Heslop Xavier

A British Secret Agent with the French Resistance
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-84954-774-1
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Colnel Richard Heslop, alias Xavier, was one of Britain's Greatest Special Operations agents in France. Ingeniously orchestrating resistance groups and ruthlessly sabotaging German operations, Xavier played a crucial role in Allied espionage during the war, from late 1942 right through to D-Day. Sent to France in the middle of the conflict, he delicately balanced clandestine missions and dangerous wartime operations on a daily basis, yet his name barely gets a mention in the accounts of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), making this insight all the more fascinating. It is clear that Xavier's role was like no other. it was a job that involved frequent encounters with the terrifying possibilities of capture, torture and death; it was a job where a careless whisper could deliver a man into the hands of the Gestapo; and it was a job that involved acts of sabotage, espionage, theft, and sometimes even murder... Xavier is a dramatic and compelling account of courage and endurance in the face of a merciless enemy - the true story of one of Britain's greatest secret agents.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Heslop, Richard

Leseproben

Chapter One

The job which led to my most disturbing incident as a British agent started quite simply when I met one of the many dozens of resistance men I had worked with in the Angers area. I saw him in a bar, and as we sat over a coffee one morning in mid-1943, he told me that he could let me have all the future train movements for months to come, every ammunition train, every troop train, every food train, which had been planned with characteristic German efficiency and listed in one slim file which rested in a steel drawer inside the movement control office at Le Mans station.

I was, of course, instantly aware of the value of this information. Armed with it, I could brief the Royal Air Force to attack the trains and could let the saboteurs in the groups know when food trains were passing so that they could be derailed and the goods taken into the secret stores of the Resistance. How, I asked, were these plans to reach me?

‘Monsieur, I have a contact at Le Mans who is a movements control officer. He can tell you where they are kept and you can come in and get them.’

That was all very well, I told him – but what about guards, locked doors and so on? And if he worked there, why couldn’t he collect the papers?

He explained that there was only one guard on at nights, a Frenchman, and that he could be tempted away by the offer of a couple of brandies in a bar close by the offices. He would leave a shutter open in a ground-floor room and the window unlocked so I could come in that way. There would be no problem. As for locked doors, he would give me wax impressions of the only key I would need which opened the door from the room with the open shutters into the room where the file was kept, but he would even try to keep that unlocked for the night I would make my burglary.

‘I cannot take the file out as I am a Frenchman. Every Frenchman is searched when they leave the offices and I could not risk smuggling the papers through myself,’ he told me.

But there was another snag. If the file disappeared, the Germans would know that it had been stolen and they would change the whole of the schedule. If I took the file, I asked my contact, could he smuggle it back the following day without being discovered?

‘Yes, they don’t search people going in. If you photograph the documents and let me have them back in a day or so, then I can cover up for that length of time. If a German asks to see the file I can put him off by pretending that another officer is looking at it, and put it back later without anyone knowing that it has been out of the office.’

That settled all my inquiries. He told me when I could have the impression of the key and I made arrangements for this to be picked up. I also arranged that he would give the date on which the raid could be made to another contact I would send to him.

I received the impression of the key a few days later and, as I was working legitimately as a lathe operator in a factory making tungsten drills – perfect cover for me – I was able to make my own key from the wax impression. I was ready for the burglary from then on. I was told the day by a courier who reached me at Angers and I arranged to be taken by van out to Le Mans. The driver knew nothing of the job I was on, just that I wanted transport there and back. I dressed in my dark-blue overalls and my black beret, as they would help to conceal me in the dark, got into the van and was driven off. At 11 p.m., the time arranged, I was hiding in the shadows by the offices when I saw my contact come out and chat to a guard who had been paying little interest in his job of sentry. After a few minutes the two moved off towards the café, from which I could hear, distantly, the clatter of glasses and the hum of talk.

I waited for the two to get out of my sight and then, with my heart beating heavily at the thought of my coming burglary and the chances of being captured, strolled over to the offices and to the shutters.

The shutters opened at a touch and without any noise – he must have oiled them. The window, too, was opened as he had promised and I pulled myself up into the dark, quiet room. I stood listening for steps, but all I heard were the voices from the café. I pulled my .45 revolver out, carried it in one hand after pushing off the safety catch, and took out a pencil-slim electric torch from another pocket.

I eased myself quietly across the room to the door which led into the office where the files were kept, and leaned my shoulder against it as I turned the handle. That, too, was open and there was no need for my key. I opened this slowly – again there was no noise – entered the room and closed the door behind me. I switched my torch on, shone it on to the floor and took two paces towards the files.

Then, all at once, the lights in the room came on and a girl’s voice ordered:

‘Stay where you are, don’t move.’ I swung to my left and saw a pretty young girl of twenty-three or twenty-four standing there dressed in a white blouse and a blue skirt. In her right hand she held a pistol which was pointing straight at me, but wavering so much that the muzzle seemed to be blurred. I fired from the hip. She fired at the same time. Her shot hit the ceiling, mine hit her in the left breast, and I had the crazy thought that my pistol instructor would have been proud of me. The heavy .45 bullet flung her across the room and she crashed on her back on the floor. She gasped and started to moan, and the blood seeped into her trim white blouse.

I should have shot her in the head, snatched the plans and run before the noise of the shots brought searchers. But I was sickened because I had shot a pretty girl, so I put my gun down, knelt on the floor beside her and cradled her head in my lap. I stayed like that for some minutes, as the girl gasped her last breaths, and then died. Shocked, I still held her for another minute or two. I laid her down gently, picked up the two guns and switched the lights off. I leaned against the wall and thought for a moment that I was going to be sick. The room reeked of gunpowder and, mingled with it was a trace of the girl’s perfume. I can smell it even now. I pulled myself together and then realised that the blast from my .45 must have been heard a long way off. But I heard no shouts, no running feet. Automatically I turned to the right file, switched on my torch and brought out the plans which I tucked into one of my big, overall pockets. I stepped over the body of the girl, walked to the door, went into the next office and stood by the open window. I looked out, saw no one, and the only sounds were those from the bar. I dropped to the ground and ran into the darkness towards the van which was tucked away a few streets off.

I stopped, panting. It was only then that I realised I had committed a murder. I leaned against a wall catching my breath, as the shock of this hit me for the first time. Murder was a frightening word at any time. But to have committed a murder oneself, and that of a pretty girl, was enough to turn one’s senses. I wanted to run, run anywhere, but I fought the panic that rose in me and forced myself to be calm.

Then another thought came into my mind. How the hell did that girl know I was going to be there? Who had talked and who was she? Had my contact betrayed me? What had happened and how was I going to escape being caught and tried?

But reason told me that the Germans could not trace me for I had left no fingerprints and they would not be too thorough just because a slip of a girl had been killed. I would photograph the plans and have them delivered back to my man as we had planned. And in the meantime I would try to find out the identity of the girl.

I was driven back to Angers and dropped at my house. The next day I arranged for the plans to be photographed and asked for information to be obtained for me on the previous night’s events.

I heard within a few hours that the girl, who was named Marthe – I never did know more than that – was a recent recruit to the , the French plainclothes equivalent of the Gestapo. Her boyfriend worked at the movement control and by chance overheard my contact discussing my coming raid on their offices. The boyfriend told Marthe about this as an interesting anecdote – he was a loyal Frenchman – not realising his girl was a member of the

Marthe was young and eager and, I presumed, had sought to impress her new chief by catching a thief single-handed. It was her misfortune to meet a fully armed and trained British army officer instead of a frightened, unarmed French thief. I felt a little better when I knew that the girl was an enemy of France. But I shall never forget that I was forced to kill a girl. Until now no one has known I was Marthe’s killer – not even SOE. I was too ashamed.

As it was, the plans were not as vital as I had been led to believe. They were useful, but only covered a small section of the future movements of the railways through Le Mans junction. The Germans hunted the murderer, checks were made in Le Mans, but no one, outside my contact at the control office, found out the killer.

The final reaction set in a couple of days after her death. I could not stop trembling, I could not eat. I was very tensed up and preoccupied for many days. At night I lay awake, hearing again the sound of her cries as she lay dying, and smelling again the fresh, exciting perfume she had worn. I was remorseful and wondered why the hell I had wanted to become a British agent. How, I asked myself, had I managed to become an assassin? I thought back to the beginning of the war when I, and many like me, still...