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PROSPER’s courier Andrée Borrel was parachuted into France in preparation for Suttill’s arrival. In the early hours of 2 October 1942 a signal flashed from a field near Vendôme, midway between Orleans and Le Mans, was spotted by the pilot of an RAF Hudson whose passenger was Francis Suttill. Once on the ground, Suttill immediately set about recruiting agents throughout northern France with very poor security until several thousand people were involved directly or indirectly, many of them knowing the identities of far too many other members of the network.
    At Norfolk House in St James’s Square in London was the office of Chief of Staff to the (yet to be appointed) Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC). This was also the umbrella beneath which several shadowy sub-organisations lurked – in particular, the London Controlling Section run by Colonel John Bevan, among whose creative brains was Wing Commander Dennis Wheatley, later to be a world-famous author. Bevan’s predecessor, Colonel Oliver Stanley, had resigned rather than deliberately misinform Resistance agents regarding the Dieppe raid. This was done with a view to letting them be caught in order to reveal under torture their false information so as to convince Hitler that the disastrous raid which cost 906 deaths in the invasion force and saw 2,195 men taken prisoner was a prelude to a full-scale invasion. Bevan, in civilian life a stockbroker, was made of sterner stuff.
    It is against that background of cynical deceit that the PROSPER network must be assessed. Suttill’s first wireless operator Gilbert Norman arrived in November, followed a few weeks later by a second radio operator of Armenian origin named Jack Agazarian. Bodington brought in his old pal Déricourt to select and supervise landing grounds for Section F agents.
    On 22 January 1943, Déricourt returned to France, tasked with organising reception parties and safe houses for new arrivals and agents returning to Britain. At first, everything seemed to be working out surprisingly well. During April and May PROSPER received 1,006 Stens, 1,877 incendiary devices and 4,489 grenades; in June it took delivery of another 190 man-sized containers of materiel on thirty-three landing grounds spread over twelve départements . Within a few months, Déricourt also safely brought in no fewer than sixty-seven agents, but his amazing confidence and success rate was beginning to worry Agazarian so much that when next recalled to London, he passed on his suspicions to Bodington and Buckmaster.
    Agazarian was right. Déricourt’s successes were due to his pre-war friendship with SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Boemelburg, the senior German spy-catcher in France. Listed in the Paris Gestapo files as Agent BOE/48, 3 Déricourt fed the details of the clandestine flights to Boemelburg, who then ordered anti-aircraft batteries along the flight path of the aircraft not to fire at them. What Boemelburg did not know is that his double agent was in fact a triple agent acting under instructions from SIS that overrode his duties for Section F. This was the real dirt of the deception operation: Suttill’s vast network was to be sacrificed in order to feed false information about the date of the planned Allied invasion of Europe when its members were tortured after capture by the Gestapo.
    However, Buckmaster remained unconvinced by Agazarian and sent Bodington into France to check out the situation. Even when Suttill, Borrel and Norman were arrested by the Gestapo on 23 June and the PROSPER network wound up, Buckmaster never lost his faith in Déricourt and even put in writing as late as December 1945 that he was innocent of any collaboration with the Germans, and ‘had the finest record of operations completed of any member of SOE’. 4
    One essential requirement for a spy is to have the appearance and demeanour of a grey person who does not stand out in a crowd, which could certainly not be said of Noor Inayat Khan, a head-turningly