Code Name: Lise

The True Story of the Woman Who Became WWII's Most Highly Decorated Spy

Larry Loftis

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501198670
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Segunda Guerra Mundial

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A Goodreads Choice Awards semifinalist
Florida Book Awards Silver Medalist
Featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, New York Newsday, and on Today!
Best Nonfiction Books to Read in 2019— Woman's Day
The Best Nonfiction Books Coming Out This Year— BookBub
"A nonfiction thriller."— The Wall Street Journal From New York Times and international bestselling author of the "gripping" (Michael Connelly, #1 New York Times bestselling author) Into the Lion's Mouth comes the extraordinary true story of Odette Sansom, the British spy who operated in occupied France and fell in love with her commanding officer during World War II—perfect for fans of Unbroken, The Nightingale, and Code Girls. The year is 1942, and World War II is in full swing. Odette Sansom decides to follow in her war hero father's footsteps by becoming an SOE agent to aid Britain and her beloved homeland, France. Five failed attempts and one plane crash later, she finally lands in occupied France to begin her mission. It is here that she meets her commanding officer Captain Peter Churchill. As they successfully complete mission after mission, Peter and Odette fall in love. All the while, they are being hunted by the cunning German secret police sergeant, Hugo Bleicher, who finally succeeds in capturing them. They are sent to Paris's Fresnes prison, and from there to concentration camps in Germany where they are starved, beaten, and tortured. But in the face of despair, they never give up hope, their love for each other, or the whereabouts of their colleagues. In Code Name: Lise, Larry Loftis paints a portrait of true courage, patriotism, and love—of two incredibly heroic people who endured unimaginable horrors and degradations. He seamlessly weaves together the touching romance between Odette and Peter and the thrilling cat and mouse game between them and Sergeant Bleicher. With this amazing testament to the human spirit, Loftis proves once again that he is adept at writing "nonfiction that reads like a page-turning novel" ( Parade ).

CHAPTER 1

DUTY

Spring 1942

London

Major Guthrie looked again at the photographs. The teenaged girl was tall and skinny, a bushel of thick brown hair clinging to her head like a dried-out mop. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen, but the shots appeared to have been taken ten, maybe twelve years ago. And there was something about the eyes—dark, determined . . . defiant.

If his instincts were right, this was a girl who would throw herself headlong into danger.

He wrote the letter.

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BORN APRIL 28, 1912, Odette Marie Céline was the first child of Yvonne and Gaston Brailly, a banker in Amiens, France. A year later, the couple would have their second child, Louis. When World War I broke out in 1914, Gaston joined the Infantry Regiment and was soon fighting the Germans and mustard gas in the trenches of the Western Front. Brave and courageous, Gaston was promoted to sergeant and decorated with the Croix de Guerre and Médaille Militaire.

He survived the Battle of Verdun, one of the bloodiest conflicts in history, but two men from his platoon had gone missing. Gaston returned to the battlefield to find them and did—both alive but seriously wounded. Before he could summon help, however, a mortar round hit their position, killing them instantly.

Odette and Louis would never know their father, but his legacy lived on through their paternal grandparents; Gaston had been their only child. Every Sunday afternoon they would take Odette and her brother to place flowers on Gaston’s grave at La Madeleine. “In twenty or twenty-five years’ time, there is going to be another war,” Grandfather would say, “and it will be your duty, both of you, to do as well as your father did.”

Odette would never forget these words.

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YVONNE BRAILLY HAD TROUBLE enough as a single parent, but further difficulty arose with a turn in Odette’s health. Always a sickly child, she contracted polio at the age of seven, leaving her paralyzed for more than a year. Worse, just before she turned eight the disease stole her sight. Over the next three years Yvonne took Odette to every specialist and medical expert she could find, but to no avail; Odette would have to struggle through life in complete darkness.

Lest Odette despair or feel sorry for herself, her grandfather encouraged her not to use blindness or pain as an excuse or handicap, but to be as clever as possible; there were many things she could do, and she should focus on those. Odette heeded the instruction and, as Hemingway put it, became strong in the broken places.

She couldn’t see, but she could hear, and soon her thoughts were captivated by Beethoven, Chopin, and Mozart. In piano and strings and waltzes, Odette would lose herself. Her blindness, it seemed, had opened a light of felicity previously unknown.

Yvonne Brailly, though, would not give up on Odette’s sight. She took her to see an herbalist—a witch doctor if you asked the medical community. The man was old, unkempt, and surprisingly dirty for a health practitioner. But Yvonne had exhausted all other options so the risk from a little herbal magic seemed negligible.

The man examined Odette and gave Yvonne a solution to bathe the child’s eyes. When Odette begins to see again, he said, gradually expose her to light. Yvonne followed the treatment and two weeks later Odette’s vision started to return. They continued the application and after two years Odette’s sight was fully restored.

A miracle, it seemed.

But no sooner than that malady had been beaten, Odette was struck with another: rheumatic fever. She spent a summer mostly in bed and the disease dissipated, but not before leaving her weak and partially paralyzed.

Yvonne was at her wit’s end. What her daughter needed was the strong air of Normandy, she felt. With Louis enrolled in the lycée in Amiens, Yvonne moved with Odette to St. Saēns, a small village some twenty miles inland from Dieppe, and from there farther east to the coastal city of Boulogne. Odette was enrolled in a local convent and when Louis visited for holidays, the siblings would spend hours walking the coast and marveling at the arriving ships, especially those with sailors of the strange English accent.

When Odette graduated high school, the nuns sent Yvonne a final report. Odette was intelligent and principled, they said, but possessed a volatile and petulant streak.

It would prove useful in due time.

Fascinated with the neighbors across the Channel, Odette determined to marry an Englishman and soon after her eighteenth birthday her wish came true: she met Roy Sansom, a Briton who was the son of an old family friend. They married a year later, in 1930, and lived in Boulogne. Their first child, Francoise, was born in 1932, and shortly thereafter the couple moved to London, where they had two more girls: Lily in 1934, Marianne in 1936.

From the security of her new home, Odette observed the progression of her grandfather’s prophecy. Adolf Hitler had become chancellor of Germany in 1933 and a year later ascended to head of state upon the death of President Paul von Hindenburg. Germany soon occupied the Rhineland, and in ’38 it annexed Austria and occupied the Sudetenland. In 1939 it invaded Poland and the prophecy was complete: France and Britain declared war.

Roy enlisted with the British army and left on deployment soon thereafter. But as Odette was about to discover, England itself was scarcely safe; the Battle of Britain began the following summer, and in September the Luftwaffe began lighting up London.

Odette had no choice: she moved with her girls a hundred miles west to the safety of Somerset. The quaint village was a haven and refuge but had a surprising disadvantage: the countryside and rolling hills—fresh with apple orchards, blackberries, and dahlias—were so enjoyable that Odette began to feel guilty. Countless others, she knew, were sacrificing greatly for the war.

One afternoon in the spring of 1942, Odette heard on the radio a plea from the Royal Navy asking for photos of the coast of France. From her time in Amiens and Boulogne, Odette had several she could send. They were quite useless, she thought, since they were of her and her brother on the beaches around Calais. In her accompanying letter, she noted that her parents were French, and that she knew the coastal area well. Mistakenly, however, she mailed her package to the War Office instead of the Admiralty.

Odette Sansom and her girls: Marianne, Lily, and Francoise. MIRROR/PA

A week or so later she received correspondence from a Major Guthrie asking if she could stop by the War Office at three o’clock the following Thursday. Odette assumed the purpose of the meeting was to return her photos, which she was eager to receive back. Over tea the silver-haired major asked about Odette’s childhood in Amiens and Boulogne.

Odette explained why they had moved and reiterated her knowledge of the area. She offered to sketch the Boulogne Fish Market if the major liked. Guthrie said they probably had something in the file and came to the point.

“Has it occurred to you, Mrs. Sansom, that your knowledge of France and, of course, of French, might be of use in some job or other? The War Office might possibly be able to find one for you.”

Odette replied that she had three children and they needed a lot of looking after, but she wanted to help. “If I can be of any use to do some translations,” she said, “or adopt two or three French soldiers, or send alouette¹ to a few, I would like to be able to do something. After all, I am French born, and I was brought up in France. My family has always lived on the battlefield of world wars, my father was killed thirteen days before the armistice in the first one, my brother is in this one, my mother is in France, suffering with the Germans, so I would like to be able to do some little thing.”

Guthrie said he understood; three children were quite a responsibility. He mentioned that there might be some part-time jobs and asked if he could send her name along to someone he knew.

Odette agreed. She went home assuming that was the end of the matter, but was disappointed she hadn’t received back her photographs.

Shortly thereafter she received a notice from the Red Cross informing her that her brother had been wounded and was in a military hospital in Paris, and that the Nazis had taken her mother’s home. Odette was grief stricken; this was the second time in her mother’s life that she had been forced to leave her home and had lost everything to the Germans. On top of that, a number of Odette’s friends were already in captivity.

She struggled with the situation. Here she was in the safety of Somerset, playing with her girls on the majestic rolling hills, while others suffered and died to secure her and her children’s freedom. Was she to accept this, Odette wondered, the sacrifice others were making, without lifting a finger? She reminded herself that as a mother of three she was somewhat exempted from the war, but she was tormented.

On June 28 she received a letter from a Captain Selwyn Jepson² asking her to visit him at room 238, Hotel Victoria, Whitehall, on July 10. Major Guthrie had not mentioned anyone by that name, but perhaps this had something to do with a part-time job, Odette thought.

Jepson, it turned out, was the recruiting officer for F (France) Section of SOE—Special Operations Executive—a new sabotage outfit that Prime Minister Winston Churchill had tasked to “set Europe ablaze.”

Its origins and objectives were predictable. Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare, believed that Britain needed something more than the existing military to fight the Germans—something secret, something subversive. On July 2, 1940, he sent a letter to Edward F. Halifax, Foreign Secretary, outlining his idea:

“We have got to organize movements in enemy-occupied territory comparable to the Sinn Féin movement in Ireland, to the Chinese Guerillas now operating against Japan, to the organizations which the Nazis themselves have developed so remarkably in almost every country in the world. This ‘democratic international’ must use many different methods, including industrial and military sabotage.”

But fighting a guerilla or dirty war was not something any branch of the military would take on, Dalton knew. What was needed, he explained, was “a new organization to coordinate, inspire, control, and assist the nationals of the oppressed countries who must themselves be the direct participants. We need absolute secrecy, a certain fanatical enthusiasm, willingness to work with people of different nationalities.”

Halifax presented the idea to Churchill and the prime minister agreed. SOE was born and Dalton was tasked to coordinate its development. Churchill gave the organization two directives: (1) to create and foster a spirit of resistance in Nazi-occupied countries, and (2) to establish an underground body of operatives who would perform acts of sabotage and assist in liberation when British forces landed.

From its founding, the organization was shrouded in secrecy; even other military branches working with it had no idea what it was. To the War Office, it was MO 1 (SP); to the Admiralty, NID (Q); to the Air Ministry, AI 10; to others, the Inter-Services Research Bureau, the Joint Technical Board, or the Special Training Schools Headquarters. Its officers and operatives called it “Baker Street,” after its address at 64 Baker Street. Money, too, was hidden: its operating budget was covered largely by siphoning expenses from other ministries, with remaining costs paid from a secret fund.

Operating in the shadows of ill intent, its agents were referred to by many names: spies, saboteurs, commandos, Baker Street Irregulars, and Churchill’s Secret Army. Indeed, they were spies, but the role of Baker Street was not one of spymaster—that was MI6’s field—but to be masters of mayhem.

The Germans called them terrorists.

This purpose, though, led to direct conflict between SOE and the Secret Intelligence Service; the latter wanted to eavesdrop, the former to be a bull in the china shop.

So Odette found herself in the bowels of the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, but the only secret she knew was that someone was hoarding her photos. Once again, she assumed that she’d been summoned to pick them up and, perhaps, to set up some part-time translating.

Captain Jepson was nothing like what she expected. Instead of a rigid officer in crisp khakis, she found a man who looked like a high-priced barrister. He wore a grey suit, dark-blue tie, an...