Roger Landes

Roger Arthur Landes, LdH CdeG MC & Bar (16 December 1916 – 16 July 2008), code named Stanislas and Aristide, was an agent of the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) organization during World War II in France.

The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in countries occupied by the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany.

SOE agents allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England.

Landes was a wireless operator for the Scientist network in the Bordeaux region of France, and later became the "organiser" (leader) of the Actor network in the same region.

Landes graduated in architecture at the École des Beaux Arts before also moving to London in 1938 after the Munich Crisis, where he joined London County Council as a quantity surveyor.

Landes was conscripted into the Royal Corps of Signals in March 1941 and, speaking better French than English and already knowing Morse code, he was recruited into SOE (F section) in March 1942.

SOE was desperate for French-speaking wireless operators and Landes was "an intelligent, careful, self-reliant and unobtrusive student, a perfect candidate for wireless work."

Landes reported for work at SOE on 17 March 1942,

Landes first mission, with his codename as Aristide, was as radio operator to the SCIENTIST network of Claude de Baissac (David).

He parachuted into France with Gilbert Norman on the night of 31 October 1942.

Arriving in Bordeaux, he made contact with de Baissac and, after initial problems, found a house from which he could send and receive messages from SOE in Paris.

The work of a wireless operator was dull, dangerous, and lonely.

Landes followed a careful routine to avoid attracting the attention of the German and French police.

Every morning he took a long walk and, once certain he was not followed, collected messages from secret letter boxes; in the afternoons he went to a cinema and slept; at night, alone in his house, he transmitted and received messages.

He used two couriers to carry messages back and forth to de Baissac and other SOE agents.

SOE's Mary Katherine Herbert was one courier.

The second was a young French woman from Bordeaux named Ginette Corbin.

Landes had to worry about German wireless detector vans which patrolled the streets and curious neighbors who might inform on him to the Germans in exchange for a reward.

The arrival of a second wireless operator, Marcel Défense, on 13 May 1943 with three new and better radios enabled Landes to locate radios at different locations and move from place to transmit and receive messages and thus run less risk of capture.

In June 1943, the Germans penetrated and destroyed the Prosper network in Paris and the fallout put the Scientist agents in Bordeaux in danger.

De Baissac requested or was ordered to return to England to avoid arrest and he and his sister, Lise, flew back by Lysander on the night of 15/16 August.

Roger Landes, Vic Hayes, Marcel Défense, and Mary Herbert (pregnant with de Baissac's child) remained in Bordeaux to continue working.

Landes, left in charge, was furious that de Baissac had taken his sister Lise with him to England and left Mary Herbert behind.

He relieved Herbert of all duties and put her into a clinic near Bordeaux where she had her baby.

The most important contact of the Scientist network in Bordeau was André Grandclément, a retired army colonel and a leader of the far-right resistance organization, the Organisation civile et militaire (OCM).

Grandclément's wife was arrested by the Germans on 29 July 1943 and on 19 September 1943, Grandclément was also arrested.

To protect his wife and secure his own release Grandclément was persuaded by the Germans to become a double agent.

With information he provided, the Germans were able to arrest many OCM members and confiscate many of the arms that had been parachuted into them for resistance to the Germans.

Landes was quickly aware of Grandclément's turncoat agreement with the Germans.

The Germans allowed Grandclément a few days of freedom and on 24 September he met with Landes and other members of the Scientist network at the house of Charles Corbin, father of Landes's courier Ginette Corbin.

After the liberation from German occupation of France in 1944, he joined Force 136 to subvert the Japanese occupation of Malaya.

Landes is best known for his assassination of double agent André Grandclément and Grandclément's wife.

He was an effective agent for the SOE, organizing and arming the French Resistance in southwestern France, and evading capture by the German occupiers.

He is described by a biographer as a "cautious secret agent with an uncanny ability to vanish into the crowd."

Roger Landes was born in Paris the second son (of three) to Barnet Landes, of Polish-Jewish descent, and a Russian mother.

Barnet's grandfather had fled Russian Poland to avoid the pogroms and Imperial conscription, setting up a jewelry business in Hatton Garden before settling in Paris.

Barnet's children had then fought for Britain in the First World War.

Barnet spoke poor English and so preferred to live in Paris and run a jewelry business there.

Roger Landes was educated in France.

He remained there with one of his two brothers until his parents' business collapsed during the Great Depression and they moved to London.