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

Piquet-Wicks’s mother was French. The name that many Brits pronounced Pick-it Wicks was in fact Pi-kay Wicks, after his mother, Alice Mercier-Piquet, of the port city of Calais. He was born in Colchester and split his formative education between England and France, earning his college degree, in Spanish, at a university in Barcelona and making him trilingual when he graduated in the middle of the 1930s. He found work, of all places, in the Philippines, on the island of Cebù, where he became the French consular agent. From there he moved to the Paris office of a multinational firm called Borax, which extracted mineral deposits from sites around the world. In Paris, Piquet-Wicks was the managing director of Borax Français, but he longed to be a spy.

After Britain declared war on Germany, Piquet-Wicks received a commission with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, an infantry regiment. He was stationed in Northern Ireland and woefully bored. He seems to have approached MI5, Britain’s security service, which oversaw domestic threats, to inquire about how he could best serve the agency, because it had a report on him. The agency described him as an “adventurer” who had once used his military permit at the Alexandra Hotel in Hyde Park as the means to gain whiskey; he’d told the barman it wouldn’t be long before he worked for MI5. The report also said that before the war Piquet-Wicks had had pro-Nazi leanings, but that wasn’t the reason the agency stayed away from hiring him. “We considered him unsuitable for employment on Intelligence duties, in view of his indiscreet behavior,” the report stated.

MI6, the famed spy agency, then began asking about Piquet-Wicks in July 1940, the idea being that he was an intelligent if unstable man whose dexterity with languages—he also knew some Portuguese and Italian—might still benefit Britain. But again a concern over indiscretion surfaced, and MI6 kept its distance, with one agent even saying Piquet-Wicks didn’t have “enough guts to be an adventurer.”

He may have stayed in Northern Ireland, living in a former brewery where “it was difficult to feel embarked in a war of … consequence,” he later wrote, were it not for a new security service that was in need of qualified agents.

Piquet-Wicks’s new life began one day in April 1941 at 3 a.m., pulling night duty in Belfast as a punishment for marching too far ahead of his company in drills. The phone rang. He didn’t think to answer it, but the ringing wouldn’t stop and so he picked up.

“Have you a Second Lieutenant Piquet-Wicks?” a man said. Piquet-Wicks thought this had to be someone in the mess pulling his leg.

“I am the poor bastard,” he said.

The shocked splutterings on the other end made Piquet-Wicks realize this was someone official. Startled, he hung up.

The phone rang again.

“Inniskilling,” Piquet-Wicks said, trying another tactic.

“Have you a Second Lieutenant Piquet-Wicks with the battalion?” the same voice said, but angrier.

“Yes, sir.”

“Where is he? A few minutes ago I had someone on this line. I thought—”

Piquet-Wicks broke in, saying this was the night duty officer speaking. “The officer you are calling is undoubtedly asleep,” he said. “Shall I wake him for you, sir?”

“Of course not, at this hour,” said the caller, who was a colonel from the Northern Ireland district. “Take note that he should report to the War Office … at 1500 hours on Friday the fourth.”

The War Office was in London, and the fourth was the next day.

In the morning, Piquet-Wicks went to his superior, to see what to make of the message. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to continue your disciplinary training as night duty officer,” the superior said, his eyes twinkling. “However, good luck and good-bye.”

If Piquet-Wicks were to make it to London, he would have to catch the next boat, which departed before he could properly gather all his things, or comprehend why he needed to rush to the capital.

When he arrived at the given room inside the War Office, he met with a general, who said the British were establishing a new department—unlike MI5 and MI6, and unlike anything seen before. “I was to be seconded to a secret organization,” Piquet-Wicks later wrote, “to become involved in events whose existence I had never suspected.”

On his walk now with La Rochefoucauld, almost two years later, Piquet-Wicks implied he would like Robert to work under him, as an agent in his branch of this secret organization, which he had built up almost single-handedly. More details and the particulars of missions would be disclosed if and when La Rochefoucauld made it through training.

“Here is my address,” Piquet-Wicks said.

He was “surprisingly close to each prospective agent,” he later admitted, and La Rochefoucauld sensed the humanity behind the spy’s implacable eyes. Like virtually every French agent whose life was to be guided and ultimately transformed by Eric Piquet-Wicks, Robert liked the man with the goofy smile immensely. So he thought it best to level with him. He said he had to seek out de Gaulle and ask the general’s advice on joining a British agency out to save France.

Robert didn’t know how closely Piquet-Wicks worked with the Free French forces. He was taken aback when Piquet-Wicks not only agreed to the sensibility of the meeting but offered him directions to Carlton Gardens, de Gaulle’s headquarters in London.

“If you get to meet him,” Piquet-Wicks said, “ask him what you need to ask him, then come meet me.” The display of camaraderie eased La Rochefoucauld’s mind and pushed him ever closer to joining the British.

No. 4 Carlton Gardens sat amid two blocks of impeccable terraced apartments, their white-stone façades overlooking St. James Park, the oldest of London’s eight Royal Parks. Built on the order of King George IV in the early 1800s and designed by architect John Nash, the rows of four-story buildings collectively called Carlton House Terrace had been home to many a proper Londoner over the years—earls and lords and even Louis-Napoléon in 1839. The German embassy occupied 7–9 Carlton Gardens until the outbreak of World War II. In 1941, during an air raid, a bomb fell on No. 2 Carlton House Terrace, leaving its roof open and exposed for the rest of the fighting. No. 4 Carlton Gardens housed de Gaulle’s Free French forces, and one didn’t need to look for the address to know who worked there. A French soldier in full military fatigues, rifle at his side and a helmet on his head, stood guard outside the entrance, itself marked by the Cross of Lorraine, which the Knights Templar had once carried during the Crusades but which was now the symbol of the Free French movement.

Robert kept his appointment, arranged by the Brits, with an aide of de Gaulle’s. La Rochefoucauld mentioned his family name, “which may have possibly facilitated things,” he wrote, and because de Gaulle’s daily schedule allowed for fugitive Frenchmen who wanted to see him, Robert was told he would meet with the general that afternoon. He gulped.

The interior was all dark wood and high Gothic ceilings—an airy space with lots of natural light but poor insulation. In the winter, the Free French, across four floors, each nearly three thousand square feet, shivered in their huge rooms.

When the hour came, the secretary asked La Rochefoucauld if he was ready, and they climbed an ornate stairwell to a landing where doors led first to the offices of De Gaulle’s aide-de-camp, and then past those to the general’s own quarters. La Rochefoucauld’s heart thrummed in his chest.

Then the door opened and there he was. The man whose voice over the last few years Robert had heard scores of times, The soul of Free France, La Rochefoucauld thought. He sat behind his desk, peering over his glasses, with a look that asked, Now what might this one want? His presence filled the room. Everyone in London called him Le Grand Charles, due only in part to his towering height. Robert took in the office, uncluttered and organized, befitting a general, with a map of the world pinned to the wall behind de Gaulle and one of France hanging to his right. Out of his large French windows, the general had a view of St. James Park.

He rose to greet La Rochefoucauld, unbending his immense frame and straightening to his full six feet five inches, a half-foot taller than the nineteen-year-old. He had an odd body, “a head like a pineapple and hips like a woman’s,” as Alexander Cadogan, Britain’s permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, once put it. His trimmed half mustache, a hairy square on his upper lip, was not a good look for a man with such a long face. The severed patch of facial hair only drew attention to his high forehead, and rather than shave the mustache, de Gaulle had taken to wearing military caps in many photographs and official portraits. He was aware of his ungainliness. “We people are never quite at ease,” he once told a colleague. “I mean—giants. The chairs are always too small, the tables too low, the impression one makes too strong.” Perhaps because of this, the general had welcomed solitude in London, taken on few friends, and worked in Carlton Gardens most days from 9 a.m. until evening, which allowed him to see people like La Rochefoucauld but returned him home only in time to talk with his wife and perhaps kiss his two daughters good night.

Visitors did not mistake his remoteness for timidity though. He came from a bourgeois family and his Jesuit education and elite military training at Saint-Cyr had instilled in him a kind of moral absolutism. Because he alone had cried out to continue the fight among his military brethren, because he alone had established an exile government of sorts in London, he alone spoke for the true France, he felt, and he alone could return it to grandeur.

“You are not France,” Churchill had once barked at him during a wartime negotiation. “I do not recognize you as France.”

To which the general replied: “Why are you [negotiating] with me if I am not France?”

Indeed, part of the reason no one else could claim to speak for France was because no one else had the bully pulpit of the BBC. By 1943 his name had become a political position, Gaullism, in the same way that his former mentor, Pétain, now stood for collaboration (Pétainism). And where he had once bluffed about his prowess—his initial Council of Defense consisted of himself and one other man—by 1943 the Free French fought alongside Allied troops throughout the world, and acolytes like La Rochefoucauld fled France almost daily to meet de Gaulle.

Still, he had a habit of treating impressionable Resistance fighters with such incuriosity or outright derision that they came away heartbroken. One described his rudeness as being like that of an “authoritarian prelate.” Another man, a courageous Resistance leader, said upon leaving a meeting with the general: “I have … witnessed ingratitude in my life, but never on this scale.” Walking now across the room and shaking La Rochefoucauld’s hand, de Gaulle’s greeting was characteristically “simple” but also “cordial,” La Rochefoucauld would later write, proving what Alain Peyrefette, a spokesman, once said of his boss: “To each his own de Gaulle. He was different with each new person he met.”

La Rochefoucauld explained how he’d gotten to London, and “de Gaulle first complimented me on wanting to join the Free French forces,” Robert wrote. La Rochefoucauld then said that the British had intervened and asked him to join its clandestine service; he wasn’t yet clear on the details, but that’s why he had come to see de Gaulle. He had only wanted to work under the general, but now he wondered: Should he join this secret British organization?

De Gaulle had a complicated and contentious relationship with the Brits. He demanded autonomy and yet relied on Britain financially to train and equip his troops. He needed to be diplomatic with London to achieve his ends but, to appeal to Frenchmen as the true voice of France, needed to undercut his diplomacy, too. “He had to be rude to the British to prove to French eyes that he was not a British puppet,” Churchill wrote. “He certainly carried out this policy with perseverance.” Churchill loved and loathed him. The romantic in Churchill saw a rebel and great adventurer in de Gaulle, “the man of destiny.” But the general’s incorrigible rudeness and unending demands on behalf of a sovereign nation that was, in truth, occupied by the Nazis, drove Churchill mad. Over the course of the war the prime minister went from wondering if de Gaulle had “gone off his head,” to calling him a “monster,” to saying he should be kept “in chains.” Franklin Roosevelt didn’t like him any better. The United States president gave de Gaulle all of three hours’ notice before the Allies’ massive 1942 landings in French-controlled Algeria and Morocco.

De Gaulle didn’t get along well with the British intelligence services, either. His Free French staff initially believed Piquet-Wicks and other Brits were poaching would-be French agents. Some Free French staffers thought of the British as a “rival organization,” Piquet-Wicks wrote. But in time certain spies in London saw the benefit of working with de Gaulle—nearly every Frenchman who came to the city wanted to meet him—and so Piquet-Wicks’s division began sharing information, and then missions, with the intelligence bureau of the Free French. Loyalties blurred, and many secret agents Piquet-Wicks oversaw considered themselves to be working first for de Gaulle, and the operatives’ success in France drew more people to London, which in turn strengthened the general, militarily as well as politically.

Now, weighing La Rochefoucauld’s question of joining the British, de Gaulle peered again at the young man, until he reached a conclusion that Robert would remember for the rest of his life: “It’s still for France,” de Gaulle said, “even if it’s allied with the Devil. Go!”

CHAPTER 6

The idea had come in the spring of 1938. Hitler had annexed his native Austria and was now eying other countries, and a few people in the British government began to consider something called “clandestine warfare” to combat the threat. The government secretly established three authorities. The first, overseen by the Foreign Office and ultimately called the Political Warfare Executive, developed propaganda to influence German opinion. The second, an outgrowth of MI6 called Section D, considered German targets vulnerable to sabotage and the sort of people who might do the work. The third was little more in the beginning than two officers and a typist, but it became MI(R), which studied how guerrilla fighting—light equipment, evasive tactics, high mobility—might shape future wars.

Section D worked on time fuses for explosives and helped convince senior civil servants that there really should be a secret agency dealing in sabotage overseas. This was a concept “until that time unheard-of,” as one author noted. MI(R) helped form an understanding of what it would mean to train foreign soldiers in guerrilla tactics. This was equally novel and just as fascinating, because a superpower like Britain had historically defended itself against such threats.

For as long as there had been war, in fact, there had been guerrilla warfare. The Jews in the bushes above the narrow mountain paths outside Beth Horon had “covered the Roman army with their darts” in AD 66, in the words of the historian Josephus, forcing the empire to retreat from its advance to the Mediterranean coast. The “fast moving and light armed” natives of northwestern Greece had destroyed the armored Athenians. The Spanish resistance of the Peninsular War (1807–14)—from which the modern-day term guerrilla derives—repelled Napoléon’s army. The British lost first to a Revolutionary American militia composed in part of farmers who blended into the population, then to Pashtun tribes whose “pin-pricking hit-and-run tactics” didn’t really cease until India’s independence, and nearly lost to the elusive Boers in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century.

Asymmetrical fighting was in fact so well established that the first counterinsurgency manual emerged in 600 AD, while the most famous guerrilla tract was T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the book based on his experiences in World War I helping disparate bands of Bedouin tribesman push the mighty Turks out of Arabia. But by the outset of World War II, even though Lawrence’s colleagues had survived, the agencies that had supported them had not. So, in May of 1940, with the situation in France worsening, the British chiefs of staff looked to the fledgling Section D and MI(R), and recommended to the war cabinet a new and “special organization” that could create “widespread revolt in [Germany’s] conquered territories.”

By July 2, with the armistice in France signed and Britain standing alone against a continent of Nazis, Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton wrote a letter to Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, continuing the theme of the earlier recommendation:

We have got to organize movements in enemy-occupied territory … This “democratic international” must use many different methods, including industrial and military sabotage, labour agitation and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist acts against traitors and German leaders, boycotts and riots … What is needed is a new organization to coordinate, inspire, control and assist the nationals of the oppressed countries who must themselves be the direct participants. We need absolute secrecy, a certain fanatical enthusiasm, willingness to work with people of different nationalities, complete political reliability … The organization should, in my view, be entirely independent of the War Office machine.

For two weeks the cabinet debated this secret organization. At last the outgoing prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, who had appeased Hitler in 1938 by giving him Czechoslovakia without a fight, signed a “most secret paper,” one of the last of his life, and one that would have begun to redeem his reputation had anyone known of it. Chamberlain said that, on the authority of the prime minister, “a new organization shall be established forthwith to coordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas … This organization will be known as Special Operations Executive.”

The document became SOE’s founding charter, and its passages—explicitly stated or implied—charged the agency with many responsibilities. First, SOE would train the foreign nationals flooding England’s shores in accepted and many unaccepted styles of war, and then parachute these fighters back to their occupied countries, where they would assassinate high-ranking Germans, sabotage the factories that made Nazi weaponry and the trains that transported it, and recruit other like-minded natives to the cause of liberation. Furthermore, inside enemy lines, SOE would drop tons of firearms, ammunition, explosives, and money near the camps of known Resistance groups, so that they might continue their anarchic efforts and draw out the men and women who wanted to fight but by dint of circumstance couldn’t get to London.

Really, the world had seen nothing like SOE. Yes, guerrilla warfare had been around for millennia, but it had been exercised locally, by small and often subjected bands of people, not administered by a foreign superpower that first trained and equipped and then sent back the rebel fighters who might free their countries from Nazi subjugation. For that reason alone, SOE was remarkable. But the agency had even greater ambitions, and here it’s important to return to T. E. Lawrence. While Lawrence served as SOE’s spiritual father, his actions in the Arabian desert in 1917 and ’18 were often of his own devising

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