Henri Déricourt

SOE had difficulties with the Royal Air Force which reluctantly supplied the planes and pilots for SOE's clandestine operations. The RAF complained about the large number of failed missions. Déricourt with his experience as a pilot and his knowledge of France seemed like a godsend. On the night of 22/23 January 1943, Déricourt was parachuted "blind" (without anybody meeting him) into France near Orléans. He made his way to Paris, reunited with his wife, and, perhaps by coincidence, moved into a house next door to the house where Abwehr spy catcher Hugo Bleicher lived. The SD headquarters of old friend Karl Boemelburg was at 82 Avenue Foch, a short walk away. The two met shortly after Déricourt arrived in Paris. Déricourt lived openly under his own name, saying he was too well known to use an alias.[10][12]

Déricourt soon assembled his Farrier team, consisting of Aisner as his courier and another old friend, pilot Rémy Clément, as an assistant. He relied on the Prosper network led by Francis Suttill for a radio operator, Jack Agazarian. Andrée Borrel helped Aisner with the courier duties. Through courier Lise de Baissac, Déricourt also established links with the large SOE Scientist network on the Atlantic Ocean coast of France, which also needed his services to move agents.[13] These extensive links among networks, although understandable as Déricourt serviced several networks, violated SOE's doctrine that for security reasons networks should be independent of each other with as little contact as possible between and among networks and even among members of the same network.[14]

Déricourt's first air operation was the night of 17/18 March 1943 when he met two Westland Lysander airplanes landing near Poitiers which delivered four SOE agents and boarded four others to return to England. The operation was successful and his success continued. Over the next eleven months, he supervised 17 air operations in which 22 aircraft landed at more than six different clandestine airfields and delivered 43 SOE agents to France and took 67 back to England.[15] The air operations were also a means of communications between the London headquarters of SOE and its agents in France. Déricourt was the "postman" who collected letter and reports from agents and gave them to the pilots of the airplanes to take back to England. Unlike wireless messages which were always transmitted in code, most of these letters and reports were in clear language although code names were supposed to be used for people and places.[16]

The first known criticism by SOE agents in France of Déricourt was in June 1943 when Jack Agazarian complained to London that Déricourt's security was faulty. Several more agents complained in July about "Gilbert" although in the terse language of wireless transmissions it was unclear whether they meant Déricourt, code named Gilbert, or Gilbert Norman, deputy to Francis Suttill, the leader of the Prosper network. In summer 1943, the Prosper network was destroyed by the Germans. Suttill, Norman and many other members and associates of the Prosper network were captured. Francis Suttill's son lists approximately 180 SOE agents and French associates arrested of whom about 80 were executed or died in concentration camps, including Suttill and Norman. Given the clandestine involvement of many people, that list is incomplete.[17][18]

SOE was not immediately aware of the fate of Prosper because the Germans used a captured SOE wireless to feed false information to SOE in London. Déricourt remained at large, and continued to organize aircraft landings into France.[19] In October 1943 veteran resistor Henri Frager took a Déricourt-organized flight to London with the objective of telling SOE that Déricourt was a German agent. Senior SOE staff members and French Section leader Maurice Buckmaster refused to believe the reports and Déricourt continued his work in France until February 1944 when he was recalled to London. An investigation was inconclusive, but he was not allowed to return to France. Buckmaster later said that Déricourt "never once let any of our boys down and that he has by far the finest record of operations completed of any member of SOE."[17]

Déricourt's complicity in the arrests of SOE agents was revealed after the war, when war crimes investigators received definite information from German sources that Déricourt had been one of their agents and that the information he provided had led to the arrest and execution of many SOE agents and hundreds of their French associates. In fall 1946, SOE spymaster Vera Atkins interviewed Dr. Josef Goetz, formerly an SD officer in Paris and now a captive of the allies in England. Goetz said that agent "Gilbert" worked for Boemelburg. Gilbert's task was to photograph all the agent's mail and SOE documents given to him to be sent back to England by aircraft. He gave copies to Boemelburg who passed them down to Goetz. Thus, the SD acquired personal and operational information about SOE agents which aided in their capture and interrogation and enabled the SD to conduct a disinformation campaign with captured radios. Goetz had met "Gilbert" on several occasions and identified Déricourt as "Gilbert" from a photograph Atkins showed him.[20]

In January 1947, Atkins located Sturmbannfuhrer Hans Josef Kieffer, who had been a senior German intelligence officer in Paris and commandant of the SD unit at 84 Avenue Foch. She interviewed him in a prison in Germany. She asked him whether there was a traitor among the SOE agents. Kieffer replied, "You know yourself there was one...Gilbert...He was Boemelburg's agent...in fact he was more than an agent. He was a friend going back a very long time...He had the symbol BOE-48, Boemelburg's 48th agent." She asked for the identity of "Gilbert" and BOE-48. Kieffer answered: "Of course, you know. It was Henri Déricourt."[21]

On 22 November 1946, Déricourt was arrested by French police in Paris and on 26 November he was charged with having had "Intelligence With the Enemy" and further investigations were authorized to "establish the consequence of Déricourt's treason." However, by the time of Déricourt's June 1948 trial in Paris, Josef Kieffer, Atkin's principal source of Déricourt's identification as a German agent, had been executed for war crimes. Her other source, Dr. Goetz, had changed his story to say that he did not know whether Agent BOE-48 was in fact Déricourt. "Most extraordinary of all" in the words of author Sarah Helm, nobody representing SOE was at the trial to give evidence against Déricourt. To the contrary, Nicolas Bodington, formerly the deputy in the French section of SOE and Déricourt's old friend, testified that he had known and approved of Déricourt's contacts with the Germans and said, "I had total trust in Déricourt and recommended he maintain his contacts with the Germans." Déricourt was quickly acquitted after Bodington's testimony. Vera Atkins and other SOE agents were infuriated and accused Bodington as being a "perjurer."[22][23]

The British foreign policy establishment was never enthusiastic about the existence of SOE, regarding it as a terrorist organization. Historian John Keegan later said that "SOE besmirched Britain."[24] After World War II, MI6 "could not snuff out its awkward wartime rival fast enough and the Foreign office was delighted to see an end to the organisation that had interfered so much with quiet diplomacy." Despite those efforts, SOE attracted the attention of many authors and film makers.[25]

Author Jean Overton Fuller tracked down Déricourt in the early 1950s and he told her that he had handed over copies of SOE agent's mail to the Germans, but was acting on the instructions of another British agency. The speculation developed that MI6 had planted Déricourt in SOE to keep tabs on its competitor. Later, the speculation expanded to the belief that MI6 employed Déricourt to deceive the Germans about Allied plans to invade France.[26] One version of the speculation as expressed by some authors is that the British government told unwitting SOE agents to prepare for an allied invasion of France in September 1943 (the invasion did not occur until June 1944) with the knowledge that some SOE agents would be captured by the Germans. Under questioning some of the captured agents told the Germans that they believed an invasion was forthcoming in 1943. The objective of the deception was to persuade the Germans to keep soldiers in France to defend against an invasion, rather than transferring them to the eastern front to fight against the Soviet Union which Britain feared was near collapse. Déricourt's role was to copy and give to the Germans the correspondence of SOE agents which hinted that an invasion was upcoming. He also gave them personal information about agents.[27][28]

The theory that SOE was deliberately betrayed by MI6 has been widely criticized. The official SOE historian, M.R.D. Foot said, "if you can believe that, you can believe anything." The son of SOE agent Francis Suttill, who was captured and executed, also debunked the theory that SOE agents were sacrificed in a disinformation campaign of MI6.[29][30] However, authors Robert Marshall and Patrick Marnham (writing in 2020) are among those who have asserted the opposite: SOE agents of the Prosper network in France were sacrificed as part of the deception plans of British intelligence.[31][32]