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By Root 2719 0

plan’, had been ‘absolutely selfless’ and ‘beyond all praise’. The other two had run ‘continued and very real risks of death over a prolonged period, showing constant, unselfish devotion to the national cause’. Kiel owned a Paris café and Goubillon was married to the owner of another one. Over a period of seven months Goubillon had sheltered over twenty Sussex agents, and hid their wireless equipment in the cellar of her café in the Rue Tournefort near the Panthéon.2 But the possible grade of award being considered - officer (OBE) or member (MBE) of the Order of the British Empire - depended on the perceived social status of the proposed recipient. Jeanette Gauthier, who unusually was a commissioned officer in the French army, was thought eligible for the OBE. The other two, however, although they were perfectly respectable women, were (apparently) ‘not what may be termed “Ladies”’, and so were put down for MBEs. This pedantic concern with precise social hierarchies was thought sufficiently ludicrous by Kenneth Cohen in March 1945 that he composed some doggerel verse on the subject:

How do you feel

About Marguerite Kiel?

Can Andrée Goubillon

Dance the cotillion?

At what social summit

Stands Mlle. Jeannette?

Their assets, their accents, their undies laid bare,

Then, only then can we apportion the share:

B.E.M.s may be spared for intelligence chores

But O.B.E.s are reserved for the silkiest drawers.3

Another illustration of what was happening at the time comes in a signal to the Paris station in the summer of 1946. An officer who had worked during the war in south-eastern Europe, now himself retired, had been re-engaged on a one-off basis to tie up some loose ends. ‘For your information only,’ instructed Head Office, ‘he has been authorised to contact one French ex-Balkan head agent with object firstly of liquidating outstanding claims on us and secondly of arranging compensation for widows of three dead French ex-Balkan sub-agents.’ London was sending out a package containing ‘a certain quantity of gold which you should deliver via any cut-out you may select’ to the retired officer at a private Paris address, ‘preferably late at night or before nine a.m.’. Evidently fearing that he might fall into old habits, London added that, other than the planned payment of ex-agent debts, the emissary had ‘been strictly instructed on no account to contact your office and to indulge in no repeat no intelligence activity while in Paris’.

Rather than just paying agents off, in June 1945 London suggested to Reginald Miller in South America that ‘where an agent has given us service and is in possession of certain information it may save considerable difficulty later if he can be fixed up in some job rather than being let loose on the world with potentialities for blackmail’. But this was easier said than done, and Miller reflected bitterly on the attitude of local British-owned companies where he had tried to find a job for an ex-agent. ‘You would be shocked’, he cabled London, ‘if you knew how unwilling all British firms so far approached are to do anything of this nature where their businesses are concerned. That we have fought a bloody and costly war for several years so that they may continue to possess these businesses, cuts very little ice.’ London, however, was ‘not in any way surprised’ at this attitude and, indeed, thought that it would ‘become more so, hence our anxiety to try to get any arrangements made while there are still some memories of the war’.

A more sombre legacy concerned Bla, the agent who had been killed by members of the Alliance network in southern France in October 1942, leaving a wife and children. In late 1945 his widow approached the SIS head of station in Paris (27000), saying that she had ‘heard a rumour that her husband had been executed as a double agent and she wanted either to know the worst, or to put the rumour down’. He discussed the matter with Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who had led the network. She thought ‘that although we may have to tell Mme [Bla] the truth to prevent her getting