After the initial meeting it was agreed that it would be better for Droz to meet me as infrequently as possible. He was a fairly well-known person and if by chance I was observed in his company it might cause some comment. Contact was thus normally kept through May. My last (one of few) meeting with Droz nearly led to disaster.
He had asked to see me because he had an important project which he wished to discuss concerning the possible infiltration of workers into factories in Constance: not a difficult task with the frontier running through the town, but one which he thought might pay dividends. He also had some information on German troop movements in the south which he thought would be of interest. He was in a hurry and so we met in a small cafe run by a Party member near his home, where we could sit in the office at the back and leave separately and innocently after we had done our business. Droz left first and returned home to walk straight into the arms of the Swiss police, who were waiting for him. Luckily they had not been "tailing" him; if they had, suspicion might well have fallen on me since it was not the kind of cafe a foreigner would normally frequent. Droz was arrested, charged with reorganising the then illegal Swiss Communist Party- and imprisoned. As has been stated, on his release he left the Party, joined the Socialists, and is presumably now out of the net.
Droz's arrest broke up the network which had just been formed and that particular project was never revived again, but by that time the Centre had given me another task and this one contained in it the seed of disaster for the whole organisation and in the end led largely to the network's liquidation and to my own arrest.
Shortly after the invasion of Russia the Centre instructed me to get in touch with two agents of theirs with whom they had lost contact. Their names were given and the only additional information Moscow had was that they were thought to be in French Switzerland and had been for some time. These were Lorenz and Laura, in real life George and Joanna Wilmer. As I have already stated, they had worked for a long time for the Red Army abroad. Lorenz had never been a resident director but always an agent or cut-out. They were both expert in all branches of photography, from straight portraiture to document copying and microphotography, and had a well-equipped studio tucked away in a corner of their villa. When formerly in Japan they had been used only for document copying. Their sole task had been to photograph the contents of the wastepaper basket of a Japanese general high up in the Imperial General Staff. This material was brought to them by one of the general's servants who was a secret member of the Japanese Communist Party. As neither of them knew any Japanese there was naturally a monstrous deal of chaff and very little wheat, for they photographed everything entirely unselectively. They told me that after they had been doing this for two years they heard from the Centre that one document had been so valuable that it made up for all the trouble and expense of the whole operation from its inception.
Before the war they had been working in Germany but after the outbreak of war the Centre had lost contact with them. Early in 1941 they had decided that the time had come to put themselves in touch with the Centre again. To this end they had written to an old contact of theirs, "Louis," who was still active in San Francisco as a Red Army agent (I never knew his real name), and had indicated in plain language code that they wished to get in touch with the Centre. Naturally they could not reveal their real names and address because, if Louis had been under suspicion, that would have "blown" them as well; thus they could only give the vaguest indications of their whereabouts. Hence the equal vagueness of the Centre's instructions. Presumably Louis had got in touch with his resident director, who had sent the message back to the Centre over his transmitter, and it was in turn relayed to me.
I went off to their villa, which was pleasantly situated above Lausanne, and contacted them on the pretext that I had heard that their villa was for sale. Despite the usual jargon and passwords it was with the greatest difficulty that I managed to persuade them that I was genuine and had a message for them from the Centre. They trusted me only when, very unwillingly, they had asked me to tea and I managed to show them that I knew a great deal of their past history, which I could only have learned from the Centre. After this initial coldness we became moderately friendly and I was accepted, albeit a little reluctantly, to their espionage- if not to their social - bosoms.
Lorenz claimed to be in touch with two sources of information in Germany known to the director as "Barras" and "Lambert." I never discovered anything about these two sources. Despite the fact that Lorenz asserted that they were in Germany, most of the information of a military nature that the sources produced was about troop movements and dispositions in France and the political information often had rather a French slant to it. Lorenz hinted that he had sources within the French Deuxieme Bureau who had been tried and tested by him over a number of years, and I always assumed that much of his information came from these sources. The Deuxieme Bureau connection should be borne in mind as it has a bearing on later events.
Despite the fact that they had been out of touch with the Centre for some years, the couple appeared to be plentifully supplied with money. Their villa was done up regardless of expense- and equally regardless of taste. Laura was, on the least provocation, swathed in mink and Lorenz was the best-dressed spy I have ever seen. They claimed to be Swiss but I am pretty certain they were Russian; they had certainly left two children in Russia last time they had been there. He was a Georgian type and faintly reminiscent of the earlier pictures of Stalin. He spoke Russian, German, and French with equal fluency, and a little English. He must have learned his French in the Midi, for it had a strong metallic tang.
Very soon I was visiting Lorenz and Laura twice weekly to gather information from their two sources- which the director appeared to value highly. Also on instructions I used Lorenz as a cut-out for various sources which were suggested from time to time by the Centre. Sometimes these sources were unknown to any of us. Instructions were merely sent that Lorenz or Laura were to go to a certain rendezvous and collect documents which would be handed over after an exchange of passwords. These were duly handed on to me and transmitted over the air to the Centre.
On one occasion Moscow suggested that it would be profitable to contact Marius Mouttet, a former French Socialist minister then a refugee in Montreux. The Centre had heard from London that Mouttet would be able to supply us with valuable political information. (This was one of the few concrete indications I ever had that the network was operating in England as well. As an abstract speculation I have no doubt that it was- if only in a skeleton form- but concrete indications were few as far as I was concerned.)
Lorenz duly went off and contacted Mouttet, saying he had heard that he might help with information. Mouttet was perfectly willing to play and offered his fullest cooperation, as he thought Lorenz was a British agent. In his turn he proposed a plan to organise the escape of Herriot from France by means of a flying boat landing on the Lake of Geneva. Lorenz was all for going ahead and taking information from Mouttet in the name of British intelligence. This did not seem at all a good or feasible plan as it might have involved us in every sort and kind of international espionage complication. If, for example, the British, who might well have received the news that Mouttet would "play" through their own sources, contacted him and asked for his help, Lorenz's position would have been, to say the least, a little embarrassing. Similarly we could hardly have helped him over the flying-boat scheme. Besides, I was having trouble enough financing the network as it was organised then, and any additional financial commitments had to be gone into with a thoroughness that a chartered accountant or thrifty housewife might envy. If that were not enough, there was already such a mass of information coming in that we had to edit it down and send only the barest essentials and the cream of the material, otherwise we would have been on the air or enciphering the whole twenty- four hours. Thus in my capacity as espionage housewife and blue-pencilling subeditor I asked the director's permission to drop the project - which was agreed to. Anyway I think that Mouttet was far too wily an old fish to be "caught in the net" and that, to continue the piscatorial metaphor, he would have soon seen how fishy the whole thing was.