Henri Déricourt (2 September 1909 − 21 November 1962),[1] code named Gilbert and Claude, was a French agent in 1943 and 1944 for the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive organization during World War II.
He found clandestine landing fields for RAF airplanes and organized receptions for the arrival and departure of flights to convey SOE agents back and forth from England to France.
In 1935, he joined Air Bleu as a pilot and flew mail around France from then until the beginning of World War II in 1939.
[5] In Paris in 1937 and 1938, according to author Robert Marshall, Déricourt met and became friends with two people who would become important in his life: a British journalist named Nicolas Bodington, later to become the second ranking officer in the French section of SOE, and a German policeman, Karl Boemelburg, assigned to the German Embassy and later the head of the SD in Paris.
Despite those concerns he was subsequently recruited by MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service) before having his name and credentials passed to the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in November 1942.
Déricourt's old friend, Nicolas Bodington, now the second in command of SOE's French section, endorsed his employment enthusiastically.
[10][12] Déricourt soon assembled his Farrier team, consisting of Aisner as his courier and another old friend, pilot Rémy Clément, as an assistant.
Through courier Lise de Baissac, Déricourt also established links with the large SOE Scientist network on the Atlantic Ocean coast of France, which also needed his services to move agents.
[14] Déricourt's first air operation was the night of 17/18 March 1943 when he met two Westland Lysander airplanes landing near Poitiers which delivered four SOE agents and boarded four others to return to England.
Over the next eleven months, he supervised 17 air operations in which 22 aircraft landed at more than six different clandestine airfields and delivered 43 SOE agents to France and took 67 back to England.
Déricourt was the "postman" who collected letter and reports from agents and gave them to the pilots of the airplanes to take back to England.
[19] In October 1943 veteran resistor Henri Frager took a Déricourt-organized flight to London with the objective of telling SOE that Déricourt was a German agent.
Senior SOE staff members and French Section leader Maurice Buckmaster refused to believe the reports and Déricourt continued his work in France until February 1944 when he was recalled to London.
In fall 1946, SOE spymaster Vera Atkins interviewed Dr. Josef Goetz, formerly an SD officer in Paris and now a captive of the allies in England.
[20] In January 1947, Atkins located Sturmbannfuhrer Hans Josef Kieffer, who had been a senior German intelligence officer in Paris and commandant of the SD unit at 84 Avenue Foch.
"Most extraordinary of all" in the words of author Sarah Helm, nobody representing SOE was at the trial to give evidence against Déricourt.
"[24] After World War II, MI6 "could not snuff out its awkward wartime rival fast enough and the Foreign office was delighted to see an end to the organisation that had interfered so much with quiet diplomacy."
[25] Author Jean Overton Fuller tracked down Déricourt in the early 1950s and he told her that he had handed over copies of SOE agent's mail to the Germans, but was acting on the instructions of another British agency.
The objective of the deception was to persuade the Germans to keep soldiers in France to defend against an invasion, rather than transferring them to the eastern front to fight against the Soviet Union which Britain feared was near collapse.
Déricourt's role was to copy and give to the Germans the correspondence of SOE agents which hinted that an invasion was upcoming.
[29][30] However, authors Robert Marshall and Patrick Marnham (writing in 2020) are among those who have asserted the opposite: SOE agents of the Prosper network in France were sacrificed as part of the deception plans of British intelligence.
On 21 November 1962, Déricourt took off from Vientiane, Laos for Sayaboury with a load of gold and four passengers, but the plane crashed short of the landing strip due to fuel starvation.