The Jedburghs by Will Irwin

Author:Will Irwin
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2010-06-17T04:00:00+00:00

Henri Frager was the organizer of the F Section circuit called Donkeyman. f The soft-spoken Alsatian with the hazel eyes and the prematurely gray hair and the slight limp had first gone to war against the Germans in 1914 at the age of seventeen. After that war he had become a successful architect. He had re-entered the army as a captain in 1939 and had joined the resistance when France fell a year later. By 1942 he had begun cooperating with Britain’s Special Operations Executive and, by the summer of 1944, Frager would head a circuit with nearly five thousand maquis fighters. But, from the very start, the Donkeyman circuit had experienced bad luck.

In May 1943, Frager had been joined by a radio operator named Marcel Clech, a forty-year-old courier named Vera Leigh, who had been a dress designer before the war, and a British captain named Sidney Jones. Special Operations Executive had hoped that these three eventually would be able to re-form a circuit next to Donkeyman which had been destroyed through arrests by the Germans.3 Then, at the end of October 1943, Vera Leigh was arrested in Paris; she would later be executed at Natzweiler concentration camp.4 Three weeks later Captain Jones was arrested. More bad luck followed on December 19, when radio direction-finders tracked down a transmission signal from Marcel Clech’s set. Agents from the Sicherheitsdienst (SD)—the German Security Service—burst into Clech’s room and captured him while he was in the middle of tapping out a message.5

But it was more than simple bad luck that had been at work in Henri Frager’s circuit. He had been working under a serious handicap of which he was not yet aware. Frager’s adjutant, a man named Roger Bardet, was a traitor and had been feeding information about the circuit to an agent of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence service, for more than a year. Bardet’s Abwehr contact was a sergeant named Hugo Bleicher. Bardet and Bleicher had been responsible for the arrests of Vera Leigh and Captain Sidney Jones (with Bleicher making the actual arrests), and almost certainly had been involved in the arrest of Marcel Clech, with whom the two men had met on two occasions.

Forty-four-year-old Hugo Bleicher was one of Germany’s most effective agents in France, and his work in 1943 and 1944 had been devastating to some F Section circuits. The former clerk from Hamburg had the appearance and demeanor of a schoolteacher. He had a gift for languages and an even greater gift for manipulating and betraying those who so easily trusted him. The Abwehr had recruited him early in the war.

Bleicher’s history with Henri Frager and Roger Bardet dated back to the beginning of 1943. Bardet had become Frager’s right-hand man during their early resistance work in the south of France in late 1942. While Frager had been absent on a visit to SOE in London in March 1943, Bardet had fallen into a trap set by the wily Sergeant Bleicher and found himself behind bars.

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