Posted on 09/04/2005 8:06:05 PM PDT by Mike Fieschko
A good-time girl from Peru stopped the 15,000 men of a crack German SS panzer division in their tracks on D-Day.As British and American troops fought their way up the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944, 2nd SS Panzer - the Das Reich Division - was hundreds of miles to the south near Bordeaux.
The formation was there because of a telegram from Elvira Chaudoir, the daughter of a Peruvian diplomat, to a Spanish bank asking it to send £50 to her dentist in London. It was a coded message she knew would be passed to the Germans, and the figure of £50 meant that the Allied invasion would take place not in Normandy but in the Bay of Biscay.
The Abwehr, the German intelligence service, thought Chaudoir was working for them, whereas in fact she was a British double agent spreading false information as part of Operation Fortitude, the deception plan designed to mask the true location of the Allied invasion. So, Das Reich, whose presence in Normandy might have spelt disaster for Overlord, was in the wrong place at the right time.
An MI5 file released today at the National Archives in Kew chronicles one of the more glamorous spies of the Second World War. Chaudoir was a high society gambler who managed to run up huge debts at Crockfords and the Hamilton Club while pursuing a colourful sex life. Weekends were spent at house parties thrown by Lord Carnarvon, with the likes of the Duke of Marlborough and Duff Cooper.
But there was another, less frivolous side to Chaudoir. She had been recruited by Lt Col Claude Dansey, the deputy head of MI6, who in 1942 sent her on a mission to Vichy France, where her father was the Peruvian chargé d'affaires. While there, she was introduced to one of Hermann Goering's agents, known only as Biel, with whom she formed a ''personal relationship''. He offered her £100 a month if she would send economic and political intelligence from Britain.
On her return to London, she was handed over to MI5's double-cross operators who ran her as a double agent under the codename Bronx, sending false information to Biel.
Her file describes the poker parties, her £1,000 debt (£28,000 today) and the small allowance from her parents which constituted her only income. Her MI5 handlers observed: ''She is a typical member of the cosmopolitan smart set and, though possibly lazy, is not un-intelligent.
"At the present moment she is living in a flat in Hertford Street, Mayfair, and there is some reason to believe she is living with a man who has a flat in the same house. It is not known whether she is continuing with her lesbian tendencies."
Chaudoir's means of contacting Biel was by coded telegram to Antonio de Almeida, the general manager of the Espirito Santo Bank in Madrid, an institution known to be friendly to the Germans. Initially, Chaudoir's intelligence consisted of political gossip or economic information, but as the Allied invasion loomed the Germans pressed her for information on its location. The telegram to the bank was to specify different amounts of money according to the location.
The £50 ''Bay of Biscay'' warning was sent late in May, less than a fortnight before D-Day.
The ruse appears to have worked because the Das Reich mobilised on June 7 - the day after the Normandy landings. Elsewhere in France, German armoured formations lay inactive, false information supplied under Fortitude having successfully concealed Normandy as the real destination of the invasion fleets.
When the division began its journey north, it was hampered by sabotage operations of the French Resistance and Allied fighter bomber sweeps. The division took its frustration out on the French population, hanging 99 people from the lamp-posts in Tulle and killing all 624 men, women and children in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane.
Despite the obvious weakness of Chaudoir's intelligence, the Germans continued to trust her. She supplied bogus information on Britain's defences against VI and V2 rocket attack.
After the war she lived anonymously in a small village in the South of France.
Sending disinformation to one's enemy? Do that today and you get roasted in the MSM.
Something more fascinating in this fact than any other. Just a feeling, I suppose.
If anyone should be able to fully appreciate Miss Chaudoir's accomplishments, they should!
I smell a movie in the works.
So basically you have a 1940's Paris Hilton, who MI6 blackmailed with her gambling debts into bedding foreign agents and sending false info to the Germans. Classic intel ops. Is there any doubt why she slunk away into obscurity after the war was over...?
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