Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  At the same time, she thought, what other option did she—and they—have? If France was to be saved, they must continue the fight, no matter how grave the danger or how unbalanced the odds.

  * * *

  —

  AS SHE MOVED ABOUT Paris that spring, Marie-Madeleine was struck by how radically different her world had become in less than a year. She was completely cut off from the life she had enjoyed in Paris before the war—dinners at exclusive restaurants, shopping for designer clothes, dancing at nightclubs. Now, like those of most of her compatriots, her life was one of austerity and making do—of ration cards and scarce food, shabby clothing and wooden-soled shoes.

  Yet some Parisians in her former social circle had seen little or no change in their privileged lives, except that they were now socializing primarily with their occupiers. At the end of 1940, the chairman of Paris’s metro system staged his annual costume ball at his château near Paris. “The buffet was groaning,” one partygoer remembered. “Champagne flowed. German officers were in their best gala costumes. Here was Tout-Paris in the spheres of literature, the arts, politics, and theater.” High-ranking German officials returned the favor, entertaining some of France’s wealthiest and most noted citizens in their commandeered houses and apartments, where white-gloved servants served black-market steaks and the finest French wines.

  If one had money and was in the Germans’ good graces, it was still possible to find butter, coffee, and luxuries like pâté and caviar. Jewelry was still being sold by Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels and haute couture clothing by designers such as Balenciaga, Dior, Nina Ricci, Paul Poirier, and Jacques Fath. Most of the designers continued to stage fashion shows during the occupation, but the audience needed special passes to get in. Some were given to the wives of German officials, but most were handed out to Frenchwomen.

  Throughout the war, the occupiers dominated every cultural and social institution in Paris, among them the opera, art galleries, auction houses, cabarets, and music halls. German officers flocked to the city’s grandest restaurants—Maxim’s, La Tour d’Argent, Lapérouse, Fouquet’s, Le Grand Véfour—which welcomed them as warmly as they had their prewar French clientele.

  The Germans’ ubiquitous presence in many of her old haunts infuriated Marie-Madeleine. It was important, she thought, to live her life on occasion as if they did not occupy her country’s capital. She enlisted her best friend, Nelly de Vogüé, to join her in a plan to do just that. Nelly, who still lived in Paris, was eager to follow the examples of Marie-Madeleine and the two most important men in her life in defying the Germans. Her husband, a naval officer who’d taken part in the fighting at Dunkirk in 1940, had remained in France after the armistice and joined a resistance group in Paris. Her lover, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, had flown reconnaissance missions for the air force until France collapsed and then had traveled to the United States to try to persuade its government to enter the conflict.

  As part of her plan, Marie-Madeleine borrowed one of Nelly’s couture outfits and had her hair cut and styled. Like many of her female compatriots, she believed that looking fashionable was one way of thumbing her nose at the Germans. “Fashion was, for the French…anything but trivial,” noted the historian Anne Sebba. “Many French women…remained as fashion-concious as possible during the war in order to retain their pride, boost morale, and remain true to themselves, because fashion expressed their identity.”

  Marie-Madeleine and Nelly then went for lunch at Maxim’s, which had been taken over by the famed Berlin restaurateur Otto Horcher and was regarded as having the most loyal German clientele in Paris. Its frequent customers included Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering, who always ate there during his art-raiding trips to the French capital.

  Until then, the only Germans whom Marie-Madeleine had encountered were low-ranking soldiers on the city’s streets. Now, as Maxim’s old headwaiter, Albert, guided the two women to their table, she saw bemedaled Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe officers dining on the best food and wine that Maxim’s had to offer. As she passed them, she thought of her shabbily dressed agents, who often had little to eat, risking their lives to get rid of the men in that elegant room.

  Not surprisingly, the appearance of the two beautiful, fashionably dressed blondes did not go unnoticed among Maxim’s clientele. Marie-Madeleine took a secret delight in the appreciative stares directed at her and Nelly. What would these Germans say if they knew she was leading a network that was plotting their destruction?

  While she was still in Paris, Fourcade received an urgent message from Navarre asking her to return immediately to the south. He did not explain why. Even though she had not finished all her work in the capital, she did as he asked, albeit reluctantly. Once again, she was searched by the “gray mice” as she crossed the demarcation line into the free zone.

  At their meeting in Marseille, Navarre delivered some staggering news. He was leaving the next day for Algeria, he said, to help organize a coup against Vichy by dissident French army and air force officers in North Africa. If successful, they and the rest of the French armed forces there—140,000 men in all—would join with the British to fight the Germans. While he was gone, she would be in complete charge of Alliance.

  Marie-Madeleine considered the idea of a coup to be stunningly wrongheaded. Yet she wasn’t surprised that he supported it. Like many of the young former servicemen he and she had recruited, Navarre had made it clear he’d much rather fight the Germans than collect information about them. Indeed, he had told Kenneth Cohen in Lisbon that his eventual aim was to take up arms when the time was ripe.

  But at the moment, Fourcade argued, that time was still in the far distant future. During her stay in the occupied zone, she had witnessed firsthand how dominant the Germans were; they had enough troops in France and elsewhere to crush any revolt. Even the mere thought of a revolt was premature, she declared, to which he shot back that nothing was premature in war.

  While Fourcade was well aware of Navarre’s taste for conspiracy and political intrigue, she knew that he was not the mastermind behind this audacious plot. Its architect was a buccaneering forty-one-year-old air force pilot named Léon Faye, who currently headed Alliance operations in North Africa.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN FOURCADE FIRST MET FAYE in January 1941, she’d been immediately taken with him. Standing ramrod-straight in his dark blue uniform, the tall, lean major was physically attractive, she noted in her memoirs, with thick dark hair, an aquiline nose, and penetrating gray-green eyes. He possessed an unmistakable air of authority and more than a hint of roguish charm. But what struck her most were his passion, daring, and steadfast determination to strike back at France’s occupiers.

  An anomaly in France’s military officer corps, Faye came from a much more modest background than did most of his cohorts. One of seven children of a police gendarme in the Dordogne, he had left high school at the age of seventeen to fight in the 1914–18 war. He’d distinguished himself in several major battles, including the bloodbath at Verdun. After the war, at the age of twenty, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

  Bored by peacetime army life in France, Faye won a transfer to North Africa, where he discovered a new passion: flying. He transferred to the air force and became a pilot, eventually earning a promotion to head a squadron. In recognition of his obvious leadership skills, he was invited to apply for entrance to the elite, highly competitive war college, the École Supérieure de Guerre. Faye was at a significant disadvantage in terms of qualifications, not only because, unlike most of the other applicants, he had not attended the military academy at Saint-Cyr, but even more damning, he was a high school dropout. Still, he was fiercely determined to succeed, and after an intensive, months-long study regimen, he passed the examinations with distinction.

  LÉON FAYE

  Shortly after he graduated from the military postgraduate school, World War II broke ou
t. During the fighting in France, Faye commanded an air force reconnaissance group and was cited several times for bravery in his superiors’ dispatches. Horrified by the armistice, he wangled another transfer to North Africa, where he became deputy chief of the air force and launched a campaign to persuade his aviator colleagues to continue the fight. At that point, the French air force in North Africa still had more than eight hundred planes but was woefully short of fuel, aircraft parts, and ground crew.

  In January 1941, Faye traveled on an unofficial mission to Vichy to petition Pétain’s government for more resources for his squadrons. His request was rejected outright, and he poured out his anger and disappointment to a former commander of his, General Pierre Baston, who happened to be a member of Navarre’s and Fourcade’s fledgling spy network. Baston stopped Faye from having a confrontation with Pétain and introduced him instead to Navarre and Marie-Madeleine. During their meeting, Faye talked about a potential uprising in a manner that, in Marie-Madeleine’s words, “left me gasping.” Since the government refused to support his plans to renew armed combat against the Germans, he would work to recruit other officers to take part in a putsch against Vichy to prevent the enemy occupation of North Africa.

  To Fourcade’s dismay, Navarre was entranced by the idea, asking how far the plot had advanced. Faye said that he was relatively confident of the support of the air force in Tunisia and Algeria and was now working on the navy, but that it would be more difficult with the army.

  Neither Fourcade nor Jean Boutron, who also was present at the meeting, shared Navarre’s enthusiasm. Boutron knew from firsthand experience that many if not most navy and army officers in North Africa—particularly in Algeria, where the Mers-el-Kébir sinkings had occurred—were violently pro-Vichy and anti-British. “Algeria had felt Mers el-Kébir as if she had been assaulted,” he later wrote. “She was thoroughly anglophobic and anti-Gaullist.”

  Following their spirited discussion, Faye acknowledged that considerably more spade work needed to be done before the conspiracy could be launched. He returned to North Africa with two missions: to recruit spies for Alliance and to continue laying the groundwork for the mutiny.

  Five months later, while Fourcade was in Paris, Navarre received a coded message from Faye that the time for the uprising was drawing near. He had been joined by a well-connected coconspirator, a young army captain named André Beaufre, who was on the staff of the governor general of Algeria and who had attracted support from a number of like-minded colleagues. Faye urged Navarre to travel to Algiers to take part in the final preparations. Knowing that Marie-Madeleine would surely oppose the idea, Navarre completed plans for his departure while she was gone and presented them to her as a fait accompli on her return.

  He told her that army intelligence officials in Marseille, who were also working surreptitiously against the Germans, had supplied him with false identity papers and other travel documents. He would pose as a Monsieur Lambdin, a wine merchant who was traveling to Algiers to negotiate the purchase of the latest vintage of Algerian wine. “The next time you hear from me, I’ll have taken over Algiers,” he said.

  Predictably, Marie-Madeleine was livid. He had interrupted her work in Paris for this? A rash scheme that in her view had virtually no chance of succeeding? Less than two months after making a pact with MI6 to supply critically important information to Britain, he was abandoning it, her, and the dozens of other people who were risking everything, including their lives, to work for Alliance. Indeed, his actions might well make their mission more dangerous. For the first time in their long association, she felt as if a wall—invisible and unbridgeable—divided them.

  The following day, Navarre sailed for Algiers. The morning after his arrival, he met clandestinely with Faye, Captain Beaufre, and three other officers to discuss their progress toward activating the coup. Faye asked the Alliance chief to get in touch with his contacts in the officer corps of the French army in Morocco, which Navarre promised to do. But he also brought up the name of another possible coconspirator—an old friend of his from his Saint-Cyr days who was now deputy chief of staff of the 19th Army Corps in Algiers. Navarre had mentioned the plot to his friend, who had expressed great interest in it.

  At Navarre’s request, the others asked his friend to lunch, where further discussions were held. When the meal ended, the officer shook hands with everyone and told Navarre he would join the conspiracy.

  Later that afternoon, the plotters met again. The table around which they sat was covered with maps and reports outlining possible means of attack. Suddenly the door to the room burst open, and a throng of Vichy policemen rushed in. One of them, a superintendent, brandished search and arrest warrants. The maps and reports were swept up, and Navarre, Faye, and the others were hustled into cars and taken to the main police station in Algiers.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER NAVARRE’S DEPARTURE FOR ALGERIA, Fourcade had remained in Marseille, feeling more secure there than in Pau, thanks to the blind eye that many members of the local police force turned to burgeoning resistance activities in the city. Summoning her radio operator, Lucien Vallet, from Pau, she continued her work while waiting to hear from her absent leader.

  A few days later, Gabriel Rivière, the head of Alliance’s Marseille operations, burst into her office and shouted that Navarre and his fellow conspirators had been arrested in Algiers and that she had to leave at once. For a moment or two, Fourcade couldn’t move or speak. When the shock wore off, she ordered Rivière to inform local agents immediately of the arrests. She then traveled to Pau to tell Bernis and the others.

  As Fourcade knew, the question of whether the network was doomed by the jailing of its founder would be uppermost in the minds of its operatives. Bernis, for one, thought the answer was yes. When she told him about the arrest, he began to pack up his intelligence maps in preparation for returning to Monte Carlo. He had agreed to work with her, he made clear, only because Navarre had been in overall charge of Alliance. Now that his old friend had been captured, he said, his work was over.

  Fourcade knew she could not afford to lose Bernis’s support. Assuring him that the network would continue, she said she would inform the British that he was going to Monaco to take charge of the entire Mediterranean region. He thought for a moment, then agreed. He was giving her a chance, she knew, to prove she could hold Alliance together.

  Another senior officer in the network—General Baston, who had introduced Faye to her and Navarre—was also dubious about its future. When Fourcade told Baston she planned to continue, he frowned and asked if she was going to carry on alone. Although his facial expression and tone of his voice indicated he didn’t think she was up to the challenge, he agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to continue Alliance’s work in Vichy.

  As it happened, Fourcade had misgivings herself about whether she would be accepted as Alliance’s leader. She also feared the impact of Navarre’s arrest on the network’s security. But those concerns soon faded. She was sure that Navarre would never reveal the group’s existence to Vichy officials in Algiers, and they had no other way of knowing about it. As for her ability to command the network, hadn’t Navarre emphasized to her and others that she was his designated successor? “She is the most valuable of us all…the pivot around which everything turns,” he had told Jean Boutron. Once, when she told him that everything would end if he were captured, his response was: “No, you will simply carry on.”

  And while Bernis and Baston might still have their doubts about her, most of the younger operatives did not. To them, Navarre was a distant figure, while they had been operating under Fourcade’s command since the network’s beginning. As chief of staff, she had recruited many of them; found hiding places for them; taught them how to do their jobs, including coding and deciphering messages; received their information; provided money and other essential supplies; and presided over the meals they shared whenever they ca
me to Pau. “She had a natural authority about her,” recalled her daughter, Pénélope Fourcade-Fraissinet. “When she spoke, she made clear that that was the way it was going to be, that her directions must be followed.” To the agents of Alliance, she was la patronne, the boss.

  Her confidence restored, at least in part, she decided to move the Alliance headquarters to Marseille and returned there by train to begin the transfer. She had not yet figured out how and when she was going to tell MI6 about Navarre’s arrest. Her main worry now was how British intelligence would respond to the news.

  On the train, she wore a broad-brimmed hat to avoid being recognized and kept her head buried in a book, the philosopher René Descartes’s classic treatise Discourse on the Method. As the stations rolled past, a man seated opposite her began nudging her foot with his. The third time it happened, she looked up with annoyance. He was wearing one of the most extraordinary outfits she had ever seen: checked trousers, a black jacket with a purple rosette, a wide cravat, and a Stetson hat, similar to the ones worn by American cowboys. She glanced at his face. It was Navarre.

  He stared ahead with a blank expression. Her stomach churning, she looked down again, pretending to read Descartes. After a few minutes, he went out into the corridor to smoke, and she followed him. He whispered to her that he’d escaped from jail with the help of a high-level official in the Algiers office of the Surveillance du Territoire (ST), a branch of the French national police responsible for counterintelligence.

  When they reached Marseille, he told her the full story of his arrest and flight from Algiers. He and the other conspirators had been betrayed by his friend from Saint-Cyr, who, after his lunch with them, had immediately informed Vichy authorities about the plot. Navarre, Faye, and the rest had been rounded up by French military police loyal to Vichy. However, as in Marseille, others in the police and state security agencies in Algiers secretly supported the British, including the ST commissioner there, who returned Navarre’s false passport to him and let him go.