Painful Memories

Britain's intelligence agencies have long been regarded as the world's best. Despite slip-ups in World War II--as when a German agent served as valet to the British Ambassador to Turkey, and the distressing affair in The Netherlands when, for 20 months, the Nazis fed faked radio messages to London and captured 54 British agents--the British scored coups that helped make good the boast that Allied intelligence had won "the underground war" as well as the fighting war.

But in London last week, two new books had Parliament, press and public wondering just how good British intelligence really was. Both dealt with the French Section of Special Operations Executive, which was responsible for dropping agents and weapons to the French resistance. In Death Be Not Proud* Author Elizabeth Nicholas considers the fate of seven brave young women agents of the S.O.E. Four of them--Diana Rowden, Vera Leigh, Sonya Olschanesky, Andree Borrel--were thrust into the Nazi crematorium at Natzweiler and burned alive. The other three also died in a concentration camp, if not quite as horribly.

The Radio Game. All, claims Author Nicholas, were victims of the "radio game": Abwehr, the German counterintelligence, when it had captured an agent and his set, often kept right on sending messages to London, using captured codes, and arranging for air drops of agents and supplies. London's S.O.E. security seemed incredibly lax. Agents had been taught to misspell words in predetermined sections of each message. Once, when the Abwehr sent a fake message through without the misspellings, London merely chided: "You forgot your double security check. Be more careful."

In Double Webs, Author Jean Overton Fuller charges that S.O.E. was totally fooled by a French-born double agent code-named "Gilbert," who was better known to the Germans as agent "BOE 48" (the 48th agent of Karl Boemelburg, a Gestapo chief in Paris). It is Author Fuller's contention that Gilbert, as Air Movements Officer of S.O.E., passed pertinent documents to the Gestapo headquarters before sending them by courier to London. In return, Gilbert obtained a German promise never to shoot down or capture any aircraft landing at fields he controlled. Gilbert was later brought to London "under suspicion" but was cleared by a French court in 1948.

The Mysterious Gilbert. In London, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, 56, former chief of the French Section (and now head publicity man for British Ford) insisted that "the allegations are thoroughly untrue," even though nearly one-third of his agents were captured by the Nazis, and most of them killed. Tracked down in France by Author Fuller, the mysterious Gilbert denied he had ever been a German agent, although admitting he had contacts with the Nazis. Gilbert hinted that, actually, he had also been working for another British cloak-and-dagger outfit and that the "radio game" was continued even when London knew the Germans were running it, because it was important to "keep the Germans occupied, to distract their attention."

The thought that the seven girl agents, and a hundred others, might simply have been decoys handed over to certain death in order to mask other intelligence activities was an unpalatable one for many Britons. Gilbert had advised Author Fuller not to "put your nose into this stinking business" because "spying is not a business for angels." Most Britons preferred to remember the words spoken in St. Paul's Church in Knightsbridge in 1948 when a memorial to the memory of war heroines was unveiled: ". . . For God proved them, and found them worthy for himself. As gold in the furnace, hath he tried them."

*A phrase of John Donne's, also used as a title by John (Inside Russia Today) Gunther for the 1949 account of the illness and death of his 17-year-old son from cancer.

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