The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy

by Judith L. Pearson

  A friend of Mme Guérin’s, Paul Genet, joined Virginia’s group shortly after the madam. He was well connected within the Vichy gendarmerie and feigned support of Pétain’s government. In reality, he was repulsed by it and was only too willing to pass on the names of officials whom he believed could be bribed into any number of things provided the price was right.

  Virginia suggested to Genet that she would like to interview some of the Vichy officials for the Post. She was interested in hearing their stories in order to better understand what made them tick. Her premise amused Genet. He understood only too well that what she was really after was what they knew and whether they might be willing to sell their information. He set up the meeting as a lunch two days later, choosing a pro-Vichy restaurant. Despite the fact that the French population at large was going hungry, Vichy officials ate very well in certain establishments in exchange for protection from persecution.

  One of the individuals at the luncheon was the director of the press in Lyon. It was his responsibility to make sure that only the “correct” news, that is, news with a German slant, was printed. The second man was a major in the gendarmerie, and had been a police officer before the war as well. The third was associated with the mayor’s office, although Virginia never completely understood what his job was.

  The director of the press asked Virginia right away how she liked the city. Virginia answered that she thought the city was beautiful, but felt badly that she had come at such an unpleasant time. She hoped by offering an opening for criticism of the current regime, the men’s answers would give her a good idea where they stood.

  The director waved aside her comment, saying it was the perfect time to be in Lyon. It was because of people like her that the world would soon see all of the wonderful changes occurring in France. He expounded on this comment, while the other two men sat in silence. When he excused himself to use the toilettes, the representative from the mayor’s office leaned forward to tell Virginia that there were some who would like other facts to be told in America. The food shortage, for example, was troublesome and was having a great effect on the people, mentally and physically.

  Virginia thought this was a very brave statement to make in front of the major, who said nothing. In fact he didn’t speak much during the entire luncheon. When they shook hands and parted ways, Virginia concluded that the newspaperman was too pro-Vichy to be of any help. The silence of the major bothered her as it could be read either way. But the representative from the mayor’s office had possibilities and she filed his name away in her mind for future contact.

  As she rounded a corner on the way back to her hotel, Virginia came across a shocking commotion. Three gendarmes were viciously beating and kicking an elderly man on the sidewalk. Each time he tried to rise, they kicked him down again. Blood from his nose and mouth stained the snow. When he stopped resisting them, the gendarmes dragged him out to the street and threw him into the back of their police van. Shopkeepers had come to their doors to watch, and other passersby had paused briefly, but none of them had tried to intervene. When the van left, they all resumed their activities.

  The brutality of the scene sickened Virginia. Her father, had he been alive, would have been approximately the same age as the man the gendarmes had just hauled off. WTiat had his crime been? Surely it couldn’t have been so grave as to require three officers to publicly beat him to bloody unconsciousness.

  The Vichy authorities were equally merciless whenever they captured downed RAF airmen wandering the zone libre. The lucky ones came in contact with Resistance circuits and a steady stream of them kept Virginia’s group busy. The best way for them to get back to England was through Spain, but they needed connections. Virginia’s Resistance organization, code-named HECKLER, had become well known among the other groups as a circuit with many ties. Lyon, they were told before leaving England, was the place to go if they ran into trouble.

  If they were wounded, Dr. Rousset, whose code name was Pepin and whom Virginia called Pep, tended to them. He was willing to undertake just about anything Virginia asked of him. He worked tirelessly and Virginia knew he would die before divulging any secrets about their organization. She wanted to feel the kind of emotion for him that would be normal for one friend to feel for another. But she didn’t dare. The cardinal rule in espionage, they had repeated during her training, was never to get involved in any way with anyone else.

  Virginia’s life was a bizarre jumble of paradoxes. She was constantly surrounded by people with whom she could never become close. They thought she was someone she wasn’t. None of them could ever know the exact nature of her mission, nor the missions of one another. Whether or not Virginia trusted them was not the issue. The fact was that affection, or love, or whatever one chose to call it, could cloud decision making. And that was not a chance she was willing to take. For a gregarious American who loved people, this self-imposed detachment from others was one of the toughest parts of her mission.

  Equally challenging was assuring the downed pilots that she really did know what she was doing. Dropping into a hostile country, barely speaking the language, and running for one’s life were all very unnerving. Being turned over to a woman and told to trust in her to assist with their escape was more than some of them could stomach. But they had no choice. Until the right opportunity for passage to Spain arose, they were virtually under Virginia’s command and housed with Lyon Resistance members or at Mme Guérin’s brothel. Those whose French was not passable had their throats bandaged by Dr. Rousset. And the good doctor provided them with a card that explained they had suffered a war injury that affected their ability to speak.

  Escape routes out of France were limited. The Germans controlled the north and the west, the Italians the east. Warships patrolled the Mediterranean and most of the ports were blockaded. Sometimes, however, Le Provost’s contacts in Marseille would be able to receive them. In that case, the pilots were shipped out in a truck belonging to fleet owner Eugène Labourier. Once in Marseille, they would board a local watercraft, usually some kind of fishing vessel, which would take them to a Spanish Mediterranean port. The most preferred method of exfiltration, however, was a trip

  in one of Labourier’s trucks to Perpignon, a French city on the Spanish border, where the pilots connected with a guide who led them across the Pyrénées.

  Virginia worked primarily behind the scenes and she rarely met face-to- face with the escaping pilots. But one cold day in early December, it was left to her to give a pilot his final instructions before he began the journey to the Spanish border. Although there was no more heat in the cafés than in any other building, warmth from human bodies helped make up for the lack of it coming from the furnace, so eateries became preferred meeting places. Plus, cafés and restaurants gave the HECKLER members a reason for congregating; sipping a beverage of choice, limited as the choices were, remained a national pastime.

  The Brit spoke French very well, with a much better accent than Virginia’s. He could very easily have passed for a Frenchman. But he had been in the country only a week, spending most of his time in hiding. His lack of familiarity with the new French laws became apparent when he ordered a beer. The waiter looked at him in surprise and pointed to the sign hanging over the bar. It pictured a beached whale expiring on the sand. Below it were printed the words Jour sans alcool.

  Virginia ordered two grenaches, as if she hadn’t even heard the pilot’s order. When the waiter left, she quietly explained the law to the pilot. But his faux pas did not go unnoticed, and a few minutes later two men in suits walked up to their table and demanded to see their papers.

  Virginia and the Brit produced their identification documents and sat quietly as the officials studied them. Virginia felt her pulse pounding in her head. Her papers were authentic, but the pilot’s were forgeries, hastily produced for him to use in his border crossing. The agonizing seconds ticked off. Finally, one of the officials bent very close to the pilot and asked why he had ord
ered a beer on a jour sans alcool.

  The pilot opened his mouth, but no words came out. He turned his wild eyes to Virginia. She looked directly at the officials and lied with complete sangfroid, telling them that the man suffered from a mental condition. He had no idea what day it was or what changes had occurred in France over the past couple of years. Her lie was picking up steam.

  She was interviewing him, she said, for an article she was writing for the New York Post. Once the interview was completed, she would return him to the care of his doctor. She waved her hand airily in the direction of the official still holding the papers saying her nationality and profession were explained quite clearly, if the men would care to read them more closely.

  They studied Virginia’s credentials again and looked back at her, seemingly memorizing her face, before moving away. When their grenaches arrived, Virginia and the Brit drank them in relative silence, and as quickly as they dared without seeming obvious. When they left the cafe, they took a circuitous route to Pep’s office on the off chance that they were being followed, but it appeared as though they were alone. Virginia told Pep about their encounter, while the poor airman, visibly shaken, tried in vain to light a cigarette.

  But the whole incident gave Virginia an idea. She suggested to Pep that they establish an asylum as a cover for all of the other “mentally unstable” who might pass through his doors. After all, the collapse of France had been traumatic and there must be myriad French soldiers who were affected. An asylum would be the perfect excuse to give to Pep’s housekeeper and neighbors to explain the number of strange men suddenly visiting the clinic. And it would give them the opportunity to keep these men close until they could escape through Spain.

  As he had with all of Virginia’s requests, Pep agreed without hesitation. But ideas such as these were always accompanied with setup costs, paid for with large amounts of mostly counterfeit francs brought to Virginia by arriving SOE agents. Some of these agents came ashore in watercraft, but many of them arrived by parachute.

  Parachute drops had become quite commonplace for SOE and the Resistance. The plane of choice in 1941 was the Westland Lysander, a small, single-engine monoplane that could cruise up to 165 miles per hour. If it was stripped of all arms and armor and equipped with an extra fuel tank, it had a range of 450 miles, more than enough to travel across the channel and back again. Besides the pilot, it could seat two passengers comfortably, three or four if absolutely necessary.

  Flights to France occurred during the fuller phases of the moon, its light being the only one pilots had available. They navigated using landmarks like rivers, as well as dead reckoning. Initially, agents were dropped in blind, with no one to meet them. But once the Resistance and agent population grew, reception committees were commonplace. The circuit leader chose a landing strip and its coordinates were determined by placing a clear plastic device on a map of the area. The device had numbered grids on it, and it was the chosen grid number, rather than a city name, that was transmitted to London as the drop location.

  The reception committee met at the agreed-upon location, and when the plane arrived, it was signaled in code from the ground using a flashlight. Once the plane flashed a response, the rest of the committee illuminated the landing strip with their lights. Their positions on the field always took into consideration the direction and speed of the wind, the goal being that the arriving agent would arrive exactly in their midst. Depending on the situation, occasionally bonfires were used in place of flashlights. Once the incoming agents had floated to earth, their flight suits and parachutes were buried and the whole group dispersed in minutes to avoid attention from nosy neighbors, passing gendarmes, or Gestapo agents.

  SOE parachuted in supplies as well. Weapons and ammunition, explosive supplies, wireless sets with repair pieces, clothing, medical supplies, K rations, and anything else that was necessary could be packed into large cylindrical containers. Rarely was the total weight over one hundred pounds. Some containers were six feet tall, with three smaller cylinders inside. Others consisted of five separate cylinders bound together. SOE’s packing staff was top notch; rarely did items arrive in poor condition. One of their finest achievements was a drop of two hundred bottles of printer’s ink for a Resistance newspaper. Not one bottle was cracked.

  One agent to parachute in during the full moon of September 1941 was thirty-three-year-old Ben Cowburn, a Lancashire oil technician. His mission was to travel through France making a study of potential oil targets, finding out which were being used by the Germans that could become bombing objectives. When his tour finally took him to the vicinity of Lyon in December, he went to the Grand Nouvel Hotel to look up Virginia.

  The two of them went to dinner at a black market restaurant along with Pep. Cowburn told Virginia how highly thought of she was back in London. He commended her for her work, in light of her leg. Pep asked Cowburn what he was talking about. Cowburn was embarrassed at the slip, but Virginia only shrugged it off telling Pep she had had an accident a few years back and in order to save her life, she lost the leg. She simply didn’t think it was important enough to mention to him. It was just one of those inconveniences one had to deal with in life. She told them she refused to let “Cuthbert” hold her back, and when they looked confused, she explained she had long ago bestowed her leg with the name.

  Virginia steered the conversation back to business asking Cowburn about new piano players. Agents used the term to refer to wireless operators, calling the radios pianos. As there was no one within earshot and their waiter was keeping a discreet distance, Virginia told Cowburn of her concern at being out of touch with London. The HECKLER circuit had been cut off since an entire group of incoming agents, including a wireless operator, had been picked up a couple of months earlier.

  Not coincidentally, Cowburn told her he had been asked by London to enlist her help with a group of agents whose mission had been code-named CORSICA. They had parachuted into France on October 10, the first combined drop of men and arms into the zone libre. One of them landed badly a mile or so from his comrades. He was knocked unconscious and picked up by the gendarmes the next day. In his pocket they found the address of a safe house near Chateauroux, the Villa des Bois. The Vichy police went to the villa and arrested everyone there. Among them, in fact, was a Frenchman, Gabriel, who had been recruited by de Guélis.

  The gendarmes waited, and as the “Corsicans” arrived one by one, they were arrested as well. A total of a dozen men were picked up, two of whom were wireless operators. It was a huge setback to lose so many men at one time.

  Since her arrival, one of the things Virginia had refused to give in to were thoughts of “what if?” What if she was putting her Resistance friends at too great a risk? What if any of them were arrested? Could they hold up under torture? And what if agents she had given information or money to were stopped? She had been incredibly careful, even protective, of all those under her watch. Cowburn’s story turned those worries into a reality. She had seen what the Vichy gendarmes were capable of. What the Corsicans would probably endure as enemies of the state was unthinkable. The only way she could remain effective was to maintain a distance from her emotions.

  She asked Cowburn where the men had been taken. His answer gave her chills. They were in Beleyme Prison in Perigueux, whose reputation was one of the worst in France. Hygiene and sanitation were nonexistent, little food was provided, and most of it was rotten. Disease and vermin ran rampant. SOE was buying information from a guard, who told them one of the wireless operators had already been shot, after having been tortured for several days.

  Virginia was ready to help any way she and her circuit members could. Cowburn told her she might be asked to help with bribes or an escape. He said he felt badly about burdening her with one more job, as he had heard just about everyone in the zone libre came to see her for one reason or another. But Virginia made it plain to Cowburn that his request was her job just as all the others were.

  On
December 8, 1941, Virginia stopped in at the shop of Labourier’s girlfriend, Andrée Michel. Maggy, as her friends called her, had joined the Resistance with Labourier and had become invaluable as a courier. She was the first to deliver unthinkable news to Virginia: the United States had been bombed by the Japanese.

  It had happened the day before on December 7, Andrée explained. A naval base in Hawaii was the target. Most of the ships were sunk and many people were killed. President Roosevelt had just asked the American Congress to declare war against Japan, and Congress accepted.

  Virginia’s life had been so involved with the war in Europe that an attack against the United States by Japan was not something she had ever considered. The days that followed were filled with an even more amazing series of events. Britain also declared war against Japan on the eighth, as several of their territories had been bombed at the same time as Hawaii. Then, on Thursday, December 11, first Mussolini and then Hitler declared war against the United States. Making his announcement at the Reichstag in Berlin, Hitler said he had tried to avoid direct conflict with the United States, but under the Tripartite Agreement signed on September 27, 1940, Germany was obliged to join Italy to defend its ally Japan. He accused President Roosevelt of waging a campaign against Germany since 1937, blamed him for the outbreak of war in 1939, and said the United States had a plan to invade Germany in 1943.

  President Roosevelt’s response was swift and Congress voted to declare war on Germany and Italy. Virginia heard excerpts of the president’s speech to the American public that night on the BBC’s French broadcast:

  On the morning of December 11, the Government of Germany, pursuing its course of world conquest, declared war against the United States.… Delay invites great danger. Rapid and united effort by all of the peoples of the world who are determined to remain free will insure a world victory of the forces of justice and of righteousness over the forces of savagery and of barbarism.