Free All the King's Men by Robert Marshall Page A

deal of unhelpful hagiography has been written about this man, a complex individual who remained an enigma even to those who worked closest with him. Trying to weave one’s way between those who thought him a god and others who believed he was the Devil incarnate proved a difficult task. Whether he was a madman or a genius is one of those MI6 mysteries that remain at best only half answered.
    Robert Marshall
    Perth, Australia, March 1987

VI

Prosper
    Since the summer of 1940, the Special Operations Executive had grown into a world-wide organization. It had developed networks of agents as far afield as Burma and Malaya and throughout most of occupied Europe. But the country where SOE expended most resources and where they experienced the most frustration was of course France. Operations in that country had been complicated from the very beginning by the presence in England of an obscure French General named Charles de Gaulle, the self-declared head of the Free-French. SOE found it necessary to have two separate country sections operating in France: RF Section, which was linked to de Gaulle’s secret service – the BCRA, and an independent French Section, or F Section, which operated mostly British agents exclusively under British command. De Gaulle never countenanced Britain’s right to operate their own agents in his country and consequently he never recognized F Section. On the other hand, many in SOE were equally exasperated by de Gaulle, who had succeeded in establishing his own networks in France early on, but then did nothing with them. As Colin Gubbins wrote, ‘De Gaulle is busy furthering his political ends … and [his] agents do not appear to be making any attempt to fulfil their primary role of executing an active sabotage and subversion policy.’ 1 It became apparent to SOE that if they were to play any significant role in the liberation of France, then it would have to be done through F Section.
    French Section had been launched during the summer of 1940, by Leslie Humphries, late of MI6’s erstwhile SectionD. Humphries was already engaged in this work at a time when the head of MI6, Stewart Menzies, was still unaware Section D was no longer his. Dansey, on the other hand, did have his finger on the pulse, both in London and in France. Because his operations had been pushed back across the Channel, future work in France would rely heavily on recruiting from the native resistance groups that were springing up – the same pool of resources from which SOE would seek personnel. Dansey was greatly disappointed when his man in F Section, Humphries, was transferred before the end of the year to establish a new section. His replacement, H. L. Marriott, who had been the Courtaulds representative in Paris, lasted less than ten months. The man who succeeded him was the irrepressible Colonel Maurice Buckmaster.
    It was Buckmaster and Buckmaster’s personality that became synonymous with F Section. It is his name that is recalled in the histories and memoirs of those who went to France for the SOE. In 1941 he was a tall, bluff-looking man, with an invariably beaming countenance that was too often darkened with each setback in the field. He was already older than most of his contemporaries and beginning to thin out on top. That and his boundless enthusiasm gave him, for many, the air of a father figure. There were many who admired him, and equally as many who did not.
    Buckmaster’s problem, if one might call it that, lay in the deep-rooted attachment he felt for most of his agents, an attachment that many felt was soft and could sometimes cloud his judgement. 2 In the end Buckmaster was responsible for sending nearly four hundred men and women into France, each with their own false identities, codenames and operations. The intense concentration of facts and names that were compressed into those four extraordinary years often meant that after the war, old pre-war friends and acquaintances had become complete