302 • LABARTHE, ANDRE ́
–L–LABARTHE, ANDRE ́.The editor ofFrance Libreand a prominent
anti-Gaullist in London during World War II, Andre ́Labarthe was a
SovietGRUspy identified invenonaasjerome. Before the war,
Labarthe had been associated with a Soviet network in London
headed byErnest Weiss, and references to his activities as a spy
were found in the papers seized by the Gestapo at the home ofHenri
Robinsonin December 1942. Labarthe was challenged by the Direc-
tion de la Surveillance du Territoire in 1965 in Paris and made a con-
fession. However, no action was taken against him because of his
political connections, and he died five years later, in 1970, of a heart
attack.
LANCASTER, DONALD.During World War II, Donald Lancaster
commanded a motor torpedo boat squadron in the Adriatic, running
agents across fromItalytoYugoslavia. In 1944 he sank the cruiser
Dalmacija, the 3-inch-gun cruiser (formerly the GermanNiobe, re-
fitted in 1926 as the pride of the Yugoslav fleet before being taken
over again by the Germans), and he was decorated with the Distin-
guished Service Cross.
After the war Lancaster joined theSecret Intelligence Service
(SIS) and operated in the Far East, serving in Saigon between 1950
and 1954 under diplomatic cover. His task was to develop contacts
among the Vietnamese nationalists, and he became especially close
to Ngo Dinh Nhu, the future president’s younger brother and the
chief of Vietnam’s many security agencies. Thereafter, in 1955 Lan-
caster officially retired from the diplomatic service to become Prince
Norodom Sihanouk’s private secretary, but in reality he continued
to work for SIS and proved to be an exceptionally valuable source,
accompanying Sihanouk to China twice. Despite his considerable
contribution, Lancaster received no recognition or compensation
fromMaurice Oldfield, and he died in somewhat reduced circum-
stances in France in 1990.
Lancaster’s book,The Emancipation of Indo-China, was published
in 1961 under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Af-
fairs and is a comprehensive history of the region from the arrival of
the first Europeans to the beginning of the American conflict.