Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  These various successful escapes had given her a sense of well-being, but that feeling quickly vanished after a surprise visit from Colonel Édouard Kauffmann, the leader of Alliance’s Dordogne sector. Kauffmann, who had traveled to Paris to see what he could find out about the fate of the network agents betrayed by Bla, returned with horrific news: They all had been executed on November 30.

  Closing her eyes, Fourcade could see them in her mind: Antoine Hugon, leader of the Brittany sector, who had triumphantly arrived in Pau in the summer of 1941 with the cloth map of the Saint-Nazaire submarine base wrapped around his middle; Lucien Vallet, her light-hearted, charming radio operator in Pau who had first warned her about Bla; Edmond Poulain, who had been engaged to Monique Bontinck. Nine agents in all had been executed. Consumed with grief and rage, Fourcade struggled to regain control of her emotions. The only way to do that, she concluded, was to continue working to eradicate the “monsters” who had murdered her friends.

  Believing that her continued presence in Toulouse was putting the agents there at risk, she, along with Bontinck and Rodriguez, slipped away to the Corrèze, the wild, rocky region in south central France where the Ussel landing field was located and where, because of its isolated location, she felt particularly safe. She had a joyous reunion with Faye there on December 17.

  The two of them, along with Bontinck and Rodriguez, would remain near Ussel through the holidays, gathering for Christmas dinner with other agents at the house of Jean Vinzant, the leader of the sector there. A year earlier, she noted, Alliance had boasted about one hundred members. Now there were nearly a thousand. Each of them was part of this special family that she had helped create, including those who had disappeared and whose legacy she and the others had inherited.

  * After a short stay in Algiers, Boutron made it to London, where he joined de Gaulle’s staff. He later enlisted in the Free French navy and was appointed captain of a frigate.

  Throughout that year’s Christmas holidays, Fourcade and Faye pored over a backlog of intelligence sent to London that, because of the chaos of the previous six weeks, they had not yet had a chance to carefully examine. The reports revealed that despite growing threats to Alliance’s survival, its agents were still producing a flood of vital information.

  The messages and other materials touched on a wide array of subjects, among them the antiaircraft defenses and types of planes on airfields throughout France, German troop movements toward the Russian front, and samples of synthetic fuels and a new type of gas mask. But the most important reports, as had been true since 1941, focused on the German submarine bases near Bordeaux and on France’s Atlantic coast.

  Thanks in part to the intelligence provided by Alliance and other French spy networks, Britain had become considerably more effective in combating the depredations of German submarines on its shipping in the Atlantic. Supplies transported from North America were still scarce, yet more were getting through. But there was another reason why intelligence about the U-boats’ movements and positions remained crucially important.

  By the end of 1942, the Allies were on the verge of halting Germany’s seemingly unstoppable momentum. The Red Army was close to defeating the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad—a five-month bloodbath that would produce more than a million casualties. American and British forces, meanwhile, were slogging their way across North Africa. Although many punishing battles lay ahead, the Western Allies would wrest the region from Germany in the early spring of 1943.

  In January 1943, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met at Casablanca to plot future offensives in the European theater. Among their key decisions was a massive buildup of U.S. forces in England to prepare for the upcoming invasion of Western Europe. The two leaders noted the obvious: In order for American troop convoys and war matériel to make their way safely to Britain, the Atlantic must be cleared of German submarines. If the U-boats continued to pose a danger, D-Day might be rendered impossible.

  By late 1942, dozens of Alliance agents and subagents had infiltrated all the ports and U-boat bases in the west of France, from Bordeaux and La Rochelle on the southwestern coast to Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, and Brest in the northwest. The leaders of these sectors, most of them in their twenties, were an impressive group.

  One of them was twenty-four-year-old Philippe Koenigswerther, the slight, blond, boyish head of Alliance operations at the submarine base at La Rochelle and the inland port near Bordeaux, located on the Gironde River. The Bordeaux port was particularly important because of the number and variety of vessels it housed, from submarines and warships to mine-laying boats, torpedo transports, and blockade runners. Bordeaux was a major destination for goods to support the German war effort, and cargo ships bringing those goods headed there, provided they were successful in slipping through an Allied naval blockade in the Atlantic.

  A member of a prominent, wealthy Jewish family in Paris, Koenigswerther had escaped to Britain in a sailboat at the time of France’s occupation. His parents were also able to flee, spending the rest of the war in New York. In London, Koenigswerther joined the Free French and was recruited by BCRA, its intelligence and sabotage service, which trained him in the specifics of gathering information about the German navy. In 1941, he was parachuted back to France, where he was captured by the Germans in Bordeaux. After escaping to Britain, he returned to France in September 1942 but was dropped by parachute in the wrong location in the Dordogne and was unable to make contact with BCRA. After meeting an Alliance operative, he asked for a job with Fourcade’s network. MI6 checked him out and urged her to take him on.

  PHILIPPE KOENIGSWERTHER

  Koenigswerther, who, according to Marie-Madeleine, looked more like Little Lord Fauntleroy than an intelligence agent, proved to be a brilliant organizer, recruiting a wide-ranging group of informants. As was true throughout Alliance, they came from all classes of society—regular and reserve naval officers, workmen, secretaries, shopkeepers, priests, and at least one Protestant pastor. One of Koenigswerther’s key operatives was the former mayor of La Rochelle, who was dismissed by the Germans in 1940 for refusing to lower the French flag at the city hall after his country’s capitulation. Another was Franck Gardes, a crane operator at the La Rochelle submarine base, who used his lofty vantage point in the crane’s cab to monitor the comings and goings of U-boats. In August 1943, after Gardes reported the departure of five subs from the base, the RAF sank all of them in the Bay of Biscay.

  One of Koenigswerther’s greatest successes was providing the information that led to Operation Frankton, arguably the most daring British commando raid of the war. In the late fall of 1942, he had sent intelligence to MI6 about the location of six cargo ships anchored in the Gironde. Based on that knowledge, a small group of Royal Marine commandoes, using canoes, paddled up the river on December 11 and placed limpet mines on the hulls of the ships. The resulting explosions caused heavy damage.

  In Brittany, another young agent—twenty-four-year-old Lucien Poulard—had been praised by the British for his own stellar work and that of his operatives. One of the air force pilots recruited by Léon Faye for Alliance in early 1942, Poulard had worked for several months as Faye’s adjutant, which, among other things, involved his reluctant participation in the execution of Bla. In early November 1942, Poulard was sent back to his native Brittany to form subnetworks to spy on the submarine bases at Saint-Nazaire and Brest.

  At Brest, Poulard oversaw the efforts of Maurice Gillet, a maritime broker who headed the Alliance group scouting out information at the base there. Eight members of his own family were in the group. Another was the young seamstress, code-named Shrimp, who repaired the life vests of the submariners. They usually brought the vests to her as they were getting ready to leave on a patrol, and by listening carefully to their chatter, she often learned the times and dates of their subs’ sailing. Thanks to the information provided by the Brest crew, several submarines based there wer
e sunk by the RAF and Royal Navy shortly after they left the port. As Poulard delightedly reported to Marie-Madeleine, “A word from us to London, and down go the U-boats.”

  There was yet another outstanding subnetwork in Brittany on which Marie-Madeleine could depend. It had considerably more autonomy than the others, as a result of her determination to begin decentralizing Alliance’s operations. The group, called Sea Star, was headed by a twenty-eight-year-old former naval officer named Joël Lemoigne.

  Soon after Marie-Madeleine’s escape from Marseille, Lemoigne paid her a visit. He brought with him a large amount of information about the Lorient base, including a sheet of paper that listed the exact number of U-boats based there, giving their fleet numbers and individual call signs as well as their operational rosters and any damages or losses they had sustained. It was, Marie-Madeleine noted, a complete picture of the entire base. She asked Lemoigne who had written the report. He said he couldn’t tell her. He did, however, give her a few details about his source, including the fact that he was a naval engineer, but said he had promised the man he would not reveal his name.

  That wasn’t good enough for Marie-Madeleine. She told him she had to know the identity of the report’s author before she could vouch for its authenticity to the British. The two sparred verbally for a few more minutes, then Lemoigne scribbled something on a scrap of paper and got up to leave. As he shook her hand on his way out, he slipped her the paper. After he’d gone, she looked down. On it was written “The engineer is Jacques Stosskopf.”

  * * *

  —

  FOR MORE THAN TWO YEARS, Admiral Karl Dönitz had ruled his submarine kingdom from a stately, elegant seaside château overlooking the huge base at Lorient. The twenty-room mansion, built in the nineteenth century by a French tycoon who had made his money in the sardine trade, boasted an unobstructed view of the harbor and of the massive fortress-like concrete bunkers that housed Dönitz’s U-boats.

  The commander of the Reich’s submarine fleet took great pride in all his bases, whose close proximity to the Atlantic killing grounds had made life so much easier for his crews. But the crown jewel was Lorient, a once quaint and peaceful fishing village on the Bay of Biscay that Dönitz had transformed into the largest submarine base in the world.

  From the château’s grand salon, which he had turned into his command post, Dönitz monitored the operations of his “gray wolves.” On nice days, the salon’s lofty windows were opened, and the admiral inhaled the sea air as he dispatched orders to his submarines by radio, “moving them like chess pieces,” in the words of one historian, and overseeing their attacks. He and his staff kept track of the wolf packs’ positions on a huge map of the Atlantic hung on one of the salon’s walls.

  Dönitz was known for his paternal attitude toward his crews, who knew that if they got into trouble at sea, an SOS to him would bring immediate help from other submarines. In the evenings, the admiral, over dinner with his staff in the villa’s baronial dining room, would lift a glass of Bordeaux and toast his U-boats’ successes.

  Submariners considered themselves the royalty of the German navy, and when they returned from successful patrols, their reception, especially at Lorient, was regal indeed. Dönitz himself was on hand to greet them, as was a brass band and a crowd of welcomers, including a number of attractive young German women who would bestow flowers and kisses on the victorious sub commanders. Medals would be awarded, speeches made, and triumphant anthems played.

  The backdrop for the celebrations were the gigantic submarine pens, nineteen in all, each connected by its own channel to the main harbor. Beneath the cavernous, vault-like structures, with their fifteen-feet-thick concrete walls and roofs, was an enormous underground city, replete with offices, workshops, guard rooms, living spaces for crewmen and key workers, a hospital, electrical and water purification facilities, and vast storage spaces for fuel, explosives, and spare parts. Although defended by batteries of antiaircraft guns that ringed the town, the U-boat pens, which were built in late 1940 and early 1941, didn’t really need them. Their thick concrete shells proved largely impenetrable to the bombs that rained down on them during frequent RAF bombing raids in 1942 and 1943. The raids, in fact, did far more damage to the town of Lorient and its residents than to the base itself. “It was a great mistake on the part of the British not to have attacked these pens from the air while they were under construction,” Dönitz later observed, “but Bomber Command preferred to raid towns in Germany. Once the U boats were in their pens, it would be too late.”

  Yet although he was confident that his base could survive any aerial assault, he was less sure of its security on the ground. Dönitz was well aware of the problem posed by the infiltration of Allied spies in Lorient and the other French bases. But he remained convinced that the Abwehr and Gestapo would root them out and that his beloved submarines would go on to help win the war for Germany.

  To limit the pilfering of secrets, the Lorient base was heavily guarded. Nonetheless, there remained an insoluble problem: Dönitz was forced to rely on French tradesmen, technicians, dockyard hands, construction workers, and others to do much of the labor in and around the facility. “From an operational point of view, Dönitz gained a great deal by moving his bases six hundred miles closer to his hunting grounds,” U.S. Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery noted. “From a security point of view, he lost.”

  Even if the base itself had been impenetrable, keeping all its secrets would have been impossible. While the U-boats were in the pens being readied for the next patrols, their young crewmen, recuperating from the stress of their last mission, indulged in a great deal of hard partying. They were given the run of the town of Lorient, frequenting the many bars, brothels, cafés, and gambling clubs that catered to them.

  In turn, the employees of those businesses—prostitutes and bartenders prominent among them—took advantage of the submariners’ binges to ferret out details of submarine arrivals and departures, along with other vital bits of intelligence. “Anyone who kept his ears open after the first five or six rounds of drinks could pick up many items of secret official information,” one observer remarked.

  For the Germans, such problems were exacerbated by the fact that Lorient, along with Brest and Saint-Nazaire, was located in the northern French province of Brittany. While German security officials viewed every French citizen as a potential enemy of the Reich, they were uneasily aware that Bretons were more hostile than most of their compatriots.

  A craggy, starkly beautiful, wind-swept peninsula that extends into the stormy North Atlantic, Brittany seemed to many to be a land apart from the rest of France. Likewise, its people regarded themselves as a race quite different from the residents of other parts of the country.

  Known for their independent, passionate, rebellious spirit, Bretons were descended from Celtic settlers who had populated the area in the sixth century. In many ways, the residents of Brittany seemed more like the citizens of Celtic lands like Ireland and Wales than to the rest of the French. Indeed, as they pointed out, their native Breton language had more in common with Gaelic and Welsh than it had with French. Bretons never lost sight of the fact that Brittany was an independent kingdom until it was absorbed by France and became a province in 1532.

  “In Breton eyes, if your family hadn’t lived in Brittany for generations, you were new here,” the novelist Jean-Luc Bannalec wrote. “Even if [a Parisian] married a Breton woman, had Breton children and spent his twilight years here, he would always remain an ‘outsider.’ After two or three generations, his great-grandchildren would be sure to hear murmurs of ‘Parisian.’ ”

  If Bretons thought of Parisians as outsiders, it’s not hard to guess what they thought of the Germans. On the surface, most residents of Lorient and elsewhere in Brittany might have seemed submissive, but underneath was a simmering hatred that, for more than a few, manifested itself in resistance work.

  Th
e Germans’ worst enemy in Lorient, however, was not one of the town’s natives. It was a Frenchman trusted by Dönitz and despised by the Bretons—the naval engineer Jacques Stosskopf.

  * * *

  —

  ON OCTOBER 24, 1942, a contingent of French workers at Lorient was dispatched to Germany to serve as forced laborers there. As they trudged past a crowd of fellow workers on their way to the railway station, several in the crowd shouted, “Death to Stosskopf!”

  The epithets were aimed at a man who, in the words of one historian, was the most hated Frenchman in Brittany during the war. The deputy chief of naval construction at the Lorient shipyard, the forty-three-year-old Stosskopf was a native of the French region of Alsace, which borders Germany. He spoke fluent German and was regarded by the occupiers and by his countrymen as a diehard collaborator.

  Dönitz and his staff were so dependent on Stosskopf that he was given the run of the shipyard and base. A cold, formal perfectionist, he meticulously inspected the work of French laborers to make sure they were living up to his and the Germans’ exacting standards. He also had access to top-secret information—everything from operational orders and U-boat movements to debriefing reports of submarine crews after their missions. His French colleagues loathed him not only because he used his technical expertise for the Germans’ benefit but also because he socialized with Dönitz’s staff and even invited them to his home.

  In fact, the “traitor Stosskopf” turned out to be one of the most brilliant, audacious Allied spies of World War II. Since the fall of 1940, he had been providing a treasure trove of intelligence about German submarine operations at Lorient, first to high-ranking anti-German naval officers at Vichy and then to Fourcade’s network.