Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  Finally, on March 14, 1941, Fourcade received the phone call she had been waiting for. Her brother had returned to France, parachuted in by an RAF plane near Clermont-Ferrand, an industrial town some forty-five miles southwest of Vichy. She and Navarre immediately drove there to pick him up.

  Jacques Bridou’s parachute drop—his first ever—had not gone well: He had badly injured an ankle when he hit the ground, and he still seemed in shock from the experience. But he insisted on returning with them to Vichy, and on the way he related the story of his lengthy, difficult hegira to London.

  The trouble had begun, he said, when he arrived in Gibraltar from Morocco and informed the admiral commanding the British base there that he had been sent by a new French underground network to make contact with de Gaulle and British intelligence in London. The admiral immediately concluded that Bridou was a German spy and put him on a troop ship to England, where he was met and arrested by Scotland Yard officers. They then took him to London for seemingly endless days of interrogation.

  He insisted to his questioners that he was married to an Englishwoman and that his wife’s father, a London businessman, could verify his identity. But his father-in-law, who had never met him and had had no message from Sylvia, his daughter, about Bridou’s trip, vehemently denied that this stranger was in fact Sylvia’s husband. Only when they were brought together was Bridou able to convince his wife’s father that he was telling the truth.

  Finally freed from British confinement, Fourcade’s brother suffered another rebuff when he presented Navarre’s letter to Charles de Gaulle at the general’s Free French headquarters in west London. De Gaulle already knew about the existence of Crusade. In a report about Navarre’s organization, one of his aides wrote, “We have to take into account this movement, as its importance is considerable in France.” He added that if the Free French provided funds to Crusade, “it will in some ways become automatically attached to us, and we will gain uncontestable advantages.” De Gaulle did not agree. After reading Navarre’s letter, he icily turned down his rival’s offer of joint cooperation. “Whoever is not with me,” he declared, “is against me.”

  As Bridou described de Gaulle’s negative reaction, Navarre appeared remarkably unperturbed. He seemed equally unsurprised when the younger man finally delivered some good news: MI6 had leapt at the idea of working with Crusade and had invited Navarre to travel to neutral Lisbon the following month for several days of consultation with a top official from their French operation.

  Thrilled as she was by MI6’s response, Fourcade suspected that this was what Navarre had had in mind from the beginning. Knowing de Gaulle as well as he did, how could he possibly think that his longtime rival would agree to an equal partnership? When she mentioned her suspicions to him, he smiled and blandly denied them.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS TIME NOW to take another step to ensure Crusade’s survival. For weeks, Navarre had been under constant surveillance in Vichy. Indeed, he had been warned by a friend that Admiral Darlan, the former head of Vichy’s navy who had replaced Pierre Laval as Pétain’s deputy, was on the verge of ordering his arrest. Darlan had already taken into custody General Gabriel Cochet, who had been calling for resistance against the Germans since the armistice.

  In late March 1941, Navarre decided to shut down the network’s headquarters there and move it to Pau, some 350 miles to the southwest, consolidating it with Colonel Bernis’s operation. Fourcade, who had never felt safe in Vichy, greeted the news with relief.

  Founded in the eleventh century, Pau was the birthplace of Henri de Navarre, the future King Henry IV, whose castle overlooked the town. The city’s fresh, dry air and stunningly beautiful setting in the foothills of the Pyrenees had drawn vacationers from British and European high society since the early nineteenth century.

  Lined with palm trees, hotels, cafés, nineteenth-century mansions, and a casino, Pau’s main boulevard ran along the top of a steep cliff, with spectacular views of the snowcapped mountains thirty miles to the south and subtropical gardens that cascaded down the cliff’s slope to a lush green valley below. The area was particularly well known for its fox hunting and Europe’s first eighteen-hole golf course—pastimes introduced by well-heeled British travelers. For Navarre and Fourcade, however, its main attractions were its nearness to the Spanish border and its quiet, remote location. It also helped that Navarre, who had grown up in the nearby village of Oloron-Sainte-Marie, was well known in Pau and regarded by many of its residents as a favorite son.

  Among his admirers were the two elderly sisters who owned the Pension Welcome, Colonel Bernis’s new base of operations. When the women politely inquired about the enormous intelligence maps of France that papered Bernis’s room, he told them that he was a geographer who specialized in the study of the country’s coasts and mountainous frontiers. And when Crusade agents and couriers began to come and go from the hotel, the sisters were informed that they were French soldiers who had escaped from German prisoner-of-war camps and whose presence in Pau must be kept secret. The women readily accepted Marie-Madeleine’s presence at the hotel, believing she had come to help Navarre cope with the escaped POWs.

  With more than a week to go until Navarre’s appointment with MI6 in Lisbon, Marie-Madeleine decided to take a break from the network and visit her children, whom she had not seen since the previous fall, when they had paid her a brief visit in Vichy. Eight-year-old Béatrice was now living with Marie-Madeleine’s mother at the family’s summer villa on the Côte d’Azur near Cannes, while ten-year-old Christian was enrolled at a Catholic boarding school in the town of Sarlat.

  When she picked Christian up at the school shortly before the Easter holidays, she decided it was time to tell him about her clandestine activities, hoping he would understand why he had seen so little of her over the previous few months. She clearly felt remorse over what she called her “apparent desertion,” a sense of guilt deepened by his complaint that she never answered his letters. She told him she couldn’t write because it might result in her getting caught. When Christian asked if her work was dangerous, she said she was doing what all Frenchmen should do in time of war. She assured him she tried very hard to stay out of danger.

  Portraying her work as a secret game in which the players had to be exceptionally quiet and cunning, she took Christian with her as she did a bit of intelligence work on the way to the Côte d’Azur. She scouted a possible parachute dropping zone for future supply shipments from Britain, surreptitiously inspected a German airfield, and interviewed potential agents.

  When she was done, they headed to her family’s retreat. Three miles north of Cannes, she turned off the road and drove up a narrow, steep dirt path that led to the family compound where she had spent so many lazy summer days in earlier years. The white stucco walls of the main house, adorned with grapevines and wisteria, shimmered in the bright early-spring sunshine. Directly behind the villa was a small grove of pine trees. On one side, the land fell away in terraces to the road below; on the other side were two large eucalyptus trees and a lawn ending in a row of mimosa trees flaunting their bright yellow blossoms. A strawberry patch and orchards of peaches, cherries, and figs were located in the rear of the pine grove. Before the war, the fruit, along with cut flowers from the house’s gardens, had been flown regularly to London and Paris markets.

  Instead of stopping at the villa, Marie-Madeleine continued up the path until she reached a small Provençal farmhouse at the top of the hill. Her mother had rented out the villa for the war’s duration, and she, her housekeeper, and Béatrice had moved into the farmhouse. Intrepid and adventurous as ever, Mathilde Bridou was fully aware of her daughter’s and son’s resistance work. Not only did she approve of it, she was not averse to becoming involved herself.

  The bedrock of her family throughout the war, Mathilde had “a remarkably quick sense of humor that never entirely left her, no
matter how appalling the situation, and her dancing brown eyes radiated warmth and love,” her daughter-in-law, Sylvia Bridou, later recalled. “She was what the French call spirituelle, witty, sprightly, intelligent. All those qualities sustained her and those around her, throughout the troubled times ahead.”

  When Marie-Madeleine and Christian arrived at the farmhouse, Mathilde ran out to greet them, followed by Béatrice, Jacques, and Sylvia. After the embraces and kisses of welcome, Jacques led his sister to a pigsty behind the house, where he had dug a hiding place for the dozens of files containing the early records of Crusade that she had brought from Pau in the trunk of her car. It was the safest place she and Jacques could think of to hide them; nobody, they were sure, would ever dream of looking there.

  For the next several days, Marie-Madeleine played with her son and daughter, helped her mother in the garden, took long walks, and gazed out at the spectacular views—the village of Mougins atop a nearby hill and the Mediterranean sparkling in the distance. But for all the pleasure she took in the family reunion and for all her joy at being with Christian and Béatrice again, she could not shake her concern about the future of Crusade. Would the encounter between Navarre and MI6 save the network? She could not bear to think about the alternative.

  Then one morning, Henri Schaerrer suddenly appeared at the farmhouse, bringing the news for which she’d been waiting. Navarre had won MI6’s support in Lisbon, he exclaimed. She must return immediately to Pau. Marie-Madeleine didn’t hesitate. She packed her things, kissed her children and mother goodbye, asked her brother to drive her Citroën back to Pau, and left with Schaerrer to catch a train from Cannes.

  The train was jammed, like most trains in France during the war, and Marie-Madeleine was forced to sit on her suitcase in a corridor for much of the overnight journey, surrounded by travelers asleep on the floor. But the wretched conditions failed to curb her elation. For Crusade, the real war was now beginning.

  On the train, she told Schaerrer that she was going to set up a new chain of command. She decided to make Maurice Coustenoble her adjutant and to appoint Schaerrer to head the network’s operations in the occupied zone. A whirlwind recruiter, Schaerrer “seemed to be everywhere and to know everyone,” noted one colleague. “He was always ready to take on any job and get it done.” Marie-Madeleine’s only worry was that in his zeal to succeed, he had a penchant for risk taking that bordered on the reckless.

  When she arrived back in Pau, however, her concerns about Schaerrer and other matters were eclipsed by the euphoria of the moment. At the Pension Welcome, the air was thick with smoke from the British cigarettes that Navarre had brought back from his mission and distributed to members of the network staff. As their jubilant celebration continued, Navarre pulled Marie-Madeleine aside to tell her about his adventure in Lisbon.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 14, Navarre had shown up at the designated meeting place—the tomb of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in the nave of the Church of Santa Maria de Belem. After a few minutes, a tall, spare Englishman joined him. He introduced himself to Navarre as “Keith Crane.” In fact, he was Commander Kenneth Cohen, the head of MI6 operations in Vichy France.

  The forty-one-year-old Cohen was an anomaly among MI6 officials, who tended to be wellborn former military officers with substantial private incomes, many of them charter members of the clubby, upper-class “old boy network” that had dominated British society for generations. A former naval officer and torpedo expert who had served in World War I, Cohen was Jewish—a rarity in MI6. He was fluent in French and Russian and was known for his sensitivity, tact, keen mind, and deep understanding of international issues—traits that were also unusual among his colleagues in the intelligence service, most of whom were determinedly anti-intellectual.

  KENNETH COHEN

  Cohen’s job was to recruit intelligence sources from within France’s free zone, and he regarded his meeting with Navarre as a potential answer to MI6’s prayers. In that first meeting, and in those that followed over the next three days, Cohen repeatedly emphasized the dire position in which Britain now found itself. After ten months of standing alone against Hitler, the country faced imminent defeat. Although the RAF had fended off the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain in the fall of 1940, German bombs continued to ravage London and other British cities. German submarines, meanwhile, were strangling the country’s supply lines by laying waste to British merchant shipping in the Atlantic.

  Most of the German bombers and U-boats were being dispatched from bases in France, the occupied country closest to Britain and hence Hitler’s springboard to victory. France would also serve as the launching point for any invasion of Britain. In order for the British to fight back, it was crucial that they learn everything possible about German operations there. Underscoring the point, Winston Churchill wrote to a subordinate days after the fall of France: “It is, of course, urgent and indispensable that every effort should be made to obtain secretly the best possible information about the German forces.” Of particular importance was intelligence about the movements and dispositions of troops, ships, submarines, barges, and aircraft.

  Yet at a time when Britain’s very survival depended upon the timely detection of enemy intentions, MI6, whose operations in Europe had been virtually wiped out in the 1940 German blitzkrieg, did not have a single agent in place who could communicate back to London the information the government so desperately needed.

  Globally renowned, MI6 had enjoyed a sterling reputation as an all-seeing, all-knowing spy organization for decades. Winston Churchill considered the British intelligence service “the finest in the world.” So, interestingly, did Hitler and other Nazi higher-ups, including SS head Heinrich Himmler and Himmler’s murderous deputy, Reinhard Heydrich. The truth, however, was far different. Starved of government funds after World War I, MI6 was underfinanced, understaffed, and woefully short of both talent and technology.

  The agency’s standing was complicated even further in the summer of 1940 when the government created another secret service, called the Special Operations Executive (SOE), whose job was to encourage sabotage and subversion by the citizens of occupied Europe. From the beginning, top MI6 officials saw SOE as a dangerous bureaucratic rival and did their best to destroy it.

  As the Nazis tightened their control over Europe, the British military brass complained bitterly about MI6’s failure to penetrate the fog that enshrouded German activities there. In the immediate aftermath of the blitzkrieg, “there was no contact between Britain and any of the occupied countries,” one senior intelligence official remarked. “Nothing was known of the conditions inside those countries except for occasional reports from the few who still managed from time to time to escape.”

  Under tremendous pressure to get its agents into occupied territory, MI6 was saved by the providential arrival in London of the governments in exile of six occupied European countries, along with Charles de Gaulle’s Free French. In exchange for providing financial, communications, and transportation support to the governments’ secret services, MI6 gained control of most of their operations. These foreign services in turn provided virtually all the wartime intelligence the British received about German activities in occupied Europe.

  From the start, France was MI6’s main focus, as well as its most politically fraught challenge. Indeed, the agency had set up two separate French sections to try to keep to a minimum the complications stemming from the extraordinary friction and rivalries that bedeviled that geographically and politically divided country.

  One section worked with the Bureau Central de Renseignements (BCRA), de Gaulle’s fledgling intelligence service, which was headed by André Dewavrin, a young army officer and former professor at Saint-Cyr. The first BCRA operative to be sent to France was Gilbert Renault, a French film producer and ardent Gaullist, who, although a complete novice at intelligence, put
together a far-flung spy network, called the Confrérie de Notre Dame, that eventually covered much of occupied France and Belgium. By early 1941, at least half a dozen additional Gaullist intelligence groups, with cover names like Johnny and Fitzroy, were reporting back to BCRA and MI6.

  Meanwhile, the second French section, under Kenneth Cohen, focused on members of the military intelligence services now headquartered in Vichy, who had worked so closely with MI6 before the war. In spite of being part of Pétain’s government, they remained opposed to the German occupation and continued to pass on information to the British. Yet while Cohen regarded those Vichy connections as extremely valuable, he was particularly keen on working with Navarre’s organization. Although most of its agents were amateurs, it had in its ranks several seasoned military intelligence veterans, including Navarre himself. Additionally, it was not hampered by the strictures and political dangers facing those who were still in the government. Most important, it had dozens of agents already in place, not only throughout the free zone but in much of occupied France as well. In Cohen’s view, it had the potential to become MI6’s largest and most important spy network in the country.

  During Cohen’s meetings with Navarre, he emphasized that in order for Britain to stave off defeat, it must above all keep its maritime supply lines open. At any given time, some three thousand merchant ships were crossing the oceans linking Britain to its trading partners and colonies, carrying cargoes essential for its survival. Without fuel oil and natural resources like copper, lead, rubber, iron ore, nickel, zinc, and aluminum, Britain’s industries would be brought to a standstill and its military forces would no longer be able to function. Likewise, Britain relied on imports for seventy percent of its food supply; if those shipments were cut off, its citizens would starve.