The Greatest Traitor Read online

  The dividing line between the occupied and ‘free’ (Vichy) zones of France ran along the periphery of Salies-de-Béarn. When George arrived at the town after his train journey from Bordeaux, he headed for his contact at a small boarding house, where, after quoting the correct password, he was allowed in and told to prepare for the crossing that night.

  It proved to be a nerve-wracking affair in the company of three Jewish women and their dog, which was there to alert them, by barking, to any German patrols. After navigating the back streets of the town, then crawling through ditches and scrambling over hedges in the fields, their two Basque guides saw them to their destination. ‘We had arrived safely in unoccupied France,’ Blake said. ‘Reaching the crest of the hill, we suddenly saw lights twinkling everywhere like a promise of peace and security, while behind us the land lay dark. It was as if an immense burden of fear and gloom was lifted from me. I was out of the hands of the enemy.’

  When dawn rose, he made his way towards the medieval town of Argagnon. There, in the market square, he boarded a bus for Lourdes and his identity card was put to the test for the first time. The gendarme returned it to him without comment and he was on his way. From Lourdes, he boarded a train for Lyon and he was in the city by nightfall.

  In September 1942, this city in the so-called Zone Libre (Free Zone) was becoming an increasingly dangerous place in which to seek sanctuary. The Germans were frustrated by resistance activities, and were preparing to send in 280 police under SS Major Karl Bömelburg to hunt down the possessors of illegal radio transmitters. Lyon had always been an intellectual hotbed and was now the effective ‘capital of the resistance’. Leaflets and clandestine newspapers like Vérités had begun to appear from the summer of 1940 onwards, and crucial figures like Captain Henri Frenay, who helped form the Mouvement de Libération Nationale and Combat, and Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s personal emissary, were based in the city or its suburbs. The network of dark, dingy traboules (passageways) that snaked their way through apartment blocks, under streets and into the courtyards of the Vieux Lyon district provided the perfect terrain for those escaping or attempting to hide from the Gestapo.

  Young Behar’s new contacts were a French colonel and his wife, both active members of the resistance, who lived in one of the city’s better hotels. They were impressed by his credentials, especially by the recommendation from ‘The Belgian’, and soon found him somewhere to stay while the next leg of his journey was planned. His new refuge proved to be a bedroom on the top floor of an old, medieval house where two sisters ran a modest restaurant, which was open for lunch and dinner for regular customers like the colonel, but also doubled as a meeting place for resistance groups.

  During his three-week stay, George was relieved to be put to work and allowed to contribute to the work of the French underground. He helped ferry a weekly Gaullist paper to distribution stores in wine cellars or factories, with two or three others wheeling a handcart through the streets with hundreds of copies hidden underneath its canvas cover. All the while, however, he was anxious to move on.

  British interests in the city were represented at the American consulate. Here George was fortunate enough to encounter a young English diplomat (actually an SIS officer), who proved more than willing to help. He listened to George’s story and then examined his British passport before suggesting that the best way forward would be to issue him instead with a travel document that would put his age at 16 rather than 19. In that way, he would not be of military age, and the Vichy authorities would grant him an exit visa. At the same time, the officer said, he would apply for Spanish and Portuguese transit visas. Once all these permits were gathered, George would be able to make his way to England legally.

  After three weeks, word came back from the American consulate that permission had been received from London for George’s onward journey to be arranged. He was issued with a travel document, given some money and was now able to report to the Vichy authorities and apply for an exit visa.

  While he awaited all the necessary documentation, he was obliged by the Vichy authorities to live in a place chosen by them, which he could not leave without permission. It was called a résidence forcée (compulsory residence), and amounted to a form of internment. George was unperturbed. He was used to confinement of one sort or another and did not find life at his particular résidence, a small inn in a village outside Grenoble, unduly constricting. Throughout October he waited patiently, preparing himself for an arduous climb over the Pyrenees and then a lengthy journey across Spain before he finally boarded a ship at Gibraltar that would ferry him across the Atlantic Ocean.

  His dreams turned to dust on 8 November 1942 with Operation Torch and the landing of British and American forces on the coast of French North Africa. The failure of the French forces to repel the Allies gave the Führer the excuse to revoke any assurances he may have given guaranteeing self-government in the southern half of France. On 10 and 11 November, German troops marched into Vichy, and soon afterwards strict surveillance was ordered over the activities of British and American citizens.

  George knew that he could be trapped indefinitely inside France unless he acted swiftly. He gathered together his few possessions and slipped away from the inn, back to Lyon to seek the advice of the colonel. His newfound patron urged him to head for Toulouse, where a journalist in the resistance movement would give him money and instructions on how to contact the passeurs, the civilian guides familiar with the best crossing points over the Pyrenees.

  That rendezvous successfully accomplished, George then took a train to the city of Pau, birthplace of Henry IV of France and the ‘gateway to Spain’. There, he teamed up with another escapee, a middle-aged, portly Portuguese Jew, and the two of them embarked on a series of bus journeys in the company of a guide (another resistance member), edging further and further up the mountains.

  Eventually, on the third day, as darkness fell, the party reached the small village of Seix, whose skyline was dominated by a stunning medieval castle, complete with twin turrets and a watchtower with a panoramic view out across the mountains. There, they made contact with their passeurs, two young local men set to accompany them on their hazardous journey.

  Perilous it most certainly proved to be. On their journey so far, their primary concern had been avoiding the dreaded Milice, the French paramilitary force that gave over-zealous support to the invaders, but now came a gruelling physical test – mile after mile of forest trail, wading across rivers, inching along perilous ledges and clambering up sheer faces of rock. All this was tough enough for a fit, young man like George, but desperately difficult for his companion, who was middle-aged and overweight. They rested at a mountain hut overnight, and enjoyed a nourishing meal of roasted meat and fresh bread, washed down with a bottle of wine. Replenished and revitalised, the group made it to the top of the snowy peaks later that day, and then early the next began the descent towards Spain.

  Abruptly, it seemed, once they had reached a meadow that sloped down to a mule track, the guides announced they were leaving. George and his friend were told they were now actually in Spain, and that if they kept to the track they would reach a farmhouse where they could stay the night.

  After some mishaps – George’s nervous companion deserted him at one point, insisting they had strayed from the correct path and misguidedly striking out in search of another – they advanced on what they fervently hoped was the last leg of their journey. But their freedom was not yet assured. ‘On the bank of the stream stood a large farmhouse from which the sound of voices reached us. The figures of soldiers and mules moved among the trees,’ George recalled. ‘We hastily withdrew behind a rock, but it was too late. We had been spotted. A warning shot rang out and the soldiers, who, to judge from their uniforms, were neither French nor German, motioned us to come down. When we got to the stream they surrounded us. We were in Spain, but no longer free.’

  In the early days of the war Spain was inclined to send escaping resistance fighters,
their associates and Allied servicemen straight back to the Nazis, returning a favour paid by Hitler when he had contributed Stuka bombers to the Nationalist war effort in the Civil War. By October 1940, however, the relationship between Hitler and General Franco had started to cool, with the Führer famously remarking after his meeting with the Generalissimo in Hendaye, France: ‘I would rather have three or four of my own teeth pulled out than speak to that man again.’ Subsequent diplomacy failed to shift Franco into more active support for the Axis powers so, in November 1942, when George was arrested at the frontier, Spain’s ‘non-belligerent’ status was still intact, though that certainly didn’t mean they could expect to be treated kindly.

  Once he had proved his Portuguese identity, George’s companion was allowed to go on his way. But Behar was taken by bus, along with another group of refugees, to Irun, a well-recognised crossing point on the French-Spanish border. This was one of the lowest moments in his journey. Through the windows of the vehicle, just fifty yards away, he could see German soldiers guarding the frontier – and the rumour circulating was that his group were going to be handed back to them. It was with an initial sense of relief, then, that after a night at a small hotel in Irun, George’s party were driven on to Pamplona, capital city of Navarre. But what greeted them there was just a taste of what was to follow in the coming weeks.

  They were led to the city’s prison, crowded seven in a cell, and served some unpalatable brown, liquid gruel. The next morning their heads were shaved, and their afternoon meal was the same brown liquid, this time leavened with a few potato peelings. This grim regime continued for three weeks, until one morning they were taken out of their cells, handcuffed together, and marched through the streets of Pamplona. They were then put on a train bound for the notorious prison of Miranda del Ebro, forty miles south of Bilbao.

  Franco had created ‘Miranda’ in 1937 in order to house thousands of Republican prisoners during Spain’s civil war: now it was the place where most foreign refugees eventually ended up. It had all the trappings of a Nazi concentration camp. Built next to a railway for easy delivery of detainees, it was filled with rows of parallel blocks of basic huts, surrounded by barbed wire, floodlights and sentry boxes. Originally meant to house around 1,500 prisoners, by the time George arrived, the camp’s population had swelled to well over 3,000. In the huts, inmates slept on two tiers of bunks with just a tattered blanket to keep warm. The first few days were entirely discouraging. The diet was invariably poor, there was a lack of water and decent sanitation – the latrines emptied into a stream that was also the wash place – and disease was prevalent.

  Then George’s luck turned: he found out that each nationality had a representative in the camp, and when he sought out the British envoy, to his great relief he discovered it was the young man from the British consulate in Lyon who had issued him with his travel document a month earlier. He was now eligible for a generous food ration, supplied by the British Embassy in Madrid – including tea, coffee, milk, sugar, tins of sardines, packets of biscuits and cigarettes. His fear of death by starvation disappeared.

  But while the Britons in the camp were now in reasonable shape because of these food parcels, others fared less well. The Poles, who had been there the longest and who had formed a tightly-knit community of their own, decided they had had enough of the squalid conditions and lack of food. They determined to go on a hunger strike, which they hoped would alert the international community to their plight and they called on all the other nationalities to join them. The strike started on Wednesday, 6 January. The Polish contingent picketed the food queues and made sure no one accepted any food. The protest lasted a week and only ended when a diplomatic negotiating team from four nations persuaded the strikers that they had won assurance from the Spanish authorities that conditions would definitely improve.

  ‘I cannot say that I felt the worse for this experience,’ was George’s recollection. ‘In the beginning I suffered from headaches, but after a few days my body seemed to get used to doing without food. The feeling of hunger disappeared and gave way to a strange feeling of elation, lightness and energy.’

  Meanwhile, his bona fides were being checked out by MI9 and its sister organisations. Their operations were coordinated from the British Embassy in Madrid, led by attaché Michael Creswell (codenamed ‘Monday’) who performed heroics to secure the freedom of stranded Britons, negotiating with the Spanish authorities while ferrying British evaders and escapers around the country.

  These diplomatic efforts worked and a week after the strike, George and a group of about fifteen other inmates were released. He and a young Dutchman were met at the camp by an official from the British Embassy and taken to Madrid. There, they were put up in a hotel for a couple of nights before boarding a train for Gibraltar, accompanied by two embassy officials.

  The following afternoon the party arrived at La Linea, the coastal town that formed the boundary between Spain and the British territory of Gibraltar. George was escorted to the Spanish customs post, where, after his papers were formally checked, he walked through.

  At last, after a journey lasting 185 days and covering well over a thousand miles, he had reached his destination. He was now on British soil.

  With barely any time to savour the moment, he was taken to a waiting bus that transferred him and a large group of others to the quayside. A naval launch saw them on to the RMS Empress of Australia, a stately ocean liner then functioning as a troopship. She was due to leave in convoy with a host of other ships, great and small, in a few hours’ time.

  When asked years later about the dangers of his epic journey, of the apprehension and fear he must have felt, George replied: ‘Scared? You had the pressure of the Germans all around you, but I’d been used to that for more than two years. You get used to being scared – it’s a part of your life and you stop thinking about it. And when you’re young, you are far less scared than you are later in your life.’

  While the Empress of Australia was ploughing its way towards Britain, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill sat down in the comfort of the Anfa Hotel in Casablanca to consider ways of combating the ruthlessly effective U-boat attacks on Allied shipping. In January 1943 German submarines, backed up by the Luftwaffe’s Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor bomber aircraft, could still lay claim to hold the upper hand in the Battle of the North Atlantic. The President and Prime Minister discussed when and where to introduce better technical equipment and increase aircraft cover, in order to begin to turn the tables. In the meantime, George and his companions would endure that mid-winter voyage in a state of perpetual tension, with more than a few nerve-wracking moments before they eventually sailed up the River Clyde and moored safely in the Scottish port of Greenock.

  This was George’s second sight of his father’s adopted country. His first had come in the summer of 1937 as he returned home from Cairo to Rotterdam for the school holidays. Then, on a brief stop at the East India Dock, London, he had taken his first walk on British soil, wandering the length of Commercial Road, noting that the people looked ‘just that little bit grimier and shabbier than in my home town’.

  If this time he had been hoping for a welcoming reception party to greet his arrival, then he was to be disappointed. No sooner had the Empress of Australia docked than he and his travelling companions – the official description for them was ‘aliens’ – were lined up and questioned, their travel documents closely scrutinised. Then, with an escort of soldiers, they were put on trains and whisked down south to London.

  Once there, they were taken on buses to a ‘monstrous building – built in the style of a Burgundian château and set in the midst of a bald and sooty park’. They had arrived at the grandly named Royal Victoria Patriotic School in Trinity Road, Wandsworth, the forbidding first port-of-call for all male foreigners coming from occupied Europe. Behind a neo-Gothic façade that hid detention and interrogation rooms, and even some cells in the basement, the RVPS hosted officers from MI5’s B Division, who
were busy working to separate what they called the ‘sheep’ (genuine refugees) from the ‘goats’ (suspected enemy agents). Although there were few of the latter, all those who passed through the gates of the RVPS could expect rigorous questioning from intelligence officials before their credentials were accepted and their freedom finally granted.

  As the war went on, these cross-examinations proved immensely valuable. Knowledge about Gestapo interrogation techniques, safe houses, couriers and enemy penetrations of escape organisations was carefully indexed and cross-referenced in a central Information Index of intelligence, then made available to Whitehall departments.

  But those interviews also served another purpose – one that was ultimately to benefit 20-year-old George. The intelligence agencies represented at RVPS were on the lookout for prospective recruits, and this regular influx of resourceful individuals from the continent provided them with a rich pool of talent.

  The RVPS first opened its doors on 8 January 1941 and it quickly acquired a reputation as an inhospitable detention centre. Such was its oppressive atmosphere that on 21 February, Major W.H. Churchill-Longman, Commandant of the School, wrote a letter to Colonel Tommy ‘Tar’ Robertson of MI5, saying that the longer-term inmates would ‘become lazy or crazy, or both’ unless they were granted some diversionary activities. In response, officials at the RVPS endeavoured to create a more relaxed, informal environment. Outside of the interviews – usually conducted one-to-one – entertainment included dance bands, a croquet lawn and a football pitch. Eventually, MI5 allowed a wireless set into the camp. For some detainees, however, the whole experience still remained demeaning and depressing. To be treated with suspicion and, occasionally, a certain animosity after all they had endured to get to a country they admired and for which they hoped to fight, was a bitter blow.