Francis Suttill
The purpose of SOE in France was to recruit resistance groups and supply them with arms and material in order to carry out sabotage against Nazi Germany.
Charismatic and a natural leader, Suttill was considered by SOE to be "highly resourceful, and smarter than most" and thus chosen for its "most challenging job: to establish a circuit in Paris, covering a vast chunk of central France."
[5] Earlier SOE networks, Carte and Autogiro, led by Frenchmen André Girard and Pierre de Vomécourt respectively, had been destroyed by the Germans.
[6] On 24 September 1942, Suttill's courier, Andrée Borrel, code names Denise and Monique, parachuted into France to prepare for his arrival.
After meeting in Paris, Suttill and Borrel took a month long trip around central France, exploring the potential for setting up resistance networks.
Their early successes and high level of activity led SOE to send them two wireless operators, Gilbert Norman (Archambaud) in November, and Jack Agazarian (Marcel) in December.
[8] During late 1942 and the first half of 1943, the Prosper network grew rapidly, covering a large part of northern France, and involving hundreds of locally recruited agents and some 60 sub-networks.
SOE headquarters in London was both surprised and elated at the rapid progress of Prosper, although concerned about its connections with the communists who were especially powerful in the northern suburbs of Paris.
[12] The truth is that Prosper's downfall, tragic as its consequences were, was brought on in spite of their bravery by the agents' own incompetence and insecurity...The real wonder is not that Suttill and his friends were caught, but that it took so long for so many Germans to catch them.
On 19 June, Suttill sent a bitter message to London blaming SOE for directing newly arrived wireless operatorNoor Inayat Khanto a compromised letter-box.
[16] On the night of 15–16 June, two SOE agents, Canadians John Kenneth Macalister and Frank Pickersgill, were dropped to one of sub-network leader Pierre Culioli's reception sites.
[10] Shortly after midnight of 23 June, a German officer pretending to be one of the recently parachuted Canadian agents came to the apartment where Norman was staying, and he and Andrée Borrel were arrested.
Over the next three months, hundreds of local agents associated with Prosper were arrested, of whom 167 are known to have been deported to Germany, where about one-half were executed, killed, or died in concentration camps.
[18] The communists in the Paris suburbs with whom Suttill worked mostly survived the debacle because of their rigid security practices and their dependence on SOE only for arms and money, not guidance and communications.
Reading these messages gave the Germans detailed locations, dates and quantities of material of almost every drop received over the last two months and it was this that persuaded Norman that he might as well cooperate in an attempt to save lives.
([20]) London was surprised by the mistakes in Norman’s messages as he had a high reputation for efficiency and accuracy and SOE's French section leader, Maurice Buckmaster, refused to believe that he had been captured.
Dr. Josef Goetz was the wireless expert at 84 Avenue Foch in Paris, the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the security service of the German SS.
They succeeded at first and were able to trick wireless operator Jack Agazarian into a meeting in July where he was arrested but this resulted in their game being exposed and communication with Norman’s radio ceased.
The terms were that, if Suttill or Norman told the Germans where their caches of arms were located, they and the local people involved would not be tried by tribunal but simply sent to a concentration camp.
[25] The role of Henri Déricourt, the French Section's air movements officer in northern France, in the destruction of the Physician/Prosper network is much debated.
Déricourt, as mentioned above, arranged for the arrival and departure of SOE agents by air and collected their mail, including their uncoded reports, for transmittal to London.
An oft-cited theory is that Suttill and his Prosper colleagues were deliberately sacrificed by the British to mislead the Germans about allied plans for the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.
The British reasoning behind the deception was that if the Germans anticipated an invasion of France in 1943, they would maintain or expand their occupation forces in western Europe, rather than sending resources east to combat the advancing Soviet Army.
British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) deputy leader Claude Dansey, who was known to oppose the existence of SOE, has been suggested as the perpetrator of the deception scheme and alleged betrayal.
"[29] After his capture on 24 June 1943, Suttill was imprisoned and interrogated at Sicherheitsdienst (SD) headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch in Paris and later sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin where he was held in solitary confinement in the prison block until he was shot on 23 March 1945.
A revised and updated edition was published by The History Press in 2018 titled Prosper: Major Suttill's French Resistance Network.
