The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [237]
Bla was taken to an Alliance safe house where he was interrogated by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade (among others) and confessed to ‘having given to the Boches all details known to him about us’. They first tried to kill him ‘without him knowing it’, by putting lethal drugs in his food, but this failed and merely alerted the unfortunate man to ‘the attempt we were making’. When he was killed he faced his fate with what Fourcade reported as ‘extraordinary moral courage’ and ‘astounded us by his calm attitude in facing punishment’. ‘The way he died’, she wrote, ‘did something to mitigate his past record.’ Although in her memoirs Fourcade relates that an ‘execution order’ was received from London, nothing so explicit survives in the relevant files, and her contemporaneous report asserted that over the weekend when Bla was in Alliance hands no contact was established with London. A subsequent minute, nevertheless, by the Free French Section in Broadway recorded that as the leading members of Alliance were ‘known personally to [Bla] the danger was such that eventually we instructed them to do away with him should the opportunity occur’. Bla’s fate was naturally suppressed. When his widow made enquiries about him towards the end of 1944 she was simply told that the authorities had had no information of his whereabouts ‘since 1942’. As one SIS officer minuted, ‘if any sleeping dogs should be let lie I think this is one’.
A.4 and A.5 represented passionately opposed French political opinions. The files contain accusations and counter-accusations, with the Free French accusing Dunderdale of purloining Frenchmen before they had a chance to declare themselves for de Gaulle, and Dunderdale complaining about the unwillingness of the Free French to co-operate. After Dewavrin had complained to Dansey about Dunderdale’s hostility to de Gaulle, in February 1941 Menzies tried to calm things down by giving Dunderdale the primary task of collecting intelligence from the ports in German-occupied France, authorising him to contact de Gaulle’s staff direct for any personnel required ‘so long as there is no possible overlapping’, while adding that A.4 agents ‘need not of necessity join De Gaulle, but if they can be persuaded to do so, the less bother will occur’. The maintenance of two parallel SIS French sections, while administratively inefficient, was a pragmatic solution to the intelligence opportunities which emerged after the fall of France. But it certainly ran risks. As the Beirut station warned in May 1942, ‘any suspicion that [the] British were in contact with Bertrand would sow deepest seed of distrust in heart of even our best friends among Free French’. Dunderdale also provided SIS liaison with Polish intelligence organisations in France, drawing on contacts he had made before the war through Bertrand. This also irritated the Free French, who complained that the Poles were not only allowed to operate much more independently than they were, but were also permitted directly to recruit French agents of their own. Towards the end of 1941 the Polish F2 network in France had 210 French and only forty Poles. But it was very productive. The Marine Section, based in Bordeaux under ‘Doctor’, noted German submarine movements out of Bordeaux, Brest and Le Havre. Doctor also ran a cell called ‘Italie’, which reported German troop movements on Italian trains. It was the collation of information about troop transports and a tank division going south with a report about desert-war training in a Prussian camp that first suggested to London that the Germans might invade North Africa.18
The threat of invasion and conditions in Germany
For about a year from the fall of France SIS was under sustained pressure to provide intelligence on the likelihood of a German invasion of Britain. What the Service was able to glean can be followed in the reports for the Foreign Office and