ventilation shaft within the tunnel and set the bomb. By the time it went off, Yvonne and her team were long gone and listening to an explosion they could no longer see.
(below) Lise casually exits her new residence on Avenue Foch and makes her way to her radio operator—her purse concealing documents detailing classified Allied information that could easily indicate her as a spy.
28
Covert Tactics
In Poitiers, Lise had taken on a daring residence on Avenue Foch. The apartment she moved into was only one door down from the Nazi Gestapo headquarters, a mansion for which the third floor was being used for a new team of expert spy hunters and radio and language specialists. Led by SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Bömelburg, the team of spy hunters listened to the same BBC radio broadcasts and telegraph signals as the Allies to record and make copies of coded messages. Even though they did not have the keys to the codes they used, Gestapo intelligence would be able to decipher them before too long. “Code breakers looked for patterns and applied statistical analysis. For example, e is the most frequently occurring letter in the English language, used about 10 percent of the time. The letters j, k, q, x, and z occur least often... So with simple counting and a little deduction, any message could be cryptanalyzed” (Rose 72). With such an operation going on next door, Lise’s cover was perfect; there was no British spy crazy enough to live so close to their enemy.
