Family Man and Spy

MEMOIRS OF A SECRET AGENT OF FREE FRANCE (Vol. I; 406 pp.)--Remy-- Whittlesey ($4).

This book is like the first draft of a wonderful novel by Andre Malraux. The author is now, like Malraux, a member of the Executive Committee of General de Gaulle's "R.P.F." During the war, Colonel Gilbert Renault, who went by the name "Remy," among other names, organized a network of intelligence agents in occupied France. His territory included the entire Atlantic coast, from Dieppe to Bayonne. The raid on the French coast at Bruneval and the raid in force that crippled the great drydock at St.-Nazaire (denying any haven outside Germany to the battleship Tirpitz), were carried out with the aid of reports received from him.

Almost every day of his hunted existence was a new complex of calculations and risks; a single muddleheaded moment might have ruined him. Despite the author's simplicity, the reader gradually becomes aware of his extraordinary energy and coolness. But the book is not only an adventure story but a family history, told by a devout and loving father. Remy flouted the Gestapo for over a year and a half with a wife and four children on his hands. And he learned his job as he went along.

Code & Confederates. In London during the early summer of 1940, Gilbert Renault, onetime businessman and would-be movie producer, found the Deuxieme Bureau (Intelligence Section) of General de Gaulle's forces represented by one young officer in a cubbyhole. He asked for a mission in France not because he knew anything about intelligence work but because he wanted to see his family again.

Sent to Spain, Renault made the spy's perennial discovery: that some of his most useful confederates are among the enemy. As a blind, Renault let it be known that despite the defeat of France he felt that business was business and planned to make a movie about Columbus. It was a member of the German Embassy staff who helpfully smuggled a letter for him into occupied France, asking his wife to bring the children and join him in Spain.

A second thing Renault learned was that the home office could be wrong. He had the name and address of a patriot in Marseille who would be able to get him a radio operator for his secret transmitter. The patriot, as it turned out, was scandalized at the very idea. Renault had better luck near Bergerac, in the Dordogne, where his host was a small, salty squire, the father of eight, with a fine disdain for the conquerors. When, he asked, would Renault like to slip across into the German zone? After Renault replied "tomorrow," he realized that he was scared stiff of the Gestapo.

Parcels & Patience. This attitude changed later. The first time Renault was picked up, with his pockets bulging with dispatches, he talked so fast and furiously that his slow-witted examiner gave up and let him go without even searching him. After his network had been sending out messages for several months, the Gestapo located one of his transmitters. Instead of keeping it under observation they arrested the operator at once. This, he says, was typical. "Their haste to make a single arrest, when in most cases . . . patience in watching the man would have brought in a good haul, can be explained only by their thirst for personal success. . . "

During the first winter Renault visited ports like Lorient and Bordeaux, where the Germans were building submarine bases. His absences from Spain aroused the interest of the Spanish police and soon he found himself with an exit visa and none for reentry. After that he relayed dispatches into Spain by simply handing a parcel to a kindly brakeman on the train from Pau to Canfranc. His network, the C.N.D. (Confraternity of Notre Dame), made a practice of sending parcels, the more casually mashed and battered the better. The Germans sometimes opened them but never detected their secret--messages in invisible ink on the wrappings.

Of treachery in his organization there were two instances. When the first man fell under suspicion he refused to execute him, a decision that he regretted later. "In the hazardous life of intelligence work, serious suspicion should be sufficient for condemnation. . . " He knows that at least two of his closest confederates kept silent under German torture; if they had not, he would have been taken.

Detectors & Daggers. Rather than endure the suspense in Spain, his wife elected to join him in France. His success in getting her a visa alarmed him, but he was not, as he had half expected, arrested when he met her. During the whole second year of his work in France, she and his children, one of them still an infant, lived near Nantes and then in Paris through the grim second winter of occupation. The Germans were now using radio detector vans to such good effect that Remy's operators could count on little more than a quarter of an hour's transmission before a Gestapo van would be at the door.

A system of parachute drops and occasional landings had been worked out with London and he was able to return to England for a conference. While there he made arrangements to be picked up with his family at sea during the spring or summer. It was high time. Several of his best agents were taken while he was away, and when he got back he knew that sooner or later the Germans would find him.

For sheer excitement, Renault's story of how he got his wife and children into a fishing boat and out to sea in June 1942 (they knew they had only an even chance because the Germans inspected every second boat in the fishing fleet) surpasses the contrived suspense of most fiction.

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