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In the chaotic opening months of the First World War, Britain's intelligence services were desperate to learn where the Germans would attack next.
Enter the White Lady.
As historian Helen Fry explores in this episode of the History Extra podcast, this courageous network of Belgian civilians began spying on German troops from behind enemy lines and, in the process, changed the course of the war.
Here in conversation with Spencer Mizen, Helen tells an extraordinary story of massacres, drug dealing, double-crossing and secret messages encased in potatoes.
So Helen, your new book is called The White Lady, the story of two key British Secret Service networks behind German lines.
I wonder if I could start, Helen, by asking you, what was The White Lady?
The White Lady, in French, La Dame Blanche, was named after an ancient German legend.
And it's fascinating because this legend said if the German army saw the ghostly figure of a white lady on the battlefield, it meant it was about to fall.
It was going to be defeated.
And with it, the Kaiser and the ruling dynasty of Germany.
And so this World War One network, British network with Belgian men and women, came actually named it the White Lady, believing that the information, the intelligence that they were going to send back to London, would ultimately bring down the German army.
It's wonderful.
It is.
So tell us how it came about then.
I mean who in British intelligence came up with the idea to work with a network of Belgian agents behind German lines?
And what did they hope to gain from this enterprise?
Well, the British Secret Service in its very early days.
Its head was Mansfield Cumming C, the head of what today we call MI6, And he already had a network in Belgium just before the beginning of the First World War.
So it all starts kicking off.
He starts to brief his agents there.
And it's quite obvious that Belgium is going to be significant.
They know that war is coming, that the Germans to move their troops to the front line because they believe that Belgium will be occupied and we believe that the German aim is ultimately to take France, which of course it was.
They didn't succeed in World War I in doing that.
But if you could set up this network of Belgian men and women that could watch the movement of German troops, which they did by train, right across Belgium.
And you just simply observe the kind of troops, artillery armaments.
What is it they're transporting?
And it takes two to three days at least to go across that country.
And then it's going in a particular direction towards the front line.
So you can actually predict, ah, the German offensive, the next offensive is going to be here.
We need to move our troops up to this area, because the whole border is was hundreds of kilometres long.
You cannot defend the whole of that border when the German army is going to mount a major offensive.
And let's remember that the British army, the British Expeditionary Force as it was called was, only in August 1914, 100000 men.
And they were about to face a German army of around a million.
So that gives you a scale.
So we need those Belgian men and women behind the lines now.
And so Mansfield Cumming made sure that that began at the start of the First World War.
But just finally to say the leader, Doudonny Lambrecht, this young sort of 30-year-old.
He actually knew that the Allies would need intelligence.
So from December 1914 he already sets up this little network.
But then he finds all kinds of ways to try and reach out to the British.
So it's happening from two ends, which is great.
And so just to establish a bit of context here, what was life like for the people of Belgium under German occupation in the first months of the First World War?
It was really grim.
Something I think we don't appreciate is that the German forces were as brutal and the German counterintelligence teams were as brutal in the First World War as they were in the Second World War.
And so in those first few weeks, as the army is sweeping partly through the south of Belgium towards near the Ardennes area, before it goes up to Brussels, which it does sort of later in August, they are carrying out massacres of civilians.
So the town of Dinant in the Liège province, 674 civilians women, children and some men amongst them, were just massacred.
And so you've got a population that is going to hate the occupying forces.
And wherever they went, there was 50 people massacred there.
And one wonders why the German army did that.
Yeah, I was going to ask you that.
I mean, what was their motivation for doing this?
Well, it's not clear from anything that I've read in the intelligence reports.
But of course, there is this resentment.
And they also impose themselves.
In some of the castles in the countryside, they just take them over.
They billet their officers there.
Some ordinary Belgians had to leave, but many of them had to live alongside or in the same house or chateau.
And the most incredibly courageous thing is that we have some of these men and women, and a lot of them, the women of different ages living literally with an occupying army in their home in their chateau, running a whole intelligence section for the British right under their noses.
I mean, that takes some real courage.
And in the introduction to the book you talk about a family that lived in a castle that operated in this way.
Can you tell us a little bit about the story, please?
This is one of the most inspirational parts for me.
This family, de Radiguez family, headed by Therese.
She's 49 years old in World War I. And she's a prime example.
She's living with her family in Conno Castle.
The sons are soon off to fight on the front line.
And this castle's taken over.
The castle's depicted on the jacket cover of the book, actually.
It's wonderful.
And there she is with these German officers that take over the castle.
She's living there, making sure they're okay at breakfast.
You know, do they need anything?
And And she's running a whole section for the British that becomes known as Post 49.
And then her daughters become involved as well.
And then when World War Two hits 21 years later, 22 years later, she does it all over again.
She's in her early 70s.
She's moved to Brussels and she's widowed.
And again her daughters.
They do it all over again for the successor networks to the White Lady, which again is an MI6 network.
Can you tell us a bit about the state of British intelligence at the outbreak of the First World War?
How sophisticated was it?
How did its work in Belgium sort of represent a break from what had gone before?
It was certainly what we would say a nascent organisation that's sort of developing.
It's developing its techniques in spycraft.
It's really very simple context of understanding.
They need information from behind the lines.
It's very hard to get people infiltrate them in behind the lines at this point, so ordinary belgian men and women are kind of making it up as they go.
And it's only in the second world war, as far as we can tell, with the successor network, that mi6 sends some directions across saying great, the intelligence you got from that area.
We need a little bit more on this.
Is there anything you can tell us about that?
But on the whole they use their common sense.
I guess it's obvious if they're seeing huge ammunition dumps.
The Germans were developing in World War One what they want to call the big gun.
So anything?
They just use their intuition and they developed methods of spycraft, which some of them are really quite funny, like lobbing potatoes with little notes in them of intelligence over guns, the electrified wire that the Germans had built.
So it's coming from the initiative of the Belgian men and women, and there's no training.
And likewise for the early intelligence service, what later becomes MI6.
As I said, there's no training for the officers either.
They're having to learn on the job.
In one way, it's quite amateurish, but what they go on to deliver is extraordinary.
They deliver... over 95% of intelligence from behind German lines for the British Army.
I mean, wow.
So how did the British intelligence officers communicate with the Belgian agents behind the German lines?
They had somebody undercover.
They had a little team, actually, undercover in Rotterdam.
In World War I, Holland was neutral.
So the couriers again Belgians, men and women, would smuggle themselves out through the border, and not easy after 1915, because by May June 1915 the Germans had completed this high-voltage electrified fence to stop spies coming in and out, and they still managed to get through there.
They also used coded messages, codes in newspaper articles.
They used all these ingenious ways to, And the key person from around July 1916 in Rotterdam was an intelligence officer, Henry Landau.
And he also had had no training.
He'd been wounded in action.
He'd also been unwell in hospital.
And they said, well, I'll give you a desk job.
Well, actual fact, he was fluent in French.
So Mansfield coming interviewed him and said, I've got just the job for you.
Go and start up the networks that have gone down because do Donny Lambrecht.
The original founder.
He was caught by the Germans and shot at Fort Rose de la Chartreuse in April 1916.
Yeah, this was really risky for these men and women.
Yeah, I was going to ask you that, actually.
How dangerous was this?
What peril were these people exposing themselves to?
Oh, the greatest danger.
In two world wars.
We think about the First World War, we think about the trenches and the fighting, but what we don't think about is the women and men who are doing the resistance behind the lines, who are actually gathering the intelligence.
They're not doing sabotage.
This network did not sabotage German lines.
That was other groups.
So hugely risky because the Germans would hunt them down.
They knew that there would be Belgians helping us.
And if they were caught, and many of them lost their lives, there was a death penalty.
But also some of the women had long prison sentences.
The Germans didn't quite have enough evidence.
They had long prison sentences, sometimes taken to Germany.
Siegsburg prison was a famous one.
Conditions were horrendous, as you can imagine.
Interrogation was as brutal as World War II.
So it was a real risk, and they knew the risks that they were undertaking.
But they also knew that...
The intelligence they smuggled out had the ability to win the war for them, to end the occupation.
And you mentioned earlier about people chucking potatoes over a bar of wire.
Is there any other examples of people really going that extra mile to get the intelligence to the British?
Yeah, we've got lots of wonderful examples.
We've got them throwing clods of mud.
So they would hide a message in a clod of mud and lob it over the electrified fences.
The other one I love are the women who knit.
So you have these women of all ages sat outside their little cottages, some of them incredibly poor, and they are just knitting.
So the Germans think, oh, that's very sweet, they're knitting.
Well, actually, they are knitting very simple coded messages into their scarves and jumpers.
And those scarves and jumpers get lobbed over the electrified fence.
So some peasant picks it up on the other side.
And again, the Germans think, oh, they've given a nice jumper for that peasant for the winter.
And it makes its way back to an intelligence officer in headquarters in France.
And he has to decode this.
But it's very simple.
Purl one, drop two, knit whatever it is, a very plain stitch, drop one.
A very early GCHQ, we might say.
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Can we talk a little bit more about the British intelligence officers now?
Because they weren't always beacons of virtue themselves, were they?
Some of them had quite complicated past, didn't they?
I wonder if you could introduce us to a couple of them, please.
Yes.
So we have Captain Tinsley, who sort of heads the whole undercover in Rotterdam.
He and his wife tried to defraud from a robbery of jewellery.
Well, he said he was only protecting his wife.
He was just lying to protect her.
But he'd spent time in prison.
You had Henry Landau, very controversial figure.
In 1917, the Dutch believed they'd had complaints that he was involved with young boys of a sort of age of 15.
They never took him to court and it was never proven.
And so this is a dark side.
And then there was another officer, Sigmund Payne Best, who realised that the only way he could go in and out of the border which for him was risky as a British officer was to bribe the guards on the border.
And he would bribe them with drugs.
He was effectively a drug dealer.
But it's, does the end justify the means?
It was the only way, as far as listeners perhaps to think what they might think about this.
But that's what he did.
This is history.
This is fact.
I think it's hard to make a moral judgment on why they did certain things.
But there are a lot of characters in the history of British intelligence that were not Snow White, but they made damn good intelligence officers.
It was a very different world.
I'm not saying it was right.
I'm not saying it was wrong.
But I just like to do the research and to put the facts on paper so we understand.
Speaking of Henry Landau, he wrote quite a controversial account of his time working with the white lady, didn't he?
Yes.
So in the 1930s, highly irresponsible.
At that time, and even later, some of our listeners will remember spy catcher Peter Wright.
Huge controversy.
He couldn't publish his memoir in the UK.
He was in Australia.
He could never come back from there.
And that caused huge controversy, because anybody who served in intelligence has signed the Official Secrets Act for life.
I mean OK, there are bits and pieces coming out now, not from MI6, but from other secret organisations like MI5.
But it's frowned upon, forbidden actually, to write their memoirs.
And Landau did.
He didn't publish it in the UK.
He was in America.
But again highly irresponsible because he names some of those agents and the leader, Doudonny Lambrecht's cousin, Walter Dewey.
So when Doudonny Lambrecht is shot at Chartreuse, that fortress in Liege, his cousin takes over again, only in his early 30s.
And so when it comes to World War II, Dewey starts up the network again.
They rename it Clarence service because they can't call it white lady.
The Germans know about it.
He called his memoirs the white lady and he mentions Dewey as the leader.
So Dewey has to run the network in hiding in World War II.
So hugely irresponsible to compromise the security of those agents.
Now, as you said, this is a kind of a story of two halves, isn't it?
Because incredibly, the network was resurrected 20 years later, when Belgium was once again occupied by German forces in the Second World War.
And how did that come about?
And how did the network's operation differ in the Second World War from the first?
I love the start of this network because you would think it would start in May 1940, when the Germans again crossed the border and occupied the country.
But in actual fact on the 3rd of September 1939, so the day that war breaks out, Walter Dewey gets a knock on the door from this mysterious MI6 figure, Captain Daniel.
And Captain Daniel says to him, Let's remember, Dewey is now in his 60s.
He's in his 60s.
And he says to him, I want you to call up the old guard of the White Lady.
Call them all up.
They're all in their 60s and 70s.
And start it again.
And Dewey goes to Therese de Radigues.
You know, the lady that was in Conno Castle had now moved to Brussels.
She is 74 years old.
And the two of them co-found this network that's called Clarence Service.
And then, of course, they recruit a lot more of the younger generation.
But in that period between September 39 and the occupation the following May, they are an early warning system for a German invasion.
And they're sending agents into Germany to try and look at the German armament buildup.
Anything of use.
So they're a fascinating group. network.
And how did they use the knowledge they'd accrued in the First World War and apply it during the Second?
Well, they're developing beyond.
So they're learning from any security mistakes.
And my understanding is from the Belgian experts that in World War II the Clarence Service had the least fatalities disasters, if you like.
They lost 2 of their agents, which is really very, very low in comparison to the disasters that happened when a lot of the networks went down in 1915.
Again, there's a wider story for our historians to tell here of brave Belgian agents that were parachuted in
They were taken to London, trained, and a bit like the SOE.
They were not SOE, but a bit like those agents dropped into France.
They were dropped back into Belgium with sophisticated MI6 radio equipment.
So over 800 messages get sent back to MI6.
Very risky, as we know, in the wartime, because the Germans had their special vans to try and track down any radio transmissions.
But again, they're watching the train networks.
It's very, very simple, but really effective.
And they are sending back high quality intelligence, particularly information on Hitler's secret weapon program, the V1 and the V2.
I don't think we can overestimate the significance of both of these networks in two world wars.
And you do wonder how we would have fared without the information they managed to smuggle out.
And how would you describe the relationship between the Belgian agents and the intelligence services back in Britain?
Did the agents feel appreciated for the work they were doing?
As far as we can tell, yes.
And we're at the very early stages of understanding the World War Two story, because in Belgium these files are only just being declassified and they're not all out yet.
So my understanding is it's going to take them five years to declassify all the agents intelligence files from World War Two, for not just the Clarence service, but to give you an idea of the scale of this,
Belgium had officially 240 resistance networks that included operations like the Clarence Service intelligence work.
That's staggering.
It is, yeah.
Isn't it?
It's staggering for a country the size of Belgium.
But it gives you an idea of its geographical significance and the fact that these men and women were prepared to do it all over again.
And what sources did you use when researching this book?
Two main sources.
London and Brussels.
So I use these wonderful red boxes in the Imperial War Museum.
They have two boxes for the White Lady, Madame Blanche, and they have eight boxes for Clarence Service.
The Clarence Service ones have only been able to be viewed by historians in the last few years.
When I first looked 20 years ago, they were not releasing it for whatever reason.
And then I also used archives in Brussels, in the state archives, They are fascinating.
There are so many files we still haven't gone through.
So that's for both world wars again.
It's staggering the sheer volume of files that are enabling us to piece together what Belgium did for our freedoms in two world wars.
And it sounds like there's still a lot more to learn about these two stories then.
There is.
And not only these two networks, yes, we can get a deeper understanding, but all the other networks.
White Lady wasn't the only one in World War I.
There were other networks, some of which have been studied already by our historians, but there are so many more that haven't properly been studied.
In World War II.
We're literally at the tip of the iceberg because the files, as I said, are still being released.
And we are well, I estimate, around 30 to 40 years behind all that study of historical material we have on france, for example, or some of the other countries.
We've got an awful lot of information.
It's great on other countries, but there are countries, like belgium, where if you were to ask people what did belgium do in two world wars, we will think of the trenches naturally, and and the slaughter and the bloodshed in those trenches and on the battlefields.
But how many of us would think that Belgium turned out to be one of the most significant MI6 networks, certainly in two world wars?
And it says words to that effect in the official MI6 history.
And Helen, during your research for the book, you obviously came across lots of incredibly courageous people who did some incredibly brave things.
Is there one episode that really sticks in your mind from your research?
You'd like to tell our listeners about?
I would, actually.
It goes back to that heroine, Thérèse de Radigues, who features a tiny bit in some of the histories written in Belgium, but she's unknown over here.
She's the one that was 49 in World War I, and in the 1940s, in World War II, she's in her 70s.
And in January 1944...
It's thought that her name has accidentally been used across the radio message.
So Walter Dewey smuggles himself out of hiding.
He knows her very well, of course.
They've known each other for decades and goes to Russell's and tells her you've got to leave.
And she says, I'm not leaving my post.
She's 79 years old now.
And effectively, readers can read about this full episode in the book.
He manages to flee out the back of the house where the Gestapo arrive.
He charges down the street.
Unfortunately, devastatingly, he's shot dead in the street.
The Germans don't realise the chap they've shot is actually the head of the network.
Thérèse de Radigues is carted off for interrogation.
And I love this part about her.
It's thinking out of the box.
She feigns senile dementia.
And the interrogators believe, oh, my goodness, we picked up this woman.
We thought she was a spy.
But actually, she doesn't know what the weather is or her name.
So they let her go.
And the extraordinary thing is that her subsectors.
She ran different sectors around Brussels that went up to the coast.
They delivered vital V weapon intelligence.
It is astonishing and really inspirational information.
They let her go and she continues to run her part of the network until the end of the war and beyond.
Finally, Helen, why is this a story that we need to still be aware of today?
Why is it so important that you've been able to tell this story in your book?
I always think there are lessons to learn for our contemporary age to understand the fight for freedom, to understand that democracy is fragile in every generation.
And I think sometimes not to find a point on it we kind of sleepwalk into complacency, thinking everything's going to be OK.
And current world events show us it's very turbulent and unpredictable.
But also we have a duty to remember, a duty to remember, to tell the stories of these heroic and they literally are heroic men and women, because they deserve our respect and our remembrance.
We wouldn't be, I really believe, here today without what they achieved in two world wars.
That was Helen Fry speaking to Spencer Mizzen.
Helen has written or edited more than 25 books on the World Wars, with a focus on British intelligence, espionage and spies.
Her latest book is The White Lady, the story of two key British Secret Service networks behind German lines.
