THE WORST TRAITOR OF ALL
That’s what MI6 called an East End jailbird who lied and cheated his way across France. When our agents exposed him, he joined the Nazis and condemned 150 of his comrades to death . . . while pursuing a life of champagne and women
THE SHOWDOWN was fittingly violent. It was 1946 and the war in Europe had been over for almost a year when armed police surrounded an apartment building in central Paris. They were acting on a tip-off that a wanted traitor-on-the-run, a renegade British soldier who had sided with the Germans and betrayed hundreds of men and women to the Gestapo, was holed up in a flat there.
The police crept up the stairs, but their heavy tread gave them away and the tall, flamehaired fugitive was waiting at the open door, pistol in hand. He fired, they shot back and their hail of bullets slammed him back across the shabby room and onto the bed, where he bled to death.
It was over at long last — a blood- stained finale for the conman from Hackney, whose double-dealing and murderous collaboration with the Nazis since 1940 led to MI6 declaring him ‘the worst British traitor of the war’.
MI5 marked his death with the terse note: ‘He has now been liquidated.’
Harold Cole was his name, though he went by many others. He was variously Mason, Rooke, Corser, de Loebelle, Anderson, Deram, Godfrey, preceded by Paul or Joseph or Richard, Captain, Sergeant, whatever took his fancy, whatever he thought might give him an advantage or get him out of a tight corner.
But his business was always the same — treachery.
His story is told in a new book by author Josh Ireland examining the lives and motivations of British traitors in World War II. But whereas others — notably the radio propagandist William ‘ Lord Haw-Haw’ Joyce and John Amery, who tried to recruit British prisonersof-war to an SS ‘ Legion of St George’ — betrayed their country on ideological grounds, what makes Cole stand out is that he did so out of nothing but greed and self-interest.
At first, though, he appeared to be one of the good guys. Operating on his own behind enemy lines in France in the years after Dunkirk, he claimed to be a British agent organising clandestine escape lines to get stranded British soldiers, shot-down bomber crew and escaping PoWs home.
And there is indisputable evidence that ‘ le capitaine Anglaise’, as admiring locals called him, did a great deal of positive work, escorting men on high-risk journeys from German-occupied northern France to the relative safety of selfgoverning Vichy France in the south, from where they could get home by ship or via Spain.
AuTHORITIESin London gave him the thumbs-up. They saw him as a useful asset, a hero even. Many of those he brought out wouldn’t hear a word against him.
But all the while he was stealing money intended to finance those operations and living a high life of champagne, fast girls and fast cars on the proceeds.
As we will see later, when he was rumbled by his own side, he sold out to the Germans, betraying scores of Resistance workers and men on the run, working with the Gestapo and even watching as they tortured those he’d given up.
As the Allies neared Paris in the summer of 1944, he fled, heading eastwards towards Germany in a red sports car, dressed in full black Gestapo uniform — now his true colours — and with a submachine gun at this side.
The extent of his treachery would have come as no surprise to anyone who had bothered to dig into his background or question the inconsistencies in his concocted life story before trusting him.
They would have quickly discovered that the suave upper- class Englishman dressed in plus-fours, with plastered-down hair, a finelyclipped moustache and a liberal use of ‘old boy’ and ‘old man’ in his conversation was an imposter.
A child of down-and- out East London, he’d embarked on a career of petty crime as a teenager before graduating to burglary, embezzlement and passing dud cheques. He’d been jailed twice and was still wanted back home for 13 larceny offences.
Cole was always a chancer, a spiv with all the charm and nerve of an Arthur Daley and with a complete absence of scruples.
He couldn’t be straight if he tried. Joining the Army, he was with the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1940, but his role was hardly heroic. As everyone else dashed for Dunkirk and home, he was left behind, locked up in the guardroom for absconding with funds from the sergeants’ mess, intending to spend it on hookers. As the Germans took over and France descended into chaos, here was the perfect opportunity for him to re-invent himself.
In a stolen black Peugeot he dabbled in the black market in Lille and presented himself to the locals as a former Scotland Yard detective who had been bodyguard to Mrs Simpson before she married the abdicated Edward VIII and became Duchess of Windsor.
He said he was now a captain in British intelligence, tasked with getting evaders back to Blighty.
Cole began building a network of safe houses, couriers, document forgers and helpers, with apparent disregard for danger.
He didn’t bother to disguise his English appearance, and in his baggy plus-fours would happily sit in bars and restaurants with Germans, who somehow never cottoned on. Government documents from the National Archives note that he spoke ‘ very bad French with strong Cockney accent’ and ‘NO German.’
When his car broke down on the way south with some escapers, he even had the gall to flag down a German army lorry for help. If he bragged too much and his tales of escaping the Germans seemed to get taller each time of telling, his sheer bravado stilled any doubters.
As did his immaculate manners. To anyone who helped him he would say courteously in his plummiest tones: ‘In the name of my King and country, I thank you.’
COLElinked his own operation to an established British- run escape line based in Marseilles. In this seedy city swarming with pimps, pushers, gangsters, Nazi agents and spies, he felt at home. And he did well for himself.
‘Monsieur Paul’, as he now liked to be known, spent more and more time there, splashing the cash in nightclubs and restaurants, playing the big man. ‘Don’t worry,’ he would boast to those who urged caution, ‘I’ve got the Germans in my pocket.’
But doubts began to grow among the network organisers there, not just about his indiscretion but over where the money was coming from. He had to be on the fiddle. Evidence emerged that he was stealing hundreds of thousands of francs sent from London to help escapers, and funnelling them into his own ever-bulging wallet.
The escape organisers were in a quandary. London remained adamant that Cole was a man to be trusted, but those on the ground were increasingly convinced he was not. At worst, they feared he was in league with the Germans and, at best, he was a risk not worth taking any more.
They called him to a meeting in a flat in Marseilles to confront him — at which point, all Cole’s surface bravado fell away and he slumped to his knees, admitted he’d been on the take and begged for mercy. ‘I have done good things as well, you know,’ he pleaded.
They locked him in the bathroom while they decided his fate. Shooting him seemed the only recourse open to them, but, while they deliberated, wily Cole climbed out of the bathroom window and scarpered. Not long after, he surfaced back in Lille, in German hands.
Whether Cole handed himself over voluntarily or German military intelligence, the Abwehr, was tracking him anyway and chose this moment to pounce, is unclear. But, either way, he was now well and truly a stooge of the Nazis.
He needed no encouragement to spill the beans on the escape lines — names, addresses, routes, maps,
damning information that filled 30 typewritten pages. What was striking, writes author Josh Ireland, was ‘the speed with which he shrugs off whatever residual loyalty he might feel towards the country in which he was born’.
Before, he’d been known for assiduously standing to attention to sing God Save The King with great patriotic fervour and spitting contemptuously behind the backs of German soldiers. Now, in a trice, he switched allegiance en enthusiastically, to save him himself. A Almost immediately, membe bers of the escape network in no northern France were hauled aw away for interrogation, to torture and execution. Cole was often there when they were detained. On some occasions the Germans would pretend theyh were arresting him too, s so he could carry on playing his hideous double game of liesi and bluff. In the coming years, he collabo collaborated with the Gestapo to lay traps for French people hiding Allied airmen and to capture agents as they parachuted in. In all, it is thought that at least 150 men and women died in German hands as a result of his treachery.
He even used Suzanne, his French wife and the mother of his child, in an attempt to infiltrate and betray the resistance groups for which she was a courier.
Young and impressionable, she was besotted with him and was quickly caught up in his web of deceit. They married in April 1942 and she gave birth to a boy seven months later, but the child was sickly and died.
To her, Cole insisted he was actually a double agent working against the Germans, not for them. He pretended he was on the run from the Gestapo and she believed him, until the truth was made plain to her and she fled from him.
Thereafter she slept with a pistol under her pillow in case he found her.
But she was not the only woman to be captivated by his charm and plausibility. As the National Archives record notes, Cole ‘admitted to an excessive craving for women which causes him to indulge in embezzlement in a way that shows he either has no scruples or is a sexual maniac’.
He convinced one girlfriend, Charlotte Leblanc, to hand over her life’s savings on the promise that he would pay her back from the wealth he said he had stashed away back in London.
It was all fog and mirrors. In reality, he was working for the Gestapo at their Avenue Foch headquarters in Paris, where torture such as water-boarding and electric currents to the body was routine to extract information.
His allegiance to the Nazis was now so obvious that, in 1944, with the Allied armies closing in, he fled Paris. Over the next nine months, the Germany he had chosen to side with collapsed and millions perished in the wreckage, but somehow Cole managed to survive, and even prosper.
In June 1945, he turned up in a small town on the banks of the Danube in southern Germany, calling himself Captain Mason, claiming to be a British undercover agent and offering his services to the occupying American forces.
Turning his coat yet again, he now went out on security operations to flush out Nazis in hiding and murdered at least one of them.
He also accumulated six motor cars, 200 gallons of petrol, 500 bottles of wine, weapons and ammunition. He even hobnobbed with the top brass of the occupying forces, holding a drinks party for them at the home he had requisitioned from its Nazi owner. The old conman was back in business.
But, foolhardy as ever and convinced of his own invincibility, he sent a postcard to his exmistress, Charlotte, in Paris. When news of this reached British investigators on the hunt for deserters, a major was sent to seize him.
Taken by surprise, he was quickly disarmed of the Tommy gun and two revolvers he was carrying. He was stripped of his British uniform and searched in every orifice in case he was hiding a suicide cyanide pill.
Cole recognised the game was up. ‘ You are being detained on suspicion of having worked for the Gestapo and for having given away to them the names of persons engaged in escape organisations,’ he was told.
He nodded his agreement. ‘I realised this would come one day,’ he replied. I know I must die for what I have done.’
And yet, astonishingly, still it was not the end of the road for him. Houdini-like, he got away again, disguising himself as an American sergeant and walking out from the prison he was held in awaiting court martial, with the typewriter on which he claimed he was writing his memoirs under his arm.
NOWon the loose in a Europe awash with refugees, he disappeared yet again, and could have stayed free for good if that old bravado had not got the better of him.
Instead of keeping his head down, he went back to his old haunts. A man answering his description was seen in a Paris nightclub. The Allied authorities were tipped off and closed in on him again — this time there was no escape. As we saw earlier, Harold Cole went down, all guns blazing, for the last time.
There was no one to mourn him, and rightly so. His behaviour was beyond forgiveness, even by the godly. A French priest he had betrayed and sent to the guillotine left a last letter in which he called Cole ‘a monster of cowardice and weakness. I would not hesitate to burn him’.
To a Scottish clergyman who had been part of the escape organisation in Marseilles, Cole was ‘a disgusting traitor without shame. You deserted your country and sold your friends to the Nazis for money, God help you.’
Cole’s mistress Charlotte summed up the stain on his soul when she wrote to him: ‘You have sacrificed others not for a very important mission, as you pretended to, but to save your own skin.’
Harold Cole was buried, in Paris, in an unmarked pauper’s grave.
The Traitors: A True Story Of Blood, Betral And Deceit by Josh Ireland, is published by John Murray at £20. To order a copy for £15 (offer valid until July 8, 2017, p&p free), call 0844 571 0640 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk.