YouTube Video — Transcript

The story of Harold Cole, a British sergeant turned traitor who destroyed the northern section of the Pat O'Leary escape line in occupied France, 1940-1944.

Key Takeaways

Harold Cole was a con man who exploited wartime escape networks by impersonating a British intelligence officer.
His betrayals led to the arrest and death of many helpers and evaders in northern France.
Archival records reveal a more complicated picture than the popular legend of Cole as a lone mastermind.
The episode highlights the immense risks faced by civilians sheltering Allied servicemen under German occupation.

What the video covers

A British Royal Engineers sergeant, Harold Cole, escapes captivity in May 1940 and drifts back to occupied Lille, where he obtains a false French identity card.
Cole, a career con man from Hoxton, London, presents himself as Captain Paul of British intelligence and builds trust among families sheltering stranded soldiers and airmen.
He becomes the leader of the northern section of the Pat O'Leary escape line, moving evaders south toward Marseille and over the Pyrenees.
Doubts about Cole grow as members of the network notice missing payments and inconsistencies, and some are unable to verify his claimed authority from London.
The narrative argues that London had some knowledge of Cole's character but allowed him to continue operating.
In late 1941, Cole is said to have handed German military intelligence detailed names and addresses, leading to arrests across the network.
Cole's betrayals include guiding German police posing as airmen to safe houses, resulting in arrests and deaths among helpers.
Cole later escapes, is involved in violence, and eventually ends up in postwar Germany, with the video noting that the famous legend may be simpler or different from the documented truth.

Chapters

Who was Harold Cole?

Harold Cole was a British Royal Engineers sergeant and career criminal from Hoxton, London, who became a traitor during the Second World War. After escaping custody in 1940, he posed as Captain Paul of British intelligence in occupied France and led the northern section of the Pat O'Leary escape line.

How did Cole betray the escape network?

According to the transcript, Cole handed German military intelligence names and addresses of people in the network around December 1941. He also guided German police disguised as stranded airmen to safe houses, leading to arrests and deaths.

Did London know about Cole's behavior?

The video suggests that London had some awareness of what kind of man Cole was and allowed him to continue operating. It also notes that the official story may be more complicated than the popular legend.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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In December 1941, somewhere in occupied Lille, a British sergeant sat down with a pen and wrote 30 pages for German military intelligence. He filled them with names and addresses, [music] and within days the people behind them began to disappear.

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A parish priest [music] on the River Somme, a shopkeeper in Saint-Omer, a young Australian who had come north to stop him.

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For more than a year, all of them had trusted him as Captain Paul of British intelligence.

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But London had known exactly what kind of man he was all along and had let him carry on.

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His name was Harold Cole. A senior Scotland Yard detective, Reginald Spooner, would later call him the worst traitor of the war. And that phrase has followed him for 80 years.

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On this channel, we follow one unit from the beginning of its war to the ground where its story ended. This time, the unit never wore a uniform. It was made of farmers and priests, hairdressers and town hall clerks, a young courier from

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Paris, and an Australian a long way from home. It was the northern section of the Pat O'Leary escape line, and for more than a year it carried stranded British soldiers and airmen out of occupied France.

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The man who built that unit in the north is the same man who brought it down. And running underneath the whole story is a question the famous version tends to skip. How much of the legend is actually true?

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The files now open at the National Archives in Kew, and the researchers who went back through them line by line tell a darker story in some places and a stranger one in others. We'll get to what they found.

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If you're new here, a like helps more than you might think. Every week, we follow one unit of the Second World War back to the place where its story ended, and we try to tell it with the care

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those men and women were owed. Chapter 1 The Horse Box On the 10th of May, 1940, the German army rolled into Belgium and Holland, and the long quiet winter of the phony war ended in a single morning.

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That same day, at an army depot called Le Croise La Roche on the northern edge of Lille, a sergeant of the Royal Engineers was being held under guard inside a horse box.

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He was 34 years old, and he was waiting to be tried for theft. He had taken money from the sergeants' mess fund, the cash his fellow non-commissioned officers had pooled for their own small comforts behind the lines.

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He had already escaped custody once and been caught again. Now, the war came racing toward the horse box.

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By his own later account, given to a British intelligence officer in 1945, his guards let him go once the offensive began.

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[music] He went looking for his unit across the border in Belgium and never found it.

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So, he drifted back toward Lille. What happened next sounds like a joke, but it's in his [music] own statement.

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Someone in authority spotted a sergeant without a unit and gave him a job. He was ordered to guard his old depot and stop [music] its stores from being stolen.

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The thief was now guarding the stores. He was still there on the 20th of May when German troops reached the depot and took him prisoner.

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He was marched into Lille and put into a long column of captured British soldiers heading east toward Germany.

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Near the Belgian town of Namur, he slipped out of the column and walked away.

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Over those same weeks, the evacuation at Dunkirk carried more than 300,000 men back across the channel to England.

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Several thousand others were cut off in the north of France and left behind. Some surrendered.

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[music] Many hid in barns and back bedrooms, fed by French families who risked everything [music] to keep them out of sight.

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This sergeant did something different. He went back to Lille, to a woman. Her name was Madeleine Dériaz, and he would later describe her as his mistress.

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She knew a man who could help. His name was François Dupré, [music] and he worked at the town hall.

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Dupré could produce the one thing a British soldier on the run needed more than food or clothes.

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[music] He made out a French identity card, and the name on it was Paul Delobelle.

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Think about what that card meant in the summer of 1940. For most men left behind, the choices were narrow.

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You could hide and wait, or surrender, or try the long walk south. With a French identity card in his pocket, this man could become somebody else entirely.

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And becoming somebody else was the one skill he had been practicing his whole life.

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Chapter two. The boy from Hoxton. He was born in London on the 24th of January 1906 [music] and he grew up in Hoxton, in the East End, one of the poorest districts of the city.

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His father, Albert, was a laborer. His mother, Alice, had been in service as a maid.

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When the First World War came, his father went to war and didn't come home.

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His mother married again, to a man named Thomas Mason. Keep that surname in mind, because it comes back at the very end of this story.

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The boy left school at 14, like almost every child on his street. By his late teens, he had found the trade that would carry him through the rest of his life.

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He conned people out of money. He embezzled from employers. He broke into houses. [music] Between 1923 and 1939, he went to prison again and again.

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In 1927, he joined the army, and then he walked away from it, deserting from the West Kent Regiment.

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Later, he told people he had served as a soldier in Hong Kong in the 1930s.

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That may even have been true. With this man, every claim has to be weighed against everything he actually did.

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In 1938, he turned up in France, calling himself Wing Commander Wayne of the Royal Air Force.

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A boy from the Hoxton slums, wearing a rank he had never earned, and getting away with it.

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People who met him in those years described the same figure. He stood over 6 ft tall, slim, always well-dressed. He liked plus fours and tweed, the clothes of an English country gentleman.

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He wore his hair plastered flat and kept a finely clipped mustache. One description of him said he was exactly the kind of man who could walk into a club and be accepted without a question.

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On the 13th of February, 1939, the British police photographed him after yet another arrest. It's one of the few pictures of him that survive.

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That September, Britain went to war, and Cole had only just been released from prison.

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Within days, he enlisted in the Royal Engineers, and he was sent to France with the British Expeditionary Force.

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And here, something unexpected happened. He was good at being a soldier. The army rewarded exactly what he had spent his life sharpening. He was quick, confident, and persuasive, and he rose fast to the rank of sergeant. Then, in

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March 1940, the mess fund went missing, and the sergeant ended up in the horse box.

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So, when he walked back into Lille that summer, he wasn't a lost soldier hoping to get home.

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Home meant a court-martial and probably another cell. In occupied France, nobody knew his name, and he could be whoever he chose.

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He chose to be an officer of British intelligence. Chapter 3, Captain DelaBelle. In the summer of 1940, Lille was a city cut off from the world.

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German vehicles filled its squares, its factories stood idle. The whole of the Nord and the Pas-de-Calais had been sealed off as a forbidden zone, run from Brussels rather than Paris, and nobody crossed in or out without a German pass.

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And hidden all over that forbidden zone were British soldiers. The families sheltering them faced a question nobody could answer. What happens now?

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A grown man eats a lot of food when every family is on ration cards.

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Neighbors talk. German patrols search. Every week a soldier stayed in an attic, the danger to the people downstairs grew.

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Into that silence walked a tall Englishman in good clothes. He introduced himself around Lille and the suburb of La Madeleine as [music] Captain DelaBelle of British Intelligence.

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He let people understand that he had stayed behind on purpose, on a mission, with authority from London.

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In some villages, the airmen and soldiers knew him as Sergeant Paul. Later, nearly everyone would call him Paul Cole.

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He had a problem, though. His French was poor and heavily accented, enough to give him away at any checkpoint the moment he opened his mouth. So, through contacts at the town hall, he obtained a document stating that he was deaf

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[music] and unable to speak. If a German soldier stopped him in the street, he could stare blankly and hand over his card. It was the kind of trick that came naturally to him.

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His headquarters became a beauty salon. A hairdresser named Janine Voglimacci let him use the flat above her salon as a meeting place. Soldiers came there to be fed and given civilian clothes.

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Helpers came for their instructions. Voglimacci became one of his most important assistants, although privately she found him strange.

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The salon's reputation reached a long way. In August 1940, a Spitfire pilot named J.W. Phillips was recovering from a broken leg in a hospital in Lille under German guard. With help from a woman and a man who turned up with a

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tandem bicycle, he got out. The researcher Keith Janes, who has spent years in [music] the escape and evasion files, believes those two helpers were Voglimacci and Cole.

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Phillips made it home the following spring. [music] In June 1941, he gave a talk to airmen at RAF Tangmere, and according to a later report, he told them where to go if they were ever brought down over France. He gave them the [music] address

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of the salon. That's how far the network's name had traveled. Pilots in England were being told to make for a hairdresser's in Lille. Around Cole gathered a circle of young and old.

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Roland Le Perre was just 18, and he became one of the network's most trusted guides.

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His girlfriend, Madeleine Damerment, joined him. Dupre, the man from the town hall, became the northern banker who handled the money.

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But not everyone was charmed. Maud Olga Bodou de Rouville, one of the most active women hiding British evaders [music] in the north, watched Cole closely.

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She said he was always borrowing money or begging petrol and never paying any of it back.

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She said he spoke badly [music] of people behind their backs. And she said he had women everywhere and was forever going off on sprees with them.

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She broke off contact with him entirely. Hardly anyone listened to her because the soldiers kept moving south, and the man at the center was so very convincing.

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Chapter four, the road south. To understand what the people of the [music] north were risking, you have to see the road itself.

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A typical journey started in a mining town like Bethune or Lillers. [music] A soldier who had been hiding for months would be handed a set of civilian clothes and a French identity card and told the rules.

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Don't speak. Don't stare at the Germans and don't look away from [music] them too fast, either.

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If anyone asks you anything, you are deaf or simple or asleep. The first barrier was the River Somme.

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The Germans used it as the frontier of the forbidden zone [music] and every bridge was guarded.

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In the town of Abbeville on the river's banks, there was a young vicar named Pierre Carpentier.

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He was 28 years old in 1940, a curate at the Church of Saint Gilles and chaplain to the local scouts.

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He had served in the French army and he had come home after the defeat to a town that was occupied and badly damaged.

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He decided he would not sit still. Carpentier [music] supplied the passes that let men cross the Somme out of the forbidden zone.

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Over and over, for party after party, it was the priest at Abbeville who opened the river.

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From there, the route ran by train to Paris. The men would spend a night in the capital, sometimes eating at a little restaurant called the Shop du Pont Neuf in the middle of an occupied city.

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Then, they took the train to Tours. Near the village of Saint Martin le Beau, they crossed [music] the demarcation line into the zone governed by Vichy.

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Then came an overnight walk to Loches, a bus to Châteauroux, and trains to Toulouse and finally Marseille, usually arriving early on a Thursday morning.

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Marseille was the center of everything. There, a Scottish officer of the Seaforth Highlanders named Ian Garrow had built an organization to hide these men and pass them on towards Spain.

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In January 1941, young Leper turned up in Marseille with eight British soldiers and airmen he had brought all the way from the north.

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Garrow was impressed. He gave Leper 10,000 francs for expenses. [music] Soon, Cole himself came south.

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Garrow met him, listened to him, and was won over. He made Cole the head of the line in northern France and gave him another 10,000 francs.

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From that point, the line had two halves and a steady traffic ran between them.

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Through 1941, Cole and Leper's brought parties of five to 10 [music] servicemen south roughly every 2 weeks. From Marseille, they went on toward the Spanish border at Perpignan and then over the Pyrenees at night with mountain guides, walking for hours on stony paths

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in whatever shoes they had been given. On the far side waited the British Consulate in Barcelona, then Gibraltar, then home.

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Every link in that chain was a person, a farmer, a priest, a hairdresser, a teenager on a train.

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And at the northern end of the chain, holding the names of nearly all of them, was Captain Paul.

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Chapter 5, What London Knew. Here's the part of this story that changes the way you hear everything after it.

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The British already knew who he was. The secret department that funded escape lines like Garrow's was called MI9.

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When reports of a mysterious Captain Delabel in Lille reached London, MI9 asked for background checks.

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Scotland Yard had a file. The man was known as a con man with a string of convictions for housebreaking and fraud.

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And London decided it didn't matter. He was [music] efficient. The soldiers he moved were reaching Spain and that was the result everyone wanted.

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Sometimes the record turns almost comic. On the 8th of September, 1941, a woman named Agnes Hewitt walked into Scotland Yard with a message. She said that H.

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Cole was living at the New York Cafe on the old port in Marseille [music] and that he had helped at least 20 British soldiers escape and smuggled some 200 British subjects across the demarcation line.

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Cole had led her to believe he worked for the criminal investigation department. He had asked her to let Scotland Yard know that he was safe.

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A career criminal sending word to Scotland Yard so they wouldn't worry about him. In Marseille, Garreau trusted him completely. [music] Files at the National Archives show that in June 1941, Garreau even used Cole to investigate rumors [music] about whether other people around the

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line could be trusted. But none of what London knew traveled north. Nobody told the priest at Abbeville.

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Nobody told the hairdresser in La Madeleine [music] or the 18-year-old guide. They were risking their families on the word of a man the British government had already filed as a professional liar.

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They would find out the truth the hard way and far too late. Chapter 6 The big party.

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It would be easy to tell this story as if Cole was a fraud from the first day.

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The record doesn't allow that. On Monday, the 1st of September, 1941, Cole and Lepers set out from Bethune with a party of seven.

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There were three airmen, a Polish cadet who had escaped from Germany, and three British soldiers who had been sheltered around the mining town of Auchy since the year before.

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One of the airmen was a young Spitfire pilot named Dennis Crowley Milling. They went by train to Abbeville where the priest supplied the passes, then on to Paris, Tours, and the crossing at Saint-Martin-le-Beau, and down to Marseille by Thursday.

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Within a week, most of them were walking over the Pyrenees. Years later, one of the soldiers on that trip, Arthur Fraser, said he would never fully understand how or why Cole went over to the enemy, but that as far as he and the other

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evaders were concerned, Cole had served them well. James, whose own father was one of the British soldiers stranded in France, has borrowed those words for his own verdict. Through that autumn, a new figure appeared at Cole's side.

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Suzanne Warenghem was 19 years old, half English and living with her aunt on the outskirts of Paris. She was already a skilled courier.

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[music] In May 1941, she had helped four British officers get out of the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris.

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She met Cole that summer and believed every word he told her. By September, they were engaged. Then, [music] at the end of October, came the biggest operation the Northern Line ever ran.

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On the 27th of October 1941, Cole, Le Bair, and D'Airmond brought out seven airmen and six soldiers together.

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The men had [music] been gathered in safe houses around Berbères and Lille. They took the morning train to Abbeville, where the priest gave them their passes for the Somme.

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In Paris, Suzanne had their beds arranged for the night, and the next day, she traveled with them as far as Châteauroux.

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They reached Marseille early on the Thursday morning. The airmen were in the British Consulate in Barcelona by the 8th of November. [music] 13 men carried across the whole of France in a single run.

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[music] It was the finest thing Cole ever did. And on the Sunday after he delivered [music] them, the men he worked for locked him in a bathroom.

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Chapter 7 The Money [music] To understand why that door was locked, you have to meet the man who held the key.

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His real name was Albert Guerisse. He was a Belgian army doctor who had escaped to Britain in 1940 and joined the Royal Navy under a borrowed identity [music] as a French-Canadian officer named Patrick O'Leary.

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The accent covered his French, and the false name protected his family back in Belgium.

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By the summer of 1941, he was working with Garrow in Marseille, and the line would one day carry his alias.

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History knows it as the Pat O'Leary line. Guerisse was careful, disciplined, and very hard to fool. And from the first time he met Cole in August 1941, something about the man bothered [music] him.

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The money bothered him most. In a statement he gave after the war, Guerisse said Cole had already received some 600,000 francs from the organization.

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Now, Cole wanted another 50,000. He explained that he had six or seven airmen waiting in the north, and he needed the money to hire a lorry and drive them south in one go.

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A few days later, Guerisse saw Cole in Marseille, nowhere near the north, spending freely on women in the city's bars and restaurants.

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A week after that, Cole turned up with two men he said were the [music] pilots from the lorry.

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Guerisse took them aside and asked them a few simple questions. It didn't take long. They admitted they weren't airmen at all. They were Frenchmen Cole had paid to repeat a [music] story.

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That was enough for Guerisse to go looking for proof. He traveled north to Lille with a colleague, Maurice Dufour, to see the man who handled the northern end of the money.

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Dupre told them what he had been watching for months. Cole was spending the funds on women and nightlife, and almost nothing on the airmen or the families hiding them.

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The farmers feeding soldiers in the Pas-de-Calais weren't being paid back. The francs that London sent to keep them going were going to the restaurants of Marseille instead. [music] Guerisse told Dupre to come south and say it to Cole's face.

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Then, on the 10th of October 1941, the Vichy police arrested Garrow in Marseille. The founder of the line was gone, and the leadership passed to Guerisse.

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Cole had lost the man who trusted him most. His new chief already had the evidence half assembled.

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Chapter 8, the bathroom window. Number 21 Rue Rue de Brignole is a quiet street address in Marseille. In 1941, it belonged to a doctor named George Rodocanachi.

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He had been born in Liverpool in 1875 to a Greek family, become a French citizen, and served France as a doctor in the First World War.

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By 1941, he was in his 60s, a respected children's doctor with a large flat and a busy surgery.

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[music] Patients came and went all day, which meant strangers on the stairs drew no attention.

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Around 200 Allied servicemen would hide in that flat during the war. On the first weekend of November 1941, [music] the flat held a different kind of meeting.

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Garry was there, so was Dupré, brought down from Lille to give his evidence. So was Mario Prassinos, [music] one of the line's senior figures.

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And so was a young Australian named Bruce Dowding, [music] who had been running the stretch of the line between Marseille and Perpignan under the cover name André Masson.

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Cole walked in, apparently with no idea what was waiting for him. [music] They put the evidence in front of him, the money, the missing payments, the two fake pilots, and Dupré sitting there ready to describe it all.

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According to the people in the room, Cole broke down and confessed. And that's when the real problem landed on the table.

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The theft was bad enough. What frightened them was what Cole knew. He knew the safe houses in Lille and La Madeleine.

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He knew the priest [music] at Abbeville. He knew the families in the mining towns, the passwords, the routes, and the very flat they were standing [music] in.

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If this man would lie to them about money, what would he do the first time the Germans offered him a deal?

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They locked him in the bathroom while they argued about what to do with him.

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It's one of the strangest scenes of the whole war. A doctor's family flat in Marseille, [music] a Belgian officer, a banker from Lille, an Australian a long way from home, trying to decide what to do with a man

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who could destroy hundreds of people. There was no court they could hand him to, they couldn't call the police, and they couldn't ship him to England.

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Some of them argued that he could never be allowed to walk out of that building.

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They never finished the argument. While they talked, Cole forced open the bathroom window, [music] climbed out, and disappeared into the streets of Marseille.

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Chapter 9 Strangers in Lille The next day, Guérisse, [music] Dowding, Dupré, and several others set out for the north.

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They had to reach Cole's people before he did. And this [music] is where Cole's greatest skill turned against everyone.

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The helpers of Lille didn't know Guérisse. They didn't know Dowding. Captain Paul had sat at their kitchen tables for more than a year and walked their sons and lodgers to freedom.

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Now, two strangers from Marseille were telling them their hero was a thief and possibly worse.

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Many of them didn't believe it. Guérisse wanted Dowding to stay in the north and take over Cole's work.

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Young Leapers helped make the introductions. People in the south remembered Dowding's French as excellent with a faint Australian accent that never quite went [music] away.

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Now, he settled in to rebuild the northern line from the inside among people who were still not sure whom to trust.

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[music] Meanwhile, Cole was doing something extraordinary. He went back [music] to work. Hardly anyone in the north knew he had been thrown out. So, a few days after the bathroom window, he collected one last party from the town of Lille Air.

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Two RAF sergeants and a Polish airman known only as Gustav. Suzanne joined them in Paris and traveled with them as far as the demarcation line.

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They went on south and at Toulouse their guide was suddenly gone. Before he vanished, Cole had collected around 6,000 francs from the men themselves.

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The airmen made it to Marseille on their own and crossed into Spain. Cole could hardly follow them there.

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Instead, he went north and in early December he called on the priest at Abbeville.

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Carpentier told him that a man the northern helpers knew as Adolf Le Compte had been there the day before looking [music] for him.

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Le Compte was the name on Guerisse's own false papers in the north. Papers that Cole himself had supplied.

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On the 5th of December, 1941, Cole arrived back at Deram's house at number 50 Rue Bernadette in La Madeleine.

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He had been warned in every way a man can be warned. The line knew what he was. The south was close to him.

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He was standing in the middle of the network he had just betrayed with his thefts among people who still believed in him.

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He had one night left as Captain Paul. Chapter 10. The day of the false airman.

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On the morning of the 6th of December, 1941, the German secret field police came to the house on Rue Bernadette.

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This was the Geheime Feldpolizei, the field arm of German military intelligence. By Cole's own account, they came with 10 men and a dog.

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Other reports point to [music] a Dutch double agent named Cornelius Verloop, a man who had been arrested in 1940 [music] and released to work for the Germans breaking escape lines.

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The historian Brendan Murphy, who wrote the most detailed study of Cole's life, [music] raised a darker possibility.

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He suggested the arrest might have been staged [music] and that Cole may already have been working for the Germans before that morning.

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Nobody has proved it either way. What we do know is what Cole did next.

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He talked and he talked fast. He wrote the statement we [music] started with. 30 pages describing how the Northern Line worked, who ran it, and where they lived.

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The Germans also looked closely at his identity card in the name of Paul D'Nobel and they recognized [music] the signature on it. It belonged to Duprez.

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The next day, Duprez was arrested at his [music] desk in the town hall. Leper's saw the Germans arrive and didn't wait.

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He left Lille that day with D'Amecourt and months later the two of them [music] crossed the Pyrenees.

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Then came Monday, the 8th of December. Much of what follows comes from Cole himself in [music] the statement he gave to British Intelligence in 1945.

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It describes a plan that was almost theatrical. German police in plain [music] clothes, carrying false papers and packed sandwiches, would pose as stranded British airmen and Cole would lead them, as he had led so many real airmen before, to the doors of the

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people who helped. Their first stop was the mining village of Burbure and the home of Porte Dubois.

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His wife opened the door, recognized Captain Paul, and invited him straight in. She sent for her husband. When Dubois arrived, he mentioned that he was expecting Lecomte later that day at the Burbure railway station. He was arrested [music] in his own home.

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Next was the town of Saint-Omer and the shop of a helper named Desire Didry. His wife was there alone. She told Cole [music] to take his airmen away because it was too dangerous to keep them in the shop. She was asked to send her husband

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to the railway station. [music] Didry arrived there on his bicycle and the police took him.

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Then the party went back to Burbure station to wait for the train from Bethune and for Lecomte. The train pulled in but the man who stepped down onto the platform wasn't Guerisse. It was Dowding.

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He saw Cole straight away and he walked directly toward him across the platform. Doting was arrested on the spot.

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In the afternoon, the car went south to Abbeville. [music] Cole knocked on the priest's door with his usual story. He had airmen who needed to cross the Somme.

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Carpentier went out to borrow local identity cards to go with the passes he would supply himself and the German police followed him. Carpentier was arrested and his mother with him. Then Cole and his escort crossed the bridge over the Somme using the priest's own

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fresh papers. Later, the man who collected the passes for return, [music] the people who had lent the identity cards and even the German sentry who had waved them across the bridge were all arrested, too. One day, a mining

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village, a shop, a railway platform and a presbytery. By nightfall, Dubois, Didry, Doting and the priest were all in German hands.

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If this story has stayed with you so far, now is a good moment to subscribe.

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Stories like Burbure and Abbeville are slipping out of memory [music] and telling them properly is the whole reason this channel exists.

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Chapter 11, the ones he spared. Three days later, the arrests reached Paris. On the 11th of December, Cole went with German police to a block of flats on the Rue des Quatre Fils Two men who made false papers for the line lived

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in the same building. One was Vladimir de Flieg, the other was Fernand Holweck, a celebrated French physicist.

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[music] Believing the men at the door were airmen in need, both of them said far too much before they understood who they were talking to. Three days after that, on the 14th of December, it was the turn of a young Parisian named Andre

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Postel-Vinay. Holweck died in German custody soon after his arrest. [music] De Flieg survived the war. Postel-Vinay was badly hurt in prison, but he later got away from a Paris hospital, reached Marseille, and was taken off by sea to

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England in [music] September 1942. And yet the betrayal had gaps in it, and [music] they're hard to explain.

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Cole did not give up the Leper's family. He did not give up Fernand Saleng's wife, who was arrested [music] and released for lack of evidence he could easily have supplied.

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He did not name anyone in the south, not Dr. Rodocanachi, not Gherez's southern helpers, not even Gherez himself. And he did not give up Voglimacci, the hairdresser whose flat had been his headquarters. Instead, he wrote her a letter warning [music] her that she

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would suffer if she kept working for the line. She kept working anyway. And she did something remarkable.

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[music] Inside Loos prison, on the edge of Lille, the priest from Abbeville managed to write a statement naming Cole as the man [music] who had betrayed them.

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Voglimacci went to one of the jailers, a man named Callot, [music] and through him she got that written accusation out of the prison.

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That note helped confirm, beyond any doubt, what Cole had done. Jaynes, after years in the files, has argued something that changes how this whole chapter reads.

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He believes the Germans had done much of their own homework, and that they already knew several of the houses they raided. Didriese and the priests among them.

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In his view, Cole was brought along on some of those arrests as pressure on the victims, rather than because the Germans needed him to find them.

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It doesn't make Cole innocent. [music] He still stood on those doorsteps, but it means the famous version, where one man brought down the entire north with his own pen, may be simpler than the truth.

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As for Cole, the Germans didn't keep [music] a close hold on him. By his own account, he offered to help them find a French intelligence officer, arranged a meeting at the Shop du Pont Neuf, [music] and slipped out through a

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back door with Suzanne. By Christmas 1941, he was a fugitive [music] from both sides at once.

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Chapter 12, Dortmund. On the 7th of December 1941 the day between Cole's arrest and the arrests at Berbère, a new order came out of Berlin.

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People in the occupied West accused of acting against German forces could now be taken secretly to Germany, and their families would be told nothing.

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It became known as the [music] night and fog decree. The people taken in December 1941 were held first at Loos prison.

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Then, in the summer of 1942, they were moved east. Carpentier left for Germany on the 6th of August, 1942. [music] Dauting went the same way.

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For their families, they had stopped existing. [music] No letters came, and no answers. In the north, the families who had opened their doors to Captain Paul now listened for every car that slowed outside at night.

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In the south, Gerrets rebuilt [music] what he could. New guides were found, and new safe houses opened. And through 1942, the line kept moving airmen toward the Pyrenees without [music] its northern half.

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In all, the Pat O'Leary line is credited with helping more than 600 Allied servicemen get out of France.

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In 1943, [music] the prisoners from the north were tried in secret before a German court and condemned to death.

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On the 30th of June, 1943, in the prison on the Lübecker Straße in Dortmund, 10 of them lost their lives.

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Carpentier, the priest of Abbeville, was 30 years old. With him were Dauting, Dedrie, Dubois, and Marcel Du Hayon, who had helped hide British soldiers in the north, along with five others.

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Duprez, the man from the town hall who had made out the first false identity card in the name of Paul de Lobel, died in a German camp.

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That's where the story of the Northern Line ends. Its leaders were gone, its safe houses were empty, [music] and its people were scattered across prisons and camps in Germany.

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But the man who led it into that ending was still free. And he had more names to try on.

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Chapter 13 A wedding in Malakoff On the 10th of April, 1942, 4 months after the arrests at Burbure and Abbeville, Cole got married.

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[music] The church was Notre Dame de la Médaille Miraculeuse in Malakoff, on the southern edge of Paris.

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The bride was Suzanne, the young courier from Paris. Two of her aunts stood [music] as witnesses. On the marriage certificate, almost every detail Cole gave was true, except that he made himself 3 years younger, and claimed he had been born in

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Marquette-lez-Lille, a suburb in the north of France. Even on his wedding day, he couldn't leave his own life story alone.

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Two months later, on the 8th of June, 1942, the Vichy counterespionage police stopped the couple in Lyon and arrested them both.

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Vichy worked closely with Germany, but it still guarded some of its own authority. And one way it did that was by prosecuting foreign agents of every kind.

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Cole qualified as a British agent and a German one. On the 21st of July, a Vichy court sentenced him to death.

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The sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment. Suzanne was tried alongside him and found innocent. [music] And it was during that trial, listening to the evidence, that she finally understood who her husband really was.

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A British agent who knew her said later that she had been naive only because she was a true patriot.

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She was 20 years old, alone, without money, and expecting a child. She made her way to Marseille, to the remains of the very line her husband had betrayed.

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They took her in, though some of them watched her with suspicion. Her son, Alain, was born that October.

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He did not survive the winter. She didn't stop. In March 1943, she was arrested again, accused of helping a British agent escape, and sent to the prison at Castres.

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On the 16th of September, 1943, she broke out of Castres with a British secret agent named Blanche Charlet.

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A local farmer helped them, and Benedictine monks hid them in a guest house for 2 months.

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The monks passed them to guides who tried to take them over the Pyrenees, but heavy snow had closed the passes.

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So, the two women crossed France instead. Paris, then Lyon. In Lyon, Suzanne heard that Cole was asking friends where she was.

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She took a new name, Eileen Legall, and she slept with a pistol under her pillow.

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In April 1944, on a dark beach in Brittany, a small boat rowed them out to a British motor torpedo boat waiting offshore.

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They came under fire as they pulled away, and the boat outran the pursuit. On the 20th of April, 1944, Suzanne stepped ashore at Plymouth.

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She became Suzanne Warren, and she never saw her husband again. Chapter 14, Captain Mason.

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Cole spent the rest of 1942 and most of 1943 in Vichy prisons. Even after the Germans occupied the whole of France in November 1942, they didn't trust him enough to let him out straight away.

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In the winter of 1943, they finally did. His new employer was Hans Kieffer, who ran the German security police's counterintelligence work against British agents in Paris from offices on the Avenue Foch.

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By the spring of 1944, the con man from Hoxton was working against the resistance as a paid German agent.

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On the 6th of June, 1944, [music] the allies landed in Normandy. By August, they were closing on Paris.

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On the 17th of August, Kieffer and his staff left the city heading east ahead of the advancing armies.

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Cole went with them wearing the uniform of a German officer. For 8 months, they retreated through a collapsing country.

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By April 1945, they were in the Black Forest in southwestern Germany and the war was nearly over.

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There, Cole and Kieffer took off their uniforms and burned every paper that could connect them to the German security services.

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Then, each man became somebody new. Kieffer chose to play a minor German policeman. The sort of small official the allies were rounding up by the thousand.

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Cole chose to play a hero. He became Captain Robert Mason, a British secret agent who had been captured by the Germans in France, dragged east as a prisoner, and had at last escaped.

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Mason. The surname of the stepfather who had raised him in Hoxton. At the very end of the war, of all the names he had ever used, he reached back for that one.

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The two men surrendered together to an American unit, the 117th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, near the village of Wald in Bavaria.

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The Americans questioned Kieffer and let him go. They looked at the tall, well-spoken Englishman who knew so much about German intelligence, and they believed him.

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They gave him the uniform of a United States Army lieutenant and an identity card naming him as a member of Allied intelligence.

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In less than a year, he had worn the uniforms of three armies, British, German, and American.

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He knew the American papers wouldn't hold for long. Sooner or later, someone would ask London about Captain Mason.

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So, he slipped away and crossed into the French zone of occupied Germany, where his American uniform earned him a warm welcome. The French gave him work in the district around the town of Sulgau in Württemberg.

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His job was to track down and question former officials of the regime. He gathered a band of rough men around him and went through the district with looting and brutality.

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The National Archives catalog describes him in those weeks with a Mercedes and a French mistress.

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For a few weeks that summer, it looked as though he had got away with all of it.

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Chapter 15 The postcard But British intelligence had never stopped [music] looking for him. The MI5 file on him at Kew runs to three volumes, and its catalog entry lists his aliases: Cole, Rook, Mason, Cool, Corser, and many more.

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Every evader debriefed in London and every helper interviewed in liberated France added something to it.

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The officers hunting him knew one thing about him above everything else. Wherever he went, there were women.

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So, they watched two of his former mistresses in Paris, and they waited. They didn't have to wait forever.

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The man who had slipped through every net since 1940 sent one of those women a postcard. And he wrote a return address on it. She showed it innocently to an officer of MI9.

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On the 11th of June, 1945, an MI5 officer named Peter Hope caught up with Cole at Sulgau.

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Hope had been posted to Allied Headquarters to track down British traitors. Cole fought the arrest, and Hope was hurt in the leg in the struggle. But this time, there was no bathroom window.

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And then, something happened that almost nobody mentions. On the 21st of June, 1945, Cole sat down with Hope and gave a long statement about his work in the north.

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In it, he listed the people who had helped him move soldiers in 1940 and 1941.

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Families in Roubaix, a lorry driver who carried escapees to Paris, a forger of German passes, the owner of the Shop du Pont Neuf, the ferryman on the River Cher.

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It's an odd echo of the statement he wrote for the Germans in 1941. And researchers today still use this one to know who many of those helpers were.

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He was held in the Allied military prison in Paris [music] while the case against him was built. A court-martial was coming for desertion, for treachery, for everything since 1940.

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On the 18th of November, 1945, he stole the overcoat of an American sergeant, put it on, and walked out through the main gate.

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He didn't need a tunnel. He looked like he belonged, and the guards let him through.

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Chapter 16, Billy's Bar. A huge search began across Paris. Police and intelligence officers watched railway stations, hotels, and the addresses of every woman he had ever known.

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Every army whose uniform he had worn was now looking for him. He went to ground in the 7th arrondissement on the Rue de Grenelle.

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There was a place there [music] called Billy's Bar with rooms on the floors above it. And as he had done all his life, he found a woman willing to hide him.

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For 7 weeks after his escape, the man who had once been Captain Paul hid in Paris.

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And he ended up in a room above a bar waiting for the hunt to pass.

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It didn't pass. But in the end, the great manhunt wasn't what found him. In early January, 1946, the French police received a tip.

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A man who might be a German deserter was hiding above Billy's bar. Paris was full of deserters from every army that winter, and the police were carrying out routine searches. This was one more address on a list.

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On the 8th of January, 1946, a group of French officers climbed the stairs. Accounts say their footsteps gave them away.

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When they reached the door, Cole was waiting with a pistol. One officer was slightly hurt.

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In the exchange that followed, Cole died in that room. He was 39 years old, a little over 2 weeks short of his 40th birthday.

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The police thought they had stopped an ordinary German deserter. It took time for anyone to realize who he really was.

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The man brought in to confirm it was Garris. Garris had been betrayed himself in March 1943 by another traitor inside the line. And he had spent the rest of the war in German camps, first at Natzweiler in the hills of Alsace, and then at

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Dachau near Munich. When Dachau was liberated in April 1945, his fellow prisoners chose him to lead their committee.

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He had survived it all and come home. Now he stood in a room in Paris and looked at the man he had once locked in a bathroom in Marseille.

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He confirmed it. The man in the room was Cole. He was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave in Paris. [music] Chapter 17, the ledger. So, what are we supposed to make of him?

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The men who hunted him had no doubts. Airey Neave of MI9, who escaped from Colditz and then spent the war helping to run the escape lines, called Cole among the most selfish and callous [music] traitors who ever served the

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enemy. James Langley, who ran MI9's escape operations and had lost an arm in 1940, described him as a con man and a thief who sold his country to the highest bidder.

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[music] And Spooner's phrase stuck to him for good. The worst traitor of the war.

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But when you check the numbers behind that reputation, they start to move. The figure most often repeated is that Cole betrayed 150 people [music] and that about 50 of them died.

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Much of it traces back to a sentence by Neave. James went back to that sentence and pointed out that it doesn't end with Cole. It goes on to include the Belgian and French traitors who sold themselves to the Germans as well.

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The biography of Douding, published by his nephew Peter Douding in 2023, gives a smaller count from Cole's revelations. The arrests of 72 French people and about 10 Allied agents.

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Even the smaller count is more than 80 people taken from their homes. And there are the questions nobody has closed. Was the arrest on Rue Bernadette real or a stage to protect a man the Germans already owned?

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Why did Claude Dansey, the deputy head of MI6, argue [music] against the line taking Cole's life when it first raised the idea?

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Some historians have wondered whether he had some arrangement with British intelligence. [music] The open files at Q show a man London watched, hunted, and despised. They don't show anyone protecting him.

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Here's the part that's hardest [music] to argue with, though. In 1941, MI9 and Scotland Yard knew he was a thief and a professional liar. They decided it didn't matter because the soldiers kept arriving in Spain.

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Nobody passed that warning to the priest [music] at Abbeville, or the wife in Bergues, or the hairdresser in La Madeleine.

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When the warning finally came, it came from strangers and it came too [music] late.

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It was the people of the north who paid for that decision. Today, a square in Abbeville carries the priest's name.

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A memorial stone stands beside the church of Saint-Gilles [music] and the town's scouts and guides are still named after him.

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He was made a knight of the Legion of Honor after the war and given the Croix de Guerre and the Resistance Medal.

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[music] Guérisse received the George Cross. He rose to the rank of major general in the Belgian army and [music] lived until 1989.

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And Dowding, the Australian who stepped off the train at Berbice and walked straight [music] toward the man who had betrayed him, waited 80 years for his full story to be told. His nephew finally told it.

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In December 1941, a sergeant from Hoxton wrote 30 pages of names for the Germans.

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Today, many of those names are carved in stone in Abbeville and across the north of France. And the man who wrote them down lies in a grave without one.

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And the story leaves one hard question for the men in London who read his file in 1941 and decided the results were worth the risk.

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If they had told the people of the north what they already knew, how many of those names would still be written only on paper?

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Next time, we follow another unit back to the ground where its story ended.

Topics:Harold ColePat O'Leary escape lineWWII Franceoccupied Lilleresistance networkstraitorescape linesBritish intelligenceSecond World War historyNazi occupation

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