Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  A few days later, he appeared at Boutron’s door. As it happened, he said, he had become involved in a new resistance group “with the same principles and goals as yours.” He had talked to the group’s leaders, who wanted to meet Boutron as soon as possible. The next day, the two men took the train to Vichy, where Schaerrer introduced Boutron to Navarre and Fourcade.

  After hours of discussion, Boutron agreed to join Crusade. Sensing that he might have doubts about a woman as the network’s second in command, Navarre made it clear that Marie-Madeleine Fourcade had his full confidence and that Boutron must accept her authority. She was, the chief added, “the pivot around which everything turns. She is the most valuable of us all.” He described her in glowing terms, saying she had “the memory of an elephant, the cleverness of a fox, the guile of a serpent, the perseverance of a mole, and the fierceness of a panther.”

  During that first meeting, Boutron was assigned to work with Schaerrer as Crusade’s advance guard in Marseille, which was to become the network’s first major outpost. There they would begin to enlist agents from among the throngs of merchant seamen who sailed in and out of the port and who could report on, among other things, the identity of ships and cargoes and where they were headed.

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  IN EARLY DECEMBER 1940, Fourcade traveled by train to meet Boutron and Schaerrer’s first two recruits, who were to take charge of the day-to-day operations in Marseille. She was happy to exchange the surreal, hothouse atmosphere of Vichy, if only briefly, for the gritty reality of the city where she had been born and which she considered her hometown.

  After arriving at the Gare de Marseille–Saint Charles, she paused for a moment at the top of the steep stone staircase leading down from the station and gazed at the hilly city, with its narrow streets and alleys, spread out below her. Noisy and bustling, it pulsated with life. She took a deep breath and savored the salty tang of the sea air.

  A center of trade and immigration since its founding by the Greeks around 600 B.C., Marseille was considered one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, surpassing, in the view of some, even Fourcade’s beloved Shanghai. If one stood for eighty minutes on a corner of the city’s best-known boulevard, the Canebière, he or she, according to local lore, would end up encountering people from more nations than Phileas Fogg did in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days.

  Marseille’s already huge immigrant population swelled even more after the German occupation of northern France. As the free zone’s biggest city and only functioning port, it served as a beacon of hope for thousands of refugees—French from the occupied zone, British and other Allied soldiers left behind after the fall of France, Poles, Czechs, Belgians, Italians, and anti-Nazi Germans and Austrians, many of whom were Jews. All had flocked to Marseille for the same reason—to flee occupied Europe and the Nazis. By late 1940, the chances for escape had dwindled considerably, but the exiles, with no place else to go, continued to crowd the city’s hotels, cafés, and waterfront bars, anxiously exchanging rumors of ship sailings and police raids.

  Not coincidentally, Marseille also served as a hotbed of early French resistance to the Nazis. Because of its status as a key international port, it was obviously a magnet for fledgling intelligence-collecting groups like Crusade. But it also became the home of embryonic escape networks, which began to smuggle stranded Allied airmen and soldiers, as well as European refugees, from Marseille to neutral Spain and Portugal and from there to freedom.

  For members of the resistance, part of Marseille’s attraction lay in the fact that it was an easy place in which to hide. The sprawling metropolis was made up of more than one hundred districts, many of which were more like separate villages than conventional city neighborhoods. Located near the port, Marseille’s Old Town, with its dark, twisting alleys and underground passageways leading to the cellars of houses, was a particularly difficult place in which to track down fugitives from the law, whether they were members of the resistance or Marseille’s flourishing criminal underworld.

  The city’s centuries-old tradition of stubborn independence from the rest of France also helped the resistance cause. “Marseille residents by their nature consider themselves as different,” an observer wrote in 1794. “The city’s geographical situation, its mountains, its rivers, which separate it from the rest of France, its peculiar language, everything encourages this opinion….Marseille is their country; France is nothing.”

  That sense of independence could be seen in the attitude of the people of Marseille to the new Vichy government and its German masters. When they were hired, policemen in Vichy France had to take the following oath: “I swear to fight against democracy, against Gaullist insurrection and against Jewish leprosy.” In Marseille, however, the police department was widely considered to be pro-British and “discreetly anti-Nazi.” When revelers in one Marseille bar raised their glasses to “de Gaulle and England,” a couple of gendarmes passing by turned a blind eye. In the margins of a surveillance report about a Marseille resident who openly expressed support for a British victory, an anonymous police officer scribbled, “Who wouldn’t wish for it?”

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  BEFORE FOURCADE’S ARRIVAL IN Marseille, Henri Schaerrer had assured her that the two new operatives had been well briefed about Crusade. But when she entered the café chosen for the meeting and walked toward the table where Schaerrer sat with the men, she heard one of them shout, “Good God! It’s a woman!” Glancing at a sheepish-looking Schaerrer, she realized that his briefing had not included the fact that their new boss was female.

  The shouter was Gabriel Rivière, a burly, mustachioed official of Marseille’s merchant marine association who, according to Schaerrer, knew more about maritime traffic in the Mediterranean than anyone else in the port. Once he recovered from his shock, the jovial Rivière made no further mention of her gender and immediately got down to business. He hated the Germans and would gladly join the network, he told Fourcade. To serve as a cover for his activities, he suggested that Crusade buy a wholesale fruit and vegetable business that was currently for sale, which would give him a cover for roaming at will around the port in search of possible recruits. A partner of his would actually run the business, Rivière’s wife would work in its retail shop, and its warehouse would serve as a hiding place for Crusade’s agents and couriers.

  Taken aback by Rivière’s sweeping proposal, Fourcade turned to Schaerrer’s other new hire, Émile Audoly, a slight, reserved, and somewhat ethereal man, at least in comparison with the earthy Rivière. Audoly worked for a company of grain dealers, which gave him access to Marseille’s docks, railway station, and warehouses. He could check the manifests of merchant marine and railway cargoes and could on occasion inspect the cargoes themselves.

  In addition, both Rivière and Audoly were acquainted with merchant marine radio operators who were anti-German and were likely recruits for Crusade. If the network could provide them with radio transmitters, they could quickly pass on the intelligence they collected to the network’s headquarters in Vichy.

  Within a few days, Crusade’s Marseille sector was up and running. Fourcade authorized the spending of 50,000 francs for the fruit and vegetable business for Rivière, whose main job would be to supervise the recruitment of agents. Audoly would be in charge of the actual collection of intelligence, focusing on the movements of ships and their cargoes. And Jean Boutron would oversee the sector’s work as a whole.

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  FOR FOURCADE, ARRANGING THE MARSEILLE operation was the easiest part of this trip. She was far more concerned about her other assignment: to recruit an experienced intelligence officer to coordinate and supervise the information that she hoped would soon begin flooding in from the fast-growing number of Crusade agents.

  For the job, Navarre had recommended a friend of his: Colonel Charles Bernis, a ca
nny sixty-six-year-old veteran of the army’s Deuxième Bureau. Regarded as the leading theoretician of French military intelligence, Bernis had written what was considered the definitive text on intelligence methods and procedures. In 1936, he had retired to the tiny principality of Monaco, whose government immediately hired him as the head of its military, police, and fire departments.

  When she arrived in Monte Carlo, Fourcade was filled with trepidation. She met the short, stocky, gray-haired Bernis for lunch at the Café de Paris, the legendary Belle Époque restaurant on the city’s main square. His unsmiling demeanor and the formality of his greeting when she introduced herself only increased her nervousness.

  Bernis asked her if Navarre really thought the French could fight back. Absolutely, she replied. Navarre believed that the British would hold out and the Americans would eventually enter the war. Until then, the most important help the French could provide was to pass on intelligence to the British.

  Bernis gave Fourcade what she interpreted as a mocking look and asked her if she knew what intelligence was. She knew that it was hard work, she said, and that she very much needed his knowledge and experience. Bernis glanced around, then motioned to her to accompany him. He rose from their outdoor table and led her down to a terrace overlooking the sea, where he gave her a detailed primer on intelligence gathering.

  When she asked him how to judge the relative importance of information, Bernis said it wasn’t an agent’s job to decide what was important. Nor should an agent speculate or make judgments. When the British asked for information, the network’s response must be as precise as possible. Nothing should be left to the imagination. An agent must report only on what he saw or heard, and let the recipients of the intelligence draw their own conclusions.

  When she had finally finished with her questions, Bernis had some of his own. Wasn’t she there to recruit him? Where was he to go? She readily provided the answers: He would work from the town of Pau in southwestern France, chosen because it was close to the Spanish-French border and also to the demarcation line dividing the free and unoccupied zones, making it easier for agents and couriers to slip back and forth between them. He would start in January 1941.

  Then came a much thornier question: To whom would he report? After hesitating a moment, Fourcade said, “To me.” Bernis stared at her without replying. Shortly afterward, the two silently began to walk down a flight of stone steps, heading for the train station.

  As she kept pace with him, Fourcade asked if he was opposed to working for a woman. Again, silence. After what seemed to her an eternity, Bernis said that if he took the job, he would need an assistant. She replied that she already had someone in mind. A woman, he said with an ironic smile. Yes, she replied.

  Just as they reached the station, Bernis gave her his answer, albeit obliquely. With a slight smile, he handed her a folder of papers just before she boarded her train. They turned out to be detailed reports of German army and naval concentrations on the southern coasts of France and Italy. Once inside her compartment, Marie-Madeleine was quietly exultant. As she later observed, she had passed the test.

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  WHEN SHE RETURNED TO VICHY, however, her ebullience over the success of her mission gave way to concern. Two months earlier, Marshal Pétain had met with Hitler in the small French town of Montoire and soon afterward announced that he and his government had embarked on a policy of official collaboration with Germany. According to the historian Robert O. Paxton, “Collaboration was not a German demand…[it] was a French proposal.”

  The Montoire meeting shook the faith of some nascent resisters in Vichy who had supported Pétain and believed he had been playing a double game since France’s capitulation. In their view, although the marshal had been prevented by the armistice terms from acting openly against Germany, he secretly opposed the invaders and would eventually join the Allies.

  One of those disillusioned by Montoire was a young Deuxième Bureau officer named Henri Frenay, who later wrote that in the immediate aftermath of France’s capitulation to Germany, “there was no inherent contradiction between joining the struggle against Nazism and retaining one’s faith in Pétain.” But after Montoire, he noted, “all the hopes which the marshal had once aroused in me had now all but vanished.” Soon after Montoire, Frenay left the Vichy government to organize a resistance movement called Combat, which would become one of the largest and most influential underground organizations in all of France.

  In hindsight, it’s clear that Pétain never intended to resist the Germans. At least in the beginning, however, he was susceptible to pressure from the anti-German faction in the government. In December 1940, that group persuaded him to arrest Pierre Laval, whom he had never liked, and oust him from his post as Pétain’s deputy. The German high command in Paris, which strongly supported Laval, was furious and put pressure on Pétain to release and reinstate him. Although Laval was set free, the marshal dragged his feet on returning him to his post.

  As a result of Montoire and this Vichy power struggle, the Germans had stepped up their pressure on Pétain, as well as their illicit presence in the free zone. The collaboration agreement, Navarre told Fourcade, had allowed the Nazis to infiltrate everywhere.

  In the midst of the turmoil, Navarre lost his position as an official of the Légion Française des Combattants, the government-sponsored veterans’ organization. Fourcade had repeatedly urged her mentor to cut his ties to Pétain and was relieved to hear the news of his dismissal. Yet she knew it also meant that Crusade would lose the funding that the Vichy government had been unknowingly providing.

  The month before, Navarre had dispatched an emissary to London to put out feelers to both Charles de Gaulle and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) about collaboration with Crusade. The intermediary was Marie-Madeleine’s twenty-nine-year-old brother, Jacques Bridou, who had been part of the network since its creation. A member of the 1936 French Olympic bobsled team, Bridou, who had trained as a lawyer, was as addicted to risk and adventure as his sister. He had worked as a journalist during the Spanish Civil War and had fought in the battle for France. Fluent in English, he had married a young Englishwoman just months earlier.

  Navarre had given Bridou two letters to take with him to the British capital: one to de Gaulle and the other to MI6. Both included a detailed report about the creation and development of Crusade. In his letter to de Gaulle, Navarre assured his former colleague and rival of his wholehearted support and cooperation in continuing the struggle against Germany. He would be happy to work with de Gaulle’s newly established intelligence service in London, he wrote, as long as his network could function on an equal basis with that of the Free French and could share with the British the intelligence his agents collected.

  Travel from France’s free zone to Britain was extremely difficult throughout the war but particularly so in late 1940, when escape lines and other resistance organizations had not yet firmly established their underground routes between France and neutral Spain. Bridou’s plan was to travel to Morocco, where he hoped to find a way to reach the British redoubt of Gibraltar and from there get to London. He had no idea how long that would take or when he could return. A month after he left, Navarre and Marie-Madeleine still had not heard from him.

  Meanwhile, Crusade’s reception center for former servicemen was drawing unwelcome attention from Vichy officials. Deciding that it was no longer a safe cover, especially since Navarre had lost his Vichy position, he and Fourcade made plans to shut it down and move their operations to an office in another, less conspicuous hotel.

  Yet for all the uncertainty and anxiety, there was much to celebrate at the end of 1940. In a matter of weeks, the embryonic network had grown from a handful of people to more than fifty agents. Most of them came together for a joyous Christmas Day lunch at the reception center—its last event before its doors closed forever.

  By the
middle of March 1941, Crusade had snowballed in size, spreading from Vichy and Marseille to other parts of the free zone and even penetrating North Africa and some areas of German-occupied France. In Vichy France, agents were at work in the southeastern cities of Lyon and Dijon and in the Dordogne, a hilly, forested region in the southwest known for its medieval villages, verdant countryside, and prehistoric caves. The Dordogne was particularly important for Crusade because of its proximity to Bordeaux and its inland port, which had been transformed into a major base for German submarines, warships, mine-laying vessels, and torpedo transports.

  Couriers for the network had begun to crisscross the country, collecting the agents’ information and taking it to the picturesque resort town of Pau, where Colonel Bernis had established his operation in a small hotel called the Pension Welcome. Among the newly recruited couriers were the pilot and radio operator of a small plane used by the Vichy government to distribute its official mail throughout France, including the occupied zone. While doing their work for Pétain and his men, the crew also picked up and delivered Crusade reports to Pau.

  Yet despite Crusade’s rapid growth, Fourcade was haunted by worry about its future. After working sixteen-hour days, she lay awake at night trying to figure out how to keep the network alive. Four months had passed since her brother had left for London; she knew he had reached Morocco but had heard nothing since then. Since no formal ties had yet been established between Crusade and de Gaulle or MI6, the intelligence it had already gathered was going to waste. To make matters worse, she and Navarre had run out of money and were living on loans. Without new sources of funds, they soon would have to shut down the network.