Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  The next day, Lemaire went to confession with Abbé Charles-Jean Lair, the vicar of the Tulle cathedral. A majestic Gothic structure built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the cathedral was particularly noted for its lofty bell tower, boasting the highest spire in the region. During his “confession,” Lemaire persuaded the abbé to allow Rodriguez to install his transmitter in the belfry.

  On the evening of January 31, Rodriguez spread his transmitter’s antenna out in the bell tower, turned on his set, and made immediate contact with London, while Abbé Lair kept guard. After his transmission, he returned to the château with alarming news he’d just been given by MI6. Alliance’s transmitters in Marseille, like those in Pau, Toulouse, and Nice, had fallen silent, and no one knew what had happened to the sector’s agents. Faye had gone from London to Algiers on a mission for MI6 and could not return to France until March. London concluded its transmission with a personal message to Fourcade from her main MI6 contact, Eddie Keyser, telling her that he feared her immediate arrest and ordering her to take the next Lysander to Britain.

  Fourcade had no intention of escaping to London or anywhere else, but her intuition told her she had to leave Tulle as soon as possible. It was clear, she later said, that Alliance was the target of a major Gestapo operation. With all her network’s sectors burned in the southwest region of France, she decided to move more than two hundred miles east to Lyon, the country’s third-largest city. She had no idea if the network’s operations there were still intact, but it was a gamble she felt she must take.

  For the fourth time in less than a month, she and her small headquarters staff were on the run. Before they left to take the night train to Lyon, a courier from Tulle arrived at the château to tell her that the Gestapo had just descended on the house of Louis Lemaire but couldn’t find him. He had gone into hiding at a friend’s house in a nearby town.

  It wasn’t until weeks later that Fourcade learned what had happened next. After a week, everything seemed quiet again, and Lemaire returned home. On February 19, he was at his shop in Tulle when three members of the Gestapo burst in and arrested him. With surprising calm, Lemaire told them, “You forget that we are here in the former free zone and you cannot arrest me without the authorization of the prefect of the region and the assistance of the French police.”

  As Lemaire argued with the Gestapo, his wife, who was working in a back room of the shop, slipped out a rear entrance and alerted Abbé Lair and the deputy mayor of Tulle. The deputy mayor hurried to the shop and told the Gestapo plainclothesmen that Lemaire was correct: They did not have the right to arrest and question him without the permission of French authorities. Meanwhile, the abbé had spread the news among residents of Tulle, who converged on the shop and surrounded the Nazis’ car. Faced with a hostile crowd and an obdurate city official, the Germans retreated. When they returned the next day with the proper authorization, Lemaire had disappeared again. Fourcade wanted him to take the next Lysander to London, but he refused to abandon his wife and five children, even if he could only keep watch on them from afar. He joined another resistance organization that specialized in sabotage.

  Abbé Lair was also urged to go into hiding, but he refused to do so, saying he would never desert his parishioners. He was arrested by the Gestapo agents who had come back for Lemaire. He was later deported to a German concentration camp, where he was executed on May 25, 1944.

  * After the war, Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, honored Philippe for his efforts to save French Jews.

  When Fourcade arrived in Lyon, she discovered a city of vast contradictions. On the surface, it was a sober, stolid, conservative place, full of successful and prudent inhabitants who prided themselves on their bourgeois values and disdained any form of excess. To some people, particularly those from Paris or Marseille, Lyon seemed more Swiss than French in its outlook. One observer described it as “a citadel of old money that was never flaunted.”

  But there was another Lyon, one that boasted a tradition of sedition and insurrection. In 1793, for example, the people of Lyon revolted en masse against the radical government that had seized power after the French Revolution. The revolt was violently quashed, but it left behind a residue of antigovernment sentiment in the city, as well as a taste for rebellion and independence.

  That tradition of insurgency was one reason why so many members of the French wartime resistance were drawn to Lyon. There was another, more practical explanation: It was a big, sprawling city, with a multitude of warehouses, cellars, and other potential hiding places. It also was the hub of several major rail lines and highways, making it easier, if under threat, to move in and out of it.

  Whatever the reason, Lyon became known as the capital of the French underground because so many resistance leaders congregated there. “You couldn’t go ten meters without running into an underground comrade whom you had to pretend not to know,” one leader noted. Among them was Jean Moulin, the former French official who would become known as the greatest figure of France’s wartime resistance. More than any other person, Moulin would be responsible for bringing together a wide array of fragmented movements and welding them into a relatively cohesive body.

  Not surprisingly, Lyon also became a hotbed of Gestapo and Abwehr activity. The major figure of Nazi repression was Klaus Barbie, the local Gestapo chief, who gained notoriety as “the butcher of Lyon.” Barbie’s four-year campaign of terror and death, which eventually extended beyond the boundaries of the city, claimed more than twenty thousand victims, most of them resistance members and Jews. He personally tortured many of those whose arrests he had ordered, including a thirteen-year-old girl whose parents had been taken into custody as both Jews and resisters. Trying to get information from the girl about her parents, he came “at me with his thin smile, like a knife blade,” she testified after the war. “Then he smashed my face. He kept doing that for seven days.”

  Fourcade had no illusions that she would be safe in Lyon, but she had run out of hiding places. As her pregnancy advanced, she also was in need of help and support. She had several close women friends in the city whom she was sure would shelter her while she tried to figure out how to save her network. The first friend she approached—Anne de Mereuil, a writer for Marie-Claire, the French fashion magazine, whom Fourcade had known in Morocco—warmly welcomed her. Mereuil’s apartment in the center of Lyon was tiny, but she invited Marie-Madeleine, Bontinck, and Rodriguez to share it with her. The three women slept in the bedroom, while Rodriguez bedded down on cushions on the floor of the small drawing room.

  The day after Mereuil took Fourcade in, the Lyon Gestapo arrested two Alliance couriers—Madeleine Crozet and Michèle Goldschmidt—who had reported to her just days before. They were taken to the Hotel Terminus, the Gestapo’s headquarters in Lyon, for interrogation by Klaus Barbie.

  For more than a week, they endured various kinds of torture at Barbie’s hands as part of his effort to get them to talk. They were punched, beaten with riding crops, and given electric shocks. When they continued to deny any knowledge of Alliance and its leaders, they were stripped naked, and Barbie burned their breasts with lighted cigarettes. Nothing worked. Crozet and Goldschmidt repeated their claims that they had never heard of Hedgehog, Eagle, Magpie, or any of a dozen other animal names hurled at them by Barbie. And since they didn’t know them, they said, they obviously had no idea where they were.

  During and after the war, Fourcade paid tribute to the remarkable courage of many of her agents, but she made special note of the women. “In my network,” she said, “no woman ever faltered, even under the most extreme kinds of torture. I owe my freedom to many who were questioned until they lost consciousness, but never revealed my whereabouts, even when they knew exactly where I was.”

  The news of the two young women’s arrests was swiftly followed by a report confirming that all the agents in the Marseille secto
r were also in the hands of the Gestapo, including Robert Lynen, the young movie star turned courier. As she stood in Anne de Mereuil’s drawing room listening to the news from Marseille, Fourcade was overwhelmed by the fast-mounting wreckage of her agents’ lives.

  Rodriguez, who failed to notice her despair, summoned her back to reality. He asked if she planned to let MI6 know that she and the other Alliance agents in Lyon were still free. She glanced at him, then at Bontinck, de Mereuil, Colonel Kauffmann, and the other operatives who were standing around her. The second wave had been largely destroyed, she later wrote, but she could not allow the sacrifice of its members to be in vain. She repeated the four words that had become her mantra: “We must carry on.”

  As Fourcade began assessing the network’s status, she realized that although the situation was bad, Alliance was far from dead. Granted, its principal sectors in the southwest and Nice had been wiped out, but the stations in Vichy, Grenoble, and some parts of central France remained intact. Those in the northern part of the country, including Paris, were still operating well, as were the crucial stations at Bordeaux and on the Atlantic coast. Although a sizable number of her senior agents had been arrested, many of them, including most of her top lieutenants, were still free.

  In response to Rodriguez’s cable to London that Fourcade was safe, she received an effusive message of relief from Eddie Keyser, who said he and the others at MI6 had been sure she’d been caught up in the Gestapo raids. He renewed his appeal to her to come to London, but she again turned him down, saying she must begin rebuilding the collapsed sectors before she could even think of leaving. She presumably also had no intention of letting MI6 know about her pregnancy.

  At the moment, Fourcade’s first priority was to find a larger headquarters for herself and her staff. Once again, one of her female friends came to the rescue. Marguerite Berne-Churchill, a physician who was already involved in resistance work, invited her to share her apartment. Berne-Churchill’s teenage children volunteered as Alliance couriers.

  Berne-Churchill also introduced Fourcade to a French industrialist who had headed a branch of a resistance network in the southwest that had recently been annihilated by the Germans. He placed himself and his agents at Fourcade’s disposal. Four of them became part of a new protection team, whose role was to guard her and other high-level Alliance operatives.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS NOW EARLY MARCH. As a result of the chaos of the previous six weeks, there had been no Lysander landing since Faye had left in January, but one was definitely needed now. A flood of detailed intelligence reports, including Jacques Stosskopf’s information about the Lorient submarine base, was waiting to be sent. And Fourcade felt an equally urgent need for the return of Faye.

  The RAF scheduled the flight for March 8, saying it preferred to use the landing ground near Ussel. Fourcade was assured by Jean Vinzant that the field was still secure despite the German raids in nearby Tulle in early February. For the first time, she decided to be present at a Lysander landing, presumably because of her eagerness to have Faye back.

  Rodriguez had gone to Ussel before her and installed his radio set in the attic of Vinzant’s house, where he, she, and the agents scheduled to leave on the Lysander would stay for a few hours before the plane landed. The outgoing passengers were to arrive at the Ussel train station on the night of the eighth.

  When she arrived earlier in the day, she met Rodriguez at a safe house near the landing field. While there, she received word that German security forces had surrounded Vinzant’s house, barricaded the roads leading in and out of Ussel, and were driving stakes in the landing field to prevent its use. Dumbfounded by this latest disaster, Fourcade had no idea how she was going to extricate herself and her network. She reckoned without the ingenuity of Vinzant’s elderly maid, Marie.

  Marie had been snapping string beans for dinner when the Gestapo pounded on Vinzant’s front door. She answered it, clutching her apron, which was piled high with the beans. Apologizing to the Germans for his “simple-minded” maid, Vinzant ordered her to leave the room. She trudged up the stairs, still holding up her apron and muttering about the nerve of “les Boches.”

  The Gestapo officers told Vinzant they had been informed he was hiding a radio transmitter in his house. Ignoring his protests, they began ransacking the ground floor. When they found nothing, they stormed upstairs and again came up empty-handed. As they climbed the stairs to the attic, Vinzant behind them, they passed Marie, still holding the edges of her apron high, coming down. To Vinzant’s astonishment, their search again turned up nothing.

  Drenched with sweat, Vinzant collapsed in a chair after they had left. Marie entered the room. “Have they gone?” she asked. Then, with a grin, she lifted up her apron: “Your radio, it’s very heavy, Monsieur.”

  She told Vinzant she had heard strange tapping sounds coming from the attic the night before, and, when the Gestapo came, she figured that the source of the noise might be the reason “les sales Boches” were there. Years after the war, Vinzant would tell an interviewer: “I had always thought she was a simple country woman. Thank God she knew about the radio and had the wit to go to the attic, to get it and clean up the mess we had made. She saved my life, as so often the lives of many of us were saved by simple, brave citizens everywhere in France.”

  Although Marie’s quick-wittedness had indeed saved Rodriguez’s transmitter and Vinzant, the situation was still dire. German forces had set up checkpoints on every road out of Ussel and were conducting extensive searches of the trains leaving and entering the town. Somehow Fourcade had to warn the three London-bound agents, who were scheduled to arrive in Ussel by train that evening. One of them was Pierre Dallas, the head of Alliance’s transportation unit, who was heading to Britain for a month of advanced training.

  After sending a terse message to London canceling the Lysander flight, she told one of Vinzant’s agents—a country doctor—about her dilemma. He replied that he had an ausweis allowing him to transport patients in his car at any time of the day or night. He would tell the Germans that she was a patient of his, whom he was taking to the city of Clermont-Ferrand for an immediate operation. Rodriguez would pose as her husband. After they’d cleared the roadblock, he would drive them to the railway station closest to Ussel so they could catch the next train and try to intercept the inbound agents at a station hub where they would change trains.

  Fourcade had no trouble appearing ill when the doctor’s car was waved over by a German sentry at one of the checkpoints. She was trembling with fear and her face was bathed in sweat as the German guard’s flashlight swept over her in the car’s backseat. The doctor explained the urgent reason for his travel and produced his ausweis and identity papers.

  After a few excruciating moments, the guard removed the roadblock, and the doctor drove off at top speed. When he pulled up at the station, their train had just left, and their rescuer again pressed down on the car’s accelerator, shouting that they would catch it at the next station. After a few nail-biting minutes, Fourcade and Rodriguez did get to the second station just a few seconds before the train pulled out. As they jumped from the car, Fourcade hurriedly thanked the doctor for saving their lives. Shrugging, he replied, “That’s what doctors are for, madame.”

  Once aboard the train, she and Rodriguez anxiously checked their watches, agonizing over whether they would make it to the junction in time. When their train finally pulled in, they got off and hurried into the buffet, squinting through the smoky haze to try to locate their colleagues. Fourcade was the first to spot them, sitting uncomfortably at a table with a group of German soldiers on leave. As the three looked up in surprise, she walked past them without a sign of recognition and murmured under her breath, “Back to Lyon.”

  “Merde alors,” Pierre Dallas muttered back.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER HER RETURN TO LYO
N, Marie-Madeleine looked so ill that Marguerite Berne-Churchill summoned a doctor. When he asked how she felt, she told him she suffered from chronic insomnia, and that when she did grab a few hours of sleep, she was plagued with nightmares. She ate very little. Every time she tried to do so, she said, she was racked with stomach pains. She didn’t tell him that she also smoked three packs of cigarettes a day.

  After examining her, he announced that she was suffering from a severe case of nerves: Marie-Madeleine made no mention in her memoirs of any discussion of her pregnancy. According to her, the doctor prescribed plenty of sleep and a respite from the stress of whatever she was doing. Staring at him in disbelief, she struggled hard not to laugh. He was talking sheer fantasy! After docilely agreeing to do as he said, she sent a message to London rescheduling the aborted Lysander landing for the night of March 11 at Alliance’s other landing field, near the banks of the Saône River outside Lyon.

  She stayed up the entire night of the eleventh, waiting for news of the landing and Faye’s safe return. But instead of Faye, her first visitor the following morning was Pierre Dallas, who was supposed to have been on the Lysander flight back to Britain. He and his crew had waited all night, he said, but the plane didn’t come, even though the weather was perfect. Marie-Madeleine felt faint. Had the plane crashed? Had she lost Faye when she needed him most? Throughout the rest of the day, she tried to focus on her work, with little success.