Returning to Bordeaux, he began a new career as a restaurateur, managing the Grand Café du Commerce et de Tourny, one of Bordeaux’s most prestigious restaurants. From here he branched out with his own businesses. One was the Café des Marchands, a modest restaurant and boarding house frequented by dockers and travelling salesmen on the Quai des Chartrons. By the end of the 1930s, Duboué’s businesses were doing well enough for him to purchase a country retreat southeast of Bordeaux, where he, his wife Marie-Louise and daughter Suzanne spent every weekend and most holidays.
His co-conspirator, Léo Paillère, recently demobilised and an ex-captain of infantry in the First World War, was, at fifty, older than Duboué. A man of distinctly right-wing tendencies, Paillère lived with his wife Jeanne and their five sons next door to the Café des Marchands.
During late 1940 and early 1941, Duboué and Paillère set about recruiting a number of friends as agents. They gathered intelligence on German positions, troop movements, weapons and ships in the port – especially the blockade-runners and submarines. The intelligence was smuggled out of Bordeaux by Suzanne Duboué (sixteen years old at the time and known in the family as ‘Mouton’, or ‘lambkin’ in English). She took the secret reports to a restaurant owner called Gaston Hèches in Tarbes, 140 kilometres south of Bordeaux. Hèches then passed them along a clandestine escape route he controlled, over the Pyrenees to the SIS representative in the British consulate in Barcelona. When this route was closed, or too dangerous, Suzanne carried the intelligence hidden in a basket across the border to the Spanish Basque coastal town of San Sebastián, where the British consulate doubled as the gateway to another escape line and courier service to Madrid, Gibraltar and London.
The Duboué–Paillère reports on German activity first began to reach London early in 1941, the year which was, for Churchill and the British, the annus horribilis of the war. The heady days of solitary defiance and the Battle of Britain were over. Now British forces were engaged in a long struggle of retrenchment and attrition, and losing on all fronts: in the Atlantic, in the deserts of North Africa, on the plains of Russia and against the Japanese in the Far East. Churchill knew that after Dunkirk it would take time – probably years – to turn the tide. He knew too that if Britain was not to retreat into passive defence, then apart from RAF attacks on German cities, his only means of carrying the war to the enemy was through clandestine and unconventional warfare.
In 1940 he created three new organisations to wage this secret war: Combined Operations, charged with conducting commando raids on the European coastline; MI9, tasked with helping escaped Allied prisoners and downed pilots to get back to Britain; and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), established in July of that year and ordered, in Churchill’s inimitable words, to ‘set Europe ablaze’.
Staffed mainly by amateurs in the spying game, the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’ (as SOE swiftly became known, after their headquarters near Marylebone station) were regarded by Britain’s professional spies in SIS with a sniffy disdain, bordering, when occasion arose, on murderous enmity. Malcolm Muggeridge, himself an SIS officer, commented: ‘Though SOE and SIS were nominally on the same side in the war, they were, generally speaking, more abhorrent to one another than the Abwehr was to either of them.’
Operationally, SOE was run by a regular army brigadier, Colin Gubbins, and was an autonomous organisation which, for cover purposes, pretended to be part of the War Office. It was divided into country sections for each of the occupied countries of Europe – except for France which had two country sections: F (for France) Section, staffed mainly by British officers, and RF (République Française) Section, staffed mainly by the French. Both sections sent their own agents into France, but their approaches were entirely different. The British-run F Section favoured small discrete spy networks built on independent ‘cells’, which had no contact with each other. This, they hoped, would limit the damage of penetration and betrayal. The French-run RF Section acted mainly as a logistics organisation for de Gaulle’s Free French spy service in London, the BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignement et d’Action). Unlike F Section, it preferred large, centrally controlled networks, more akin to an underground army.
SOE was nearly a year old and under considerable Whitehall criticism for delivering little of value to the wider war effort at the time that Jean Duboué’s intelligence started to arrive in Baker Street. Up to this moment almost all the secret agents SOE had dispatched to France had been sent to the Vichy zone non-occupée. Suddenly, here was an opportunity to get involved in the spying business, not just in the occupied zone, but also, given Bordeaux’s role as a submarine base, in an area of real strategic importance to the battle of the Atlantic.
SOE decided to send a secret agent of their own to Bordeaux to see what was going on.
Robert Leroy was in many ways an unsuitable person for such a pioneering and precarious mission. A former marine engineer from the Brest area, Leroy’s SOE training reports describe him as ‘shrewd … [but] suffering from the weaknesses of his class – a proneness to alcoholic indulgence and women’ – and add, in a comment which tells us more about SOE’s snobbery than it does about Leroy’s table manners, that he was ‘out of place in an Officers’ Mess’.
Under the codename ‘Alain’, Robert Leroy was landed from an SOE ‘ghost ship’ on a beach at Barcarès near Perpignan on the night of 19 September 1941. His orders were to make his way to Duboué’s contact, Gaston Hèches in Tarbes, and thence to Bordeaux, where he was to liaise with Jean Duboué, get a job in the port and assess the possibilities of attacking the German submarine pens. Unfortunately, the explosives Leroy was supposed to take with him somehow got lost during the landing, leaving him with no option but to set off on his mission without them. His journey to Bordeaux appears to have been both leisurely and bibulous, for he did not reach the city until mid-November, leaving behind a trail of debt and unpaid bar bills.
Arriving in Bordeaux, Leroy contacted Duboué, who used his influence to get the newcomer a job as a tractor driver in the docks. The new arrival quickly established a relationship with the director of warehouses in the Port de la Lune, to whom Leroy hinted that he was involved in black-market operations which could be of mutual profit to both of them. In return he had his card stamped ‘Indispensable pour le Port de Bordeaux’. This meant that Leroy, provided he wore his docker’s blue blouse, could roam anywhere he liked, safe from German checks and roll calls.
Other early information came from a fellow Breton marine engineer, who furnished Leroy with intelligence on the blockade-runners. These merchantmen were using Bordeaux in increasing numbers, unloading the precious raw materials (tungsten, molybdenum, rubber) needed by the German war machine and reloading their holds with blueprints and examples of new German technology – such as radar and proximity fuses – for the Japanese. In early 1942, Leroy sent back ‘detailed reports on the shipping and also a map of the docks’ to London. They arrived at a most propitious moment. On 9 May that year, the head of SOE and Minister of Economic Warfare, Lord Selborne, wrote to Prime Minister Churchill drawing his attention to the Bordeaux blockade-runners and their ‘most vital cargoes’ and proposing that it was now crucial to the national interest to ‘[stop] the trade altogether’.
Suddenly SOE found themselves, through the unlikely person of the ever-convivial Robert Leroy, with a ringside seat on what had just become a national strategic war target. London immediately recalled their secret agent to make a full report. It seems probable that Leroy returned to Britain via San Sebastián with Suzanne Duboué acting as his guide, for one of his first acts on reaching London on 29 May 1942 was to send a message back to Bordeaux through the BBC French Service, announcing his arrival with the words: ‘Bonjour à Mouton’.
After a full debriefing and a few days’ leave, Leroy was sent back to Bordeaux with instructions to continue his work and prepare for reinforcements. Bordeaux was about to become, along with Paris, SOE’s most important centre for spying and sabotage in occupied France.
