Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  Worried that Vichy and German security forces were again closing in, Fourcade moved once more, this time to a spacious villa called La Pinède, perched on a hill outside Marseille and surrounded by lush gardens. The villa was rented in Marguerite Brouillet’s name, and she and one of her sons moved in first, telling the landlord that several relatives of hers, refugees from the occupied zone, would be staying with her. Those “refugees” included Fourcade; her brother, Jacques Bridou; Léon Faye; and Monique Bontinck.

  The villa’s large drawing room was turned into an office and radio transmission center, where operators sent and received messages to and from London and the network’s other sectors. In another room, Ernest Siegrist, the former Paris policeman who served as the network’s specialist in forged papers, turned out a flood of false identity cards, ration books, and other documents needed by Alliance agents.

  Acutely aware of the growing threat to the network, Fourcade felt as if she were sitting on a barrel of gunpowder. One of her greatest priorities now was to locate safe places in the countryside where Allied operatives on the run could hide and be evacuated to safety. One such agent was Audoly’s radio operator, who had been captured with him but who had managed to flee while he was being taken to jail. Another was Jean Boutron, who had been interned for the previous three months at a fort in the French Alps and who was still waiting for Marie-Madeleine to fulfill the pledge she had made in Vichy to help him escape.

  During her stay in Madrid, Major Eddie Keyser, her MI6 handler, had discussed with her the creation of a new air operation between England and France, using small planes called Lysanders to pick up and bring in her agents, mail, and other important material. Until then, Alliance and other French spy networks had been forced to rely on radio messages, unofficial shuttle services like Jean Boutron’s mailbag scheme, parachute drops, and crossing the Pyrenees into Spain as the main ways to communicate with London and to bring agents in and out.

  All those methods had major disadvantages. Mountain crossings into Spain, for example, were arduous and time-consuming, with a high risk of being captured by Vichy, German, or Spanish border police. Parachute drops were also problematic. To make one, an agent had to have special training. Even then, it was not uncommon to break a leg or suffer some other injury on landing. And of course parachute operations could only be mounted from England; there was no way to use parachutes to smuggle agents out of France.

  In the summer of 1942, MI6 finally inaugurated the new plane service. In July, it dispatched an agent from London, whose real name was Arthur Gachet but who was known to Marie-Madeleine and her operatives by his code name, Arthur Crowley. Gachet was to teach network operatives the intricate and risky maneuvers necessary to bring in and send off the Lysanders.

  His pupils were members of a small, recently created branch of Alliance called Avia, whose purpose was to handle the ground logistics of parachute drops and the new Lysander service from Britain. It was headed by Pierre Dallas, a twenty-six-year-old former air force pilot who had been one of the first fliers recruited by Faye. A native of Lyon, Dallas had already established a parachute dropping zone just south of that city, in a field near the Saône River. His house, which was located on the banks of the Saône, served as Avia’s headquarters.

  In the months to come, the field near Lyon would be used for Lysander landings, as would another site, discovered by Fourcade, that would prove to be even better for the new air operation. She learned about the location from an Alliance agent who before the war had been a gun runner in the Corrèze, a wild, rocky region in south central France. Set in the Massif Central, the third biggest mountain range in the country, the Corrèze was an area of steep peaks, deep gorges, and flat plateaus—the perfect setting for an emergency hideout. Alliance’s new landing strip was installed on a wide, grassy former army airfield near the isolated town of Ussel.

  The strip would play a key role in one of the least known yet most important RAF operations of the war. The pilots who ferried agents from Alliance and other French intelligence networks to and from their country were members of a special operations unit—161 Squadron—an elite all-volunteer group. The aircraft they flew—a tiny two-cockpit single-engine plane—had been designed as a reconnaissance plane, with the ability to rapidly land and take off in small, contained areas, which made it an excellent craft for pickup operations. But the Lysanders, affectionately known as Lizzies by their young pilots, had more than their share of problems. They were slow and carried no guns, which made them vulnerable to German fighter planes and antiaircraft batteries.

  Before the war, the ungainly little Lysanders had been mainly used for patrolling coastal areas, towing targets, and spotting downed aircraft in the English Channel—unimportant duties in the eyes of most airmen in the RAF, who, completely unaware of the planes’ new wartime function, looked down on their colleagues who flew them. In fact, the work of the Lysander pilots was top secret, highly dangerous, and essential to the war effort.

  The squadron’s flights, which lasted as long as eight hours round-trip, took place only at night. Since the Lysanders had no navigation equipment, the pilots had to rely on light from the moon to locate small landing fields that appeared no bigger from the air than a pocket handkerchief and to see the terrain clearly enough to make a safe landing, all the while looking out for enemy aircraft. The fields themselves were lit only by flashlights operated by members of the resistance networks’ reception committees.

  But the members of 161 Squadron enthusiastically embraced the difficult challenges they faced. An iconoclastic, buccaneering crew, few of them were regular RAF officers, and most had little use for military rules or discipline. One of the unit’s top pilots, Peter Vaughan-Fowler—who joined the squadron as a nineteen-year-old and whom Marie-Madeleine would get to know later in the war—was known for his love of jazz and his penchant for performing daredevil acrobatic stunts over a village near the squadron’s airfield.

  “We were all different, and our greatest common factor must have been our individualism,” said Hugh Verity, a French-speaking Oxford graduate who at the age of twenty-four was named 161’s squadron leader. “I was rather pleased,” Verity added, “to find myself in a job where I could make an operational contribution to the war without killing people. It was also much more satisfying to carry people than bombs—especially when the people one carried were such outstanding personalities.”

  As the war progressed, the Lysander pilots forged tight bonds with many of the French men and women they ferried between France and England. Of all the Britons based in England who dealt with the French during the war, the men of 161 Squadron developed arguably the most personal relationships with them, sharing their dangers, rejoicing in their successes, and grieving when they were all too frequently swallowed up in the Gestapo maw. But the closeness between the two groups could also be attributed to the great similarity in the personalities of their members. Like the Lysander pilots, résistants tended to be mavericks.

  LYSANDER PILOTS IN FRONT OF ONE OF THEIR AIRCRAFT (NOTE THE FIXED LADDER BEHIND THE WING). SQUADRON COMMANDER HUGH VERITY IS SECOND FROM LEFT, AND PETER VAUGHAN-FOWLER, WHO FLEW MARIE-MADELEINE FOURCADE TO BRITAIN IN 1943, IS SECOND FROM RIGHT.

  During and after the war, both groups expressed great esteem for the courage and dedication of the other. Speaking of the French with whom he worked, Verity wrote that while he and the other pilots “were only vulnerable to the enemy on the ground for a few minutes at a time, they were at risk for months and years on end. It was they and their invaluable work that justified this unusual type of air taxi service.”

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  SHORTLY AFTER ARTHUR GACHET arrived in France, he launched a crash course to teach the Alliance aviation team how to work with the Lysanders and their pilots. On the night of each mission, he told the French, a strict routine had to be followed without deviation. When the plane approached t
he field, three team members were to position themselves on it in the shape of an inverted L. The pilot would be flying at a low altitude—usually no more than 1,500 feet—to enable him to make out the distinguishing features of the surrounding countryside. As he came near, he would flash a prearranged Morse code signal with his craft’s signal light. If the head of the reception committee, using a flashlight, responded with a prearranged signal of his own, the pilot would prepare to land; if he didn’t see the correct signal, he was under orders to return to base. Provided all went well, the other members of the team would then turn on flashlights mounted on sticks to guide the pilot in.

  After touching down near the first light, the airman would make a turn at the second light, then stop his plane at the third, thus positioning himself to take off. At that point, any baggage aboard the plane would be thrown out, and its passengers—three at most—would quickly climb down a ladder fixed to the side of the Lysander. Outgoing sacks of documents, maps, samples of new weapons, oils, and gases used by the Germans, and any other material would be quickly loaded, along with the baggage of departing passengers. Then the passengers themselves would clamber up the ladder into the plane. To avoid enemy detection, the emphasis was on speed, and the operation usually lasted less than ten minutes from landing to takeoff.

  Since moonlight was essential for the Lysander flights, they could be scheduled only two weeks a month—before, during, and after a full moon. The first Alliance pickup took place in early August 1942 on the field in the Corrèze. One of the passengers whisked away was Léon Faye, who was traveling to London for consultations with MI6. The agency’s officials had wanted Fourcade to make the trip, but she declined, sending Faye in her place. The morning after the pickup, to her great relief, the BBC broadcast a prearranged coded message telling her that Faye was at that moment walking the streets of London. He was scheduled to return during the full moon period the following month.

  For the September operation, the RAF decided to use Alliance’s other landing ground, on the bank of the Saône River near Lyon. This time, Jean Boutron was scheduled to be one of the outgoing passengers. Earlier in the summer, Fourcade had finally made good on her promise to smuggle him out of the fortress where he had been held since April. A doctor who moonlighted as an Alliance agent injected him with a substance that produced symptoms of urinary disease, which, the doctor insisted to officials at the fort, must be treated at his hospital in Grenoble. Boutron was taken there and a few weeks later was spirited out by agents in Alliance’s Grenoble sector and whisked off to a hideout in the town of Meyzieux, about eighteen miles from Lyon. There he received a message from Marie-Madeleine informing him of her decision to send him to London aboard the next Lysander flight.

  The flight that would bring Faye back to France was scheduled for September 11. A worrier at the best of times, Marie-Madeleine was edgy from the moment she heard that the date had been fixed. She thought about all the dire possibilities: the Lysander shot down by enemy fighters or antiaircraft fire; a crash caused by bad weather; capture of the Avia reception crew and the outgoing passengers. But Marie-Madeleine’s greatest fear, although she never specifically acknowledged it, was centered on the fate of Léon Faye.

  Throughout the war and after, Marie-Madeleine was extremely discreet about her private life. She never discussed or wrote, for example, about her affair with Faye. But while she made no public mention of the intimate nature of their relationship, her comments about him in her memoirs left little doubt that she was deeply in love with him.

  On the evening of September 11, she would later write, she was at her villa outside Marseille. Pierre Dallas called to tell her that despite wretched weather conditions in England, the Lysander carrying Faye had taken off and was on its way to France, where clouds and rain also predominated. As she knew, it was hard enough to conduct the missions in perfect weather. Having to fly through clouds, rain, or fog with no navigation aids was far more difficult, even for the most skilled pilots. She heard nothing more about the flight that night or the following day.

  Finally, on September 13, Dallas informed her that his team had waited for the Lysander for several hours, but it had never shown up. With her anxiety, already sky-high, mounting even further, she finally got word that Faye was all right. His plane had been forced to turn back because of the bad weather, and another attempt would be made when the conditions improved.

  For the next week, Dallas and his crew, along with Boutron, traveled to the landing ground every night, but the weather continued foul and the Lysander never appeared. Having waited in the cold and rain for several nights, Boutron came down with a bad case of the flu. On the evening of September 20, racked by fever and chills, he was in bed at a nearby inn when Dallas came to see him. He told Boutron that although he and his crew were going to make one final trip to the landing ground, the weather was still bad and he was sure the plane would not appear. He advised Boutron to stay in bed.

  Unbeknownst to Dallas and the others, however, the sky had finally cleared in England and the Lysander was once more on its way to France. As it approached the coast of Normandy, the moon appeared from behind a bank of clouds. Heading southeast, the plane was caught in the beams of German searchlights, but the pilot, John Bridger, veered away, making a sudden dive, and the searchlights, unable to find the craft again, went out.

  As the Lysander flew over the Loire River, the sky clouded over again, and the plane and its occupants were plunged into almost total darkness. They crossed over two mountain ranges, and Bridger struggled to stay clear of the ridges that were no more than vague outlines in the thick clouds veiling them. When the plane drew close to the Saône River, the rain was coming down in sheets, and, as Bridger approached the field, he was flying almost at ground level, trying to make out the landing ground’s features. There were no lights to indicate the reception crew’s presence, and he began to circle, looking for any sign of life below.

  Suddenly he and Faye saw a jerky flicker of light. The plane’s signal light blinked the prearranged Morse code signal, and the light from the ground blinked back with the correct response. Descending into the darkness, Bridger finally spotted the lights marking the inverted L of the flare path and touched down a few seconds later on the rain-soaked earth. When the Lysander made the turn to get ready for the takeoff, however, one of its wheels sank in the mud, and the plane tipped over on its right wing. Revving his engine, Bridger tried to free the Lysander, but to no avail. After throwing his luggage and bags of mail to the ground, Faye climbed out of the plane. He and the Avia crew loaded bags of outgoing mail into the Lysander and then, using their hands as makeshift shovels, dug a deep furrow in front of its mired wheel. The aircraft still refused to budge. In a desperate final effort to free it, the four Frenchmen clung to its fuselage while Bridger revved the engine to full throttle. Slowly, the Lysander began to move, heaving itself out of the muck and lumbering down the field. Faye and the others let go, and Bridger lifted the plane into the air and back into the storm.

  There had been no time to fetch Boutron from the inn. Bridger’s revving of the plane had been extremely loud, and he and the French reception committee feared that the noise might attract unwelcome attention from nearby farmers or, even worse, Vichy security officials. The unlucky Boutron would have to wait six more weeks for a new opportunity to escape.

  In Marseille, meanwhile, Marie-Madeleine spent another agonizing night. Early the following morning, she heard a pounding at the front door of the villa. When she opened it, Faye, covered with mud, burst in with two equally muddy suitcases. “Well, I’ve got what you wanted,” he exclaimed as he unlocked the luggage and revealed its contents—countless stacks of francs and piles of important documents.

  Trying to control her emotions, Marie-Madeleine didn’t say a word. Realizing that Faye was puzzled by her silence, she picked up what looked like a photo negative from one of the suitcases and peered closely at it. H
e stared at her for a moment, then began to laugh. “I see your imagination has run away with you again,” he said. “When will you stop worrying for no reason?”

  She laughed, too, although she knew how wrong he was; there was a multitude of reasons to worry. But for his sake, she would try to put her anxiety aside. All that mattered was that he was safe—at least for now.

  On a chilly afternoon in late October 1942, Arthur Gachet, having overseen the first Lysander missions to Alliance, arrived in Marseille for a meeting with Fourcade. As he left the Saint Charles train station, he spotted a familiar face—someone he had met during an MI6 training course for radio operators a couple of years before in London. His former colleague recognized him, too, and seemed delighted to see him.

  The man told Gachet that the resistance group to which he had been assigned had been destroyed by the Gestapo, that he had barely escaped, and was now looking around for another network to join. He mentioned the fact that the head of the defunct group had been a woman.

  Gachet immediately realized to whom he was speaking: Arthur Bradley Davies, also known as Bla, the former Alliance radio operator suspected of selling out more than a dozen agents in Paris and Normandy to the Germans the year before. Even though MI6 had assured Fourcade in late 1941 that Bla had had nothing to do with the arrests, she believed otherwise and, with the help of some of her men, had set out to prove his guilt.

  In the early spring of 1942, Maurice Coustenoble, Fourcade’s adjutant at the time, had uncovered a key piece of evidence that supported her suspicion. He’d made the discovery during a trip to Paris to investigate the possibility of organizing an escape attempt by the jailed agents from Fresnes prison, a massive gray fortress-like structure near the French capital that held hundreds of resisters. After several days of casing it from the outside, Coustenoble gloomily concluded that unlike Vichy jails and prisons, whose guards often could be bribed or were anti-German themselves, Fresnes was so impregnable that a successful escape attempt was impossible.