In the history of the British Secret Service, SIS/MI6, two of its intelligence networks have been given high acclaim and both were in Belgium. They were La Dame Blanche (the White Lady) in the First World War and the Clarence Service in the Second World War. La Dame Blanche, hitherto the White Lady, is described in the official MI6 history as “the most successful single British human intelligence operation of the First World War.” And Claude Dansey, a former deputy head of MI6, said of its successor network, the Clarence Service, that “by the quality and quantity of the messages and documents which it provided, Clarence was the highest among the networks of military information of all occupied Europe.”
And yet the existence of these two highly significant MI6 networks are still largely unknown by the general public. Today, the sources for their history can be reconstructed from archives in the Imperial War Museum in London, and the State Archives in Brussels and State Security Archives in CegeSoma in the same city. The vast majority of the material is in French, but occasionally Dutch and Flemish.
Many patriotic and loyal Belgian women and men operated in clandestine missions and intelligence-gathering in both world wars. They were strong leaders, agents, couriers and spies who were at the very heart of these two MI6 networks. They collected information on troop movements and defences behind the German lines, and wrote coded reports and messages which were then smuggled out of Belgium to British intelligence in Rotterdam, Holland. Families set up safehouses, ran letterboxes and established courier networks.
The agents delivered critical eyewitness information that enabled British intelligence and Allied commanders in the field to build a picture of German positions behind the lines, and in which geographical regions the troops were located, and the enemy’s fighting capability. Information on the movement of troops in a particular direction enabled a prediction of the area for the next German offensive against Allied positions, often along the front line
Women were prominent in the network and not incidental to its success; women like Thérèse de Radiguès who ran a whole intelligence section from the region around Ciney and sent agents into the German-occupied Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Like the men, the women swore an oath of allegiance and were given a military rank and in some cases they outranked the men.
Over 40 agents initially worked for the White Lady and theirs was a great sacrifice because if captured, they suffered brutality and torture during interrogation by the Germans. Yet, knowing this, they continued their work because they understood the importance of their operations for the Allies. The network was led by Dieudonné Lambrecht, a patriotic Belgian from Liège, from December 1914 until April 1916 when he was captured by the Germans. He was shot for espionage on 18 April 1916 at the Citadel of the Chartreuse, Liège. His 34-year-old cousin Walthère Dewé took over.
By the armistice in November 1918, agent numbers in the White Lady had risen to over 1,500. For these brave women and men, it was a war without uniform, passing invisibly through enemy-occupied Belgium and northern France to gather vital intelligence for MI6. In the nascent years of the British Secret Service, which had only been formed in 1909, these Belgians were developing early spy techniques, including invisible ink, knitting coded messages into jumpers, and organising the structure of an effective intelligence network, that would come to define spycraft going forwards.
When the call came again in 1939 and 1940, many of the same men and women, albeit older, did it all again for the successor network called the Clarence Service.
On 3 September 1939, the day Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, fifty-nine-year-old Walthère Dewé was contacted by a British secret service agent, known only as “Daniel”. MI6 had an important mission for him and the old guard of the White Lady. He was asked to re-establish an intelligence network in Belgium, modelled on the White Lady, but modernised and with methods of spycraft modified for a new era. MI6 was under no illusion that Germany might seize the country again. The Clarence Service set up observation posts as an early warning system of a German invasion, which did indeed occur in May 1940 when German troops crossed the border and began to occupy Belgium again.
A new leader emerged alongside Dewé and that was Hector Demarque (codename Clarence). The network was named after him. As before, its members were militarised and again, women were indispensable and operated as heads of intelligence sectors, couriers, agents and ran letterboxes and safehouses. They were as courageous as the men and undertook the same personal risks. Thérèse de Radiguès and the Tandel sisters were once again a central part of the leadership and operated as agent handlers. Thérèse’s sector went on to deliver crucial V-weapon intelligence from behind enemy lines, including the positions of V-1 installations.
From the London end, operations were headed by “Major Page”, the pseudonym for Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Jempson, who headed the Belgian section of MI6. Working with him was MI6 officer Ruth Clement Stowell (née Wright). She was an agent handler who organised the training and planned the secret missions of the agents being parachuted into both Belgium and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. She oversaw the missions, often being the last person to see the agents as they left on their flight from Tempsford airfield in Bedfordshire.
The Clarence Service did not only operate in Belgium, but dispatched agents over the border into northern France, where they were particularly active along the coastline and near sites of German defences. Other agents were secretly sent from Belgium into Germany. As the war progressed, they went deeper into Nazi Germany to gather information on military capability, new weaponry and technology as well as German units.
The observation posts set up by the Clarence Service provided an extraordinary volume of detailed military intelligence across the war. Intelligence reports in the nine months prior to D-Day, for example, provided volumes of valuable information on German troops and their movements, reports of the results of Allied bombing sorties on engine sheds and locomotives, enemy activity at aerodromes, and sketches of a range of important sites, including railways and docks. Blueprints of stations and rail lines were smuggled out to London. These are the impressive blue and white technical plans which unfurl to a length of two to three metres, and survive today in the archive of the Clarence Service at the Imperial War Museum.
Just a fortnight before D-Day, reports were urgently required by MI6 on the markings on enemy aircraft, types of aircraft engines in production as well as manufacture of special equipment and weapons, the movement of planes, location of headquarters, and the state of the railways and traffic in Belgium and Northern France. Clarence Service agents were able to provide MI6 with updated material on this. The vast intelligence-gathering across Belgium, into northern France and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg by the Belgian agents was simple but effective.
What emerges from a study of this Belgian history is a story of defiance, heroism, ingenuity and leadership that saw Belgian women and men engaged in daring acts of espionage behind the German lines. These networks sprang from the initiative and courage of ordinary Belgians. The White Lady and Clarence Service are important parts of intelligence history, largely missing in focus for far too long, and it is hoped that more historians and researchers will begin to study the numerous other clandestine Belgian networks in declassified files. So far, these files have barely been consulted outside Belgium.
I have only tapped the surface of this country’s espionage history for my latest book, but there is already a sense emerging of the strategic importance of Belgium. Belgium may emerge as the highest asset to the Allies during two world wars and outweigh other countries that have been the focus of war studies for the last 30 to 40 years. Importantly, today, Belgium should have due recognition for its heroic role and the enormous part it played in the defeat of the occupying German forces and the restoration of democracy in Europe in the twentieth century.
Helen Fry is a historian of the Second World War with a particular focus on intelligence, and the author of The White Lady: The Story of British Secret Service Networks Behind German Lines.
