Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  As von Braun began to drift off to sleep, the air raid sirens began to wail. After quickly dressing, he hurried to the testing station’s communications center to get a status report. He was told that several waves of bombers from England were now over Denmark and approaching Germany but that they were believed to be on their way to Berlin.

  Walking back to his quarters, von Braun noticed that an artificial fog system in the complex had been activated, and a heavy mist now enshrouded nearby buildings. Looking up, he saw what he and his colleagues called “Christmas trees”—red and green marking flares dropped by RAF advance bombers. A thunderous roar filled the sky, and antiaircraft guns bellowed into action. As von Braun and dozens of other Peenemünde workers raced to the main air raid bunker, the first bombs were already falling.

  Almost six hundred British aircraft, comprising virtually all of RAF Bomber Command’s frontline units, swept over the island, dropping a lethal mix of high explosive and incendiary bombs. Before they took off from England, the air crews had been told that the raid’s outcome “would affect the whole course of the war.” In an attempt to destroy the brains behind the weapons, the first wave of bombers targeted the scientists’ and engineers’ living quarters. Succeeding waves were aimed at laboratories, production plants, and testing facilities.

  When the raid finally ended and a dazed von Braun left the shelter, he gazed out at a nightmarish landscape of splintered trees and burning buildings. “It was like hell,” one of his colleagues recalled. Another Peenemünde worker described the scene as “a veritable sea of flames.”

  Accompanied by his secretary, von Braun rushed into the blazing building containing his office to try to salvage key documents and plans. They were able to collect a few piles of paper before the flames and extreme heat forced them out. Overall, the raid exacted a heavy toll: Most of the blueprints and model devices of the V-2 were destroyed, many key installations were heavily damaged, and an estimated 180 scientists and engineers were killed.

  In a poignant irony, several of the workers who had earlier reported to the British about the V-1s and V-2s at Peenemünde also died during the bombing. “A substantial proportion of our bombs fell to the south of the establishment itself,” Reginald Jones recalled, “and particularly on the camp which housed foreign laborers, including those who had risked so much to get the information through to us.”

  As Winston Churchill later noted, the raid “had a far-reaching influence on events.” Workers were evacuated from Peenemünde, and research there was halted. The production and testing of both weapons were pushed back several months, long enough to prevent an attack from interfering with the June 1944 Allied invasion of France, which had been a main goal of German officials.

  Initially, the V-2 was to be used almost simultaneously with the V-1, which could have had calamitous consequences for Britain. But thanks to the raid on Peenemünde and to difficulties with the V-2’s production and testing, the Germans repeatedly had to postpone its use. Instead, as Churchill and his men discovered from reading later reports from Jeannie Rousseau, the V-1 was to be deployed first. It was finally fired at Britain on June 13, 1944, eight months after Hitler’s planned launching date and one week after the Allies successfully landed on the beaches of Normandy.

  “Were the Germans able to perfect these new weapons six months earlier, it was likely that our invasion of Europe would have encountered enormous difficulties and, in certain circumstances, would not have been possible,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the invasion forces, later wrote. “I am certain that after six months of such activity, an attack on Europe would have been a washout.”

  For nearly three months, thousands of these pilotless missiles—called buzz bombs because of the noise they made—showered down on London and its outskirts, killing more than 6,000 residents, injuring some 16,000, and destroying about 23,000 houses. But while losses were heavy and the fear and worry excruciating, the damage caused by the V-1s was considerably less than it might have been. The British could not prevent them from being launched, but in the fifteen months that they had known about the weapon’s existence, they had been able to plan countermeasures, such as improved antiaircraft defenses, to greatly lessen its impact.

  Of the more than 8,500 V-1s fired at London, fewer than thirty percent overall reached their targets. By August, less than one bomb in seven—about fifteen percent—got through to the London metropolitan area. Early in September 1944, the V-1 campaign came to an abrupt end when Allied troops fighting in France overran the areas containing the buzz bombs’ launching sites.

  Londoners, however, enjoyed only a few days of relief. On September 8, from sites in still-occupied Holland, the Germans unleashed the V-2 rocket, which tormented the British capital until just a few months before the end of the war. To most people, the V-2s—which traveled faster than sound and approached their targets in total silence—were even more terrifying than their predecessors. More than five hundred of them exploded in and around London, rocking the city like an earthquake and killing nearly three thousand people.

  Again, though, the death toll and scale of damage were far less than they would have been had Germany been left unhindered. Without the delays caused by the Peenemünde raid, the rockets would have been fired months earlier and from shorter ranges. “Although we could do little against the rocket once it was launched,” Churchill observed, “we postponed and substantially reduced the weight of the onslaught.”

  Jeannie Rousseau, meanwhile, had no knowledge during the war of the astonishing impact that her report had had. By the time the V-1s and V-2s were launched, she was in a German concentration camp, struggling to remain alive.

  For Marie-Madeleine, the month spent in London with Léon Faye and Ferdinand Rodriguez was a cherished interlude in a difficult time. Thanks to Jeannie Rousseau’s astonishing report about the new German terror weapons, Alliance’s standing with the British had never been higher. And under the direction of Paul Bernard in Paris, key intelligence continued to pour in from network agents throughout France.

  During a visit to MI6’s communication center, Rodriguez proved his point about the importance of initiating broadcasts from London when he used a transmitter at the center to call several Alliance sectors. They responded with more than fifty intelligence messages within a few hours. Impressed, Dansey decreed that London would now originate calls, at prearranged times, to the network’s highest-priority sectors, including those covering the ports and submarine bases at Caen, Brest, Saint-Nazaire, and Bordeaux. Meanwhile, Fourcade and Faye worked out a plan to increase the network’s security by further decentralizing its operations.

  In the evenings, her English friends occasionally took her, Faye, and Rodriguez to some of London’s most popular nightclubs. She loved to dance and spent considerable time on the clubs’ tiny dance floors as the orchestras played such wistful hits of the day as “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” and “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Yet although she enjoyed the evenings out, she couldn’t rid herself of a lingering sense of melancholy. As cigarette smoke spiraled to the ceiling, she watched the other dancers—the bomber and fighter pilots in RAF blue who might soon be killed in action and the agents from European countries who would be heading back to highly uncertain futures on the Gestapo-infested Continent. She was clearly thinking about Faye and Rodriguez.

  Fourcade’s gloom increased as the September full moon approached and her two colleagues prepared to return to France. A week before they were scheduled to leave, Claude Dansey treated Fourcade and Faye to lunch at Brown’s, one of London’s most luxurious hotels. The meals there were lavish, Fourcade remembered. Also on offer was a dazzling array of the finest French wines.

  But thanks to an announcement by Dansey, she found herself unable to enjoy any of this bounty. He told her with an air of great satisfaction that she soon would move out of the h
otel where she’d been staying into a house of her own in west London. Stunned, she exclaimed that she didn’t want a house; she wanted to go back to France.

  Impervious to her outburst, Dansey responded that it was more important for MI6 to have her in London than in Paris. Her network was the largest and most important French spy organization reporting to his agency, he went on, and it was vital for her to stay in Britain so she could have a bird’s-eye view of Alliance’s far-flung operations. When she failed to accept his reasoning, Dansey said bluntly that the Gestapo was stepping up its campaign against the French resistance and that only by staying in London would she be able to survive.

  A few nights later, Fourcade, her mind awhirl, dreamed again of the landing field surrounded by pink heather. In her nightmare, she saw the Lysander touching down, Faye and Rodriguez getting out, the Gestapo closing around them as the plane took off, and the German voice saying, “We have gotten Faye! We are delighted.”

  The next morning, Dansey paid her a visit. This time, he insisted that both she and Faye must stay in London. The network was running well without them, he said. Why not let Paul Bernard take charge for a little longer? There was an advantage, he added, in dividing the direction of the network between France and England. Rumors were swirling that the Allies would soon mount an invasion of Western Europe, with France as the odds-on favorite landing site. It was far better, Dansey argued, for Alliance’s two top leaders to remain in London to help plan their network’s role in the attack.

  Fourcade didn’t deny the logic of what he said but insisted that if she were to extend her stay, she must first go back to France to explain in person to her headquarters staff and agents why she was doing so. Dansey curtly replied that her job was to give orders, not explanations. That might be true in the military but not in the resistance, Fourcade retorted. Her agents were volunteers, not soldiers subject to military discipline.

  Then changing the subject, she asked Dansey why he didn’t want Faye to leave. Because, he said, Faye would surely be captured if he returned to France; he was already living on borrowed time. When Marie-Madeleine said Faye would never agree to stay, Dansey replied, “If you order him not to return, Poz, we won’t provide him with a Lysander. I’m putting his fate in your hands.”

  Marie-Madeleine’s nightmare, coupled with Dansey’s warning, made her sick with anxiety. At lunch with Faye that day, she repeated word for word her conversation with Dansey. Then she told him she agreed with their MI6 boss. He leaped to his feet, his eyes blazing. “Damn their law of averages!” he shouted. “Tell them that I’ve got fifty bombing missions to my credit and that I was a volunteer at the age of seventeen in the trenches. According to their calculations, I should have been dead long ago!” He could not allow the agents he had recruited for Alliance, particularly his former air force comrades, to be caught in his place, he said.

  Realizing that no argument would dent Faye’s intense sense of honor, Fourcade backed down. She wouldn’t force him to stay in London, she said, but he must agree to take special care the moment the Lysander arrived in France. This would be the first landing operation not directly supervised by either her or him, and she was concerned that the inexperienced Bernard would not insist on the strictest possible security. She would let him go back only if he promised to travel to Paris as soon as he landed in France. After finding out what was going on in the network, he would return to England by Lysander in October, and she would fly to France in November. In that way, they would alternate direction of Alliance until the invasion.

  After Faye promised to do as she said, she phoned Dansey to explain how passionately he had fought the idea of his staying. She had agreed to his return, she added, but with two conditions—he must come back to London after a month and take exceptional precautions while he was there. “It’s up to you, my dear,” Dansey replied with a sigh. “You’ve made a very grave decision.”

  The final few days before the September 13 Lysander flight passed in a flurry of last-minute consultations with British military officials, who outlined the specific information they needed most urgently. Many of the requests, Fourcade noted, focused on the German defenses on Normandy’s Cotentin Peninsula. She speculated to Faye that the peninsula might be the landing site for the long-awaited Allied invasion.

  When they were not in meetings, Fourcade, Faye, and Rodriguez packed up cases with a profusion of supplies—crystals and operating codes for the radio operators; dozens of questionnaires; millions of francs; new directives for agents; a variety of equipment; and material needed for the forging of documents, including rubber stamps, Red Cross cards and armbands, and identity and ration cards. Faye and Rodriguez would take a couple of the cases with them on the plane, while the others would be dropped by parachute over a new Alliance landing ground in Normandy.

  All the while, Fourcade’s mind kept returning to Dansey’s statement—“It’s up to you.” Her intuition, which had saved her from disaster again and again, was working overtime now. Why was she so loath to obey it? Was she a coward for not stopping her two closest associates from going back?

  September 13 dawned cool and clear—perfect weather conditions for that night’s flight. Early in the evening, just before sunset, Fourcade, Faye, and Rodriguez, accompanied by an MI6 liaison officer, set out for Tony and Barbara Bertram’s cottage. With everyone lost in his or her own thoughts, it was a silent, somber trip.

  As the rolling, wooded countryside flashed by, Fourcade suddenly spotted a field filled with heather. The pink rays of the setting sun shone down on the pale purple of the heather bushes that spread as far as the eye could see. Her nightmare had come to life, and she sat frozen in shock. Should she order the driver to turn around? Should she explain the dream to Faye and Rodriguez and tell them that because of it, they could not go? And if they were going to their deaths, how could she not stop them?

  In the end, she said nothing. When the group arrived at their destination, Barbara Bertram had a light supper ready, but it went mostly untouched. At ten o’clock, Faye and Rodriguez, together with Tony Bertram, left for the airfield. Arriving on that night’s Lysander were two key Alliance agents—Maurice de MacMahon, who had eluded the Gestapo and escaped to Switzerland in the spring, and Philippe Koenigswerther, the head of the network’s operation in Bordeaux. Bored by the peace and quiet of Switzerland, MacMahon had left his wife and children there and slipped back into France, where arrangements were made to fly him to London as soon as possible. As for Koenigswerther, the British Admiralty was anxious to quiz him about the current status of German submarine bases on the Atlantic coast.

  The next few hours seemed like an eternity to Marie-Madeleine, who stayed behind at the cottage with Barbara Bertram. Finally, at about two in the morning, the phone rang. “Tea for the same guests,” Tony Bertram told his wife. The flight had been aborted and Faye and Rodriguez were back at Tangmere.

  Marie-Madeleine was as jubilant as Faye was furious. He growled that even though the moon was full, there were no signals from the reception team on the landing field. Tony Bertram speculated that the brightness of the moon had prevented the pilot and passengers from seeing the flashlight signals below them—a guess that was validated later that day when Pierre Dallas, in a message to London, confirmed that the team had indeed been in place and had seen the plane but received no response when they signaled.

  Marie-Madeleine didn’t care what had prompted the Lysander’s return. All that mattered was that Faye was back. In the previous seventeen months, he had flown three times from London to France aboard a Lysander; each time, the aircraft had had to return. For Marie-Madeleine, this third return was confirmation that her premonition was right. Pleading with Faye to stay, she argued that the plane was refusing to take him back and that he should heed its warning.

  He would not reconsider. Two nights later, the Lysander, with Faye and Rodriguez on board, took off again. Marie-Madeleine watche
d Faye go with the “absolute conviction” that she would never see him again. After their wrenching farewell, she helped Barbara change the sheets on the beds that her lieutenants had vacated. Then, as Barbara remembered it, the two women sat talking for hours, with Marie-Madeleine opening up to Barbara in a way she had never done before. Among other things, she confided that Faye was her fiancé.

  Shortly before 3 A.M., the phone rang. “Tea for our new guests,” Bertram told his wife. Faye and Rodriguez had landed in France, and MacMahon and Koenigswerther were on the return flight. When they walked in a few minutes later, Marie-Madeleine embraced MacMahon, then asked him how the landing had gone. Very badly, he replied. Even before he and Koenigswerther had arrived at the landing field, he’d had misgivings about the area. His father had fought in a bloody battle there during World War I and later had told his son that it was “cursed ground.” The situation was made worse, MacMahon added, by the confused and disorderly scene at the landing ground. With the exception of Pierre Dallas, the members of the reception team were all new. He also thought there were far too many people milling around on the field before the Lysander arrived.

  After Faye had jumped out of the plane, MacMahon had only enough time to embrace him and whisper in his ear to get out of there as soon as he could. Koenigswerther echoed MacMahon, telling Marie-Madeleine that the scene was chaotic on the ground and that he had the feeling they were being watched.

  Marie-Madeleine struggled to keep her emotions under control. All she could think of was Rodriguez’s next transmission from Paris, scheduled for one o’clock that afternoon. Its purpose was to let her know that he and Faye were safe.

  * * *

  —

  LATE THE PREVIOUS NIGHT, as Rodriguez removed his bags from the Lysander, he overheard MacMahon’s whispered message to Faye. Already uneasy about returning to France, Rodriguez became even more anxious, not only because of MacMahon’s warning but also because of the sight of unfamiliar faces in the crowd at the landing site.