by Lynne Olson
MARIE-MADELEINE FOURCADE’S FALSE IDENTITY CARD AS MARIE-SUZANNE IMBERT
Their first stop was Verdun, the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Great War, located less than eighty miles from the German border. When they arrived at the house of the chief of Alliance’s sector there, he informed them that the top leaders of the Paris Gestapo had just taken up temporary residence in the hotel across the street. Marie-Madeleine and Noal quickly returned to the ambulance and pushed on a few more miles to the little village of Brabant-au-Argonne.
Unable to make contact with London by radio, the two sent one of Alliance’s local agents, who owned a motorcycle, to make contact with the Third Army, which having helped liberate Paris was swiftly advancing from the west. The agent carried intelligence reports on enemy activity, which alerted Patton and his men to mined roads and possible ambushes by German troops while also making clear that Verdun and the surrounding area were only lightly defended and could be taken with little trouble.
In mid-August, Georges Lamarque made an unexpected visit to Marie-Madeleine’s base in Brabant-au-Argonne. He and his radio operator had made it to Nancy and set up a post there. Now, he told her, he wanted to continue his advance, heading for the Rhine and then entering Germany, with the aim of establishing an intelligence operation in the Reich itself.
His sense of urgency, he made clear, was fueled by a deep feeling of guilt over the arrests of several young women agents, particularly Jeannie Rousseau, whom he had recruited. Marie-Madeleine felt the same urgency and guilt, but she cautioned him not to push into Germany on his own. He didn’t respond. When she begged him to stay another day or two, he declined, bidding her farewell with a cheery, “See you soon.”
In the last days of August, so many German troops were seeking temporary shelter in Brabant-au-Argonne that Marie-Madeleine and Noal moved their base again, this time to a newly established maquis camp in a dense forest a few miles away. Most of its occupants were young resistance fighters from Verdun and the surrounding area.
Soon after they arrived, an Alliance courier told them that the Third Army had received the intelligence they had sent and had changed its route as a result of their warnings about possible ambushes. Now army intelligence officers wanted more information about German defenses in the nearby Argonne forest. The Allies, the courier added, were less than a day’s march away.
After Marie-Madeleine and Noal ferreted out the status of the Argonne defenses, they dispatched another courier to Patton’s forces. The next evening, they heard a dull roar coming from the west, and at daybreak, Noal left to find out what was going on. He returned an hour later, his face pale and his voice trembling. He told her Patton’s troops had liberated Verdun.
That afternoon, she and Noal drove their ambulance to the nearby village of Recicourt, whose residents, gone mad with joy, were drinking, laughing, dancing, and singing. When they caught sight of the ambulance, they pulled Marie-Madeleine and Noal out, embraced and kissed them, and handed them glasses of wine. As the celebration continued around her, Marie-Madeleine couldn’t hold back her tears. After Noal made a toast to victory, she shot back that “victory” was a meaningless word, when so many of those who had won it were still missing.
* * *
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AS IT HAPPENED, a final Allied victory was still more than eight months away. There was no doubt, however, that after four terrifying years, the Germans had finally relinquished their iron grip on most of France. After a seemingly endless time suffused with secrecy and fear, it seemed surreal to see uniformed soldiers on the streets and know that they were liberators rather than persecutors. At first, Fourcade didn’t know how to react. How long would it take, she wondered, before she felt comfortable using her real name instead of a false one? Or to realize that a knock on the door was not the Gestapo but the postman delivering mail? One of the first steps she took to emerge from the shadows was to attach a sign to the front door of the house of Alliance’s Verdun sector leader that openly proclaimed the various intelligence organizations that she and her agents represented: ALLIANCE—BCRA—INTELLIGENCE SERVICE.
In early September, she briefly returned to Paris, which was filled to bursting with its Allied liberators. The Allies had taken over hundreds of hotels for their own use, and the city’s best restaurants, which had served members of the Wehrmacht and Gestapo just two weeks before, were now welcoming the hordes of American and British officers and journalists who flocked to them.
Alliance set up an office in a building on the Champs Élysées, and dozens of agents streamed in from around the country to celebrate their network’s survival, as well as their own. There were joyous reunions of old friends and first-time introductions to colleagues previously known only by their code names. As Fourcade put it, “the animals of Noah’s Ark were becoming people again.”
Soon after her arrival in Paris, she had a happy reunion of her own with Kenneth Cohen, who had come to the French capital with a specific purpose in mind. On a beautiful early fall day, he and a throng of British military and diplomatic officials—some, like Cohen, in naval uniform, some in RAF blue, and others in army khaki—arrived at the Alliance office to pay tribute to the extraordinary achievements of the network and its leader. Surrounded by his compatriots and Alliance agents, Cohen called Fourcade to his side and presented her with the Order of the British Empire, one of his government’s high honors for acts of gallantry and meritorious service.
She tried to respond but was so overcome with emotion that she couldn’t utter a word until the champagne reception that followed, when Cohen asked her what else MI6 could do for her. She requested two immediate parachute drops, one at Verdun and the other at what Fourcade learned was Georges Lamarque’s latest headquarters—near the village of Luze, about twenty-five miles from the German border. And then she asked him to get her children back from Switzerland.
Fourcade already had been reunited with her fourteen-month-old son. Soon afterward, she had an emotional reunion with Christian, now fourteen, and Béatrice, twelve, whom she had not seen since the summer of 1943, when she had viewed them from the window in Lyon before they were smuggled out of the country. She did not know until months later that they had been forced to cross the border into Switzerland on their own and had ended up in a refugee camp. Thanks to an Alliance agent who had been tipped off about their presence there, they were taken to their grandmother’s chalet in the Swiss village of Villars-sur-Ollon, where they stayed until they were brought to Paris.
The two had been apart from their mother for almost all of the previous four years. The last time Fourcade had spent time with Béatrice was in the spring of 1942, after the little girl’s surgery in Toulouse. In her memoirs, Fourcade was extremely terse about her reunion with her children, saying only that they had “returned, miraculously unaffected, bigger, of course, but also above all enriched by a flame that would make them forever different from many others.” A reader might be forgiven, however, if he or she took this observation with a grain of salt. It’s difficult to believe that Fourcade’s offspring had not been greatly affected by their long separation from their mother, not to mention their traumatic escape. But Fourcade, who elsewhere in her memoir confessed to a sense of guilt about her failure to be with them, clearly did not want to deal any further with the issue, at least in public.
* * *
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KENNETH COHEN LIVED UP to the other promise he’d made to Fourcade. On September 7, he came to Verdun to observe the parachute drop he’d arranged—and the first he’d ever witnessed. As dozens of parachutes floated down from RAF bombers, Alliance agents, joined by members of the nearby maquis group, hurled themselves on the containers as they landed. Fourcade helped unpack and distribute the containers’ contents, which included radios, food, Sten guns, grenades, and revolvers.
As she worked, she thought of Lamarque, who was due to get his parachute drop
that night. The following day, however, she received terrible news from London: The pilots of the bombers dispatched to his drop zone had spotted a village in flames and aborted their mission. MI6 had also lost contact with Lamarque’s radio operator.
Fourcade never heard from Lamarque again. She later discovered that the SS had tracked down his radio transmissions and had captured him, along with his radio operator and adjutant. Lamarque had been tipped off about the raid but refused to flee for fear that the SS would take retribution against the residents of Luze. Several hours after his arrest, villagers had witnessed armed SS troops pushing him and his two colleagues toward a nearby orchard, where they were summarily executed. As it turned out, Lamarque’s act of self-sacrifice was not totally in vain. Although the SS set afire the homes and farms of the villagers, they spared their lives.
Once again, Fourcade mourned the loss of a key agent. But her grief for Lamarque was especially intense. His work had been crucial in reviving the network in its darkest days, and the intelligence contributions made by his Druids, particularly Jeannie Rousseau, had been inestimable. With his boundless energy and enthusiasm, not to mention his keen wit, he had endeared himself to Fourcade, and the thought that this brilliant young mathematician, who had so much to offer postwar France, had been struck down with the war drawing to a close was particularly painful.
Fourcade’s sorrow over his death was matched by her growing anxiety about the slowness of the Allied advance and the fate of Faye and her other imprisoned agents in Germany. After marching virtually unchecked across northern and central France, the Third Army had come to a sudden stop just thirty-five miles west of the Moselle River, near the German border.
This was not what Patton had had in mind. Determined to attack the Germans without letup, he was anxious to sweep across the border and smash into the German heartland. After liberating Verdun, he had immediately dispatched scouts to the Moselle, to prepare for its crossing by his troops.
But at that crucial moment, his army ran out of gasoline, as did other Allied forces making their way east. The port of Cherbourg in Normandy was the only source of gas and other supplies for the entire Allied Expeditionary Force, and the farther away Allied forces moved from Cherbourg, the more difficult it was to keep their supply lines open.
Fourcade was stunned when she was told the reason for Patton’s sudden halt. When she argued that the pause would allow the Germans to regroup in Lorrain, U.S. Army officials told her that the German troops were finished. In fact, she was correct: The Germans took advantage of the halt to move in infantry and panzer forces to defend the Moselle.
Thus began what Fourcade would later call the longest winter of the conflict for her and Alliance. Doing her best to hurry the Allied forces along, she ordered her agents to continue probing the terrain in eastern France and report back to Patton’s intelligence chief on the whereabouts of German forces. At one point during the winter, Alliance operatives alerted the Third Army to a planned attack by a German panzer division from Luxembourg, giving the Americans time to thwart the assault.
In early November, an Alliance patrol led by Pierre Noal clandestinely crossed the Moselle to scout out the territory behind German lines as far as the border. During their seven-week mission, Noal and his men sent fifty-four messages about enemy activity—reports that guided the late-December offensive launched by the Third Army and General Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army that finally pushed German troops out of eastern France and back into their own country.
In the south of France, meanwhile, Helen des Isnards and his agents provided vital intelligence for Operation Dragoon, the landing of Allied forces on the beaches of the Côte d’Azur in mid-August. After helping to liberate Aix on August 21, des Isnards joined American troops in their drive up the Rhône Valley toward the Alps.
By early January 1945, all of France had been liberated except for pockets of German resistance in La Rochelle, Saint-Nazaire, Lorient, and other coastal redoubts in Brittany. A new generation of Alliance agents, replacing those who had been swept up in the Gestapo dragnet, provided intelligence from those places until their German defenders finally surrendered in May 1945.
No other Allied spy network in France had lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence over the course of the conflict. “By their work and sacrifice,” the historian and journalist David Schoenbrun later wrote, “the agents of Alliance saved thousands of Allied lives and speeded the victory over Hitler.”
* * *
—
DURING THE WANING MONTHS of the war, Fourcade was overjoyed when a scattering of Alliance agents, who had disappeared into the “night and fog” of German prisons and concentration camps, turned up alive. One night in late 1944, she walked into the Alliance office in Paris and saw what she thought was an apparition. Standing with his back to her was a short, slender, older man with close-cropped gray hair, who was examining a large wall map of eastern France bearing little flags that marked the whereabouts of Alliance agents and Allied troops.
“Colonel Bernis,” she murmured. He turned around. It was indeed Colonel Charles Bernis, the former Deuxième Bureau officer who had taught her the basics of intelligence gathering but who all the while seemed to doubt her ability as a woman to run a major spy network. She had never been sure she had had his approval. When he turned back to the map on the wall, her fears were finally allayed. “It’s my finest intelligence map, my dear,” he said. “Thank you.”
As Allied forces headed farther into Germany in early 1945, word came of others who had miraculously survived the hell of German captivity. Among them were several female agents who had been liberated from the infamous Ravensbrück women’s camp north of Berlin. They included Madeleine Crozet and Michèle Goldschmidt, who, before being sent there in the spring of 1943, had been personally tortured by Klaus Barbie, the infamous Gestapo commandant in Lyon.
Another survivor of Ravensbrück was Jeannie Rousseau, who owed her life to bureaucratic bungling by German officials. When Rousseau was arrested by the Gestapo, she was identified as Madeleine Chauffour, her code name. But when she arrived at the three camps in which she was incarcerated, she gave her real name to officials at each, none of whom ever made the connection between her and the official dossier, sent separately to all the camps, identifying her as Madeleine Chauffour, a dangerous Allied spy.
When Rousseau arrived at Torgau, a camp in Saxony attached to a munitions and explosives factory, she told the camp commander that she and the other Frenchwomen there were prisoners of war and under the Geneva Convention could not be forced to manufacture weapons. She was quickly dispatched to a punishment camp and then to Ravensbrück, where, weighing only seventy pounds and close to death, she was evacuated in the waning days of the war by the Swedish Red Cross.
Navarre came back, too. Almost two years after Georges Loustaunau-Lacau’s arrest in July 1941, the Vichy government had turned him over to the Gestapo. He was deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where the vast majority of inmates died in unspeakable conditions. When he was liberated by American troops, the emaciated Navarre weighed less than one hundred pounds.
There was yet another astonishing piece of good news. In late January 1945, Kenneth Cohen’s assistant called Fourcade to tell her that Magpie had just been released in a prisoner exchange. Marie-Madeleine’s heart skipped a beat. Ferdinand Rodriguez, otherwise known as Edward Rodney, was alive! The news nourished her still flickering hope about the fates of the man she loved and the hundreds of other missing Alliance agents. Could Léon Faye have cheated death, too?
On January 14, 1945, the 453rd day of Ferdinand Rodriguez’s captivity, he lay on a straw pallet in a fortress prison in Sonnenburg, Germany. Rodriguez knew the date and the number of days he’d been confined thanks to his obsessiveness in keeping track of both, jotting them down on scraps of paper with a tiny pencil he’d hidden from his guards. It was one of
the methods he used to keep himself sane.
He was well aware of another consequential period of time. For 160 days, he’d been under a death sentence for espionage, a verdict imposed on him in June 1944 by the Reich’s highest military court. During that same month, dozens of other Alliance agents had also been put on trial and condemned to death. He was sure that the sentence for most of them had already been carried out. Yet he and Léon Faye, who had also been tried and sentenced, were still alive.
Until two weeks earlier, Rodriguez had had no inkling of what had happened to Faye. The two had not seen each other since they’d been captured by the Gestapo outside Paris in September 1943. As the New Year dawned in 1945, Rodriguez was being held in yet another fortress—Schwabisch Hall—deep in the heart of Germany. It was the fourth prison he’d been in since his arrest.
Early on the morning of January 2, he’d been rousted from his cell there, and with chains shackling his hands and feet, hustled down several flights of stairs and pushed into a large room smelling of mold, sweat, and dirt. Milling around were dozens of haggard prisoners with shaven heads, many so weak they could hardly walk. To Rodriguez, they looked like ambulatory skeletons; he knew he appeared the same to them. “There is no personality here, no glimmer of life,” he remembered thinking. “There may be, in this mass of humanity, military officers, engineers, craftsmen, professors, clergymen. But not one of them has any distinguishing feature.”
“Where are we going? What’s happening?” he whispered to a cluster of inmates. After a few moments of silence, one whispered back, “We are being transferred.”
Rodriguez scanned the crowded room for a familiar face. He had done so every time he had been in the presence of other prisoners—occasions that had been extremely rare. Only twice in the last fifteen months had he caught a glimpse of other Alliance agents.