The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [52]
Getting information out of occupied territory was relatively easy in the early days before the lines of trenches settled down along the Western Front. The Belgian-Dutch frontier remained relatively porous, too, until 1916 when the Germans tightened up security and erected a high-voltage electrified fence along the border. Experienced smugglers were engaged and various devices developed to cross this fence, including rubber gloves and boots as well as an insulated climbing frame. Landau noted two other methods: employing the boatmen who were permitted to ply barges between Rotterdam and Antwerp (though under close German surveillance); and using farm labourers working fields adjacent to the border, who could simply ‘toss messages across the wire when the sentry was not looking’ (though this was considerably more dangerous than it might seem). Over the last two years of the war, Landau aimed to have at least six separate ‘tuyaux’ (pipes) available for communications between occupied Belgium and the Netherlands. ‘When one broke down, we had the other five in reserve, and others were continuously being established.’ One of La Dame Blanche’s greatest successes was the establishment in the autumn of 1917 of an effective train-watching operation in Hirson, monitoring a strategically important railway running parallel to the German lines. With the help of a Hirson-born trainee French priest, Landau was able to contact a former railwayman who lived at Fourmies alongside the line and who agreed to help. It was a real family endeavour. ‘Every one in this humble household’, wrote Landau, ‘did their share of watching. ’ During the day it was the man’s fourteen- and thirteen-year-old sisters; at night he and his wife took over. ‘The composition of the trains was jotted down in terms of comestibles: beans for soldiers, chicory for horses, coffee for cannons, and so on.’ Reports were ‘hidden in the hollow handle of a kitchen broom, which was left innocently in its place in the corner’. From 23 September 1917, when this post began operating, Landau reckoned that ‘not a single troop train was missed’. Getting the reports across the frontier involved the usual sleight-of-hand including a Belgian midwife whose job allowed her to travel around the countryside and whose ‘special vocation’ was ‘the delivery of deadly spy reports, cunningly wrapped around the whale-bones of her corset’.15
La Dame Blanche was the most successful single British human intelligence operation of the First World War. Learning from the painful experience of 1914-16, guided by Landau and Dewé’s sharp sense of security, and sustained, above all, by the patriotic devotion of the brave Belgian and French men and women who collected the precious information and brought the reports to Cumming’s Rotterdam headquarters, by the last year of the war it was producing military intelligence in copious quantities. ‘Il n’y a aucun doute qu’en ce moment critique’, wrote Landau to the leaders of the organisation in January 1918, ‘votre organisation représente de loin la source la plus fertile que les Alliés possèdent et que vous obtenez des résultats dont l’importance ne peut être estimé.’16 Much of this intelligence was shared through the Bureau Central Interallié (Allied Central Office), created in the autumn of 1915, which comprised military missions from the French, British, Belgian, Russian, Portuguese and subsequently the United States governments. By July 1916 Cumming noted in his diary that he had twelve staff seconded to the headquarters of the Bureau on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris.17
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