Island Life Magazine Ltd August/September 2008 | Page 52

life

FEATURE

Escape into
Espionage

By June Elford

Seventeen years ago on a cold
November afternoon I drove
to Firestone Copse to meet a
spy. Would he resemble one
of John Le Carre’s characters.
I wondered, or maybe James
Bond, Ian Fleming’s top spy?
The man who opened
the door of his house was
like neither. He was an
85-year-old Frenchman every
bit as charming as agent 007.
But Roland Rieul was
my idea of a spy - dashing
across frontiers, hiding from
the Germans and meeting
underworld types in Paris
cafés.
Speaking with just
a trace of a French accent
Roland told me his regiment
was captured in France in
1940 and he was sent to a
prisoner-of-war camp. The
prisoners worked in an aircraft
factory where he wrote a
mixture of gossip and war
news on the toilet paper in the
latrines and also ‘mislaid’ some
of the job sheets to delay the
factory’s production.
The Gestapo soon got
suspicious and he was moved
to a disciplinary camp where
the prisoners existed on a diet
of thin soup and were made
to dig trenches in sub-zero
temperatures.
Roland
escaped with another man
and managed to get on a train
from Berlin to Stuttgart but
they were caught and arrested
by a Gestapo agent and sent
by train to a reprisal camp
in Russia. On the journey

52

another prisoner managed
to unlock a door and Roland
said, “I knew it was only the
fear of jumping from the train
that was between me and
freedom.”
He landed safely but the
railway workers nearby
handed him over to the SS
guards who beat him up
and put him back on the
train. More determined than
ever to escape, Roland was
successful on his third attempt
and using a home-made
compass, walked through
the forests and mountains to
Switzerland. Once across the
Swiss border he went to the
British Consulate at Basle
and showed them a sketch
he’d drawn of a canal the
Germans had camouflaged to
stop Allied planes using it as

a landmark. Roland told the
people at the consulate that a
‘dummy’ canal had been made
to look like a factory when it
was a prisoner-of-war camp
and hundreds of French and
Russian prisoners were being
killed in the raids.
Impressed by his story,
someone in British Intelligence
asked if he fancied being a spy.
“And that was that,” Roland
said, “I agreed but only until
Paris was liberated.”
Next followed a period
of recuperation and a big
dossier to study on German
codes, their methods and
organisation. “Never let it
out of your sight,” Roland
was instructed but when an
attractive blonde in the hotel
invited him to join her for
coffee, a note was slipped

www.wightfrog.com/islandlife