In the spring of 1944, a young French pilot was one of a group of foreign double agents who helped MI5 to fool the Germans into believing the allied D-Day forces would land around Calais, far from their true target, the Normandy beaches, reports The Times.
Eighty years on from Operation Double Cross, the son of Lieutenant Roger Grosjean of the Free French Air Force, is hoping the British Security Service will finally come clean about his father’s role and tell him whether it asked the Englishwoman who became his mother, to beguile him.
The Security Service has declined even to confirm that Grosjean, who arrived in England in 1943, had worked for MI5 although memoirs of the time have recounted his activities for the service under the code name Fido.
“The British Security Service is still refusing to divulge anything about Fido and the tale of his mission to England as a false Nazi agent who served them in Operation Double Cross and also fell in love with a beautiful Englishwoman called Sallie Pratt,” said their son, François Grosjean, a university professor.
“Years of research have led me to believe that the British reluctance to open Fido’s file — unlike those of other Double Cross agents — is tied to the likelihood that Sallie was part of a honey trap operation.”
“Fido” fell deeply in love with Pratt, a stage manager of striking beauty and fiery temperament, when they met at the Free French Club in London. She quickly moved into his lodgings and changed her name to Sallie Grosjean, an extraordinary act at the time for an unmarried couple.
Professor Grosjean, 78, now retired from his psycholinguistics post at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, believes that Pratt was recruited by MI5 to keep tabs on the French pilot, who had gained his clandestine passage to Britain in return for a promise to the occupying Nazis to steal a British aircraft and fly it to them in France.