Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  Late that evening, she received word from London that Faye was all right. The pilot of his plane had gotten lost the night before and had been forced to return to his base in Britain. The plane had already taken off again and would be at the Saône airfield early in the morning. Dallas and the other passengers were alerted, and they, along with the reception crew, headed for the field.

  When Faye walked in the following day, Marie-Madeleine broke down, her body shaking with the convulsive sobs she’d been suppressing for days. Faye stared down at her. “Marie-Madeleine, there’s nothing left of you!” he said. “I don’t recognize you anymore.” She responded with a tremulous laugh. He was referring not only to her thinness but to the color of her hair, which was now bright red. (As part of an ongoing effort to change her appearance, she would dye her hair a total of five times during the war.)

  But just as she was rejoicing in Faye’s return, the Germans struck again. In Paris, Gestapo agents rounded up several Alliance radio operators and couriers. The Duke of Magenta, head of Alliance’s operations in the northern part of the country and the main target of the Gestapo raid, managed to escape and headed back to the Château de Sully, his grand ancestral estate in the heart of Burgundy.

  The Gestapo tracked him there, and a few days later, several German plainclothesmen crossed the moat in front of the château and pounded on its door. The duke’s wife, Marguerite, ushered them in. The château contained dozens of rooms, which the ducal couple used to their advantage. The duchess, who was pregnant with her fourth child, allowed the Gestapo to inspect all the rooms, knowing that her husband was “dodging from room to room, using secret doors and odd recesses known only to him.” After searching for hours the Germans finally gave up, saying they would return. Before they did so, Alliance agents spirited the duke, the duchess, and their three small children out of France and into Switzerland.

  That good news, however, was overshadowed by the fact that the Germans had captured the entire Alliance network in Vichy—thirty-five operatives in all. Among others caught up in this new onslaught of raids were members of Marie-Madeleine’s own family. Her elder sister, Yvonne, who had been tangentially involved in the network, was arrested by Italian secret police in Nice. Although Yvonne’s husband, Georges Georges-Picot, had stayed aloof from resistance work, he was warned that as Marie-Madeleine’s brother-in-law, he was on the target list, too. Friends helped him escape to Spain.

  Also on that list, to Marie-Madeleine’s horror, were her own two children. She received a message from the head of her son’s boarding school that the Gestapo had ordered him to turn Christian over to them as a hostage, in order to force her to give herself up. He had refused. Marie-Madeleine’s mother, who had been caring for Béatrice at her villa on the Côte d’Azur, worried that the Germans would make the same demand of her.

  Marie-Madeleine made arrangements to bring both children to Lyon and hand them over to Amitie Chretienne, a Lyon-based organization run by two Catholic priests that had helped save hundreds of Jewish children and others at risk by hiding them in private homes or Catholic institutions like convents and schools. The group promised to smuggle Christian and Béatrice out of France and into Switzerland, where her mother owned a chalet.

  During her brief, clandestine stay in Toulouse in January, just three months earlier, Marie-Madeleine had managed to see Christian. But she had not been with Béatrice for almost a year, ever since she had stayed with her during her hospitalization at the Toulouse clinic. She desperately wanted to see her son and daughter now, if only for a few minutes, to explain what was happening and to kiss them and say goodbye. But she remembered how Navarre had been arrested in 1941 after making arrangements to see his family before attempting to escape from France. She decided that for the children’s safety and that of the network, she could not risk a meeting.

  Monique Bontinck had taken care of the children since their arrival in Lyon. Shortly before they left, Marie-Madeleine asked Bontinck to walk them past the window of Marguerite Berne-Churchill’s apartment. She looked down at her son and daughter, who appeared lost and helpless, with no idea of what was happening to them. “As I watched them walk past me,” she recalled, “I had the feeling of being buried alive.”

  She was not informed until much later that the children’s escape route to Switzerland had been blocked and that the French-Swiss border was bristling with German patrols. Just before their party reached there, the French peasants to whom the children had been entrusted refused to go any farther and simply pointed to the barbed wire marking the frontier. Christian and Béatrice were forced to evade the patrols and cross the border alone. “My son came through the test with flying colors and saved his sister,” Marie-Madeleine noted. “He was 12 and she was 10.”

  * * *

  —

  ALTHOUGH DEEPLY WORRIED ABOUT her children, Marie-Madeleine had little time to focus on their departure and uncertain fate. Her most immediate concern now was the safety of the agents who were with her in Lyon. As she knew, the Gestapo noose was fast tightening around her and her headquarters. To strengthen security, she split up her staff and sent them to new locations. She and Rodriguez left Berne-Churchill’s apartment to take cover in a private clinic on the outskirts of Lyon, where a nurse involved in the resistance, known to Marie-Madeleine as Madame Prudon-Guenard, watched out for them and also likely monitored Marie-Madeleine’s last weeks of pregnancy.

  Faye and Bontinck, meanwhile, moved to an apartment in downtown Lyon, joined by Marguerite Brouillet, Marie-Madeleine’s friend from Le Lavandou, whose house had been the base for Alliance’s rescue of General Giraud the previous November. Also sent to new quarters were the security chief Ernest Siegrist and Pierre Dallas’s Avia team.

  The increasing worry over security affected Rodriguez most directly. In an attempt to keep German direction-finding vans from zeroing in on him and his radio set, he roamed around the countryside near Lyon, transmitting from various places. As he noted in a letter to MI6 early that spring, his peripatetic travel was mostly on foot, meaning that he had to carry his heavy, bulky set from place to place. “Last Sunday,” he wrote, “I had to walk 9 miles carrying the set and the aerial—you can guess what a sport that is. Incidentally, the handle of the case is not strong enough—mine has broken twice—and I can tell you it is not very easy to carry without a handle.”

  A RADIO SET LIKE THOSE USED BY FERDINAND RODRIGUEZ AND OTHER ALLIANCE RADIO OPERATORS TO TRANSMIT TO LONDON

  Rodriguez proposed that MI6 provide him with additional transmitters that could be left in various locations, so that he would not have to put himself constantly at risk by carrying his only set. Commenting on Rodriguez’s letter, Kenneth Cohen noted that the network “had been more or less on the run during the previous two months” and urged that more sets be sent to Rodriguez immediately.

  But none had yet arrived by early April, and Rodriguez was still carrying around his case. In the late morning of April 7, he transmitted from Meyzieux, a small town near Lyon. London had demanded several repetitions of one of his messages, and realizing that he had been on the air for a dangerously long period, he abruptly cut off contact, retrieved his antenna, and set off by foot back to Lyon.

  As he walked past the town’s central square, he noticed a black car, whose rear windows were shielded by dark blinds, pull up behind him. Two men got out and hurried toward him. Rodriguez knew instantly who they were—Gestapo agents—and approached a priest who was in the square. “Act as if you know me,” he murmured to the priest. “Talk to me as if we’re old friends.” The startled priest did as he was told, and the two men were chatting when the plainclothesmen approached them, one with a revolver in his hand. “Police!” the man with the gun yelled in German. “Show us what you have in your suitcase.”

  Rodriguez hurled his set at the head of the agent and sprinted across the square. He was chased by his pursuers, both of whom beg
an shooting at him. Bullets crashed into the windows of nearby shops, and customers took cover.

  A champion sprinter in high school, Rodriguez lengthened his lead, dashing down one street and then another. When he reached the outskirts of the town, he saw an open gate that fronted a large vegetable garden. He darted in, observed by an old gardener, whose bald head was shielded from the sun by a large straw hat. Trying desperately to catch his breath, Rodriguez asked the bewildered man if he had fought in the 1914–18 war. “Of course,” the gardener replied. “Then please hide me,” Rodriguez panted. “I’m being chased by the Germans.” Without hesitation, the man escorted him to the back of the garden and hid him behind a woodpile. Then he went to summon the mistress of the house.

  Within a few minutes, he returned with a woman in late middle age who introduced herself as Madame Clément. In a ragged voice, Rodriguez explained who he was and what had happened. He asked her if she knew a man named Mathieu, an Alliance agent who lived in the area and who had selected the places from which Rodriguez transmitted. Once again, luck was with him: Madame Clément’s husband, as it turned out, was also in the resistance and had worked with Mathieu. Madame Clément went back to her house and soon returned, a glass of red wine in her hand. “Drink it,” she told Rodriguez. “It will do you good.” She had contacted Mathieu, and he was sending someone to take Rodriguez away. She warned him that the Germans were searching the town but added that its postmaster, whose office was next door and who had seen him enter the garden, had directed them to the other end of Meyzieux.

  Rodriguez waited for what seemed an eternity. Finally, a teenage boy—Mathieu’s son—arrived, bringing with him two bicycles. After Madame Clément inspected the road and gave an all-clear signal, the boy, followed by Rodriguez, bicycled to a small house outside the village. He told the elderly woman who lived there that Rodriguez was an escaped French prisoner of war and asked her to hide him for a couple of days. She agreed. When Rodriguez finally returned to Lyon, the Nazis had embarked on an intensive citywide search for him, and Marie-Madeleine knew she had to get him out of there as fast as possible. He was soon spirited away to Paris.

  For Marie-Madeleine, Lyon had become a tinderbox. The Germans had on their payroll dozens of French informers, whose job was to loiter in cafés and on street corners, eavesdropping on conversations and taking note of anyone they found suspicious. Marie-Madeleine’s concern was not eased by an MI6 radio message that strongly urged her to leave the city.

  On the morning of May 16, Monique Bontinck failed to show up as scheduled at the clinic where Marie-Madeleine was hiding. In midafternoon, the phone rang at the clinic, and Madame Prudon-Guenard, the nurse who acted as Marie-Madeleine’s protector, handed it to her. Bontinck, her voice trembling, told her that she had badly hurt her foot and couldn’t come that day, and neither could the others. She abruptly hung up.

  Marie-Madeleine instantly understood the meaning of Bontinck’s message: Her staff in Lyon had all been caught. Whom could she turn to now? She wanted to rush out and find out what had happened, but Madame Prudon-Guenard gently told her she couldn’t appear on the street. “Sit quite still,” she said, “and tell me what to do.” Marie-Madeleine asked her to warn Anne de Mereuil and Marguerite Berne-Churchill, her previous hosts in Lyon, that they were in great danger, and to tell them to alert other members of the network.

  Finding it hard to breathe, Marie-Madeleine waited for further news. Early in the evening, the door to her room in the clinic abruptly opened and Faye rushed in. Struggling to catch his breath, he exclaimed that he had just escaped. When she saw him, she later noted, “the blood flowed to my heart again.” She fetched him a glass of water, and after he’d drained it, he told her what had happened.

  He, Bontinck, Brouillet, and three male agents had been having lunch at their apartment when four French police inspectors burst in. Faye told the police he and the others were Vichy secret agents working for Marshal Pétain. Perplexed by his claim, two policemen took Faye and his male colleagues to the central police station for questioning, while the other two inspectors remained in the apartment to guard Bontinck and Brouillet. When the car reached the station and all the men got out, Faye and the other Alliance agents broke free from their captors and sprinted down the crowded street, melting into a throng of pedestrians and disappearing from view.

  Meanwhile, at the apartment, Bontinck managed to evade her guards’ attention long enough to warn Marie-Madeleine. When the two policemen began searching the living room and bedrooms, Marie-Madeleine’s assistant sneaked into the kitchen, rolled up a pile of coded messages into a paper log, lit a flame on the gas stove, and burned the paper. “My guards burst into the kitchen, but it was too late,” she recalled. “There was nothing left but ashes.” They were, she noted in a masterpiece of understatement, “in a pretty bad mood.”

  Bontinck and Brouillet were forced to stay at the apartment for several days as bait for a “mousetrap”—a common Vichy police and Gestapo tactic of lying in wait in the house or apartment of an arrested résistant to see if other members of his or her network would show up. But no other Alliance agents appeared, and Brouillet was taken away to jail. Bontinck, for her part, was told she would be turned over to the Gestapo that afternoon.

  With the saddest expression she could muster, Bontinck asked her captors if she could first take a bath, saying that it probably would be her last. They agreed but told her to hurry. She went into the bathroom, turned on the taps of the tub full blast, and then retraced her steps. It was a beautiful spring day, and her guards had gone out for a smoke on the balcony. Taking off her shoes, she tiptoed down the hallway, quietly opened the front door, and raced down four flights of stairs. By the time she got to the ground floor, she could hear shouts from the policemen in the stairwell.

  Knowing that the front of the apartment building was under police surveillance, Bontinck ran into the courtyard, climbed atop a trash can, scaled a wall next to it, and yanked open the back door of an adjacent building. She made her way to its entrance, which faced a parallel street, and, as calmly as she could, put on her shoes, walked out, and caught a passing tram. Within a few minutes, she was at the office of a Lyon lawyer and part-time Alliance agent, who found her a hiding place.

  The Gestapo, informed by the French police about the various escapes of the Alliance agents, began conducting house-to-house searches. Marie-Madeleine was taken from the clinic by Madame Prudon-Guenard and hidden in a seamy hotel frequented by prostitutes. Faye and the other agents found their own temporary hideouts. Thanks to Marguerite Berne-Churchill, who had close contacts with the French Red Cross, several of the fugitives—including Faye, Bontinck, and Brouillet, who was rescued from jail—were soon spirited out of Lyon in Red Cross ambulances.

  With the exception of Ernest Siegrist, Marie-Madeleine was the last member of the Alliance headquarters left in Lyon. About to give birth, she was hidden away by her female friends and guarded by Siegrist. Her baby, a boy, was born in June.

  But she had very little time with her newborn son. He was entrusted to the care of Monique Bontinck, who whisked him away to an Alliance hideout in the south of France. Meanwhile, Marie-Madeleine, with new identity documents forged by Siegrist, left to join Faye and Rodriguez in Paris, the most Gestapo-ridden part of the country.

  Her energy depleted by childbirth and the chaos of the previous six months, Fourcade took the overnight train from Lyon to Paris, accompanied by Madame Prudon-Guenard. When German police entered the women’s compartment to inspect their papers, Fourcade pretended to be asleep. Prudon-Guenard, who introduced herself as Fourcade’s nurse, told them in a hushed voice that the patient was suffering from a serious illness that might be infectious. She then handed them a sheaf of medical documents that Ernest Siegrist had forged. After a cursory glance at the papers, the Germans quickly backed out of the compartment.

  Early the following morning, the train rolled thr
ough the drab gray suburbs of Paris. “Barricade” was the code name Fourcade had given to the French capital, and when she arrived at the Gare de Lyon, the cavernous station seemed as “forbidding as fortified battlements.” She knew that legions of people in the city, both German and French, were plotting the destruction of her network and others like it. By 1943, the Paris operations of the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS’s counterintelligence unit, had grown exponentially. Both agencies had established multiple substations there, with armed guards, thousands of French informers at every level of society, and fleets of black cars, ready to sweep up their quarry at any hour of the day or night.

  Although still anxious and depressed, Fourcade felt a bit better when she saw a smiling Ferdinand Rodriguez waiting for her at the station. Since escaping to Paris in mid-May, he had become head of Alliance’s radio operations nationwide. Prodded by Kenneth Cohen, MI6 had finally done as Rodriguez asked, dispatching more than a dozen new radio transmitters to the network. It now had at least thirty sets scattered throughout the country, a number of them in the all-important sectors of Bordeaux and the Atlantic seacoast towns of Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, and Brest. Paris alone had six. Rodriguez called the transmitters his “orchestra” and gave each one the name of a musical instrument.

  Having come so close to being captured, he was extremely careful with his own transmissions and preached to his two assistants in Paris and the network’s other radio operators about the importance of tight security. He had secreted the six Paris radios in different locations, as far away from each other as possible, and when he and his assistants went from place to place to communicate with London, they took with them only microfilmed operating schedules and the sets of crystals they needed to operate the sets. They also frequently changed their daily transmission times and frequencies.