Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  Like Madrid’s other squares, the Puerta del Sol, the vast expanse in the heart of the city where Marie-Madeleine and her mother had spent many happy prewar hours socializing with friends in its cafés and restaurants, was largely deserted—its fountain dry, its trees barren. As in Paris, a shroud of silence enveloped the city.

  Also as in Paris, black-and-red German swastikas fluttered in the breeze almost everywhere Marie-Madeleine went. During the civil war, Nazi Germany had aided General Francisco Franco and his fascist army, and even though Spain was officially neutral now, Franco’s government still favored the Reich.

  Although Madrid, like the capitals of other neutral countries, had been inundated by intelligence agents from all over the globe, Gestapo and Abwehr spies predominated. The chiefs of both agencies—Heinrich Himmler and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris—were occasional visitors to the Spanish capital and, along with their subordinates, were feted at lavish parties by members of Madrid’s high society, most of whom were pro-Franco and pro-Axis.

  During her stay there, Marie-Madeleine was taken under the wing of Georges Charaudeau and his wife, a clothing designer whose fashion house catered to Madrid socialites and the wives of Franco’s officials—and acted as a front for Charaudeau’s pro-Allied intelligence activities. The Charaudeaus showered her with clothes unavailable in France—a black silk dress, sweaters, skirts, lingerie, and shoes with cork soles, to replace her ugly wooden-soled French shoes. She also received an abundance of British cigarettes, whisky, coffee, and tea.

  Although she reveled in this bounty, Marie-Madeleine found the experience surreal. Here she was, in the midst of luxury, while cut off from everything and everybody she loved most in the world. She was haunted by thoughts of her mother and her agents in jail and by the plight of her two children, who now had no mother or grandmother to care for them. She would discover only later that they were being looked after by other members of her extended family.

  * * *

  —

  THE MAN FROM MI6 turned out to be a tall, fair-haired, youthful-looking man in a British army uniform who introduced himself as Major Richards. His real name was Eddie Keyser, but Marie-Madeleine Fourcade knew him only as Richards until after the war.

  Even though Keyser had been informed before he left London that the chief of Alliance was a woman, his dumbfounded expression when he met her betrayed his disbelief that this lovely blonde in her chic silk dress could possibly be head of a major intelligence network. After staring at her for several seconds, he glanced at Jean Boutron, who was standing beside her, as if to say, “This is a joke, isn’t it? You are the real POZ 55.” Boutron, however, made it clear that Fourcade was indeed la patronne.

  When Cohen’s deputy mentioned the deception, she stiffly replied that she had concealed her identity because she was afraid MI6 would abandon her network and agents if it learned that Alliance’s leader was a woman. She felt she had to prove herself before letting Cohen and the others know who she was.

  With a wave of his hand, Keyser brushed her worries aside and asked if she still wanted to work with his agency. Hearing the anxiety in his voice, Fourcade recovered her confidence. Her help—and that of her agents—was needed, regardless of her sex.

  Before discussing the future, she gave Keyser the details of what had happened in Pau—the arrests of her agents and mother, the seizure of the transmitters that MI6 had just parachuted in, the fact that the millions of francs sent by London had not yet been discovered by the police. As she talked, she was perplexed by his seeming lack of surprise about the events she was describing. In fact, he seemed to know far more about what had occurred than she did. He passed along some new information, which made the network’s situation appear all the bleaker.

  Her agents in Pau, Keyser said, had been betrayed by the head of the Alliance patrol in the Dordogne, who had been having an affair with the daughter of a policeman there. Pulled in for questioning by the young woman’s outraged father, the agent, who had been recruited months earlier by Maurice Coustenoble, informed the police about the British parachute drop in a nearby field and told them where they could find members of the reception committee. He also revealed the location of the network’s headquarters in Pau and the identities of its staff.

  Fourcade found herself barely able to speak. She asked Keyser if he had anything else to reveal. Keyser nodded. “Paris,” he said, telling her that the Alliance agents captured in the French capital just days before the Pau raid had been turned over to the Germans and were now in Fresnes prison.

  Her heart raced: Lucien Vallet, Antoine Hugon, and the rest of the operatives in Paris—now in the clutches of the Gestapo! In a strangled voice, she asked where he had gotten the information. From an agent of hers named Gavarni, he said. She replied that was impossible: Gavarni was in prison in Pau.

  Actually, Keyser said, he had never been in prison. MI6 had received a recent cable from him explaining what had happened. After Gavarni’s arrest, according to his message, he had met in Vichy with Commander Henri Rollin, the head of Surveillance du Territoire, the government’s political counterintelligence agency. Fourcade’s chief of staff had insisted to Rollin that the Alliance network had been broken up and was no longer a threat to Vichy. Telling Rollin that Fourcade had fled to England, Gavarni offered him a deal: In exchange for the release of himself and his Alliance colleagues, he would hand over the 2 million francs from London that she had given him for safekeeping. Rollin agreed to the proposition and allowed Gavarni to travel to Marseille and send a message to Fourcade via MI6, outlining the situation and asking her to approve the deal. According to Keyser, Gavarni reported that giving the money to Vichy would prove that the network had indeed collapsed.

  Fourcade found it incomprehensible that the Englishman could keep so calm in the midst of this calamity. Above all, she was horrified by the idea that Gavarni would hand over such vast sums of money to Vichy—money that the network badly needed. She had promoted him to chief of staff because she had been impressed by his energy, quickness of mind, and leadership qualities. She especially valued his decisiveness after the Vichy raid on the Pension Welcome, when he had whisked her away to safety. As she sat there in Madrid, she found it almost impossible to believe that he could have done what Keyser said he had.

  Jean Boutron was even more upset, calling Gavarni a “bastard,” a “skunk,” and a “traitor.” Fourcade told him to calm down, noting that if Gavarni had indeed been a traitor, she, Boutron, and other Alliance agents would have been arrested long before.

  Unconvinced, Boutron appealed to her to turn down Gavarni’s proposal. But all she could think of was her mother and operatives in a Pau jail. Urged on by Keyser, she reluctantly agreed to give up the 2 million francs in exchange for the release of all the prisoners. After writing a message to Gabriel Rivière giving her approval, she handed it to Keyser, who coded it and sent it to London for transmittal to Marseille.

  She would wait until her return to France to deal with Gavarni herself.

  * * *

  —

  AS SHE TRIED TO come to grips with the latest bad news, Fourcade had a question of her own. Why, she asked Keyser, did MI6 send her an agent like the radio operator Blanchet, whose odd appearance and suspicious behavior had immediately raised red flags in everyone’s mind? Was it meant to be some sort of test?

  Keyser scowled and said no, then scolded her for such suspicions. But Fourcade persisted, describing in detail Bla’s inquisitiveness and blatant carelessness. She wondered if Bla had somehow been involved in the arrests of her agents in Paris.

  The MI6 officer dismissed her concerns. Blanchet may have been a little too talkative and agitated, he acknowledged, but there was nothing to fear from him. He was, in fact, considered one of the agency’s best radio operators and thus far had been doing an excellent job in Normandy.

  Fourcade asked Keyser if he was sure Bla was transmitting
from Normandy. She said she’d heard from an Alliance agent in Paris that Bla had reported technical problems with his transmitter and had come to the capital to use one of the machines there. In fact, according to her agent, Bla had been in Paris for some time.

  Keyser seemed slightly shaken by Fourcade’s account and said he would report her fears to London. MI6’s response, sent the following day, endorsed his support of Bla but, to alleviate Fourcade’s worries, said that it would gradually ease him out of Alliance and send him to another network.

  Fourcade was far from satisfied by MI6’s ambiguous reaction, but there was nothing more she could do about it. She shared Jean Boutron’s jaundiced opinion that the British, with their high opinion of themselves and their nation, found it almost impossible to believe that one of their countrymen might be a traitor. Indeed, Stewart Menzies, the current head of MI6, had once been quoted as saying that “only people with foreign names commit treason.” Fourcade could only hope that her network could survive that myopic attitude—and its potentially deadly consequences.

  * * *

  —

  WHATEVER THE CAUSES OF the network’s recent losses, their enormity, after the triumphs of the organization’s first fourteen months, had badly shaken her. With a few exceptions, Alliance’s first wave of agents had been wiped out. In her mind, Fourcade ticked off the sectors that still survived: Marseille, Vichy, Brittany, Nice, and Grenoble. There were a few other resources scattered throughout the country: several agents who had gone undetected in Paris, as well as a sprinkling of couriers and reserve radio operators. Overall, however, the network was in tatters and needed to be rebuilt from the ground up.

  She took solace in the fact that MI6 remained fully committed to Alliance—and, from all appearances, to her as its leader. Such an attitude was remarkable, considering that the agency, like most of the British government, was an almost exclusively male preserve, with little tolerance for the idea of women in any sort of position of responsibility or authority. Claude Dansey—MI6’s misanthropic, irascible deputy director who was the power behind the throne there—once had grumbled that “letting women run anything was against his principles.” But neither he nor his colleagues could argue with the invaluable information collected by Alliance under Fourcade’s command. Again and again, Keyser underscored how dependent his agency was on a continuing flow of information from her organization. “Your network must last,” he declared.

  For more than a week, he met daily with Fourcade to brief her in detail about the specific kinds of intelligence that the British now needed regarding the German military presence in France. As always, their most immediate priority was the sea, with the emphasis on information about port installations and the movement of ships and submarines.

  Their meetings turned out to be eye-opening for both of them. Fourcade sketched verbal portraits of Alliance’s remaining agents and described the difficulties they faced in collecting information. In turn, he briefed her on the vagaries of MI6 and British officialdom in general. He also outlined a plan to vastly expand MI6’s methods of communication with Alliance, including the introduction of a new air operation between England and France, using small planes to pick up and take out Alliance agents, mail, and other important material.

  With his typical audacity, Jean Boutron came up with his own contribution for improving the exchange of information. To help speed up the flow of messages back and forth between MI6, Alliance headquarters, and his own base in Madrid, he installed a radio transmitter in the attic of the Vichy embassy there, telling the embassy’s radio operator that he had been authorized by Marshal Pétain himself to open up a secret wireless link with London. Using the transmitter, Boutron established a secure, direct link to Marseille, where Fourcade planned to install her base, as well as to London.

  In the ten days they spent together in Madrid, Keyser and Fourcade developed a surprisingly close relationship. At their last meeting, they warmly shook hands, realizing, as Fourcade later wrote in her memoirs, that they had formed a real friendship. For them, the word “Alliance” had taken on a new, more personal meaning.

  * * *

  —

  IN LATE DECEMBER 1941, Marie-Madeleine and Boutron prepared to return to France and get back to the work of spying on the Germans. But at the moment, she was preoccupied by a more immediate concern: Had her mother and agents in Pau been freed in response to the deal between Gavarni and Vichy authorities to which she had agreed?

  Although still difficult, her return journey in the mail sack proved to be far less agonizing than the earlier trip. The train—and flatbed car—were already waiting when she and Boutron arrived at the Spanish custom post, which meant she had to endure only three hours of extreme discomfort instead of nine. Back in France, it took her only a few minutes to recover.

  Her spirits rose even more when, on their way back to Marseille, she and Boutron rendezvoused with an Alliance courier, who informed her that Mathilde Bridou had been freed from jail several weeks before, thanks to the intervention of Georges Georges-Picot, Marie-Madeleine’s brother-in-law and a colonel in the small postarmistice French army, who pulled strings in Vichy to obtain her mother’s release.

  Arriving in Marseille on the morning of New Year’s Eve, Marie-Madeleine felt a momentary sense of happiness and peace after the chaos and trauma of the previous month. Here, everything was safe and familiar, including the vegetable and fruit warehouse and shop that she had bought the year before as a cover for Alliance activities. It had turned out to be a remarkably profitable business venture as well.

  From Madrid, she had brought back a cornucopia of goods—cigarettes, coffee, tea, chocolate, and whisky—for her agents. She also handed over some money to buy food, on the black market if necessary, for a memorable New Year’s Eve feast. For one night at least, they would block out the omnipresent fear and danger and simply take pleasure in each other’s company.

  That night, she glanced around the table in Gabriel Rivière’s apartment, just above the warehouse and shop. There was Rivière himself, the burly chief of the Marseille sector, whose idea it had been to buy the produce business. Sitting next to him was his wife, Madeleine, who had become a close friend of Marie-Madeleine’s. Also at the table was Émile Audoly, the grain merchant who provided invaluable intelligence about ship movements in the Mediterranean. And of course the ever-ebullient Jean Boutron, who, as Marie-Madeleine recalled, was “the king of the feast.”

  These beloved colleagues represented the advance guard of Alliance—men who had been at the core of the network since its beginning. But there were others at the table, too—several new agents who had recently joined the fraternity. As they ate and drank together, laughing and offering toasts to each other, “joy,” in Marie-Madeleine’s words, “took hold of us all.”

  At the end of the evening, however, reality intruded. Although her mother was now free, her agents arrested in Pau were still in jail. Now Rivière told her that Gavarni wanted to meet her soon to discuss his plan to free them. Gavarni believed, Rivière said, that the network was finished and that it should sever its ties to Britain.

  The celebration was over, and the New Year had begun. It was time to return to the daunting task of saving Alliance.

  Two days later, Fourcade summoned Gavarni to the vegetable warehouse. She had resolved not to pass judgment on him until she heard him explain his actions in Vichy. As she waited for him to arrive, she thought back to his brief stint as her chief of staff and the confidence she had placed in him. But she also recalled that immediately after Navarre’s arrest, Gavarni had expressed doubts about whether she as a woman would be fully accepted as Alliance’s leader. He supported her, he said, but others didn’t. She asked him if they objected to taking orders from a woman. He replied that they were unsure about both her gender and her youth. Now she wondered if he had been voicing his own skepticism.

  Having no idea what to expec
t from him, Fourcade went to the warehouse accompanied by Alfred Jassaud, Rivière’s young deputy, who stood guard outside its office door. When Gavarni appeared, Jassaud let him in. Despite her burgeoning doubts, Fourcade could not forget how he had saved her from arrest, and she warmly embraced him. It was clear, however, that the warmth was not reciprocated. Instead of the deference and sympathy that he had shown her before, his voice had a distinctly hard edge. She sensed he had come to try to impose his authority on her.

  He freely acknowledged that during his meeting with Henri Rollin, he had turned over the 2 million francs and had promised the Vichy official that the network’s imprisoned agents would cut their ties with the British. When they were freed, he said, they would begin working for Vichy.

  Unable to speak for a moment, Fourcade finally found her voice. She strenuously objected to the idea of betraying the British. Gavarni took out a cigarette, put it in his mouth, then threw it away. He was sick of the British, he yelled. Grabbing her by the shoulders, he declared that if he and she joined forces and worked for Vichy, they could become rich in the process by convincing MI6 to provide them with vast amounts of money.

  Trying hard to smother a laugh, an incredulous Fourcade pushed him away, deliberately knocking over a small table to attract the attention of Jassaud. When he rushed in, she told him that Gavarni musn’t miss his train back to Vichy and that he should be taken to the station immediately. Gavarni protested that she hadn’t yet given him an answer. She said she needed time to consider the implications of his proposition. In the meantime he should tell Rollin that she had agreed to the dissolution of the network and that when Vichy had released all the agents still in jail, they could arrange another meeting. He nodded.