Operation SUSSEX
Operation SUSSEX was a tripartite joint secret intelligence operation of the American Secret Intelligence Branch at OSS/London, the British Secret Intelligence Service, and the French Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action. The plan under which this operation was carried out was Operational Plan 'SUSSEX, or simply the SUSSEX Plan. During SUSSEX, the BCRA recruited exclusively French soldiers from within the Free French Army who were trained in espionage tactics in the UK and then dropped by parachute into Occupied France in two-person teams to report on the locations of strategic and tactical military targets and objectives in the lead-up to D Day, and especially the Normandy Landings. These teams, collectively known as the SUSSEX Network, were deployed to areas not already covered by the existing espionage capabilities of the French Resistance.
The SUSSEX teams were divided into BRISSEX teams and OSSEX teams'. BRISSEX teams were managed, trained, and deployed by the British SIS into the British-Canadian 21st Army Group objective areas north of the Seine. OSSEX teams, managed, trained, and deployed by the American OSS, were those dropped into American objective areas south of the Seine. One agent in each team was trained as an observer. The other agent in each team was specially trained as a radio operator, and those teams on the ground then communicated by secret radio and S-Phone to radio stations in Great Britain; the OSSEX teams with Station Victor, and the BRISSEX teams with another station. Communication with the continent, however, was carefully controlled to ensure that French radio frequency bands did not become "overcrowded."
In total, 120 SUSSEX agents were parachuted into Occupied France as a part of Operation SUSSEX. BRISSEX teams were dropped by the Royal Air Force, and OSSEX teams were dropped by the Carpetbaggers. On D Day, there were already 7 BRISSEX and 7 OSSEX teams deployed behind enemy lines reporting on enemy movements. Overall, between February and September 1944, 2 Pathfinder teams and 52 SUSSEX teams were parachuted into Axis-occupied territories.
Background
Shortly after the British were forced off of mainland Europe at the Dunkirk evacuation, plans were already underway to reopen the Western Front. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were in constant communication after Churchill became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, where Churchill convinced Roosevelt – through a cadre of British officers stationed at the British Security Co-ordination and American officers visiting the UK – to establish an American intelligence agency. That was first the Office of the Coordinator of Information, which became the Office of Strategic Services.Led by Brigadier General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the OSS was designed as a centralized intelligence agency, whereas the British had already begun decentralizing their own intelligence apparatus after 1941, creating an organizationally functional distinction between secret intelligence and special operations. As a result, when OSS/London was established, the branches of OSS formed relationships with their British counterparts. OSS/London, the largest OSS foreign headquarters, was overseen by David K. E. Bruce for the bulk of the war.
The counterpart of the Secret Intelligence Branch was the Secret Intelligence Service, led by Stewart Menzies, known as C. By 1942, the British intelligence apparatus had gone through radical transformation – the unit known as the Section for Destruction had been removed from its purview to be combined with Military Intelligence to create the Special Operations Executive. SIS no longer had any mission tasking for sabotage, destruction, special operations or guerrilla warfare, and left those missions to the SOE, while it maintained the dominion of secret intelligence.
File:Stalin in Tehran.jpg|left|thumb|Joseph Stalin pictured sniffing a sword at the Tehran Conference. At Tehran, he greatly encouraged Roosevelt and Churchill to commence with Operation Overlord.
After the establishment of Vichy France, the French counterpart to Roosevelt and Churchill became Charles de Gaulle, operating out of the territories of Free France, and his followers were nicknamed "Gaullists." The Bureau central de renseignements et d'action was the intelligence arm of the Free French government.
Despite Nazi Germany's plan for a "thousand year Reich," the Axis in Europe were already hard-fought and losing ground on the Eastern Front from Operation Barbarossa against the USSR, in the North African campaign from Operation Torch, and elsewhere. At the Tehran Conference, the leaders of the French, British, and American intelligence agencies and militaries began to finalize plans for Operation Overlord.
COSSAC and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force knew that Operation Overlord needed secret intelligence prior to the landings at Normandy to identify military targets.
SUSSEX Plan (1943-1944)
Developing the plan, interagency politics
During the planning stages of the invasion of Occupied France, the Secret Intelligence Branch was seeking to develop stronger ties with their British counterparts, but the British were hesitant that the Americans might compromise their existing intelligence networks. In March 1943, an OSS officer named Stacy Lloyd developed what was called initially the Lloyd Plan. The Lloyd Plan called for:"...the organization of a number of two-man intelligence teams, equipped with , to be dropped well behind the lines at the time a Continental bridgehead was being established."In the vision of SI/London, and especially the chief of SI/London, William P. Maddox, these teams would be solely American officers recruited from the US Airborne that would be reporting via radio to OSS/London alone. Stacy Lloyd and Bill Maddox wanted this operation to prove that SI could operate independently of the British, especially because they had faced much opposition from both General Jacob L. Devers and Claude Dansey to the notion of joint operations in the year of 1942, which hindered most of their intelligence gathering efforts up to that point. The Lloyd Plan specified that about 50 teams of two men would be deployed behind enemy lines, to be attached to the airborne units of the invading armies.
On April 1, 1943, Maddox wrote to David Bruce recommending the Lloyd Plan. The only alternatives to this plan, he wrote, would be to find groups opposed to the Axis that were not working with SIS, or to accept a secondary position to British supremacy in intelligence collection on the continent. Bruce took the Lloyd Plan to William J. Donovan in May 1943, who rejected the plan on the 6th of June.
However, before Donovan had cabled his rejection, David Bruce and Stewart Menzies had already met on the 28th of May to solidify a new tripartite arrangement between SIS, SI, and the Gaullists. By that time, "Uncle Claude" Dansey had already been removed from his position as deputy director of SIS by Stewart Menzies, replaced by James Marshall-Cornwall, who was more amenable to the American position.
In lieu of the Lloyd Plan going forward being only an American operation, Stewart Menzies put forward the suggestion of a joint operation that would work alongside the French. Bruce and Menzies organized access to "...a common pool of about a thousand Frenchmen..." The Lloyd Plan was around this time transformed into the SUSSEX Plan.
In mid-June, Bruce reported to Washington that SUSSEX had already begun recruiting French agents, and the plan was in place for roughly 25 SUSSEX teams to be deployed.
Also in mid-June, Menzies cabled in a message to his superiors at Whitehall that:
"...a new agent system superimposed on the existing one is necessary the Germans would tighten their security measures in occupied France they felt an Allied invasion was growing imminent... Existing Allied sources of intelligence information would be discovered and liquidated."The primary motivation for this cable was that the British, French, and the Americans knew that the existing networks of French Resistance operatives on the continent had been infiltrated by the Direction centrale des renseignements généraux and the Bureau des Menées Antinationales, being the official government intelligence agencies of Vichy France, and even possibly by the Abwehr or the Gestapo.
On July 5, 1943, the SUSSEX Plan was submitted to the US Command for approval. That approval came three months later.
On November 13, the joint SUSSEX School was made operational. SI/London provided five instructors. David Bruce and Bill Donovan coordinated and worked with the British Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to produce the proposal that SUSSEX could move forward. However, it took several months for Donovan to convince the US commanders that SIS should not be allowed to treat SI as an inferior branch, as the plan put forth by the British chiefs of staff to place SUSSEX under the authority of SIS and COSSAC alone was, in his words: "...tantamount to regulating the OSS communications activities to those of a basic training depot and supply dump..." With the appointment of General Eisenhower as the Supreme Commander, the situation became more amenable for SI/London, despite the continued objections of Claude Dansey.
Tripartite Planning Committee and the recruitment process (1944)
The plan was officially given a planning committee on January 4, 1944. This Tripartite Planning Committee, also called the SUSSEX Committee, or the Tripartite Control Committee, was staffed by Kenneth Cohen from SIS as chair of the committee, Francis Pickens Miller from SI/London, and Gilbert Renault from the Bureau central de renseignements et d'action, who was known to his agents as "Colonel Rémy".All three of these men had previously had great experience managing spies. Kenneth Cohen, who went by the pseudonym "Wagon," was the SIS case officer for all Resistance operatives in Occupied France, including the Alliance Network led by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. Cohen had spent the final days of the First World War in the Grand Fleet participating naval boarding operations during the Scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow.
Gilbert Renault had been one of the creators of the Notre-Dame Brotherhood. He had also been in charge of a French Resistance intelligence network that was betrayed to the Germans, and he had to escape the country by boat.
After 1943, and the realignment of Free French Forces, the London branch of the BCRA was known as Bureau Central de Renseignements et Action et Londres, or BCRAL, which for security purposes maintained a separate command structure from the main BCRA command in Free France. BCRAL was often referred to as "the Gaullist intelligence organization in London."