Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  Faye, too, was troubled. After everyone had piled into Dr. Gilbert’s car for the short trip to the farm that served as the reception center, he sharply quizzed Pierre Dallas about the reason for the presence of so many people. The Avia chief replied that he’d brought reinforcements because of the growing danger posed by the Gestapo. Dallas added that instead of following the usual procedure of an immediate departure for Paris, everyone would spend the night at the farm and catch the early morning train, which, he assured Faye, would be perfectly safe.

  When the travelers arrived at the farm, they discovered that Dallas’s “reinforcements” included two members of the network’s protection team—its head, Jean-Philippe Sneyers, and Sneyers’s assistant and friend, Jean-Paul Lien. The security team had never been part of a Lysander landing before, and there was no reason for two of its members to be there now. Faye was particularly concerned by the presence of Lien, whose carelessness had been responsible for the capture of Ernest Siegrist in Lyon.

  The owners of the farm had laid out an early morning feast of roast chicken and wine for the throng of agents, more than a dozen in all, who gathered around their kitchen table. Faye seemed to be the only one not enjoying the meal. He brusquely asked a number of questions about what had gone on in his absence and showed particular irritation when Lien spoke boastingly about his own activities. Faye again chided Dallas for the size of the crowd on the field and rejected his argument about the need for reinforcements.

  Yet although he clearly sensed danger, Faye did not leave immediately for Paris, as he had promised Marie-Madeleine. Rodriguez would later speculate that as one of Alliance’s leaders, Faye felt that if he saved only himself, he would be abandoning his fellow operatives. Whatever the reason, he spent the night at the farmhouse, sharing a bedroom with Rodriguez, although neither was able to sleep.

  At a quarter past five the next morning, Faye, Rodriguez, Sneyers, Lien, and three other Alliance operatives set off by foot for the train station at the village of Nanteuil-le-Haudouin. Walking in groups of two and three, with several hundred feet between each group, they were followed at one point by a car with its headlights out. Dallas dispatched Lien to find out the identity of the car’s occupants, while he and the others hid in a ditch. When Lien returned, he said the driver had told him he was lost and had asked for directions to Paris. The car then sped away.

  At the station, each man bought his own ticket, then waited on the platform several feet away from each other. As Rodriguez lit his first cigarette of the day, a tall, stocky man in a trench coat and felt fedora approached him and asked for a light. The train steamed in, and the Alliance group, at Lien’s direction, entered a first-class carriage and took seats throughout the car. Although riding together in one compartment was another violation of network security, Lien insisted that it would enable him and Sneyers to protect the others more easily in case of a problem.

  Rodriguez, his hands in the pockets of his raincoat, slouched down in his seat and, lulled by the rhythm of the train, drifted off to sleep. A few minutes later, the train jerked to a stop, a movement so abrupt that he nearly fell off his seat. The door of the compartment opened with a crash, and a throng of men, wearing trench coats and armed with machine guns, burst in. One of them was the man who’d asked Rodriguez for a light.

  Shouting “French police,” they ordered the car’s occupants to put their hands up. Like everyone else, the network’s security men—Sneyers and Lien, who were both armed—obeyed. Two of the intruders headed straight for Faye, pulled him out of his seat, and dragged him out of the compartment. The other Alliance agents were handcuffed and hustled from the car. As he left the train, a gun pointed at his back, Rodriguez had no doubt that their assailants were members of the Gestapo.

  He and his colleagues were herded along the platform of the station—Aulnay-sous-Bois, the last stop before Paris—as dozens of travelers waiting on the platform nervously looked on. Four black cars, their engines idling, waited in front of the station. Approaching Rodriguez, one of the Germans said in fluent English, “Good work, don’t you think?” Shrugging his shoulders, Rodriguez instantly understood the man’s underlying message: They already knew he was an Englishman.

  Faye was put in the first car, Rodriguez in the third. The Gestapo man in the front passenger seat of Rodriguez’s vehicle slapped the driver on the back and told him in fluent French, “We will have champagne tonight.”

  In less than half an hour, the cars pulled up in front of 11 rue des Saussaies, a massive gray building that served as the Paris headquarters of the Gestapo. Before the war, it had housed the French secret police, the Sûreté Nationale. Rodriguez and the other Alliance operatives were pulled from the cars and taken to a bare fourth-floor room, where they stood for hours, guarded by two gun-toting German soldiers.

  Léon Faye was not among them. Veering off, his car had headed to 84 avenue Foch, the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS’s counterintelligence unit, which also served as a jail for the Reich’s most high-profile French prisoners. Armed guards pulled back the ornate iron gates, and the car disappeared into the darkness of an underground tunnel.

  For two days, Fourcade waited. There was no word from Ferdinand Rodriguez on September 16, nor did he send a message the following day. Adding to her worry was the failure of any of the seven radio sets in Paris to transmit during that time.

  Alliance’s chief tried to convince herself that the situation wasn’t as dire as she feared. It wasn’t uncommon for a radio operator to have problems establishing contact. But how did one account for the silence of all the transmitters in the capital?

  Finally, on the evening of September 18, she received a black leather briefcase from MI6 containing the latest messages from France. Although most of them came from Paul Bernard, she saw to her surprise that they’d been sent from a transmitter in Le Mans, a city in the northwestern part of the country. As she read Bernard’s reports, she understood why.

  The network’s interim head informed her of the capture of Faye and Rodriguez on the train to Paris, along with Jean-Philippe Sneyers, Pierre Dallas, Jean-Paul Lien, and two other agents. On the same day, four Alliance radio operators had been arrested in Paris and all their sets confiscated.

  Bernard and the rest of the headquarters staff, meanwhile, had had a narrow escape of their own. On the morning of September 18, they had been waiting in their office for the arrival of Faye, Rodriguez, and the others who had taken part in the Lysander landing. At midmorning, Marguerite Berne-Churchill spotted more than a dozen Gestapo agents swarming into the building and sounded the alarm. Everyone there—including Bernard; Berne-Churchill; Joël Lemoigne, head of the Sea Star subnetwork; and Lucien Poulard, who was now Bernard’s top lieutenant—managed to flee before the Germans made it to their floor. Jean Raison, a former Vichy police superintendent who had replaced the captured Ernest Siegrist as the network’s expert in forged papers, unwittingly walked into the building during the Gestapo raid but was saved by its concierge, who threw her ams around him, called him her nephew, and exclaimed how happy she was to see him. He realized what was happening and got away, too.

  As she struggled to absorb the calamitous news, Fourcade came close to breaking down. She had barely slept for a week, and the reflection of her pinched, haggard face in the bathroom mirror frightened her. She said out loud, “I’m going mad. I have no right to go mad.” Spying the liquid sedative prescribed by the MI6 doctor two months earlier, she opened the bottle and gulped its contents down.

  The next thing she knew, it was morning, she was lying on her camp bed, and the phone was ringing. When she finally picked it up “with a hand as heavy as a block of stone,” she heard Claude Dansey on the other end, saying he had been on the verge of sending someone to break down her door. Within minutes, Dansey was there. When he saw her, he said, in a failed attempt at lightheartedness, that the London air didn’t seem to agree with
her. What she needed was French air, she exclaimed. She had to go back to France.

  Shaking his head, he said he could not authorize her return. Alliance was far from the only French resistance network currently under brutal German attack. Throughout the autumn of 1943, the Gestapo, like a giant scythe, had swept through dozens of resistance groups—some supported by MI6; some by the BCRA, de Gaulle’s intelligence and sabotage department; and others by SOE. A number of intelligence networks were totally wiped out, among them the Confrérie de Notre Dame, which, next to Alliance, was the largest and most important spy group in France.

  With the Allied invasion of Europe looming, it was vital for the British that Alliance—and Marie-Madeleine—survive. If she went back now, Dansey argued, she would be immediately arrested and the network she had so painstakingly built would be destroyed. But if she remained in London, she could help guide it through the extremely difficult months that lay ahead.

  As she always did when facing such crises, Marie-Madeleine finally pulled herself together and doggedly got on with her work. She sent an urgent message to all her sectors not to communicate with one another by radio and ordered radio operators in the critical areas on the Atlantic coast to strictly limit the number of their messages to London. She told Paul Bernard via Le Mans that he and the others in Paris must go into immediate hiding until they received further instructions.

  On September 19, word reached her of yet another hammer blow in Paris: the arrests of two of her most trusted veterans—Gabriel Rivière and Alfred Jassaud. The loss of the burly, jovial Rivière, recruited by Henri Schaerrer in Marseille in 1940, was especially devastating. “Good God, a woman,” he had shouted when he first met her, yet in time, he had become not only one of her most loyal lieutenants but an extremely close friend and adviser.

  On the same day, a Gestapo raid in central France netted Colonel Édouard Kauffmann, Léon Faye’s former air force colleague, and more than a dozen of his agents. In Autun, a town in eastern France, sixteen Alliance operatives were also captured. The deputy head of the sector, a banker, was taken away in chains, with two machine guns that had been found in his bank hanging around his neck.

  Less than a week later, one of Fourcade’s favorite young operatives—the boyishly enthusiastic Lucien Poulard—was taken by the Gestapo while walking down the Champs Élysées, only six weeks after he had returned to France with the dressing gown that she had bought him in London. The capture of the twenty-four-year-old Poulard was immediately followed by the collapse of the Brest sector and the arrests of most of its agents, including its head, Maurice Gillet, and seven members of his family. Also captured in Brest was Joël Lemoigne, who had hidden there after escaping the mass arrests in Paris ten days before. The network’s sector in the town of Rennes, in eastern Brittany, was decimated, too. Among those caught was its head, Pierre Le Tullier, one of the Vichy policemen in Marseille who had helped Fourcade escape after her arrest at La Pinède in November 1942.

  In little more than a week, Alliance’s operations in Paris, central France, and eastern Brittany had been annihilated, with dozens of agents swallowed up in the Gestapo maw. “Since September 16, Eagle, my magnificent Eagle, had fallen, and with him more than 150 members of my beloved network,” Fourcade wrote. How many of her agents were now in the Gestapo’s clutches? Three hundred, perhaps four hundred?

  Throughout all of France, only six Alliance transmitters had not been shut down, and just a few of Marie-Madeleine’s major operatives remained at large. Besides Paul Bernard, they included Georges Lamarque, head of the Druids; Jean-Claude Thorel, who replaced Joël Lemoigne as chief of Sea Star; Henri Battu, a businessman from Lyon, in southwestern France; and Count Helen des Isnards, who headed the network’s activities in the southeast. A former air force pilot, the twenty-eight-year-old des Isnards was the scion of a prominent aristocratic family with centuries-old roots in Provence. His region was considered the most secure of all, and his radio transmissions from Aix-en-Provence were so regular and frequent that MI6 dubbed his operation “the post office.”

  And although Brittany had been badly hit, key operatives continued their work there, among them Jacques Stosskopf, Alliance’s uber-spy in Lorient, and André Coindeau (Urus), an engineer from Nantes who was in charge of intelligence gathering at the port of Saint-Nazaire. (Coindeau was also known as Nero because he carried on his work seemingly heedless of the fires consuming the other sectors in Brittany.)

  In a message to Marie-Madeleine, sent this time via Aix-en-Provence, Paul Bernard begged her to dispatch new transmitters, money, and other urgently needed material to a new landing field near Verdun, in eastern France. Marie-Madeleine was as desperate as he to reestablish the air link between Britain and Alliance. She assured him that help would soon be on the way.

  But the full-moon period in October came and went with no RAF operation to the Verdun landing ground, to the anger and dismay of Bernard and his reception committee who waited there for several nights. Bernard directed his wrath at both Fourcade and MI6, blasting what he called “the indifference…the unexpected and disappointing attitude of London.” Bernard thought she had deserted him, Fourcade recalled, and she couldn’t tell him the truth—that the RAF had cut back on its commitment to ferry Alliance agents and supplies to and from France. Fourcade was aware that the Lysander operation had recently experienced a number of losses, but she also worried that British air force officials considered Alliance on the verge of extinction.

  PAUL BERNARD

  With the Lysanders unavailable, at least for the moment, Fourcade decided that her only option for forging a new link to Bernard was to send an agent by sea to the coast of Brittany, which was closed to all small craft and heavily guarded by German patrols. André Coindeau, in Nantes, was tasked with finding a location and organizing the reception committee for this extremely difficult mission.

  As the landing place, Coindeau chose a cove near Cape Frehel, a cliff-lined peninsula in northern Brittany. The British Admiralty agreed to provide a torpedo boat for the operation, and Marie-Madeleine appointed as her emissary Philippe Koenigswerther, the young head of the Bordeaux sector, who had spent the last two months in London.

  Because of bad weather, the initial landing attempt, in early November, was a failure, and Marie-Madeleine was informed that another one couldn’t be staged for several weeks. In the meantime, she appealed to the RAF to consider a myriad of other possible operations, including parachute drops in three areas: Aix-en-Provence, Brittany, and near Verdun. She also came up with another idea for a sea operation, this one on the Mediterranean coast, to pick up a huge backlog of agent reports and other crucial mail.

  All the while, she attempted to fend off a growing sense of despair. As she learned of the capture of more agents and crossed off their names on her network chart, she said, “I experienced the feeling of having wielded the executioner’s axe….I was dying of grief.”

  In late September, Fourcade had moved into a stately four-story townhouse that MI6 had found for her in Carlyle Square, in the fashionable London borough of Chelsea. The house’s interior was painted pale green, and its more than a dozen rooms were filled with flowered chintz furniture. Fourcade, however, spent virtually all her time in her ground-floor office, sleeping on a camp bed next to her desk so that she could be close to the phone, with its direct line to MI6.

  From there, she fought to keep her network alive. Despite the wholesale pillaging of Alliance, intelligence reports from surviving agents kept trickling in. As she read the messages, she often thought of something Colonel Bernis had once told her, that each bit of information, dry as it appeared on paper, “represented a wealth of suffering.”

  It troubled her that some of the French and British officials whom she encountered in London seemed to have little concern for the human tragedies behind the intelligence they so eagerly sought from France. One evening in late November, she wa
s reminded of the chasm between London officialdom and her colleagues back home when a London-based agent for BCRA surreptitiously came to see her at Carlyle Square. The operative, who had met Fourcade in Lyon in the spring of 1943, handed her a radio message sent to BCRA that he had just found in its files.

  The cable, sent from Paris, informed BCRA that Léon Faye had been arrested on a train with Pierre Dallas and “a British radio operator,” along with Jean-Philippe Sneyers and Sneyers’s lieutenant, whose first name was Jean-Claude. The message went on to say that Jean-Claude was a German collaborator and had been released by the Gestapo after the others were imprisoned. BCRA had received the message in mid-October.

  Marie-Madeleine felt a chill. The Alliance protection team had no member named Jean-Claude. But it did have a Jean-Paul—Jean-Paul Lien, who was Sneyers’s deputy. More than a month had passed since the Free French received this report, and they had not seen fit to forward it to her. In the meantime, Lien had been free to continue his work of betraying his colleagues.

  She suspected that the oversight was a deliberate act on the part of BCRA officials, particularly the agency’s icy young chief, André Dewavrin. Free French officials had long fumed about Alliance’s close ties with MI6, criticizing the network and Fourcade for sending their intelligence to the British rather than to de Gaulle’s intelligence operation. Ever since she’d arrived in London, those attacks, particularly by the BCRA, had grown noticeably sharper.

  To prove themselves to the Allies, the Free French needed to produce as much information as possible about German military activities in France, as well as to establish themselves as a significant presence on the battlefield. But the BCRA’s obsessive quest for intelligence was also part of its struggle to win its brutal internecine war with the secret services of de Gaulle’s archrival, General Henri Giraud.