by Lynne Olson
In early 1941, one of Churchill’s private secretaries had passed on to the prime minister the latest in a series of dire reports of merchant ship sinkings. When the secretary remarked how “very distressing” the news was, Churchill glared at him. “Distressing?” he exclaimed. “It is terrifying! If it goes on, it will be the end of us.” Top German officials agreed. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop told the Japanese ambassador in Berlin that “even now England was experiencing serious trouble in keeping up her food supply….The important thing [now] is to sink enough ships to reduce England’s imports to below the absolute minimum necessary for existence.”
For Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of Germany’s submarine fleet, France’s defeat had been a gift from the gods. It gave him control of a string of ports on the northern and western French coasts, whose transformation into submarine bases, he believed, would spell the end of Britain as a free nation. Until the summer of 1940, Dönitz’s “gray wolves” had been forced to sail hundreds of miles from their bases on the North Sea and Baltic to reach the Atlantic killing grounds. Now they could begin their marauding of British shipping from the gateway of the Atlantic itself, allowing them to prey on merchant ships for up to ten days longer than before.
Less than a week after the armistice agreement was signed, the first submarines began to arrive at Lorient, a quiet fishing village in Brittany, which Dönitz made his headquarters, and at its sister ports in Saint-Nazaire, Brest, and Bordeaux. Thousands of French workers were brought in to convert the ports’ shipyards into U-boat repair yards, while German and French engineers designed and built huge submarine pens with concrete roofs thick enough to withstand Allied bombing raids.
Dönitz’s wolf packs were now free to run amok. In the last six months of 1940, German submarines sank more than five hundred merchant ships in the Atlantic, totaling about 2.5 million tons. It’s no wonder that Dönitz and his submariners called this period die gluckliche Zeit (the happy time).
Each succeeding month, the losses grew vastly greater. In April 1941, the amount of matériel sunk—nearly 700,000 tons—was more than twice the tonnage lost two months earlier. On a single night in April, as Kenneth Cohen and Navarre were meeting in Lisbon, a U-boat wolf pack sank ten of twenty-two ships in a British convoy. The overall figures were so devastating that Churchill ordered Whitehall to discontinue the publication of weekly sinkings.
As a result of the deepening shortage of food imports, rationing in Britain had become draconian. Britons were limited to one ounce of cheese and a minimal amount of meat per week and eight ounces of jam and margarine per month. Some foods, including tomatoes, onions, eggs, and oranges, had disappeared almost completely from store shelves.
Cohen made it clear to Navarre that the number one priority for his spy network would be to infiltrate the submarine bases on the French coasts and glean everything possible about the U-boats’ movements, including their sailing schedules and routes. In return for that and other intelligence requested by the British, MI6 would fully fund and supply his organization. To commemorate this new British-French intelligence partnership, Cohen and Navarre rechristened the network. It would now be called Alliance.
When he returned to Pau, Navarre brought with him a treasure trove of material from MI6, including a large amount of money—5 million francs—and a wireless transmitter, which Cohen assured him was the first of many more to come. According to the plan worked out by the two men, Alliance couriers would deliver intelligence reports to Pau, where they would be encoded and sent by the transmitter to MI6 in London.
Each member of Alliance was to be given a code name. Navarre was N1. After assuring an anxious Fourcade that he had not disclosed her gender or name to Cohen, Navarre said that she, as Alliance’s chief of staff, would be known to the British only as POZ 55. Similarly, the code names of other network members consisted of three letters and two numbers, such as COU 25 for Maurice Coustenoble.
Finally, at the end of his briefing, Navarre handed Fourcade a stack of flimsy sheets of paper, each covered with dozens of single-spaced typewritten lines. The quid pro quo for MI6’s largesse, they were questionnaires covering a vast array of subjects, among them the arrivals and departures of German submarines and ships; movements of enemy troops and supply trains; and the location of German airfields, antiaircraft defenses, weapons arsenals, and factories producing war matériel. Although a bit daunted by the scope of the information sought by MI6, Fourcade was at the same time delighted by its specificity. Finally, the British were letting the network know the exact information they needed.
With Alliance now linked officially with MI6, its work shifted into high gear—and grew considerably more perilous. At Navarre’s suggestion, Fourcade prepared to travel to Paris to expand the network’s reach there and in other cities in the German-occupied zone. She also was tasked with finding agents to report on the shipyards and submarine bases in Brittany.
Fourcade, as she was well aware, was still a neophyte as a spymaster, continuing to learn how to organize the network and run its day-to-day operations. In the Gestapo-infested French capital, this on-the-job training would involve risks far more lethal than any she had faced thus far.
In the town of Orthez, the sky was blue and the air warm, and spring flowers were finally blooming after a winter that had been punishingly hard. But at the town’s railway station, the crowd waiting in line to board a train to Paris paid little attention to the beautiful weather.
Instead, on that late April day, their focus was on two German soldiers at the head of the line, who were studying the identification papers of each passenger. Orthez, thirty miles north of Pau, lay on the boundary dividing the Nazi-occupied north of the country from the free zone. To cross that demarcation line, French citizens needed an ausweis, a German-issued identity card that was difficult to obtain and was carefully examined each time its bearer traveled across the border.
From inside the Orthez station, Henri Schaerrer and Maurice Coustenoble watched as Marie-Madeleine Fourcade approached the table. She and her papers had obviously been targeted for special scrutiny; after a few minutes, she was abruptly removed from the line and led away by two female Nazi auxiliaries, known as “gray mice” because of the color of their uniforms.
Trading worried glances, Schaerrer and Coustenoble headed for the station’s buffet. Fifteen minutes later, Fourcade joined them. Shaking with anger, she announced that the “witches,” as she called the auxiliaries, had thoroughly searched her luggage and then had made her strip. Following her outburst, she fell silent, providing no answer to her lieutenants’ unspoken question: What had she done with the questionnaires she was carrying to Paris?
It wasn’t until they boarded the train and took their seats in an otherwise empty compartment that Marie-Madeleine slipped her fingers inside the double lining of her hat and took out several sheets of paper. Schaerrer groaned, and Coustenoble covered his face with his hands. Ignoring their dismay at her boldness, she handed Schaerrer one of the questionnaires. He would soon assume his new duties as chief of operations in the occupied zone, but before doing that, he’d been assigned to ferret out information about the U-boats based at the port near Bordeaux, including any intelligence he could gather about new sonar devices that reportedly had been installed aboard them.
When Marie-Madeleine asked him how he planned to go about his sleuthing, he replied with a grin that he’d get a U-boat crew member drunk, take his uniform, and board the sub. Marie-Madeleine was shocked by his audacity, seemingly forgetting her own penchant for risk taking. She said she hoped he was joking. Schaerrer didn’t respond. A few minutes later, they arrived at the Bordeaux station, and he melted into the crowd leaving the train.
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LIKE ORTHEZ, PARIS WAS experiencing a beautiful spring. The breeze was warm and soft, the chestnut trees were unfurling their pale green leaves, and the air was redolent with
the scent of lilacs. But the city displayed none of the bustle and gaiety that were its usual hallmarks on such a glorious day. Gone were the incessant blare of car horns, the laughter and buzz of conversations among Parisians strolling along the boulevards or sipping their coffee at sidewalk cafés. The city was eerily, soullessly quiet—a silence only occasionally broken by the screech and roar of large black Citroën and Mercedes sedans carrying high-level Nazi functionaries along the Champs Élysées and other major thoroughfares. The Germans had banned all but a few thousand French-owned vehicles from the capital, forcing its residents to rely on bicycles, the metro, or vélotaxis (small wagons pulled by bicyclists) to get around.
Everywhere Fourcade went in Paris, she saw more humiliating reminders of its residents’ subjugation by the Germans. Enormous black-and-red swastikas flew atop the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe; over the Ritz, the Crillon, and the city’s other grand hotels; and above public buildings like the French Senate and Chamber of Deputies. Wehrmacht troops goose-stepped along the Champs Élysées each afternoon, and German cannons were pointed menacingly down the four main boulevards radiating out from the Place de l’Étoile. Restaurants that once displayed “English spoken here” signs now made clear that “Hier spricht man Deutsch.”
Paris and the rest of occupied France were under the command of the German military, which had been quick to requisition the capital’s best hotels for their headquarters. The army’s high command had taken over the Majestic, off the avenue Kléber, while the Luftwaffe occupied the Ritz, on the Place Vendôme, and the German navy chose the Hôtel de la Marine, on the Place de la Concorde. Outside each hotel, rifle-toting sentries stood guard, forbidding the French to enter without a pass. Banners draped over the entrances read DEUTSCHLAND SIEGE AN ALLEN FRONTEN (Germany is victorious on all fronts).
The Abwehr, the army’s intelligence and counterintelligence branch, meanwhile, established its headquarters at the Hotel Lutetia, on the Left Bank’s boulevard Raspail. Among its departments were the Geheime Feldpolizei, the German military police, whose main function was to arrest Allied agents and others suspected of anti-German activities.
When Fourcade arrived in the French capital on that late-April day, she already knew that the Germans had been trying to track her down. During a quick trip to Paris a few weeks earlier, she had stopped by the office on rue Corty that she and Navarre had occupied before the 1940 blitzkrieg. The building’s concierge turned white when she saw her. Within days of the Nazi occupation of Paris, she told Fourcade, German police had searched the place and demanded to know where she and Navarre were and if the concierge knew a “Mr. Jacob,” a reference to Berthold Jacob, the German journalist who had provided Navarre and Fourcade with the German army’s order of battle in 1938.
The concierge asked Fourcade what she was going to do. Taking the keys to the office, she replied that she would stay there. She asked Pierre Dayné—a policeman on the Paris vice squad, whom she’d known for years—to report to the police that she had not returned to rue Corty. He then helped her move her furniture and other possessions from her old apartment on rue Vaneau into the office, which she planned to use as a pied-à-terre as well as a meeting place for agents. Before returning to Pau, she installed her maid, Marguerite, there to keep an eye on it.
But when she showed up during her second trip, she realized how naive she had been to think she had outwitted the enemy. Two Germans had paid a visit to the former office the day before, Marguerite said. She told them she was expecting a visit from Fourcade, and the pair ordered her to let them know when she arrived.
Marie-Madeleine thought for a moment, then said that when the Germans came back, to tell them her mistress had returned to Paris only briefly to attend the funeral of an uncle who had left her some money. After Marguerite agreed, Marie-Madeleine wandered through the apartment. Here, she wrote, were all the belongings she valued most—her piano, books, music, and the mementos she had saved from her early years in the Far East. As important as these items were to her, she realized she must let them go. She had no intention of ever entering that office again.
A friend of hers, an Armenian industrialist, gave her a key to his stately townhouse on avenue Foch, where she hid out in a sixth-floor maid’s room. Avenue Foch was a thoroughfare with which Marie-Madeleine was very familiar: In the years before the war, she’d been a guest at dinner parties and other gatherings in several of the grand nineteenth-century mansions that lined it.
The engineer who designed the avenue in the 1850s had made it especially wide so that wealthy Parisians could easily drive their coaches from the Arc de Triomphe at one end to the Bois de Boulogne, a vast, verdant park that once served as a hunting ground for French kings, at the other. The wealthiest and most exclusive street in Paris, it seemed an oasis of peace, with its towering chestnut trees, manicured lawns and flower beds, and elegant wrought-iron railings fronting its houses.
But in this case, appearances were brutally deceptive. Under the Germans, avenue Foch had become the most dangerous spot in Paris. Most of the mansions’ owners, who included members of the Rothschild family and other wealthy Jews, had fled or been displaced by the most feared German occupiers in the city—members of the various branches of Heinrich Himmler’s SS.
The Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS’s counterintelligence unit, established its headquarters at 84 avenue Foch and requisitioned several other mansions on the street. Created to investigate cases of espionage, sabotage, and treason against the Third Reich, the SD was responsible for the interrogation and imprisonment of members of the French resistance. It was the twin of another infamous Himmler-controlled entity—the Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo, the SS’s secret state police, whose members, known for their black leather trench coats and ruthless methods, were charged with ferreting out and arresting those it deemed enemies of the state. The Gestapo headquarters was on rue des Saussaies, not far from the Champs Élysées.
The French public, as well as the individuals who were targets of Nazi persecution, paid little attention to the faint distinction between the SD and Gestapo—or, for that matter, between the two SS agencies and the Abwehr, which was also involved in tracking down French spies and resisters and which became subordinate to the SS in 1942. The French used the term “Gestapo” to cover all of them. Regardless of the branch to which they belonged, the members of these services were united in using terror, torture, and murder in their relentless drive to crush anyone who dared defy the Reich.
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AFTER INSTALLING HERSELF IN the maid’s room on avenue Foch, Fourcade contacted Alliance operatives already at work in the city, setting up hiding places for them in case of emergency, and organizing “letterboxes”—locations like a bar or apartment where intelligence reports could be left or picked up. She also cast her net wide for additional agents, radio operators, and couriers.
Her initial catches were impressive: a childhood friend, now in the oil business, who provided information about the location of oil storage dumps near the city and the vast amounts the German army was siphoning from them, and another prewar friend, who produced reports about German orders from French companies for war matériel such as plane engines and propellers. She also recruited a distributor for a film company in Paris, who, while traveling throughout northern France to book films in local theaters, gathered information about German airfields, infantry bases, and depots for weapons and ammunition.
But Fourcade’s greatest triumph during this scouting trip was discovering a middleman for the collection of intelligence at the Saint-Nazaire submarine base in Brittany. The intermediary was a garage owner named Antoine Hugon, who, surprisingly, had been awarded an Iron Cross by the German government for saving the life of a drowning German soldier during World War I. Although fervently anti-German, Hugon conspicuously displayed the Iron Cross on his lapel from the earliest days of the occupation. According to one o
bserver, “it turned out to be the most useful shield an [Allied] agent could have.” Named leader of Alliance operations in Brittany, Hugon in turn recruited Henri Mouren, the head of the shipyard at Saint-Nazaire, who agreed to provide information about German U-boats there and the facilities servicing them.
With these new Alliance agents, as with veterans like Schaerrer and Coustenoble, Fourcade developed an extraordinary sense of community. But with that closeness came fear. Not for herself—in the seven months she had been involved with the network, she had often been worried but never afraid. So far, Alliance and its agents had suffered no severe consequences for their work in the unoccupied zone. The Vichy government, while increasingly irritated by anti-German activity, had yet to strike back hard. Even in Paris, with the German threat ever present, Marie-Madeleine was not overly concerned about her own safety.
Rather, her fear was for the men and women whom she had enlisted in the cause. These people were not trained intelligence agents. They were what MI6’s Kenneth Cohen called “enthusiastic volunteers,” who had no real preparation for going up against the extremely skilled and dangerous operatives of the German counterintelligence services, whose only mission in France was to annihilate them and others like them.
For a brief but crushing moment, Fourcade was overwhelmed by a sense of futility. She and her agents were challenging the mightiest military power in the world. What could they possibly accomplish? Did she have the right to involve these amateurs in a venture that could lead to their deaths?