74 • BROUER
BROUER. Secret Intelligence Servicecode name for adouble agent
working as a stay-behind agent in Rome for theSicherheitsdienstin
1944.
BROWN, JOHN.After his return to England in 1945 Quartermaster-
Sergeant John H. O. Brown of the Royal Artillery was decorated with
the Distinguished Conduct Medal, an award that caused some sur-
prise among the British prisoners of war with whom he had shared
the previous four years. They remembered him as having often ex-
pressed pro-German sympathies and although he had never been a
member of the notorious British Free Corps, he had been regarded as
more likely to face a court-martial when he was back in England than
to be the recipient of a medal. In reality, Brown had undergone a
lengthy debriefing at the hands ofLeonard BurtofMI5as soon as
he had been repatriated, and his evidence, together with the secret
messages he had succeeded in smuggling out of various German
prison camps, ensured that none of those who had collaborated with
their captors escaped justice.
The secret of John Brown’s duplicity was finally revealed at the
Old Bailey trial of Walter Purdy, a renegade Briton who was con-
victed of broadcasting propaganda for the Nazis. Both he and Tom
Cooper, a leading recruiter for the British Free Corps, were sentenced
to death after Brown had given damning testimony for the prosecu-
tion. Once Brown’s role was made public, he returned to civilian life.
The full details of his extraordinary wartime adventure were pub-
lished only after his death in 1964, when a manuscript was discov-
ered among his possessions.
Educated at Cambridge and a man of deep religious beliefs, Brown
had attended a course ofMI9lectures to prepare him for the possibil-
ity of capture. He memorized a simple code to use in his correspon-
dence home and was taught to indicate the existence of a secret
message by writing the date in a particular way and by underlining
his signature. Scrutiny of the letters by British censors upon their ar-
rival in London enabled those with secret messages to be diverted to
MI9, where they were decoded.
Brown was captured in France at the end of May 1940 with a
dozen survivors of his battery, a remnant of the British Expeditionary
Force. His first prison camp was Lamsdorf, but he volunteered for