The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [312]
All through the war Biffy Dunderdale, P.5 at Head Office, continued to work with separate French networks. In June 1943 he reported that, apart from Polish intelligence, he still got information from his old Deuxième Bureau contacts (with a special line to Bertrand), and also from the Jade organisation. The Polish service had some thirty networks in occupied and neutral Europe, and three hundred agents were employed primarily on SIS work. Dunderdale’s section organised their travelling and transport facilities, while a centre at Stanmore, just north of London, produced agent equipment including radio sets. Some of the Polish networks were very productive. One based in the south of France run by ‘Lubicz’ (Zdzisław Piątkiewicz) had 159 agents, helpers and couriers, who in August and September 1943 provided 481 reports, of which P.5 circulated 346. Dunderdale’s other organisations were rather smaller. He recorded the Deuxième Bureau as having nine stations and Jade four in mid-1943.13
In the autumn of 1942 Claude Lamirault had begun to rebuild the Jade organisation. One group on the Swiss frontier was organised to smuggle urgently needed precision instruments out of Switzerland and across France in fruit boxes, though this was not a great success. There were also sub-groups in Marseilles, Bordeaux, Lyons and Paris (it was in the capital that Lamirault established his headquarters). Each group had independent communications with London, and relied on the centre only for funds and instructions. The Jade Bordeaux group, which actually came to be centred on Paris, was led by Philip Keun (‘Admiral’ or ‘Deux’), a Dutchman raised in England and France who had worked for the French Marine Deuxième Bureau and whom Bill Cordeaux described as ‘an international adventurer with more than his fair share of charm and cunning’. Along with Roman Czerniawski, who had been part of the Polish F2 network, Keun set up his headquarters in a convent which, happily, the Gestapo regarded as above suspicion. Czerniawski had been arrested in 1941 and recruited as an agent by the Germans, but got back to London in October the following year where he pledged to continue to work for Polish and British intelligence and was thereafter run as double agent ‘Brutus’ by the XX Committee.14
One of Lamirault’s most impressive achievements, which helped enormously in his work, was the acquisition of an official identity card and badge used by the Vichy police. Both card and badge were sent to London by courier, faithfully copied by SIS’s false document section and returned to France. The false badges allowed Lamirault and a few chosen members of the Jade group to pass through police cordons, but in the end it was the fake identity card that caused his downfall. He was arrested in Paris on 15 December 1943, trying to force his way into a hotel as a police inspector, but suspicions were raised, and in resisting arrest he shot a real policeman. The following day he was handed over to the Gestapo, who transferred him to Fresnes prison. Attempts were made to rescue him but they failed. He was deported to Dachau, but survived the war only to be killed in a road accident back in France in May 1945. Philip Keun was also arrested, in June 1944, and murdered at Buchenwald the following September.
Intelligence product
In November 1942, Menzies asked that Dunderdale should provide him with a fortnightly progress report, drawing his attention only ‘to items of outstanding interest’. ‘Where there is no such item’, he instructed that he ‘would prefer the paragraph to be as short as possible’. Although it is difficult to ascertain exactly who was providing what for Dunderdale