Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  With a grin, Faye pointed to a desk across the room, on which several tall piles of paper were neatly stacked. They contained messages and queries from London and information from the sectors. Combing through them, she realized that the network’s day-to-day operations under Faye were very much under control. Indeed, the summer of 1942 marked the apogee of Alliance’s wartime activity. Thanks in large part to Faye’s assiduous recruitment work, the network now numbered almost a thousand agents and had sectors in virtually every region in France. Although the Paris sector was still being rebuilt, there were strong operations in, among other places, Normandy, Brittany, Vichy, the Dordogne, Lyon and the rest of the Rhône Valley, and Grenoble and the Alps.

  Particularly vital was the information being gathered by Alliance spies in Marseille, Nice, and other locations on the Mediterranean coast of France and Italy. Such intelligence was of critical importance to the British, whose troops were then engaged in a desperate struggle with General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in Libya. There were also rumors of an upcoming Allied invasion of North Africa in the fall of 1942, which, if true, would require as much information as possible about the strength of German, Italian, and Vichy French forces in the region.

  Virtually every day, Alliance’s headquarters was inundated with queries from MI6 about the movement of German and Italian land, sea, and air forces from their bases on the Mediterranean coast to North Africa. Émile Audoly, who ran the network’s agents in Marseille, was in charge of supplying many if not most of the answers. According to Fourcade, Audoly and his operatives never missed anything to do with the shipping that went in and out of Marseille, such as German raiders sailing under neutral flags or consignments of arms and material loaded under French commercial labels but intended for the Afrika Korps. Thanks to Audoly’s intelligence, the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy were able to intercept and destroy much of the shipping on which Alliance reported.

  The network’s sector in Nice, run by Colonel Charles Bernis, also provided invaluable information about the Mediterranean. Bernis, Alliance’s first supervisor of intelligence, had conquered his doubts about Fourcade’s ability to lead the network and had been in charge of its operations on the Côte d’Azur for almost a year. He had reinforced its strength by working closely with an antifascist network just across the border in Italy, which gave him information about Italian troop, naval, and air force operations. Shortly after Fourcade returned to Marseille, Bernis passed on a report from his Italian colleagues that several of Mussolini’s air force squadrons were about to be dispatched to Libya to reinforce the Afrika Korps. A day or so later, MI6 reported to her that the Italian planes had been intercepted.

  Less well known than the agents but just as important to Alliance’s success were its couriers, who crisscrossed the country carrying transmitters, diagrams, maps, photographs, and other documents between Marseille and the various sectors. They tended to be people whose occupations required them to travel, such as truck drivers and salesmen, and who thus were eligible for an ausweis. The risks they faced were enormous. Unlike the network’s agents, couriers did their work out in the open, carrying incriminating information and material on trains and other public forms of transportation, all of which were heavily patrolled by German and French security officials.

  In the spring of 1942, Fourcade needed a courier to transport several transmitters to the occupied zone. A teenager named Robert Lynen, who had just started working at the Marseille headquarters, volunteered for the job. As it happened, the nineteen-year-old Lynen had one of the most recognizable faces in France. A freckle-faced redhead, he had been known in the 1930s as the best and most popular child actor in French cinema. His first movie, Poil de Carotte (Carrot Top), which he made in 1932 at the age of twelve, was an international success, spawning Robert Lynen fan clubs across the Continent and as far away as Japan.

  When the Nazis occupied France, Lynen, who had starred in nine films since his first hit, refused offers from a German film company to continue to make movies aimed at French audiences but under its auspices. Instead he became involved in resistance work in Marseille, where he came to the attention of Fourcade and her network.

  ROBERT LYNEN IN HIS ROLE IN THE HIT FILM POIL DE CAROTTE (CARROT TOP)

  Lynen, who had recently agreed to take part in a theatrical tour across France, said he would transport the transmitters and secret documents from one city to another in his costume trunk. He told Fourcade that his celebrity would be an advantage rather than a negative: No one would ever believe that the famous “Carrot Top” was a spy. It would be, he said with a grin, his finest role.

  Buoyed as she was by Alliance’s resurgence, Fourcade had very little time to savor its success. By the summer of 1942, Nazi officials in France, increasingly infuriated by what they saw as Vichy’s vacillating policy toward resisters, had begun to strike back hard.

  Returning to Marseille in early July after visiting several of the network’s sectors, Fourcade was startled to see Léon Faye and three other Alliance agents positioned along the length of the platform as her train pulled into Saint Charles station. As she stepped down from the train, Faye was the first to spot her. Grabbing her arm, he hustled her to a car, which was waiting at the bottom of the station’s steps with its engine running. As it raced off, he exclaimed, “They’re after you again! And this time the Boches are handling the job.”

  In the late spring of 1942, German officials had pressured Admiral Darlan to step down as head of the Vichy government and engineered the reinstatement of their puppet, Pierre Laval. As the car carrying Marie-Madeleine sped through Marseille, she recalled Henri Rollin’s warning that if Laval returned to power, she and other resisters would lose all hope of Vichy protection. Although a collaborationist himself, Darlan had shown occasional signs of ambivalence. Laval demonstrated no such vacillation: He was Hitler’s man and proud of it. One of his first acts after taking over the reins of government again was to push Rollin aside as chief of the Surveillance du Territoire.

  During that same period, the SS in occupied France had wrested complete control of policing and security from the German military, thereby winning its ongoing power struggle with the Abwehr, the army’s intelligence and counterintelligence operation. SS authorities regarded the Abwehr as being too weak and lenient in its dealings with French resisters. Now, with the SS unequivocally in charge, the Nazis set out to crush anti-German activity throughout the entire country.

  Under the armistice, German security agents and police were barred from entering the free zone. In fact, they had been infiltrating the area since the French capitulated. Until mid-1942, most Vichy officials had closed their eyes to the fact, although some rebels in the government, notably army counterintelligence officials, continued to track the Germans down and arrest them. But with Laval back in power, Vichy now actively assisted the German security services in their hunt for resisters.

  The Germans had long complained about the fast-growing number of radio transmitters in Vichy France being used by the resistance to communicate with the Allies. With Laval’s approval, German officials in Paris dispatched more than 280 agents from the SS and Abwehr to the south, bringing with them cars and vans with direction-finding equipment to track the transmitters down. Vichy officials provided the German intruders with French identity cards and local license plates for their vehicles. The Germans were also allowed the use of Vichy police headquarters to send their reports to Hugo Geissler, the Gestapo’s chief representative in the free zone.

  In yet another egregious infringement of the armistice, dozens of Surveillance du Territoire agents were ordered to accompany the Germans and, under Abwehr and Gestapo supervision, to make the actual arrests of resistance members. When a French army counterintelligence official complained to his superior about the order, he was told that if Vichy didn’t do what the Germans wanted, Hitler had made it clear he would occupy the free zone.

 
The main focus of the German dragnet was resistance activity in Marseille, Pau, Lyon, and Vichy—all areas in which Alliance had transmitters. After whisking Fourcade away from the Marseille station, Faye told her that he had ordered the network’s radio operators in those sectors to drastically reduce their transmission times and to repeatedly change frequencies while sending messages, in an effort to prevent the Germans’ direction-finding operation from pinpointing their locations.

  Faye also insisted that it was not safe for Fourcade to return to her apartment in Marseille. When she protested, he was adamant, saying he had already found her another place to stay. She was driven to a house outside Le Lavandou, a small seaside village in the rocky, wooded headlands of the Côte d’Azur, some sixty miles east of Marseille. There she took refuge in a small villa surrounded by pine trees and overlooking the sea. It was owned by Marguerite Brouillet, a social worker whose husband was with the French army in North Africa and who served as an occasional courier for Alliance.

  As was her practice wherever she went, Marie-Madeleine transformed Le Lavandou into an Alliance outpost. She enlisted Brouillet’s two teenage sons and other local residents, among them a doctor, a schoolmaster, and a wine grower, in the network’s cause. Couriers traveled daily between Alliance’s Marseille headquarters and her new hideaway, carrying messages and documents.

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  MARGUERITE BROUILLET WAS THE LATEST in a widening circle of women whom Marie-Madeleine welcomed into Alliance and whom she considered friends. In the French resistance as a whole, women played crucial roles. Their effectiveness, in France and throughout occupied Europe, owed much to the Nazis’ stereotypical view of them. Coming from a traditional, conservative society themselves, the Germans saw women chiefly in their conventional domestic roles as wives and mothers and, at least early in the war, rarely suspected them of being spies or saboteurs.

  As the only female resistance chief in France, Marie-Madeleine made a special effort to surround herself with other strong women. Although Alliance began as an almost exclusively male organization, women accounted for some twenty percent of its agents over the five years of its existence. Like their male counterparts, they represented all classes of society, from maids and laundresses to Paris socialites.

  Among Marie-Madeleine’s female agents was Jeannie Rousseau, an impish, elegant young Parisienne whose reports on the development of Germany’s terror weapons—the V-1 flying bombs and the V-2 rockets—turned out to be one of the greatest Allied intelligence achievements of the war. Another was Jeanne Berthomier, a high-level official in the Ministry of Public Works in Paris, whose access to top-secret information about the Germans’ presence in the occupied zone proved invaluable to Alliance and the British. And then there was a young dressmaker (code-named Shrimp) who repaired submariners’ life vests at the German base at Saint-Nazaire in Brittany. In the course of her work, she learned which submarines were coming in for repairs and which were headed out to sea. She passed on the information to Alliance, which in turn transmitted it to MI6.

  Women also were numerous at Alliance’s headquarters in Marseille. Its administrative head was the former historian Denise Centore, who oversaw the comings and goings of couriers and agents and monitored the flow of mail. In the spring of 1942, Marie-Madeleine brought in an intrepid nineteen-year-old blonde named Monique Bontinck—code-named Ermine—as her personal courier and assistant.

  The eldest of seven children, Bontinck came from Doue, a village in northern France. She was strongly anti-German as a child, thanks to the stories her Belgian grandfather told her about German atrocities in Belgium during the 1914–18 war. When Germany occupied France in 1940, she left her family and traveled to Paris, determined to join the resistance. She met Edmond Poulain, a young lawyer who had recently joined Marie-Madeleine’s network, and the two soon became engaged.

  Poulain was one of the Alliance agents arrested in Paris in the fall of 1941 and sent to Fresnes prison. In a coded message smuggled out of Fresnes, he wrote to Marie-Madeleine that he expected to be executed and appealed to her to save the girl he was to marry. But keeping Bontinck from harm was easier said than done. Her demure, shy appearance masked a fearless nature that bordered on recklessness. In her memoirs, Marie-Madeleine recalled that during Bontinck’s three-year tenure with Alliance, she repeatedly went out on extremely dangerous missions without Marie-Madeleine’s knowledge.

  MONIQUE BONTINCK

  Ferdinand Rodriguez, a British radio operator assigned to Alliance later in the war, said of Bontinck: “She performed with an icy pluck the most mind-boggling acts. She had a candid face and a childish silhouette, with her fair hair falling to her shoulders, but she also had the spirit of a secret agent ready to do anything.”

  As was true of other French resistance networks, Alliance found that women were particularly successful when acting as couriers. Many, like Bontinck, were young and attractive—and used their charm and guileless appearance to talk their way out of ticklish encounters with German and French police and security officials. “I carried messages all over France, and sometimes radio transmitters, too,” Bontinck later wrote in an unofficial account of her wartime activities. “You can’t imagine what I went through trying to avoid police controls on trains and at train stations.”

  Among Alliance’s other women couriers was a chic, well-connected Paris matron named Odette Fabius, whose background was very similar to that of her patronne. Like Fourcade, Fabius was thirty-two years old. The daughter of a wealthy lawyer in Paris, she had been tutored by a British governess and spoke English fluently. At the age of seventeen, she had married an affluent antiques dealer considerably older than she and a year later gave birth to a daughter.

  But Fabius wanted more than marriage, motherhood, and a prominent position in Paris society. Shortly before the war began, she volunteered as an ambulance driver for the French army. After the armistice was signed, her restlessness returned, and she cast about for something else to do. In a chance encounter, a friend with ties to Alliance asked her if she would be willing to deliver a letter to Léon Faye in Marseille. Ignoring the objections of her husband, she did as her friend asked and was recruited by Faye as a full-time courier. Fabius embarked on her resistance career with zest, carrying letters and documents and escorting people across the demarcation line between the occupied and free zones. Her young daughter occasionally accompanied her, and on more than one occasion, Fabius hid incriminating papers in the girl’s suitcase.

  Having developed a taste for risk and adventure, Fabius was anxious to assume a more important role within Alliance. Fourcade taught her how to encrypt and decrypt coded messages, and she was occasionally given other duties at the Marseille headquarters. But she was never assigned weightier responsibilities or included in the long, conspiratorial closed-door meetings that Fourcade held with Faye, Maurice de MacMahon, and her other key agents. In Fourcade’s view, Fabius was somewhat of a dilettante, focusing more on the excitement and drama of this deadly serious work than on the need for discipline and security.

  Fabius, who eventually left Alliance and joined another network, clearly resented Fourcade’s treatment of her, and after the war, she was the only Alliance operative to write negatively about her boss. Idolizing Léon Faye as she did, Fabius believed that he, not Marie-Madeleine, should be leading Alliance, and she was scathing about his willingness to subordinate himself to a woman. “Faye is obsessed with the beauty and undeniable charm” of Fourcade, Fabius wrote in her wartime journal. “She exercises on him, as on everyone, a huge influence, and makes him accept without difficulty the role of assistant to the ‘grand chef.’ ”

  Odette Fabius was hardly the only one to comment on Marie-Madeleine’s striking good looks; many others—men and women—did the same. After the war, MI6’s Kenneth Cohen noted that “fact had outpaced fiction in producing the copybook ‘beautiful spy.’ That was Marie
-Madeleine.” In Madrid, Cohen’s deputy, Eddie Keyser, had been transfixed by her appearance when he first met her. In his old age, Chris Marker, a noted French photographer and documentary filmmaker who had joined the resistance in Vichy early in the war, told his biographer that he had done so in part because “he, like so many young men in Vichy, was madly in love with the fabulously beautiful Marie-Madeleine.”

  Unquestionably, Faye, like so many others, had been smitten by Fourcade’s beauty and charm. As it happened, she was equally attracted to him, and the two had become lovers. But the jealous Fabius was wrong in her belief that Fourcade’s allure was the main reason for Faye’s willingness to subordinate himself to her leadership. When he had first approached Colonel Édouard Kauffmann, his old air force colleague, about joining Alliance in early 1942, Kauffmann had asked him who ran the network. “A woman,” Faye responded. “But not just any woman! She’s an indisputable and undisputed leader. Even the English have accepted her!”

  His view was echoed by the British radio operator Ferdinand Rodriguez, who would later become part of Fourcade’s inner circle. “She was young and very beautiful, but there was an unmistakable aura of authority around her,” Rodriguez told an interviewer after the war. “She was definitely la patronne par excellence.”

  Fourcade did not stay long at Marguerite Brouillet’s house in Lavandou. Soon after her move there, Gabriel Rivière arrived with yet another dose of bad news. Émile Audoly, the architect of Alliance’s astonishingly successful intelligence gathering operation in Marseille, had been arrested by Vichy police. He’d been betrayed by a former Alliance radio operator who had gone to work for another network and then, having been caught by French security officials, told them about Audoly’s operation in order to save himself. Fourcade had no time to properly mourn the capture of Audoly, one of the few remaining members of Alliance’s first wave and a treasured associate. Her first priority must be to save his sector. She asked Rivière if he could take over from Audoly. He replied that he’d already begun to do so.