He was one of Winston Churchill’s last living French secret agents, and one of the most colourful heroes of the second world war, reports The Guardian.
Captain Robert “Bob” Maloubier, who died on Monday night aged 92, was an agent in Churchill’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret army created to “set ablaze” occupied Europe.
Its hand-picked members were tasked with sabotage and spying on the Nazi forces, and Maloubier, then a teenager and trained in weapons and demolitions, carried out several daring missions, including blowing up a power station and a steel plant requisitioned by the Germans.
Maloubier, whose nom-de-guerre was Clothaire, long regretted that the SOE role was largely eclipsed by the resistance in the postwar period.
“The influence of the SOE, experts who came over to train the French, has had very little coverage in France,” he said in an interview four years ago.
Maloubier went on to become a founder member of the French equivalent of the US Navy Seals. He joined the French intelligence services and also designed the famous Fifty Fathoms diving watch worn by the celebrated oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.
Between May 1941 and August 1944 more than 400 Section F SOE agents were dropped into occupied France.
Maloubier had escaped for Tunisia, then Algeria from where he travelled to Britain and spent six months training how to kill, escape and sabotage. He was then dropped into France on two occasions.