| HOME Go to  Homepage
GENERAL |
| CHAPTER
III
O.S.S. OPERATIVES IN FRANCE One day in the Spring of 1943 René Chave arrived at one of our poetry meetings with some exciting news. We were asked to furnish some of our identity cards for an international undertaking of great importance, involving connections to both the Swiss and British intelligence services. The group agreed that this collaboration was what we wanted, especially since these organizations seemed to represent the best guarantee of a useful and secure underground network. Within a few weeks we learned further details about the project, which involved in fact more than the mere production of identity cards. It would be our task to escort Allied officers, most of them Americans, through occupied France on the railroad linking the Swiss and Spanish frontiers. We would work not only with British and Swiss intelligence, but with the newly-created American Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA) in one of its first covert operations. Our contact for the undertaking was a medical student, a member of the FEDE (a Protestant student organization) in Toulouse, who had come to us highly recommended through a chain of underground connections. As he had a number of aliases, we knew him simply as Georges Brantès, which was more than we needed to know. He apparently had been to Switzerland, where he had established the necessary contacts. We found out many years later that his contact in Bern was an American Colonel by the name of Allen Dulles (alias Allen Smith), who organized the first OSS groups in Europe and who worked closely with the British Intelligence Service. We were to become his first group of OSS operatives in France. Our task was specific. American fliers and allied navy personnel, (even, on one occasion, an Australian general), who had somehow made their way to Switzerland, were to be smuggled out of the landlocked and isolated country through France into Spain. In Madrid the Americans had a special arrangement with the Franco government: For a few gallons of gasoline, delivered to the Spanish army, the American or Allied officers were brought to the American Embassy and from there were allowed to head for England. Our task was to take delivery of the men at the Swiss frontier and bring them to Toulouse, where they would be taken in charge by other members of the underground and brought into Spain through the Pyrenees. We would first receive,
via a special courier from Geneva, a photograph and the exact description
of the person to be smuggled through France. The picture |
