Airborne Espionage: International Special Duty Operations in the World Wars by David Oliver

Author:David Oliver [Oliver, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Build-up to Invasion

At the beginning of the new year, No. 161 Squadron had an establishment of five Halifax B Vs, two Wellington B IIs, five Hudsons and ten Lysanders. On 1 January 1944 Sqn Ldr Robin Hooper was appointed to command the Lysander Flight at Tempsford, but owing to exceptionally bad weather no pick-up operations were flown during the month.

The Halifaxes were restricted to only a handful of sorties, on one of which two agents, including 20-year-old WAAF Anne-Marie Walters, were parachuted into Gascony in south-western France on 4 January. Anne-Marie was to be a courier to the Wheelwright circuit leader, George Starr, a former Belgian mining expert. Walters’ father was British, her mother French; she was raised in France, but was at school in England when war was declared. Working alongside the circuit’s ‘pianist’ Yvonne Cormeau in one of the underground’s most efficient units, Anne-Marie would take many risks to carry information between Starr and his Resistance fighters. She was stopped and searched by Vichy police and the Gestapo on several occasions, before being identified by an informer in July 1944 and narrowly escaping capture to make a hazardous escape over the Pyrenees into Spain, and eventually on to England.

On the same night Col Clifford J. Heflin flew the 801st Bomb Group’s first Carpetbagger operation from Tempsford to France in a B-24D co-piloted by Lieutenant Stapel. During the January moon period a total of six missions were flown to France by the 36th Squadron and nine by the 406th. The American Liberators were equipped with ‘Gee’ – a medium-range radar aid employing ground transmitters and an airborne receiver which was prone to jamming over enemy territory – plus Eureka/Rebecca and the ‘Sugar-phone’, as the Americans called the two-way S-phone, for close range communication.

The OSS was spreading its operations throughout occupied Europe, as well as neutral Sweden, Switzerland and Spain. At the beginning of the year Wild Bill Donovan had flown to Moscow to attempt a meaningful relationship with Stalin’s intelligence apparatus. He was not entirely successful, but did manage to establish an OSS mission in the Russian capital.

In January OSS agent Aline Griffith flew from Long Island Sound, the only woman among thirty-two passengers on a Pan American Boeing clipper to Lisbon, and later on to Madrid’s Barajas airport on a small aircraft which parked alongside a Deutsche Lufthansa (DLH) Ju 52. Griffith, a young business graduate, had trained at an OSS camp known as ‘The Farm’ on an estate 20 miles outside Washington. For the next year she worked at the ‘American Oil Mission’ in Madrid – a front for the OSS mission – with a triple agent recruiting female communist agents to work as secretaries or cleaners in the German and Japanese embassies located in the Spanish capital. The mission also circulated misinformation about the expected Allied invasions of the north and south of France, counter-intelligence on German covert operations in Spain, and it monitored the Axis escape line through the country to safe havens in South America.

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