PARIS—There was a moment in the dark of night, as she sat down in the blacked-out, flat-black American B-24 flying very low over Normandy, when 22-year-old Second Lieutenant Évelyne Clopet must have felt what one of her colleagues on an earlier mission called “that cowardly sense of relief replacing the fear I had felt until just then.” Five of her colleagues had parachuted into the fields of France below, far behind German lines, but then the lights went out in the drop zone. It looked like the mission might have been compromised. The plane headed back to England and Clopet was still on it.
She was part of a top secret operation pulled together jointly by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and exiled French leader Charles De Gaulle’s BCRA intelligence service using French volunteers to spy on German troop deployments before and after the Allies’ D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.
Operation Sussex, as it was called, had recruited about 100 men and a handful of women to supply first-hand observations on the ground and report back.
They had trained for months, learning among other things how to kill silently with their hands in “le close combat,” how to carry out sabotage missions, identify German military units, parachute into enemy territory, operate radio equipment and send and decipher coded messages.
The Sussex agents would work in pairs, one primarily as an observer, and one as the radio operator, and each pair was given a code name. With Clopet in the plane that night were the Filan team, the Salaud team, and her partner in the Colère team, Roger Fosset—and all had disappeared into the blackness below the plane.
In World War II, as now, human intelligence was not always respected. The Allies had broken the German Enigma code (although very few people knew this), and there was a great deal of aerial surveillance, all of which was useful. But it could also be fatally misleading.
Stephen Ambrose wrote about Normandy’s hedgerows in his bestselling history, D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. One of “the great failures of Allied intelligence,” he concluded, was the misjudgment about just how big these vegetal walls really were. Seen from the air, their scale wasn’t apparent. Seen from the ground by members of the Resistance, they looked perfectly normal—for Normandy. But as a sergeant in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne remembered, “We assumed that they would be similar to the English hedgerows, which were like small fences that the foxhunters jumped over.” In Normandy they were six feet high or more and all but impregnable, and the roads between gave the Germans what amounted to readymade trenches. This “bocage” countryside of hedges, lanes, and small stands of trees presented a major obstacle to the advancing U.S. forces, and one for which they had not trained.
The Normandy campaign was off to a rough start the day of the landing, as witnessed first-hand by the head of the OSS, William “Wild Bill” Donovan and David Bruce, the head of European operations.
Donovan was the most highly decorated American soldier of World War I and then a successful lawyer, with a stint in senior positions at the Justice Department and as a well-traveled New York attorney who made it a point to gather political intelligence. Once tasked with the creation of the OSS, he was also a ferocious bureaucratic infighter who had told a top general in Army intelligence in London, when the officer expressed doubts about Donovan and his ideas for Operation Sussex, “Unless the general apologizes at once, I shall have to tear him to pieces physically and throw his remains through these windows into Grosvenor Square.” The Army intelligence officer, probably as bemused as he was threatened, soon came around.
Donovan was forbidden to land on D-Day out of concern he might be captured and expose a huge number of secrets about British as well as American operations. But he refused to stay in England. Trying to cajole an admiral who was an old friend into giving him a berth, Donovan wrote, “You and I are old and expendable. What better end for us than to die in Normandy with enemy bullets in our bellies?”
The admiral was not convinced, according to Richard Harris Smith in OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency, but Donovan and Bruce still found a way to join the troops going ashore after the first beachhead was established.
Bruce wrote in a colorful letter to a friend many years after the fact that Donovan had insisted on moving ahead of a forward anti-aircraft position, claiming farmers in a field were really OSS people.
“As we progressed,” wrote Bruce, “our alleged agents disappeared. Donovan and I came to a halt in the lee of a hedgerow that was being subjected to intermittent German machine-gun fire. Flattened out, the general turned to me and said: ‘David, we mustn’t be captured, we know too much.’ ‘Yes, Sir,’ I answered mechanically. ‘Have you your pill?’ he demanded. I confessed I was not carrying the instantaneous death pellet concocted by our scientific advisor.... ‘Never mind,’ replied the resourceful general, ‘I have two of them.’ Thereupon, still lying prone, he disgorged the contents of all his pockets, etc. There were a number of hotel keys, a passport, currency of several nationalities, photographs of grandchildren, travel orders, newspaper clippings, and heaven knows what else, but no pills. ‘Never mind,’ said Donovan, ‘we can do without them, but if we get out of here you must send a message to Gibbs, the Hall Porter at Claridges in London, telling him on no account to allow the servants in the hotel to touch some dangerous medicines in my bathroom.’
“This humanitarian disposition having been made,” Bruce wrote, “Donovan whispered to me: ‘I must shoot first.’ ‘Yes, Sir,’ I responded, ‘but can we do much against machine-guns with our pistols?’ ‘Oh, you don't understand,’ he said. ‘I mean if we are about to be captured I'll shoot you first. After all, I am your Commanding Officer.’”
Whether there was quite so much old-boy bonhomie under fire is doubtful. One often has to factor in a bit of fabulism when people tell war stories, especially long after the fact. But there is no question that life and death struggles were going on all around Donovan and Bruce that day, while miles away, far behind the German lines, the Sussex teams they had dispatched were in constant, mortal danger.
Because of rivalries among and within the intelligence services involved, the Sussex operatives did not go into action until weeks later than planned. The first to land were called “Pathfinders,” dropped into France in February 1944 to develop informants and find suitably secure drop zones. This proved more difficult and much more time-consuming than planned, and internecine frictions persisted.
The teams were managed separately. Those working in what was expected to be the American area of operations were handled by the OSS and dubbed Ossex, those in the British sphere were handled by the British SIS and covered by the rubric Brissex. The first of them landed in mid-April, and by the end of May, seven Ossex, six Brissex, and five Pathfinder teams were on the ground and operational.
According to Joseph Jakub’s Spies and Saboteurs, the first intelligence about German deployments came six days later with map coordinates for three munition dumps and reports about the evacuation of a town.
By D-Day, the OSS operations room in London, overseen by William Casey (later Ronald Reagan’s CIA director), was getting a flood of intelligence that included observation of German V-1 flying bombs being transported through France.
“The importance of Sussex to the success of D-Day cannot be overstated,” Charles Pinck, president of the OSS Society, told me recently. “Donovan said it best: ‘As long as we had the Sussex teams ahead of us it was like we had a brightly lit path, but beyond it was like advancing into a dark tunnel.’”
The Sussex team code-named Vitrail, Jacques Voyer and André Guillebaud, were among the first to send back actionable intelligence. Operating around Chartres, they transmitted what turned out to be hugely valuable information about the movements of Hitler’s most well-equipped armored unit, the Panzer-Lehr-Division. Resistance fighters were mobilized and their acts of sabotage helped thwart the Lehr’s advance to the Normandy beachhead on June 6. The Allies and the Sussex observers would continue to track the Lehr until the critical battle for Saint-Lô in late July, when the U.S. Eighth Air Force carpet-bombed the division virtually out of existence.
But by then Voyer had been captured as the result of a clumsy accident. Although at 21 he was already a veteran espionage agent with De Gaulle’s services, when he was stopped by the Germans and pulled his identification papers out of his pocket, rough sketches of German insignia came with them. He tried to run. He was shot twice, then tortured for eight days, but did not expose his partner or the Sussex operation. Voyer was executed on June 27.
When Évelyne Clopet and her five companions first took off from England on the night of July 3, they may have been aware of Voyer’s capture. Certainly they knew about the risks. And four days later, when Clopet once again headed for a drop zone in the dark, now alone, the sense of danger must have been enormous. But when the moment came, she plunged into the night, and after 10 days hiding out she was able to join up again with Fosset, her opposite number in the Colère unit.
The Germans were still fighting ferociously, not only against the Allied troops on the front lines, but against all potential spies and infiltrators—and they had planted plenty of agents of their own.
Georges Maurel, the observer for the Plainchant team near Le Mans, was captured and interrogated for six days, then sent to Paris to be worked over some more. As D. Rex Winslow wrote in the journal Intelligence and National Security a couple of years ago, a Werhmacht lieutenant grilling Maurel in Paris suddenly interrupted Maurel’s uninformative answers and addressed him by the agent name he had had during training in England, “Monsieur Clauzel.” The German lieutenant then asked if the Sussex agent recognized him, and yes, now that Maurel looked more carefully, yes he did. The man had been an American second lieutenant radio instructor for Sussex recruits in England. In fact, he was a Nazi spy.
Recently, a niece of Évelyne Clopet has devoted a tremendous amount of time and research to examining the question of what other informers and double agents might have penetrated the Sussex operation.
Sylvie Kabina-Clopet’s investigations, partly described in an article in the newspaper Ouest-France, show a major German counter-intelligence unit was operating out of Le Mans (the area where Maurel was picked up) and then moved to Angers, the area where Évelyne Clopet and the teams with her were assigned, beginning in March 1944.
The official records of Sussex that most scholars have drawn on pass lightly over some of the most important work the agents were supposed to do, which included cultivating informers, including Nazi collaborators, turning them, getting them to send false messages, and sometimes tricking the Nazis into arresting them in a complex duel of spy versus spy that offered “fertile terrain for double agents,” says Kabina-Clopet. The record of competition and infighting among the services contributing to Sussex would have made the risk of penetration and betrayals even higher.
Of particular interest to Kabina-Clopet are the activities of a young French woman who went by the name Geneviève Mouquet, an agent for the Germans who had several aliases and is said to have fingered a number of people, very likely including her aunt.
Whether one accepts the official version of events or the more complex and nuanced one that Kabina-Clopet is researching, barely a month after 22-year-old Second Lieutenant Évelyne Clopet parachuted into France, she would be part of the greatest single disaster suffered by the entire Sussex operation.
This is the version of the event that David K. Bruce, head of OSS Europe, noted in his journal on Aug. 13, 1944, as the Allies, having broken free of the bocage terrain and broken through the German lines, charged ahead across the French countryside.
Writing that night in Le Mans, Bruce reported that six Sussex agents “who were near here left just before the capture of Le Mans by the Americans to try to reach Paris and set up communications from there. Taking with them their radios, they made the fatal mistake of proceeding in a stolen German Army truck. They were dressed as Todt workers [forced laborers], and one of them was a woman. They were stopped last Wednesday at a road block by a German patrol, and the first thing uncovered was a radio set. On their way to headquarters, one man jumped out of the car and, although fired at, managed to escape.”
According to a memoir by “Colonel Rémy,” the senior French officer in Operation Sussex, quoted on the website Plan Sussex, the captives had been handed over to the Feldgendarmen, the German gendarmerie, at 9 p.m. on the night of Aug. 9 near the city of Vendôme, and subjected to savage interrogation. A cleaning lady saw the woman captive on the ground, passed out, with the Germans circled around her. Her forehead had been hit with a gun butt, her thighs bore the lacerations of a whip.
“The interrogation lasted until 1:30 in the morning, punctuated by cries of pain,” wrote Rémy, “yet the torturers never succeeded in extracting a single word from those they martyred.”
By Aug. 18, David Bruce was in Chartres, where he found the temporary OSS base of operations “bulging with French agents.” He also discovered “the five Sussex agents who were killed by the Germans had been photographed where their bodies fell. I saw the photographs and they were horrible. They had all, including the woman, been shot through the groin and the stomach. One of the men in the village where they were killed had taken the pictures after the Germans evacuated it, and brought them to us so we could identify the dead.”
Today, the agents of Operation Sussex, and the operation itself, are largely forgotten. But as the anniversary of D-Day approaches, as yet another American president prepares to stand before a dwindling group of veterans who survived the landing, and have hung on to life until this day (God bless them), it is time to remember not only those who served and who died on the beaches beneath Colleville-sur-Mer, and amid the hedgerows of Normandy, but those who served and who died in the shadows as well.
