Inevitably, one of the band members fell out of step or grew confused by the complicated formations, and the prisoners snickered under their breath at the band.

Every week, two large trucks from the British embassy arrived, dropping off cigarettes and other provisions and picking up whichever Brits the Spanish authorities had agreed to release. Ambassador Hoare had a keen interest in freeing pilots; the Allies increased their air missions over France in 1942 and ’43, dangerous missions in which the Germans often shot the planes down. If the pilots survived the crash and ended up in Miranda, getting them back to London and back in the air took less time than training new men.

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.

CHAPTER 5

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. And the answer seemed to be: because he was a nineteen-year-old who still acted like a boy, creating mischief amid authority figures. In some sense, deceiving the British was the same as climbing a lycée’s homeroom curtains. It was a fun thing to do.

The British officers in the Patriotic Building would later claim they didn’t rely on torture but used numerous “techniques” to get people to talk: forcing them to stand for hours and recount in mind-numbing detail how they had arrived or to sit in a painfully hardbacked chair and do the same; or filling up refugees with English tea and forbidding them to leave, seeing if their stories changed as their bladders cried for relief; or questioning applicants from sunup to sundown, or from sundown to sunup; or tag-teaming a refugee and playing good cop, bad cop. Robert remembered emerging from marathon sessions and talking to the “twenty or so fugitives there, in a situation similar to mine, who had come from various European countries.” The people he saw were some of the thirty thousand or so who ultimately filtered through the Patriotic Building during the war: men and women who in other lands were politicians or military personnel or just flat-out adventurers, washing ashore in England, sleeping in barracks, and awaiting their next interrogation slumped over on small benches, remnants of the building’s former life as a school for orphans.

La Rochefoucauld was there for eight days. In the end, an interrogating officer who spoke French knew of Robert’s family and its lineage, and soon he and the officer were chatting about the La Rochefoucaulds like old friends. Because the British espionage services brimmed with upper-class Englishmen, the spies identified with a Frenchman from the “right” sort of family, and it soon became evident that this nobleman was not a German agent. Robert was free to go.

A man waited for him as he left the grounds. He had a boy’s way of smiling, turning up his lips without revealing his teeth, an attempt to give his slender build a tough veneer. His name was Eric Piquet-Wicks, and he helped oversee a branch of the new secret service that Ambassador Hoare had mentioned to La Rochefoucauld. His features had an almost ethereal fineness to them, but his personality was much hardier, all seafaring wanderlust. He was aging gracefully, the thin creases around his eyes and cheeks granting him the gravitas his smile did not. He wore a suit well.

Piquet-Wicks and La Rochefoucauld walked around the neighborhood, Robert taking in the spring air, free of the paranoid thoughts of the last months, while Piquet-Wicks discussed his own life and how Robert might be able to help him.