Tag Archives: SIS

Secret Intelligence Service, MI6

Wednesday, 12 March 1941

Czechoslovakia: Operation BENJAMIN

S/Ldr Knowles pilots Z6473 in an attempt to drop the Czech agent Otmar Riedl about 50 km east of Prague, near the town of Kolin.

Sparse details for the sortie flown by S/Ldr Knowles come from the logbook of Sgt (later F/Sgt) Fisher, a Wireless Operator who has just joined the Flight. Fisher flies on several of 1419 Flight’s early operations as a member of S/Ldr Knowles’s crew; when Ken Merrick was doing his research for ‘Flights of the Forgotten’ he did have sight of Fisher’s logbook, and it gave Knowles’s target for this sortie as Czechoslovakia.

The sortie was to attempt Brigadier Gubbins’s SOE Operation BENJAMIN. This had been ‘bumped’ (to use modern airline parlance) on February 17th in favour of an SIS operation to Belgium. BENJAMIN is important, though clearly not to SIS: a Czech soldier, Otmar Riedl, had been trained to provide a W/T link, independent from Frantisek Moravec’s Intelligence organisation, between the Czech government-in-exile in London and other Czech resistance groups. Riedl was to be dropped in the Kolin district of central Bohemia, near the village of Křečhoř. This is a crucial operation for Gubbins: he has to show that his fledgling organisation is a serious outfit.

Delayed by a technical fault, S/Ldr Knowles and his crew take off late, at 20.09. They turn back shortly after passing Frankfurt, having calculated that they cannot make it to the target and return to friendly skies before daybreak. Fisher’s logbook and the Ops Officers’ log agree that the trip lasted 6 hours 10 minutes, the Whitley returning at 02.18 on the 13th.

France: Operations FITZROY & FELIX

The sortie is flown by F/Lt Oettle. His Whitley leaves the English coast over Selsey Bill and reaches Chateauroux, via Tours, at 0145. Eugène Pérot, a wireless operator for Claude Lamirault, is dropped about 5 kilometres south-west of Chateauroux. To disguise the aircraft’s purpose the crew drops three packages of ‘Nickels’ (propaganda leaflets) over Chateauroux before heading north-east at about 0235 towards the Fontainebleau area.

Schneidau is dropped just to the north of Montigny-sur-Loing. The crew reports that he’s made a successful landing, but a fresh breeze carries him into dense woods. He falls through the tree-tops, and crashes into tree-trunks well above the ground, and becomes entangled. The wireless set is suspended in the branches above his head. It takes several hours to cut himself and the W/T set free. The parachute canopy is high in the tree-tops, and he has to cut this rather obvious advertisement down before he can make his way off the plateau. He has been injured, first by the fall and then through his strenuous efforts to free himself and recover his equipment.

F/Lt Oettle and his crew returned to Stradishall via Fécamp and Tangmere, landing at about 0550.

Thursday, 13 February 1941

Stradishall – Dordogne

F/Lt Keast flies an operation to France. Keast writes a summary of operations since October, in which he records this trip’s target as a successful sortie to Fontainebleau, but as Philip Schneidau will not be dropped until March, this is erroneous.

The operation appears instead to be the drop of BCRA agent Maurice Duclos (‘Saint-Jacques’), with a wireless operator. The target is near the village of Saint-Cirq, 6 kilometres west of Bugue, in the Dordogne. Duclos’s wireless operator is John McLennan, the nom-de-guerre of John Mulleman. Duclos lands awkwardly, breaking his right leg, and he is arrested almost immediately by the French authorities.

Keast takes off in Whitley T4264 at about 1830, and lands at Tangmere at 0158, about 7.5 hours, Although his logbook records the flight duration as 5 hours 30 minutes, this is way too short for a trip to the Dordogne; the independent Stradishall times are about right.

Norway

Jack Oettle flies an 11-hour operation in Whitley P5029 to Norway, where he drops the SIS agent Sverre Midtskau*. (Mark Seaman confirms the agent and the date as 13-14 February.) He lands at Sumburgh in the Shetlands, but the Whitley sustains damage to the tail when landing. Oettle, his crew and aircraft are therefore stranded, and are unavailable for operations in the immediate future.

Sources

*Mark Seaman: ‘Special Duties operations in Norway’, article No. 18 in ‘Britain and Norway in the Second World War’, ed. Patrick Salmon (HMSO), p. 170.
Seaman’s principal sources are:

  1. TNA AIR 20/8224, and
  2. the Air Historical Branch summary ‘Special Duties Operations in Europe’, in TNA AIR 41/84

TNA AIR 14/2527 Stradishall Ops Officer’s log

Thursday, 16 January 1941

Stradishall – Non-occupied zone (ZNO), France

Oettle and Keast fly a 7 hour 10 minute sortie to the non-occupied Zone of France, with Oettle as Captain. Keast characteristically dates the operation to the 16th. Take-off is recorded by the Watch Office at approximately 10.20, and they land at 05.25 the following morning. (Keast will have recorded it from taxi out to engines off, whereas the Watch Office log will have noted its observation times from take-off to landing. This would account for the difference.)

This operation parachutes the SIS agent Michel Charles Joseph COULOMB into the Chateauroux area in the French Unoccupied Zone. A French citizen, he has been recruited the previous June by Commander Dunderdale’s A.4 section, which maintains links with Vichy intelligence. Coulomb has already completed at least one mission, having been landed by fishing boat in August 1940 and extracted in October. On 23 October 1940 he is commissioned into the Intelligence Corps as 2nd Lieutenant Michael James CARTWRIGHT (151291). His circuit has a strong aviation flavour and purpose, with links to several pre-war French aviation figures, including the aircraft designer Maurice DELANNE. At some unknown date in late 1940, his circuit has joined up with a group run by Robert IVERNEL, a subset of the Vichy French circuit ‘SR Air’.

Friday, 10 January 1941

Stradishall – Châteaumeillant – Operation FITZROY

Oettle and Keast drop Claude Lamirault a little south of Châteaumeillant, Cher. Keast’s target map (a British reproduction of the French pre-war large-scale 1:80,000 series) has survived. It shows the likely drop site on a ridge. Some farm buildings nearby are also indicated in red crayon; Lamirault may have made for these after landing, though it has not been possible to establish a definite connection due to the farm having changed hands since the war.

P/O Baker is also aboard for this operation. As the Flight’s Lysander pilot he is expected to fly a pick-up operation to extract Lamirault when the need arises, so needs to be familiar with the area.

They take off in Whitley P5029 at 22.15, and are routed via Abingdon and Tangmere. On their return they are diverted to Digby because of fog, landing at 07.20.

Claude Lamirault is a controversial figure: only 22 in 1940, before the war he had been involved with ‘Action Française’, a right-wing direct-action group of the 1930s that nowadays would rightly be considered a terrorist organisation. On the outbreak of war he was recalled to the army, serving with the Chasseurs Alpins. Escaping to Britain in October 1940, he met Lt Henri d’Estienne d’Orves, soon to be landed in Brittany to form the ‘Nemrod’ organisation. He was soon recruited by SIS: after his insertion he made contact with the left-wing activist Pierre Hentic.

Some sources have it that Lamirault was parachuted near Rambouillet in December 1940; they may have been confused by one of Lamirault’s later drops as CLAUDIUS – codenames were sometimes laboured puns on real names – most insecure – in December 1941.

Saturday, 17 August 1940

Henri Leenaerts and F/O John Hunter Coghlan, DFC

DATE OPERATION NAME PILOT AIRCRAFT AGENT TARGET COUNTRY OUTCOME
17/8/40 F/O J.H. Coghlan, DFC Lysander R2625 Henri Leenaerts Momignies Belgium Aircraft disappeared after take-off from Manston.

This was the RAF’s first attempt to insert an agent from Britain by air into Nazi-occupied Europe.

56Sqn Officers cropped

At the beginning of August 1940 John Coghlan — seen here standing, fourth from the left, in September 1939 — was a Flight Commander with No. 56 Squadron, a Hurricane squadron based at RAF North Weald. Holding the Acting rank of Flight Lieutenant, Coghlan was officially an ‘ace’ with some six victories, and he had just been awarded the DFC. On 2 August he had flown his last patrol, operating from Rochford, and on the 7th he was posted to RAF Ringway. Over the next few days two Lysanders, R2625 and R2626, arrived at Ringway. R2625 had been converted for night flying, with the rear machine gun removed.

According to his logbook Coghlan was no Lysander expert; he had logged only a single half-hour as a Lysander pilot in March 1939. Now he had to learn to fly one operationally, at night, before the Full Moon.

Coghlan was to insert a 37-year-old Belgian, Henri Leenaerts, into Nazi-occupied Belgium. Before the war Leenaerts had been an insurance salesman and swimming instructor with a wife and three children. He had served with the Belgian Air Force in his youth. On May 15th Leenaerts had been recalled, but the German invasion was too swift. He somehow contrived to escape to England. A trained wireless operator, he was recruited by SIS. The Belgian government and the head of the Belgian secret service had not yet reached England, but Anatole Gobeaux had.  Gobeaux had served in the First World War espionage organisation ‘La Dame Blanche’. Anticipating a German invasion more accurately than his government, Gobeaux had spent much of the ‘Phoney War’ visiting past members of La Dame Blanche, recruiting from the willing. After the German invasion he had taken the names to London. Leenaerts was to take a wireless set to Momignies, a small town on the border with France. There he was to make contact with one of the names provided by Gobeaux, and instruct this contact in their wireless codes and procedures.

Momignies was a small town close to a railway that led to the Channel ports. It was therefore well-placed for the kind of train-watching espionage activities that had been the hallmark of La Dame Blanche’s success in the Great War. Political and religious divisions in Belgium made a landing on Belgian soil unwise, so Leenaerts was to be landed just over the border in France. The new wireless sets developed for SIS were just light enough for Leenaerts to lug one across fields and over the border into Momignies. Three nights later, on the 20-21st, Leenaerts was to return to the same field, where Coghlan was to return and pick him up. Together they would return to England.

It is possible that Coghlan and Leenaerts made an attempt on the night of 16 August, but there is no published evidence to back this up. They are known to have set off in the late afternoon of 17 August in Lysander P2625, and landed at Manston to refuel. (The standard Lysander carried only 95 gallons of fuel; Manston brought Momignies within range.) At Manston they were spotted by Eric Clayton, a 56 Squadron ground-crew fitter who had looked after Coghlan’s Hurricane at North Weald. Clayton was at Manston repairing one of 56 Squadron’s damaged aircraft, and in the early evening of 17 August he saw Coghlan and an anonymous civilian arrive in a Lysander. He later wrote about the encounter in his memoir, ‘What if the Heavens Fall?’

Nothing is certain after the pair’s take-off from Manston. More than a month later, on 23 September, Flying  Officer Coghlan’s body was found washed up on the beach at Wimereux, a few miles north of Boulogne. Coghlan is not mentioned in the Belgian papers that describe Leenaerts’s mission. In their post-war enquiries the Belgian authorities believed Leenaerts had been lost over the North Sea, but knew nothing of the RAF’s involvement.

Manston was a logical departure-point for Coghlan to fly an easterly route crossing the Belgian coast between Dunkirk and Nieuwport, then heading south. Although Coghlan’s body was found south-west of Calais, the Lysander probably came down in the North Sea somewhere north-west of Ostend, cause unknown. Coghlan may have been jumped by a patrol in the moonlight, but he is more likely to have run out of fuel on the return leg, with Leenaerts still aboard. Though the operation was within range, he may have spent valuable time and fuel searching for the target. The fuel margin was not generous, and Coghlan did not have the Lysander experience to wring maximum range or endurance from an aircraft which repaid close acquaintance. Coghlan’s body was found more than a month later, along a heavily-patrolled shoreline. Analysis of currents and tidal flows indicates that Coghlan’s corpse probably drifted back and forth through the Dover Straits on a month of tides before being flung ashore at Wimereux.

Henri Leenaerts had no known end; in his career as an agent, only an unfulfilled beginning. In 1946 he was posthumously recommended for the Belgian Croix de Guerre with Palm, and for elevation to Chevalier of the Order of Leopold, but it’s not clear whether these awards were ever made. Most of the graves in the Commonwealth section of Boulogne’s Eastern Cemetery are from 1914-18, but in a small section at the far end, dedicated to casualties from the later conflict, lies Flying Officer John Hunter Coghlan, DFC.

Sources

  • Aircraft record cards, RAF Museum, Hendon.
  • Logbook: F/O J.H. Coghlan, DFC (TNA AIR 4/17)
  • Operations Record Books, 1940: No. 56 (F) Squadron; RAF Station, North Weald;
    Central Landing Establishment, RAF Ringway.
  • ‘What if the Heavens Fall? Reminiscences of 56(F) Squadron in the Battle of
    Britain’, Eric Clayton, Wye College Press, 1995.
  • Clive Richards, at the time (2008) working for the MOD’s Air Historical Branch, made the connection between Leenaerts and Coghlan; contributors to the rafcommands.com forum pointed me towards Eric Clayton’s memoir, and helped me definitively to establish R2625 as the Lysander used.
  • ‘La guerre secrète des espions belges: 1940-1944’, by Emannuel Debruyne, p.23
  • CEGESOMA, Brussels: File OP 723, and William Ugeux archives, AA 884, No. 56.
  • Personal File, Henri Leenaerts, CEGESOMA SVG: d340578