by Lynne Olson
On the morning of November 10, Léonard allowed Fourcade to sift through the other documents that had been removed from La Pinède and remove those that were particularly incriminating and would put the lives of agents in jeopardy. Those that were left would be handed over to the Germans, while the rest were burned. Also destroyed was the suitcase filled with documents that Jacques had brought from their mother’s house on the Côte d’Azur.
Late that afternoon, however, her sense of relief was replaced by a feeling of panic. Jean Boubil, the inspector who had come to her aid at La Pinède, took her aside and whispered that the Germans had persuaded the Vichy government to send her and her agents to the prison in Castres, a town in Languedoc about 160 miles west of Marseille. From there they would be extradited immediately to Fresnes, the Gestapo prison near Paris.
A few minutes later, Jean Léonard informed Fourcade that she couldn’t stay at the police headquarters that night but must return to L’Évêché prison, adding that he would retrieve her and her colleagues the following morning. Fourcade blanched. She told him she had intelligence that the Germans would invade the free zone the following day. They would find her and the other Alliance agents at the prison and take them into custody—so in effect Léonard would have handed them over.
Once again, Léonard gave in, assigning three inspectors to keep watch over her and the others from Alliance. She persuaded her guards to check periodically through the night with other police stations in the free zone to see if there were any signs of incoming German troops. At about midnight, the police in Moulins, a city in central France just south of the demarcation line, reported that German forces were marching in and fanning out through the countryside.
Early in the morning, Léonard came in, his head bowed, and without a word went into his office and shut the door. A truck pulled up outside and a squad of French policemen got out. Fourcade knew they were there to take her and her colleagues to Castres.
She burst into Léonard’s office. “The whole police section was there, dismay written on their faces,” she remembered. “I was conscious of their tragic role under the German jackboot….I knew, however, for I had just been living in their company, that not one of them wanted to hand us over to the enemy and had done their best to save us.”
Explaining that he was under orders from Vichy to transfer the Alliance group to Castres, Léonard assured Fourcade that she and the rest would be safer there than in Marseille. Did he really not know, Fourcade thought, that Castres was simply a springboard for extradition? Despairingly, she glanced at Léon Théus, Léonard’s deputy, who had burned the incriminating suitcase and its papers, and at Xavier Piani. Both men, their eyes steady, gazed back at her.
A few minutes later, Fourcade saw Théus walk outside and talk to the head of the waiting police squad. They got back in the truck and drove away. Returning to the building, Théus pulled Fourcade aside. He whispered that he had arranged for Gabriel Rivière and several other Alliance agents to attack the police van taking her and the others to Castres. At that point, Piani joined them. He told Fourcade that he and two inspectors would be in the van and that they would make sure the rescue attempt succeeded.
At that point, Fourcade recalled, all the policemen in the room helped her and her comrades pack up their belongings. On their way out, several agents picked up revolvers and Sten guns lying around the room, as well as a sealed envelope containing eighty thousand francs that had been taken from the villa. While all that was going on, Théus grabbed a pile of paper—the transcripts of the interrogations of Fourcade and the other agents—and burned it. As she left, Fourcade shook hands with all those who had helped her and wished them luck. Two policemen whispered that they were leaving that night to join the Alliance sector in Nice.
Once in the van, she promised Piani that she would arrange for him and the two inspectors “guarding” her and the others to escape to London. She knew that if they did not leave France, the Germans would track them down and, in all likelihood, execute them.
At the rendezvous point agreed upon by Théus and Rivière, a swarm of Alliance agents stopped the van and liberated their colleagues. “Come on!” yelled Rivière. “We can’t hang around here.” The three French policemen joined their erstwhile captives aboard the large truck that Rivière had commandeered. As it sped along the road toward Avignon, a vehicle appeared in the distance, advancing slowly toward them. Fourcade stiffened. It was an open-topped German staff car—the vanguard of a flood of troops that was soon to follow. A Wehrmacht officer sat next to the driver, staring intently at a large map spread across his knees. They were completely unprotected.
Struck by the same thought, several agents in the truck took out the Sten guns and revolvers they had pilfered from the police headquarters. “No!” Fourcade shouted. “Don’t move!” As tempting as the thought of killing the Germans was, “it would be too idiotic a risk after all our providential luck,” she wrote. “Our duty was elsewhere.”
She turned and watched as the German car passed by and disappeared down the road.
The Germans called it Operation Attila.
On November 11, 1942, more than two hundred thousand Wehrmacht troops, armed with tanks and artillery, crossed France’s demarcation line and flooded into the free zone. By nightfall, the army’s panzers had reached the Mediterranean coast and were parading through Marseille. Italian forces, meanwhile, moved into Nice and other cities on the eastern edge of the Côte d’Azur.
The invasion prompted a few feeble protests from Vichy radio, but those broadcasts—and the scuttling of the remnants of the French fleet at their base in Toulon—were the only gestures of resistance made by Pétain’s government. The armistice army was disbanded and its weapons confiscated.
Although the Germans retained Pétain and Laval at the top of the Vichy government, the illusion of power and authority that the two men had sought to project was brutally stripped away. In the aftermath of the occupation, they were exposed for what they were—figureheads who were there to serve their German masters. Members of the Vichy police were seen as Nazi henchmen who rounded up Jews for deportation, along with other French citizens who had been drafted by the Reich to serve as slave labor in Germany.
For Fourcade and others in the resistance, there would be no more safe havens, no buffers of any kind shielding them from Nazi fury. No longer could they count on sympathetic members of the Vichy police and other security forces to turn a blind eye to their activities or come to their aid.
As it happened, many anti-German policemen and security officials joined resistance networks after the occupation. The two inspectors who told Marie-Madeleine they were about to enlist in Alliance did so; one of them eventually became head of the Alliance sector in the northwestern city of Rennes. Superintendent Léon Théus, who had played a key role in Fourcade’s rescue, cofounded a new resistance network called Ajax, whose members were largely former policemen. The Nazis would hunt down these new recruits as relentlessly as they did veteran Alliance operatives. Nowhere in France would any resister feel safe again for the duration of the war.
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THE EVENT THAT TRIGGERED Germany’s occupation of the free zone—the Allied invasion of North Africa—had not unfolded in the way that the U.S. government had hoped or expected. Contrary to Roosevelt’s prediction that Vichy forces would welcome an assault by American troops, the French mounted stiff opposition at almost every landing site. General Giraud was finally airlifted to Algiers, but French troops didn’t seem inclined to follow him. In any event, another candidate had already preceded him on the scene—none other than Admiral François Darlan, commander of the Vichy military, who happened to be in Algiers visiting his ill son at the time of the Allied assault.
In an effort to stop Vichy’s armed resistance to the invasion, Americans offered a deal to the opportunistic Darlan: In exchange for his engineering a cease-fire,
the Allies would appoint him high commissioner, or governor, of North Africa. For a time, Darlan seesawed back and forth on the deal, first accepting it, then reneging. Finally, under heavy Allied pressure, he gave in and ordered an armistice.
Darlan’s appointment was one of the Roosevelt administration’s most controversial decisions of the war and was greeted with a storm of protest around the globe. The president was unfazed by the criticism, telling a French resistance leader visiting Washington: “For my part, I am not an idealist like [Woodrow] Wilson. I am concerned above all with efficiency. I have problems to solve. Those who help me solve them are welcome. Today, Darlan gives me Algiers and I cry ‘Vive Darlan!’ If Quisling gives me Oslo, I will cry ‘Vive Quisling!’ Let Laval give me Paris tomorrow, and I will cry ‘Vive Laval!’ ”
In the view of many, such cynical pragmatism undermined the lofty moral position of the Allied cause. Members of the French and other European resistance movements, whose lives were in constant danger due in part to collaborators like Darlan, were the most outspoken in expressing their dismay and anger. For Jean Boutron, who had been transported to Algiers by the submarine that rescued him, the news of Darlan’s appointment “hit me like a bomb. I was stupefied. I had escaped Darlan’s police in France so that I could deal with his police in Algeria? And the Allies were responsible for this? The thing seemed so absurd that all I could do was laugh.”*
In France, meanwhile, the march to de Gaulle accelerated. On November 17, leaders of some of France’s largest resistance movements issued a statement calling for de Gaulle, “their uncontested leader,” to be named governor of North Africa. De Gaulle was supported as well by much of the British public, most members of Parliament, and the British press. Even some high-level British government officials, including several from the Foreign Office, joined the parade.
Like nearly everyone else, Winston Churchill, who had reluctantly supported Darlan’s appointment, couldn’t help knowing that it was a huge political mistake and that some corrective action was necessary. It wasn’t long before the corrective occurred. On Christmas Eve 1942, a twenty-year-old French military trainee burst into Darlan’s headquarters in Algiers and shot him dead. There were suspicions that American and British secret services had arranged the murder, but nothing was ever proved.
To replace Darlan, the U.S. military turned to Giraud. But the general, who accepted the position, also turned out to be extremely unpopular and had little or no Allied support, except in Washington. “Between Giraud and de Gaulle, there is no real choice,” a French resistance leader said. “Giraud is not a name at all in France. De Gaulle is more than a name, he is a legend.”
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FOURCADE WAS APPALLED BY the Giraud fiasco and the peril that now faced her network because of it. After more than a year of relative refuge and stability in Marseille, she and her staff were fugitives again. Following their November 11 escape, they were whisked off to Châteaurenard, a rural Provençal town about fifty-five miles northeast of Marseille. Like shadows, they crept down the streets in the dark to various hiding places. They would remain in those bolt-holes until false identity papers could be prepared for them.
The task was undertaken by the redoubtable Ernest Siegrist, who not only served as Alliance’s chief of security but was also a skilled forger. After photographs were taken of Fourcade and the others, Siegrist inserted their names, descriptions, and fingerprints and pasted their photos onto false identity cards, complete with perfectly forged seals. According to her new card, Fourcade was now a vegetable and fruit dealer, born in North Africa, who had been cut off from her home by the American landings there. Siegrist also provided her and the others with false ration cards for food and clothing, along with driver’s licenses and other documents appropriate for their new identities.
Plagued by worry about Faye and his fate in German-controlled Vichy, Marie-Madeleine left immediately for the Alliance sector in Toulouse. When she arrived, Jean Philippe, the police superintendent who moonlighted as the network’s security chief there, told her that the Germans and Vichy police were scrambling to find her. But the Toulouse sector, at least for the moment, appeared quiet, and Fourcade decided to stay there long enough to draw a breath and assess the network’s status.
She was joined by a new addition to her team—a twenty-seven-year-old British radio operator known as Edward Rodney. He had been dispatched from London on October 26, 1942, landing by Lysander at the field in Ussel and taken to Toulouse to await further orders. The newcomer could not have been more different from the first radio operator sent by MI6—Arthur Bradley Davies, the infamous “Bla.” Tall and fair-haired, with pale blue eyes and a lively sense of humor, Rodney “looked terribly British, with his blond hair and Burberry trench coat,” Monique Bontinck remembered.
It was not until the end of the war that Bontinck and Fourcade discovered that Edward Rodney was a nom de guerre. In reality, he was Ferdinand Edward Rodriguez, a young Briton with a pedigree as exotic as his name. At the turn of the century, just a few years before the Bolshevik revolution, Rodriguez’s father, a Spaniard, had been the secretary to a high-level Spanish diplomat in the Russian capital of St. Petersburg. There he met Rodriguez’s mother, a young Englishwoman who served as a companion to the wife of the British ambassador. The two fell in love and were married.
Not long afterward, they moved to Paris, where they had four children—three girls and Ferdinand, who was the baby of the family. Rodriguez’s father died when Ferdy, as he was called, was a boy, and his mother remained in Paris with her children. After high school, Rodriguez attended the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris, France’s foremost business school, and became an accountant.
When the war broke out, he tried to enlist in the French army, but because he was a British citizen, he was rejected. He promptly went to London and joined the British army’s Royal Signal Corps. In 1941, he was attached to the British Eighth Army in Egypt, serving as a signals officer in a reconnaissance group that slipped behind enemy lines at night to collect intelligence on German positions.
The following year, Rodriguez, who spoke flawless French without an accent, was recruited by MI6 and, during his training, met Léon Faye during Faye’s trip to London that August. “I was looking for a network to serve,” Rodriguez recalled, “and he was looking for an agent who knew his country as well as he knew it himself.” Impressed by Faye’s passion and charisma, he expressed interest in joining Alliance, although he later acknowledged he was a bit skeptical when told that the leader of the network was a woman. But the moment he met Fourcade, he later said, he was won over. She was just as impressed with him, citing, in a later message to MI6, his “constant good humor, unfailing loyalty, intelligence, courage, and calm.” He was given the code name of Magpie—Pie for short—and swiftly became one of the most important members of Fourcade’s team.
FERDINAND RODRIGUEZ (LEFT) WITH THE BRITISH EIGHTH ARMY IN EGYPT
After handing Rodriguez a message to send to London assuring MI6 that she was safe, Fourcade began picking up the threads of her operation. Weeks before, in preparation for the possible destruction of Alliance’s headquarters in Marseille, she had arranged for Colonel Charles Bernis, head of the Nice sector, to take over command of network activities in the southern zone and Maurice de MacMahon, who led the Paris sector, to do the same in the north. The preparation had paid off: With the exception of Marseille, everything was still running smoothly.
In the north, all sectors had escaped German detection thus far and were operating at peak efficiency. Bernis, who had come to report to her in Toulouse, said that Alliance’s key agents in Marseille—Gabriel Rivière and Émile Hédin among them—had managed to escape and were being assigned to new sectors. The stations in Grenoble, Vichy, Nice, and other locations in central France were all still functioning well.
Then Fourcade received the best news of all: L
éon Faye had escaped from the Vichy prison to which he had been confined since his abortive attempt to persuade Pétain to fight the Germans. Faye’s escape was as dramatic as that of General Giraud: He had lowered himself down a rope from the fourth floor of the prison, followed by General Gabriel Cochet, the former head of the French army’s intelligence branch, who had been imprisoned in 1941 for his repeated calls for resistance against the Germans. The two men’s escape was organized by members of Alliance’s Vichy and Grenoble sectors, who immediately spirited them away.
While all this was taking place, Fourcade made good on her promise to Superintendent Xavier Piani and the other two French policemen who had helped engineer her own escape from Marseille. On the night of November 25, a Lysander that she had summoned from Britain arrived at the field in Ussel. When she had asked MI6 officials to send the plane, she didn’t tell them who the passengers would be. Increasingly anxious about her safety, especially in light of her recent capture, they had repeatedly appealed to her to come to London and obviously believed, as she well knew, that she would be one of the Lysander passengers leaving France.
Early the next morning, an MI6 welcoming party, headed by Kenneth Cohen, the official in charge of Alliance operations, waited on the tarmac at an RAF base near London. After the Lysander taxied to a stop in front of Cohen and the others, they were astonished to see three unknown French policemen extricate themselves with difficulty from the cockpit. At the time, MI6 higher-ups were less than thrilled by Fourcade’s small deceit, but they forgave her when told the reason for the unexpected passengers.