by Lynne Olson
To take charge of Vichy forces in North Africa once the attack occurred, U.S. officials wanted a French general who was anti-Gaullist but also anti-German and untainted by Vichy’s collaboration with the Reich. Giraud, who outranked de Gaulle by two stars, seemed the perfect solution. Unlike many of his military colleagues in Vichy, he strongly believed that Germany was going to lose the war and that Vichy must ally itself with the Americans and reenter the conflict. The tall mustachioed general, who had distinguished himself in both world wars, was known for his courage and integrity. His remarkable escape from the Koenigstein fortress had been heavily publicized in newspapers around the world and had added even more luster to his already notable name.
Having designated Giraud as commander of French forces in North Africa, the Americans instructed the British to sound him out about the job and then find a way to smuggle him out of France. MI6, which was handed both tasks, turned to Alliance—its most effective French spy network—to carry them out. The selection of the network for this delicate, controversial mission showed how vital Alliance was to the British war effort. But it also thrust Fourcade and her agents into uncharted territory: They had never before been involved in this kind of operation. Although she continued to have grave doubts, she did what MI6 asked, later writing that it was not her job to think. Her job was to help Giraud return to the fight against the Germans.
She and Faye decided to send one of their top agents—Maurice de MacMahon, the Duke of Magenta—as their envoy to Giraud. The meeting between the two in Lyon, however, proved to be highly problematic. The general told the duke that while Giraud was willing to cooperate with the Americans, he was anti-British and had no interest in going to London. At the same time, though, he was prepared to accept British aid to help him achieve his primary goal: to become the leader of all resistance movements in occupied Europe. Giraud would consider leading French forces in North Africa, he said, as long as the invasion there was coordinated with an attack in France. If the Allies supplied him with enough arms and equipment, he added, he could lead France’s armed forces to victory over Germany, accompanied by armed rebellions in other occupied countries, including Holland and Norway.
Marie-Madeleine was dumbfounded by Giraud’s presumption. How could he possibly believe he could take charge of all of Europe’s resistance movements from inside France? It was hard enough, as she knew from bitter experience, to lead a single network in one’s own country. She also knew that French resisters would refuse to accept the leadership of a man like Giraud, who had never had any dealings with the resistance up to that point and who had pledged his loyalty to Pétain and Vichy. Resistance members who had already taken a political stand had, for the most part, thrown their support behind de Gaulle and the Free French. Courageous as Giraud obviously was, he was also clearly out of touch with reality, political and otherwise. One resistance leader later called him “idiotically self important.” Another labeled him “delusional.”
Knowing that British officials would be as nonplussed by Giraud’s quixotic plans as she had been, she sent a brief, considerably watered-down version of his demands to Eddie Keyser. She told Keyser that Giraud wanted to stay in France for the moment and play a leading role in the resistance there.
Marie-Madeleine heard nothing more about Giraud until late September, when Léon Faye returned by Lysander from his monthlong stay in London. During his time away, he had also made a brief trip to Algiers. From various sources, British and French, he had learned that the Allied invasion of North Africa was imminent and that planning was already well under way to spirit Giraud out of France. American officials had met with a representative of the general and promised him that Giraud would be given an important role in the invasion if he could persuade French commanders in North Africa not to oppose the Allied landings. While agreeing to work with U.S. forces, Giraud, according to Faye, was apparently still trying to induce the Americans to combine the attack on North Africa with a simultaneous landing on the French Mediterranean coast.
Although such a demand was obviously unacceptable, the Americans apparently believed they could bend Giraud to their will. They told the British to proceed with arrangements to retrieve the general from the south of France and bring him to Gibraltar, the forward-planning headquarters for what would be called Operation Torch. Instead of a Lysander, a submarine would be dispatched to help him escape. The submarine and its crew would be British, but the anti-British Giraud would not know that. Instead, he was to be informed by officials in London that the sub was American.
Alliance was put in charge of finding a secure embarkation site on the Côte d’Azur, as well as smuggling Giraud out of Lyon from under the noses of his Vichy and German watchers and transporting him to a safe house to await the submarine’s arrival. Marie-Madeleine chose Colonel Charles Bernis, head of the network’s Nice sector, and Pierre Dallas, chief of the Avia team, to handle the logistics of the escape, which the British christened Operation Minerva.
After scouting several possible embarkation locales on the French coast, Bernis recommended Le Lavandou, the village sixty miles east of Marseille where Marie-Madeleine had briefly taken refuge a few months before. The rocky, wooded terrain there, overlooking the sea, was quiet and secluded, with little sign of German or Vichy police activity. A local fisherman who was sympathetic to Alliance had agreed to take Giraud and his party from the coast out to sea to rendezvous with the submarine. Marguerite Brouillet’s villa, where Marie-Madeleine had stayed, would be used to shelter the general and his retinue until the vessel came.
On November 1, Marie-Madeleine was notified that Operation Minerva must begin no later than November 4. Over the next three days, a flood of coded messages flew back and forth between London and Alliance headquarters in Marseille. Marie-Madeleine was uncomfortably aware of how dangerous these frequent, lengthy radio transmissions were to the safety of her network. With German radio-detecting vans and cars on the prowl in and around Marseille, it was essential to keep transmissions short and to a minimum. But when one was working out the details of a mission as complicated as the Giraud escape turned out to be, it was virtually impossible to do so.
MI6 informed Marie-Madeleine that Giraud would be picked up by HMS Seraph, commanded by the Royal Navy’s Lieutenant Commander William Jewell. Giraud, however, would be told that the British sub was actually the USS Seraph, under the command of U.S. Navy Captain Jerauld Wright, who would greet Giraud as he boarded. As part of the charade, the Seraph’s forty-man British crew would pretend to be Americans as well. Once the submarine was several miles out to sea, Giraud would be transferred to a seaplane that would fly him directly to Gibraltar to meet with U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the commander of the North Africa invasion.
Two days before the Seraph was to arrive, Faye showed up at La Pinède with disconcerting news: Giraud had just told him that one submarine was not enough. He was now asking that a second one also be dispatched, to pick up a number of other French army generals from Vichy whom he had urged to accompany him to North Africa.
Marie-Madeleine couldn’t believe it. This escape plan had already put her network and its operations in jeopardy, and now Giraud was making matters worse with his ridiculous new demand. She wasn’t running a public transportation company, she exclaimed to Faye. Although she would do everything possible to smuggle out Giraud, the other generals would have to fend for themselves.
After calming down, she reluctantly agreed to pass on Giraud’s request to the British, although she was convinced that no other high-ranking Vichy officers would break ranks and join the Allies. Just in case they didn’t, she said, she wanted several Alliance agents who needed to be evacuated, among them Jean Boutron and her brother, Jacques, to be ready to board the submarine in the generals’ stead.
The British agreed to the second submarine, and plans for Operation Minerva seemed back on track. Then on November 3, Giraud dropped another bombshel
l. He had changed his mind, he told Faye. He’d decided not to leave France after all; instead, he would take control of the country’s resistance from there. When Faye told her of this latest turn of events, Marie-Madeleine exploded with rage.
She knew that the noose was already tightening around Alliance. In addition to the threat posed by the direction-finding vans, French and German police had somehow learned of Giraud’s planned escape and were searching the coast for the general and those helping him. Faye urged her to calm down, assuring her that Giraud would change his mind again and decide to go. Faye’s prediction proved correct. Late that night, Marie-Madeleine received confirmation from Giraud’s representative that Operation Minerva was on track once more.
Early the following morning, she left Marseille with Monique Bontinck and several other headquarters staffers. She was determined that the network should not suffer because of the venture. If the escape effort failed, she wanted to make sure she was still free to oversee Alliance’s continued operations. She and the others spent the next two days at the headquarters of the network’s Toulouse sector.
With Faye taking her place at Le Lavandou, the stage was set for that night’s embarkation attempt. Their nerves on edge, Faye, Colonel Bernis, Pierre Dallas, and the rest of Alliance’s escape team spent the day at Marguerite Brouillet’s villa awaiting the arrival of Giraud and his party. Brouillet had prepared a lavish meal for the general, but by dinnertime, there was still no sign of him, and the food went cold. Finally, at about ten o’clock, two cars arrived at the villa, and Giraud, his son, and several aides stepped out.
After Brouillet reheated the food and everyone sat down to eat, Faye was pulled away from the table by an incoming message from London. The submarine, it appeared, might not arrive in time that evening. If it didn’t, another attempt would be made the following night—November 5.
While Giraud and his party were escorted to their rooms, the sixty-three-year-old Bernis and twenty-six-year-old Dallas scrambled down to the beach and for several hours used flashlights to send out prearranged signals to the submarine, scanning the horizon in vain for a response. Early the next morning, they gave up their watch and returned to the villa for a couple of hours of sleep before going back to the shore at dawn. The sea had grown considerably choppier, but the conditions were still good enough, they thought, for the embarkation to proceed that night.
As the hours dragged by, a strong wind began howling outside the villa, and the Alliance team’s anxiety mounted, reaching sky-high levels when the fisherman who was to take Giraud from the coast to the submarine arrived. He said that at the moment, the wind was too gusty for him to take his boat out of the harbor, and if the gusts continued, the operation would have to be canceled.
A fierce debate broke out. Faye insisted that an attempt must be made, regardless of the weather, while Giraud’s chief aide said that the decision must be left up to the fisherman. The general himself remarked that he was willing to take any risk necessary. Bernis, who was equally worried about the weather conditions and the security threat posed by Giraud’s presence at Lavandou, settled the matter, declaring that the operation would proceed as planned if the boat could make it through the harbor entrance.
Near midnight, the wind began to die down. Giraud’s son and aides left with the fisherman to help him load the party’s luggage into his boat and get it in the water. Giraud and the Alliance team, meanwhile, set out on foot toward a rocky headland overlooking the sea. When they reached the headland, Pierre Dallas hurried to its tip and flashed a signal meaning “wait” to the submarine that he hoped was out there in the inky darkness.
Giraud and the others clambered down a narrow path to the beach. The fishing boat soon came alongside and took Giraud and Dallas on board. Standing in the bow, Dallas flashed a prearranged letter signal out to sea. After a few heart-stopping seconds, a light flashed back with the correct letter of response. A muffled cheer went up from those in the boat and on the shore. They could barely make out the dark mass of the Seraph, which had surfaced a few hundred yards away.
The rescue’s only hitch came when Giraud tumbled into the water while trying to board the Seraph from the fishing boat, which was pitching and rolling in the ocean swells. His son and aides immediately fished him out, and he climbed aboard the sub with only minor injuries to his pride and the herringbone suit he was wearing. The American naval officer posing as the captain showed him to the captain’s quarters, where he fell asleep without ever noticing the pronounced British accents of the crew.
Later that morning, an RAF seaplane rendezvoused with the Seraph in the Mediterranean, landing about thirty yards from the submarine. The transfer of Giraud and his retinue—from sub to rubber dinghy to plane—took more than an hour. Finally, after a bumpy takeoff in an increasingly rough sea, the seaplane flew west to Gibraltar, landing three hours later. Giraud was immediately whisked away for a meeting with General Eisenhower.
Meanwhile, after delivering the general to the Seraph, the fisherman and Pierre Dallas returned to shore, met by cheers and embraces from Faye, Bernis, and the rest of the embarkation team. The Alliance men all had mixed emotions: jubilation over their successful execution of an exceedingly difficult operation coupled with a lingering sense of regret that as former military officers, they were unable to emulate Giraud and return to actual combat against the enemy.
But they had little time to dwell on such things. It was time to get back to work. Another submarine was arriving in less than forty-eight hours.
Fourcade returned to Marseille in the early morning of November 6. She stopped first at the Saint Charles bar to make sure it was safe to go on to La Pinède, observing as she did so that none of the Vichy generals who were supposed to leave on the second submarine had yet shown up.
When she arrived at the villa, Faye described in detail the success of the previous night’s mission. He emphasized the importance of the second submarine’s arriving as planned on the night of the seventh, saying that the British had informed him that no submarines would be available after that date. Although London had not told him why, Faye had correctly guessed the reason: The Allies planned to launch their invasion of North Africa on November 8.
Fourcade pointed out that no generals had yet arrived. She didn’t mention that she’d already arranged for Jean Boutron, Jacques Bridou, and two other Alliance agents to be at the bar the next morning, ready to take the generals’ place.
Late that evening, Marguerite Brouillet phoned to say she had come down with the flu and couldn’t host the guests who were attending the party the following night. Her message was a prearranged code for some very bad news: Lavandou could not be used as the embarkation site for the second submarine. Fourcade guessed that the Germans had been tipped off by the unusual comings and goings of the previous night and were roaming around the area. The submarine must be diverted to a backup site—Cros-de-Cagnes, another small fishing village on the Côte d’Azur, midway between Cannes and Nice. With the submarine due in less than twenty-four hours, it was crucial, she told the radio operator on duty at La Pinède, that MI6 be notified immediately about the change in plans. He assured her he would send out the alert in that night’s transmission to London. But when she returned the next morning, she found the operator, unshaven and red-eyed, still hunched over his transmitter. He told her he had tried to contact London repeatedly throughout the night, but there had been no response.
He added he was going to switch frequencies and try again. Retrieving from his pocket the crumpled and stained message that she had coded the night before, he placed it on the table beside him and turned on the transmitter. At that point, Ernest Siegrist, Alliance’s head of security, came in to give Fourcade more unsettling news: A friend in the Marseille police had warned him that German detector vans were on the verge of locating a transmitter in the area of La Pinède. After urging her to shut down the radio immediately, he left to try to fer
ret out more information. A few minutes later, Monique Bontinck and another agent, who had been out shopping for food, returned to the villa to report that several strange men were walking up and down the avenue.
Fourcade knew she should follow Siegrist’s advice and halt the transmission. But as she and he were talking, her operator finally made contact with London and began tapping out her message. Since it was vitally important to keep the submarine away from Lavandou that night, she allowed him to continue. She walked into another room, listening to the Morse signals and begging him under her breath to work more quickly.
Finally the tapping stopped, and the operator switched over to receive London’s reply. There was a moment or two of silence, then the front door crashed open and shouts of “Police” echoed through the house. Glancing out a window, Fourcade saw several police cars and vans haphazardly parked in the street and men swarming into the villa.
She ran into the office and saw her operator holding a cigarette lighter and trying to burn the message and his transmission schedules, while a man waved a gun in his direction and shouted at him to stop. Another man, dressed in a leather overcoat and speaking German, was rifling through the drawers of the operator’s desk. In a fury fueled by two years of frustration, anger, and constant worry, Fourcade lost control. Screaming “Dirty Boche!” she threw herself at the German plainclothesman and clawed at his face. Astonished by her outburst, he shrank back and picked up a chair to fend her off, much like an animal trainer facing an enraged lion.
Suddenly she remembered a sheaf of incriminating notes from her recent travels that she’d stored in her purse. Rushing back to the other room, she retrieved the notes, wadded them into balls, and crammed them into her mouth. At that point, the man whom she’d assaulted burst in and ordered her to stop.