SCHOOLGIRL SPY FINALLY FINDS PEACE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-01208R000100090020-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 22, 2011
• Sequence Number: 20
• Publication Date: August 19, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT-
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ARTICLE APPEARED
ON PAGE,. MIAMI HERALD
19 August 1984
Schoolgirl
spy finally
finds peace
By JEFF LEEN
Herald staff writer
When Helene Deschamps was a 17-year-
-old French convent girl, she become a
spy. Innocence, she found, was the per-
fect cover.
Working as a secretary in the bowels of the
'French Gestapo, she would stuff the dossier of a
Resistance fighter into her bra, walk into the
bathroom, shred the papers and flush them. She
estimates 100 Frenchmen were flushed to safety.
In August 1944, her sister, a fellow agent, was
shot in the heart before Helene's eyes as they
drove to meet American forces landing in the
south of France in what has become known as
"The Second D-Day." She buried her sister and
made the rendezvous.
This week, Deschamps, who now lives in West
Palm Beach, is back in France for a week of cere-
monies celebrating the 40th anniversary of the
Second D-Day. She was invited as the guest of the
French government along with former CIA direc-
tor William Casey and his wife.
"Helene was a very gutsy young woman," said
;Henry Hyde, the wartime chief of the U.S. Office
of Strategic Services (OSS) - forerunner of the
CIA - in Algiers. "She went through the lines for
us observing German defense installations. She
,took many risks. She was very pretty, very gutsy
rand a genuine good agent."
r At 61, she is a striking woman who lives "like a
hermit" in a nicely furnished but modest inland
-condominium. Sitting in her apartment recently,
she told war stories in a French accent spruced
with a brave bonhomie, a survivor's ability to
smile through the wreckage of war.
"It was hell," she said of the five years she
.spent underground, first for the French and later
.for the Americans. "You never feel at peace.
You're always afraid. You sleep when you can and
you eat when you can. Sometimes we went two or
three days without eating"
It was a life of safe houses, code names (she
had two, "Anick" and "H-1"), radio transmitters,
false identification papers and let-
ter drops. A simple trip to the mar-
ket could result in an arrest. Ar-
rested once in Paris, she faked a
miscarriage to escape an interro-
gation cell.
She survived six months on a
daily two slices of bread made of
."sawdust and flour full of
worms."
Riding her Peugeot bicycle, she
counted enemy troops and studied
German coastal defenses. She
'spotted mine fields and camou-
flaged artillery. She helped Ameri-
can fliers and Jews escape across
the Spanish border. She was sel-
dom paid and when it was all over
she received no medal.
"I was raised military, and for
me I thought that was the an-
swer," she said. "We had to fight
back any way we could."
Deschamps was born in north-
ern China into a French military
family that traces its lineage to
one of Napoleon's generals. Her
family lived on posts in Africa,
Madagascar and the Indian Ocean.
Private tutors instructed her in .
fencing, target-shooting and clim-
bing.
She was in France attending the
Convent of the Sacred Heart in
Avignon when war broke out in
Europe. Her two brothers immedi-
ately joined the Free French
Forces in Algiers. She spent
months seeking a way she could
fight. Finally, she talked her way
into a courier's job with the Resis-
tance in late 1940. She never told
her mother.
"She never knew until the end
of the war what I was doing," she
said.
At first, she rode her bicycle de-
livering pamphlets exhorting the
French to resist "les Boches" (a
slur for the Germans). Later, she
got a job in Vichy, the capital of
the Nazi-collaborating French. She
worked for the "Milice" -
Frenchmen enlisted in a German-
controlled Gestapo unit. Soon her
co-workers were looking for the
leak to explain their poor perfor-
mance.
"I was interrogated, beat up,"
she remembered. "They released
me because -I was so young. You
could play dumb because of your
youth. In my day, 17 and 18 '
wasn't what the kids are like in
this day. We were innocent."
In 1943, weary of the infighting
among the French Resistance, she
joined the Americans - signing on
with the OSS. Her adopted sister,
Jackie, joined, too.
Sniper fire
The two sisters were driving to
St. Tropez to meet the landing
American troops on the "Second
D-Day" when Jackie was shot by
a sniper while she was crawling,
over a car seat to exchange places
with Helene.
Continues
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"I felt responsible for her
death," she said. "She knew she
was going to be killed. She didn't
want to go on this mission. I bur-
led her myself and continued the
mission."
The landing succeeded, combin-
ing with the first D-Day to wedge
the Germans from French soil.
In 1945, an exhausted Des-
champs resigned from the OSS
and was sent to the Carlton Hotel
in Cannes to recuperate. The hotel
was managed by a young U.S. Ar-
my lieutenant suffering from
shell-shock. His name was Forrest
Adams, and he asked her out the
first night she was there. On the
third night he asked her to marry
him.
She was an Army war bride, ar-
riving in America six months
ahead of her husband. Adams at-
tended the University of Southern
California on the GI bill. He had
never recovered sufficiently from
his wounds, mental and physical.
He died at 29, three weeks short of
getting a degree in civil engineer-
ing. Helene had a 10-month-old
baby girl and no visible means of
support. She became a French
teacher.
In Hawaii, she taught American
soldiers' headed for Vietnam in the
early 1960s. In Los Angeles, she
came to know and befriend the
sisters of the Shah of Iran. She
moved to Tehran to teach for five
years at the American Internation-
al School in the late 1960s. For the
past nine years, she has lived in
Palm Beach County where her
daughter, Karyn Monget, formerly
fashion editor of the Palm Beach
Daily News, is now a model and
free-lance writer.
On this trip to France, she plans
to spend two weeks visiting her
brother Henri in the coastal town
of Beziers. Her brother Maurice
died wearing a French Army uni-
form at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and
is buried in Hanoi.
Her home is filled with Chinese
knick-knacks, Iranian porcelain,
French paintings. There is an
enameled cigarette case - a gift
frm Princess Sharms of Iran. But
her proudest possession may well
be her U.S. citizenship, which she
received 32 years ago.
A Reagan supporter
At the Bicentennial celebration
in Washington, she was included
in an exhibition on women spies.
She proudly displays a letter from
President Reagan, a form letter
answer to a message of support.
She supports Reagan and is glad
the country is becoming stronger
militarily and more patriotic.
Americans, she feels, don't un-
derstand the price the world once
paid for freedom. She quit giving
lectures because she got so angry
at the questions.
"The American women would
raise their hand and say, well, we
had restrictions, too," she said.
"We couldn't make jam. Half of
France was starving and they
were worried about making jam.
When I told one group that I had
been underground five years, a
woman asked how do you stand it
without going up for air? They
thought I was living in a sewer."
Most of Deschamps' ex
just now being declassified. In
max, the CIA turned over records
Of USS operations to the National
Archives in Washington. The first
atc was opened to the public on
June 11.
When the books about the spy
war came out, she was not in
them. Taking a pen name, she
wrote her own book, The Secret
War of Helene De Champlain,
which was published in London in
1980. It took 17 years to write and
it did not become a best seller. But
the book accomplished something
else.
"As soon as I put it down in the
book then the nightmares were
gone, she said. "When you are
able to write it down, it relieves
you a lot."
In The Secret War, Deschamps
wrote:
"I, H-1, live alone. It was my
destiny after all. I never really ad-
justed to a routine life, with regu-
lar hours and chores. My free spir-
it has never accepted the
transition. I rebel when I feel
forced into a situation. Even
,though I am not so very old, I feel
that I have lived longer than most
people."
She wrote her book in English,
not her native French because
"French people are not interested
in war stories. We've had too
many wars."
Spy thrillers
Her own bookshelves are well-
stocked with war volumes and spy
thrillers by Robert Ludlum, Len
Deighton, Frederick Forsythe,
John le? Carre.
Le Carre provided the epigraph
for her book:
"There's fieldmen, and there's
deskmen, and it's up to you and
me to see that the distinction is
preserved ..."
Clearly she was a fieldman.
Now she herself aspires to write
spy fiction. She has a manuscript
titled Spyglass, and would like to
place it and The Secret War with
a
an American publisher. But she
says publishers have found the
nonfiction book lacking in lurid-
ness.
"One said there's not enough
sex," she said. "One said it's not
bloody enough and one said we'd
like more like Mata Hari."
She never remarried and does
,not socialize much anymore.
"Usually people get bored when
I tell war stories," she said. "They
say, 'Oh, she's imagining.'"
Among the books on her shelf is
the definitive one on OSS opera-
tions in World War 11, The Secret
War Report of the OSS, a 572-
page account by noted espionage
author Anthony Cave Brown. A
chapter is devoted to "Penny Far-
thing," the code name for Des-
champs' network. In her copy she
has added remarks in blue pen.
Next to "The original [Penny
Farthing) staff of 23 on D-Day
was augmented at intervals until
some 150 men represented OSS in
one capacity or another in
France," she has written, "plus
one woman, me!"
Next to "one of the agents was
wounded by a booby-trapped gre-
nade located between the lines,"
she has written the name Bill Duff,
a friend. Next to "the joint losses
of the three lunits] at the end of
October were 10 killed, 15 wound.
ed, 39 captured," she has added
one word: "Jackie."
A fieldman must preserve the
distinctions.
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