Game of Spies: The Secret Agent, the Traitor and the Nazi, Bordeaux 1942-1944

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There was almost nothing in the hitherto quiet and fastidious life of young Roger Landes that could have prepared him for the next four weeks. Wanborough Manor was a French-speaking microcosm. Its students were cut off from the world, save for carefully vetted letters and occasional accompanied trips over the Hog’s Back to the local pub The Good Intent (Landes drank alcohol only very abstemiously), or to the nearby gravel pit for hand-grenade practice. Landes was woken at dawn every morning from a hard army bed and went straight into PT, followed by a run around the manor house grounds. Then lessons all day, most of them requiring hard physical exertion, which cannot have been made any easier for Landes by his habit (which continued unabated all his life) of smoking sixty cigarettes a day. Soon every muscle of his slight, city-softened body ached. He ate voraciously and without discrimination. And at the end of the day sleep came to him as swift as the click of a camera shutter.

Landes had never held, let alone fired, a gun in his life. But by the end of his four weeks’ intensive training he knew how to strip down and reassemble, even in the dark, every German, Italian, French, American and British small arm in common use. He knew how to fire them too – and found he was a surprisingly good shot. He also learnt how to move unseen across open country; how to prime and throw a hand grenade; how to find his way, even at night with a map and compass; how to kill a man without a weapon; how to disarm an enemy and how to dissemble convincingly in the face of inquisitive questions.

At the end of the Wanborough Manor stage of the course, two of the original ten ‘disappeared’. By this time Landes’s colleagues had begun to resolve themselves into personalities. Of the eight remaining, three would feature prominently both in SOE’s history and in Roger Landes’s life as a secret agent. ‘Clement Bastable’ (real name, Claude de Baissac) was ten years older than Landes. An imposing man with the air of someone who expected to be obeyed, he too was of dark complexion and had a neatly trimmed moustache in the style of many Hollywood actors of the time – Clark Gable, say, or Errol Flynn. He had indeed been a film publicist in France before the war. ‘Hilaire Poole’ (Harry Peulevé) was the same age as Landes, but he was taller and more powerfully built, with a finely chiselled, handsome face and deep, rather disconcerting eyes. ‘Fernand Sutton’ (Francis Suttill) was thirty-two, but looked much younger. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, clean cut, with the fresh-faced look of an English public school boy, he was, in the words of a fellow secret agent, ‘magnificent, strong, young, courageous and decisive, a kind of Ivanhoe; but he should have been a cavalry officer, not a spy …’.

Among these fellow students, Landes was the exception – perhaps sufficiently even to feel, and appear, a little out of place. Most of his colleagues were, like SOE itself, ex-public school and from the upper echelons of British society. Claude de Baissac was of course French – or to be precise Mauritian French. But he too had been to one of the best schools, the Lycée Henri IV in Paris. His family were not by birth from the upper reaches of French society, but they aspired to be so, adding the aristocratic ‘de’ in front of their name when de Baissac’s mother accompanied her son to Paris to begin his education, in the late 1920s. Landes’s Wanborough Manor colleagues were also, in one way or another, strong characters, bursting with charisma and natural leadership. Landes, the little clerk from the Architectural Department of London County Council, son of an immigrant Jewish jeweller from Paris, who had managed to educate himself at night school, was none of these things. His SOE reports refer to him, somewhat dismissively, as a ‘cheery little Frenchman’; he was less impressive, less significant and much, much less noticeable than his fellow recruits. Qualities which, whether SOE valued them or not, were precisely those he would require to be a successful secret agent.

In early 1942, the eight students caught the train north for Scotland and four weeks’ intensive training at Meoble Lodge, beside Loch Morar in Inverness-shire. Here, where moor and mountain sweep down to the back door, they marched long distances carrying heavy loads, spent nights in the open under rough shelters made of bracken and fir branches, learnt how to set a snare for rabbits and how to skin, gut and cook them afterwards. Two ex-Shanghai policemen taught them how to kill a man noiselessly with the SOE’s specially designed fighting knife, and an ex-chartered accountant showed them how to pick a lock and blow a safe. They also learnt the strange artefacts and sacred rituals of explosives: how to place the primer, just so; how to crimp (but gently) one end of the fuse in the detonator so it wouldn’t pull out, and how to scarf the other end at an angle, waiting for the match. How to light it, even in a gale, by holding the match end against the scarfed face of the fuse and striking it with the box, rather than the other way round. Why, with the fuse lit, you should always walk away, never run.

Parachute training at Ringway near Manchester followed, after which, in early May, Landes and his colleagues attended SOE’s ‘finishing school’ at Beaulieu, Hampshire. Here they learnt, among other things, codes and cyphers; disguise; how to follow someone and know if you were being followed; how to hide in a city; and how to place an explosive charge in just the right manner to cut a rail, slice through a bridge girder or blow the giant flywheel off a power station turbine, causing a hurricane of damage to everything it careered into.

After Beaulieu, most of Landes’s colleagues were given leave, while waiting for an aircraft and a full moon to parachute into France. In Claude de Baissac’s final report he was assessed as ‘an excellent operator’ destined for leadership. Not seeing the same qualities of ‘leadership’ in Landes, SOE marked him out for a radio operator and sent him to their wireless school at Thame, near Aylesbury. Here he met another fellow student, destined to join him in France. Gilbert Norman, also an ex-public school boy, was an imposing figure whose regular features, permanent suntan and moustache gave him the air of an actor who specialised in playing cads – or perhaps army captains – in a seaside repertory company. In fact, he was a chartered accountant from Llandudno. In July 1942 the two men passed out as fully qualified SOE wireless operators.

Roger Landes had done well. ‘He has the eye of a marksman … works well with others … liked for his keenness … very fit and tries hard … did exceptionally well on his own,’ his trainers wrote on his various reports: ‘a pleasant little man who takes great interest and trouble in what he does …’. Of all Landes’s attributes it would be his ability to work alone and his unobtrusiveness which would make him a truly great secret agent.

But Roger Landes was now much more than the sum of his good reports.

He had been transformed – and he had transformed himself – from a young Jewish refugee from Paris, working as an architect’s clerk in the LCC, into a fully capable secret agent and radio operator, ready to take the fight to the enemy in occupied France. To be sure, he still looked as he had always done: small, pleasant, unremarkable. But inside, he was now something completely different. Something hard, uncompromising, focused – even a little cold; always alert, always suspicious, always watchful. Above all, he was confident of his own strength and his ability to survive and to endure.