by Lynne Olson
LUCIEN POULARD
The two incoming passengers aboard the Lysander that would take Poulard to France had been specifically requested by Fourcade. One was Ferdinand Rodriguez, whom she wanted to bring in so he could discuss with MI6 officials his proposal for ending the requirement that radio operators initiate contact with London. The other was Léon Faye.
From reports Faye had sent, she knew that Gibbet—the code name that Alliance had given to the Gestapo and Abwehr—had rounded up several more of the network’s agents in Paris and elsewhere. Among them was Pierre Dayné, the redoubtable Paris policeman who served as her personal bodyguard. In his messages, Faye had connected the latest arrests to the capture of Ernest Siegrist in Lyon. According to Faye, the Gestapo had found a notebook in Siegrist’s pocket with the code names of a number of agents, including those just arrested. She had asked him to come to London so that the two of them could come up with a comprehensive plan for tightening the network’s security to prevent such lapses from happening again. But she also just wanted to be with him again, even if only for a month.
In the late afternoon of August 15, Fourcade accompanied Poulard to Tony and Barbara Bertram’s cottage to see him off and to welcome Faye and Rodriguez. “Barbara did her best to cheer me up by chatting gaily away,” she recalled, but, haunted by her perpetual fear of losing Faye aboard a Lysander flight, she failed to respond. It was not until Tony Bertram called from Tangmere to tell his wife to “put the kettle on for tea”—a code message that meant the Lysander had arrived—that Marie-Madeleine came to life. Jumping up, she embraced Barbara and helped her set the table for the light meal she had prepared for the travelers.
Faye’s and Rodriguez’s arrival was boisterous. Both had stayed with the Bertrams before, and they greeted Barbara with exuberant hugs, kisses, and gifts. In her wartime memoirs, Barbara recalled all the presents Faye had showered on her in his several visits, among them oranges from Algiers and a large bottle of Schiaparelli perfume. Rodriguez, meanwhile, spent his first few minutes at the cottage entertaining the others with an off-key rendition of the song “Home, Sweet Home.”
Later that morning, Fourcade, Faye, and Rodriguez traveled to London. There she and Faye examined the rich bounty of intelligence reports he had brought with him. One of them immediately caught her eye. She skimmed its contents, then looked at Faye in astonishment. “I see it’s made the same impact on you that it did on me,” he said.
GEORGES LAMARQUE
Faye had received the document from Georges Lamarque, a twenty-eight-year-old native of Paris who, in the eleven months he’d been with the network, had become one of its top agents. Before the war, Lamarque had distinguished himself as a brilliant up-and-coming mathematician, writing his doctoral dissertation on the calculation of probabilities and making plans to create an institute for the study of public opinion in Paris.
When the Germans invaded France, Lamarque had fought in the Battle of Samaur, a last-ditch stand by French forces along the Loire River. Wounded in the fighting, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He refused to accept Pétain’s capitulation to the Germans and joined a fledgling resistance network, which was soon decimated. Not long afterward, he took a position with the Compagnons de France, a scouting movement sponsored by the Vichy government and aimed at teenage boys. The group’s members, thirty thousand in all, worked on farms and were assigned to construction projects, such as rebuilding roads and bridges that had been damaged by the fighting. They also participated in cultural and social activities.
Although Vichy had putative control of the youth organization, its head was an anti-German liberal who had already joined the resistance and who saw the Compagnons de France as a possible vehicle for such work. He enlisted Lamarque as its inspector general; his job was to travel around the country and keep an eye on the group’s young members, as well as on the activities of German forces in the various places he visited.
Lamarque joined Alliance in August 1942 and was initially assigned to distribute new radio transmitters to its sectors around France and to recruit and train their operators. Four months later, he came to Fourcade with a startling proposal: He asked to be put in charge of an autonomous group within the network, which would draw its agents from the Compagnons de France.
At first, Fourcade regarded the idea as an implicit criticism of Alliance and its operations, which Lamarque insisted was not the case. He told her that granting autonomy to this new subnetwork would create protective walls for both it and Alliance. She promised to think about the plan, and as she grew more convinced over the next few months that the network needed to decentralize, she decided to approve it.
While Alliance provided financial and other resources, Lamarque, whose code name was Petrel, was solely responsible for recruiting agents and administering his new organization, which he called the Druids after the Celtic priesthood in the pre-Christian British Isles. The new subnetwork immediately proved its value following the mass Gestapo arrests in the early months of 1943 that decimated many of the Alliance sectors in southern France. At Fourcade’s urging, Lamarque recruited from the Druids new sector leaders who were dispatched to rebuild the devastated areas. The result was the rebirth of sectors in Lyon, Nice, Vichy, Toulouse, and other cities, “conjured into life as if by magic.”
Fourcade was so impressed by Lamarque’s organizational skills that she had sent him to London in June 1943 for advanced training by MI6. He returned to France in July, aboard the same Lysander that then flew her to Tangmere. Now, less than a month later, Marie-Madeleine had in front of her, thanks to Lamarque, a report that was better than anything she had read in more than two years. In his foreword to the document, Lamarque had written, “This material looks preposterous. But I have total faith in my source.”
Marie-Madeleine asked Faye who the source was. A young woman with the code name of Amniarix, Faye replied. Lamarque had refused to divulge her real name. All he would say was that she was a gifted linguist and that she had acquired all the intelligence firsthand.
In less than a week, the voluminous report would be on Winston Churchill’s desk. Not long afterward, it and its author would help determine the course of the war.
When World War II began, twenty-year-old Jeannie Rousseau had just graduated at the top of her class at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, an elite institution credited with producing some of France’s most distinguished intellectuals, government leaders, researchers, and scientists. Adept at concealing her brilliance beneath a disarmingly guileless exterior, Rousseau took advantage of the fact that most men, while beguiled by her effervescent charm and pert good looks, failed to take her seriously. Such was the case in June 1940 when she went to work for the Germans in the seaside town of Dinard, in the northwest corner of Brittany.
Rousseau and her family were there because her father, a former high-ranking civil servant in Paris, had decided to move them out of the capital when the Germans invaded France, thinking that such a remote place would be safe from the occupiers. To his chagrin, Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau, whom Hitler had put in charge of planning a possible invasion of Britain, established his headquarters in Dinard, and Wehrmacht troops poured in by the hundreds.
The mayor of the town, who lived next door to the Rousseaus, told Jeannie’s father he needed someone to serve as a translator and interpreter for the German high command. Rousseau suggested his precocious daughter, who was fluent in five languages, one of them German. She got the job and soon was a favorite of von Reichenau and his staff. “The Germans still wanted to be liked then,” Rousseau later recalled. “They were happy to talk to someone who could speak to them.” Her new employers spoke openly in front of her about military tactics and strategy—“all the things that older men imprudently let themselves discuss with a pretty young girl who speaks such good German,” the Washington Post journalist David Ignatius wrote years later in a profile of Rousse
au.
JEANNIE ROUSSEAU
A few months after the Germans arrived, a man from a nearby town who had heard about Rousseau’s new job paid a call on her at home. He asked if she would be willing to share with him any interesting information she picked up from the Germans. He, in turn, would relay it to the British. Rousseau immediately agreed.
Not long afterward, Berlin began to notice that the British seemed to know a great deal about military operations in the Dinard area; officials suspected a spy at work there. In January 1941, Rousseau was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to prison in the city of Rennes, but the officers with whom she had worked protested, adamantly insisting that their lovely translator was incapable of espionage. With no concrete proof against her, the young freelance spy was released and ordered to leave the coastal area. She traveled to Paris, where she looked for another post that would give her access to sensitive information, a job “that would take me into the lion’s den, which was where I wanted to go.”
The news of Rousseau’s arrest apparently was never passed on to the Gestapo in Paris, and soon after she arrived, she found the kind of work for which she had been searching. She was hired as an interpreter for a syndicate of French industrialists who often met with the staff of the German military command in Paris to discuss commercial issues, such as the placing of German orders with French firms. In time, Rousseau became the syndicate’s chief staff person and met almost daily with German army officers at their headquarters at the Hotel Majestic. “I knew all the details about the plants and commodities in Germany,” she recalled. “We were building up knowledge of what they had, what they did, and we could keep an eye on what they were doing—‘we’ being me.”
As it happened, some of the officers Rousseau met at the Majestic were old friends of hers from von Reichenau’s headquarters in Dinard, who worked in a different office than the ones she frequented. Delighted to see her, they took her out for drinks one evening, and in the course of it, dropped hints that their work involved a top-secret weapons project.
Having acquired a great mass of intelligence about German industry, not to mention the tantalizing possibility of information about a new weapons program, Rousseau grew increasingly frustrated about her inability to pass on such vital material to the British. Then Georges Lamarque appeared on the scene.
One night in early 1943, Rousseau, as part of her work, took a train from Paris to Vichy. Soon after she boarded, she spotted a familiar face. It was Lamarque, an old friend of hers from her university days in Paris. They hadn’t seen each other in years, and, finding no empty seats on the train, they stood in the corridor and caught up on each other’s lives.
Rousseau told him about her job with the syndicate and her constant contact with German officers. She also mentioned the secret work being done in other offices at the Majestic. In turn, Lamarque told her about his job. He had created “a little outfit” that was gathering intelligence for the British, he said. It was called the Druids. He asked her if she would like to work for him, and she enthusiastically agreed. He gave her the code name of Amniarix.
Rousseau’s German friends from Dinard began inviting her to their evening social gatherings at a house on the avenue Hoche, near the Arc de Triomphe, where they ate, drank, and talked freely about their work, including frequent mentions of secret weapons being developed on Germany’s Baltic coast. She never used sex—what she called “Mata Hari games”—to get information, she later said. What she did do was listen. “I had become part of the equipment, a piece of furniture,” she remembered. “I was such a little one, sitting with them, and I could not but hear what was said. And what they did not say, I prompted.”
Rousseau “teased them, taunted them, looked at them wide-eyed, insisted they must be mad when they spoke of the astounding new weapons that flew over vast distances, much faster than any airplane.” Over and over, she exclaimed: “What you are telling me cannot be true!” Finally, one of the officers had had enough of her playful skepticism. “I’ll show you,” he said, pulling from his briefcase drawings of a huge rocket and a map of an experimental testing station, called Peenemünde, on an island off the Baltic coast. He also showed her documents detailing, among other things, how to enter the testing site, the passes that were needed, and even the color of each pass.
After each evening with the officers, Rousseau, who had a photographic memory, went to a Druids’ safe house on the Left Bank and wrote down what she had heard, word for word. “I would absorb it, like a sponge,” she said. “I wasn’t asked to paraphrase, or to understand.” As it turned out, she didn’t understand most of it. When the Germans talked about raketten, for example, she hadn’t the slightest idea what they meant. What she did know was that this purloined information was “very serious.” She suspected it might be one of the top secrets of the war.
* * *
—
EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER, on October 3, 1942, a gleaming black-and-white rocket, nearly five stories tall, sat on a launchpad in a clearing surrounded by a dense thicket of pine trees. German scientists and engineers, watching tensely from the assembly building at Peenemünde, could see clouds of vapor streaming from the missile. There was the sharp scream of a siren, then the beginning of a ten-second countdown.
As the countdown ended, flames shot out from under the rocket, and, with a thunderous roar, it slowly rose from the pad and began to accelerate. Within seconds, it thrust itself into the stratosphere, broke the sound barrier, and then, exactly as planned, veered to the east and traveled 120 miles before crashing into the Baltic.
When he heard the news, Luftwaffe General Walter Dornberg, the director of the Peenemünde center, exultantly crowed to his staff, “This afternoon, the spaceship was born.” But, as Dornberg knew, this first successful test flight of the V-2 rocket—the world’s first long-range ballistic missile—had a much more immediate importance. He told Wernher von Braun, the young director of the V-2 project, that “the new superweapon must be put into production as soon as possible for the Führer and victory.”
It had been six years since the German military had taken over the Baltic island of Usedom, a popular summer retreat for Berlin’s upper crust, then torn down its tiny village, called Peenemünde, and created the world’s largest missile testing center and launch site. It was there that von Braun and other top German scientists and engineers worked on the development of new aerial weapons, particularly the long-range rocket, dubbed the V-2, and a pilotless jet aircraft armed with bombs, known as the V-1.
The success of the V-2 test flight came at a particularly crucial moment for Hitler and his generals, who were soon to face two major military disasters—the defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa. Hoping that the V-2 and V-1 would help Germany regain the initiative in the war, Hitler gave top priority in early 1943 to their mass production, pouring huge amounts of money and assigning thousands of slave laborers to the task. Calling the missiles “the new weapons that will change the face of the war,” he told his top military officials that by the end of 1943, London would be leveled, Britain forced to capitulate, and any planned invasion of the Continent rendered impossible. The attacks would begin on October 20, 1943, he declared. The V-2 rocket would be the first to launch.
Even though security was extremely tight at Peenemünde, small amounts of information about the test site had been leaked to the British by resistance members from various countries who had worked as slave laborers there. British officials knew that the Germans were conducting experiments on guided bombs and building launch sites along France’s Atlantic coast. But they lacked specific details of the missiles and their tests.
And then, unexpectedly, Jeannie Rousseau’s report turned up in London. Providing a wealth of detail, she described what she called the “stratospheric bomb,” including its size, launch speed, range, fuel supply, deficiencies, the locations and other information about its launching sites, and even th
e sound it made during launch—“as deafening as a Flying Fortress.” According to her sources, “50–100 of these bombs would suffice to destroy London” and would be aimed at “most of Britain’s large cities during the winter.”
After her report had been sent, Rousseau wondered whether British officials would ever actually receive it or put it to any use. Years later, she would describe the loneliness that she and other intelligence agents felt—“the chilling fear, the unending waiting, the frustration of not knowing whether the dangerously obtained information would be passed on—or passed on in time.” In her case, she need not have worried.
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade immediately sent the document to MI6, which passed it on to Dr. Reginald V. Jones, a young physicist from Oxford who served as assistant director of scientific intelligence at the Air Ministry and unofficially as Winston Churchill’s chief adviser on scientific warfare. Jones, who instantly grasped the implications of what he called “this extraordinary report,” asked who the source was. Fourcade told him only that she was “une jeune fille la plus remarquable de sa génération” (the most remarkable girl of her generation). The information provided by Rousseau reached Churchill the following day.
Along with the other material received by the British about Germany’s new terror weapons, Rousseau’s document, described years later by one historian as a “masterpiece in the history of intelligence gathering,” convinced Churchill and his team that a large-scale attack must be launched as soon as possible against Peenemünde.
* * *
—
SHORTLY AFTER 11:00 P.M. on August 17, 1943, Wernher von Braun was going to bed after attending a party with some of his fellow scientists at the officers’ club at Peenemünde. It had been a beautiful, clear evening, and a few of the partygoers were still outside, enjoying the balmy air and star-filled sky.