Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  Here he saw only strangers. And then, across the room, he spotted someone who looked vaguely familiar—a stooped old man with sunken eyes and white stubble on his face and scalp. Peering more closely, Rodriguez recognized the man’s aquiline nose and strong jaw. Hobbled by his chains, he shuffled over. “Commandant!” he cried. Léon Faye’s eyes widened in disbelief, and his face lit up with a smile. Unable to embrace because of their chains, the two men put their cheeks together and clutched each other’s hands.

  “Raus, raus,” a guard shouted, pointing a machine gun at them and motioning them to separate. But as they and the other inmates formed lines to leave the prison and board a waiting train, Rodriguez kept an eye on Faye. Aboard the train, he maneuvered himself next to his old friend and boss. For the next several hours, they related, in low whispers, the hellish experiences each had endured over the previous fifteen months.

  Faye told Rodriguez about his imprisonment at avenue Foch and his failed escape, followed by his solitary confinement in the freezing, damp underground cell at Bruchsal, where, from his first day there, stagnant water had covered the floor and oozed out of his straw mattress. Winter or summer, his hands and feet were raw with chilblains. The ceaseless noise from the factory next to his cell had damaged his hearing and led to an incessant buzzing in his ears. His daily food ration was one bowl of soup, and he was limited to ten minutes of exercise a week, always away from other prisoners.

  The forty-six-year-old Faye was still considered a dangerous escape artist—so much so that the Gestapo refused to let him leave the prison for his trial, and the Reich’s military court had come to Bruchsal in June 1944 to judge him. He had planned his defense carefully. When he was called before the tribunal, composed of two generals, three colonels, and a captain, he insisted that Alliance was not a terrorist spy group as charged but an official military organization defending its country. He noted the pledge of his SD interrogators at avenue Foch that he and his fellow agents would be treated as prisoners of war.

  But the judges were having none of it. Faye was startled by the visceral rage expressed by the tribunal’s chief judge as he accused Faye and Alliance of the mass murder of German sailors, citing the information the network had passed on to MI6 about the movements of German submarines and ships that were later sunk. The judge also noted the stream of Alliance intelligence about coastal fortifications on the beaches of Normandy, which he said had contributed to the killing of thousands of German troops. It was Faye’s first inkling that D-Day had occurred.

  As he listened to the judge’s fulminations, Faye realized that the verdict against him was a foregone conclusion. At the trial’s end, after the court pronounced him guilty and condemned him to death, Faye stood as straight as he could in his weakened state and loudly declared, “Vive la France!” He was sent back to his cell, where he stayed until September 1944. He was then transferred to Schwabisch Hall.

  Before he left Bruchsal, he told Rodriguez, he had used a pencil and paper that he’d squirreled away to write an account of what had happened to him from the time of his arrest. After rolling up the bits of paper, which included his last will and testament, he had thrown them behind the grille of the defunct radiator in his cell, with the hope that they’d be found after the war and given to Marie-Madeleine.

  When Faye had finished his story, he asked Rodriguez for his. The British radio operator recounted his time at Fresnes prison near Paris, then his transfer in January 1944 to a prison in the German city of Kehl, just across the Rhine from Strasbourg. Three months later, he was dispatched to a fortress in Fribourg-im-Brisgau, some fifty miles southeast of Strasbourg, where most of the trials of Alliance agents had been staged.

  “And our friends?” Faye asked. “Have you news of any of the others?”

  He had seen Paul Bernard at a distance at Kehl but did not get a chance to talk to him, Rodriguez replied. That was his sole contact with their former comrades until one morning in May 1944, shortly after he arrived at Fribourg. Taken to a courtyard for exercise, he was stunned to see several of his oldest and closest friends from the network in a group of prisoners circling the yard. Pierre Dallas, the head of the Avia team, was there. So was Lucien Poulard, the fun-loving chief of the Brittany sector; Ernest Siegrist, the former policeman who’d been in charge of producing false papers and documents; Joël Lemoigne, the head of the Sea Star subnetwork; and the incomparable Gabriel Rivière, longtime leader of the Marseille operation.

  Rodriguez had laughed out loud, not only from the sheer joy of seeing them but also because of the motley outfits they were wearing, “like something out of a Laurel and Hardy movie.” Poulard’s was the oddest of all. Clad in the long, checked dressing gown that Marie Madeleine had bought him in London shortly before his arrest, he walked around the circle as if he were a gentleman taking a morning stroll. Although Rodriguez’s colleagues were prevented by the guards from talking to each other or to him, their broad smiles expressed their delight at seeing him.

  A week later, when Rodriguez was brought his morning ration of watery soup by another inmate, the prisoner whispered that the Allies had landed at Normandy. That afternoon, when Rodriguez was escorted to the courtyard for exercise, he noticed that his friends and the other prisoners there were in a tighter circle than usual, giving them the opportunity to whisper to each other. “They’ve landed,” one of them said. “We’re saved!” said another. A third burst out, “They’ll be here in fifteen days.”

  The men’s optimism pierced Rodriguez’s heart: If only they were right! But he was not one to believe in miracles. Neither was Gabriel Rivière, who quietly engaged him in a brief conversation. Rivière asked if he had had his trial yet. When Rodriguez said he hadn’t, Rivière made clear that he and his other Alliance comrades—more than twenty of them—had already been judged and been condemned to death. With his index finger, Rivière imitated the shooting of a gun.

  Rodriguez’s turn in court came on June 24, 1944. Before the trial began, he asked the attorney assigned to his defense if the death sentence had yet been carried out against any of the Alliance operatives being held at Fribourg. The answer was no: After a sentence was handed down, the case had to be sent to Berlin for review, which meant a delay of at least three weeks between the verdict and its execution.

  On the day of his trial, Rodriguez was taken to a large courtroom in the shape of an amphitheater, with the five judges sitting on a raised platform covered by a dark green carpet. The name under which he was tried was his code name, Edward Rodney. The Germans still had not discovered his real name.

  Like Faye, Rodriguez argued in his defense that Alliance was a military organization and its agents should be treated as prisoners of war. The court’s response was the same: Because of the information supplied by Alliance, German sailors had been murdered in the Atlantic and German troops were being killed in Normandy. Rodriguez remembered with pride that just before he had left France for London in August 1943, he had installed a chain of transmitters from Bayeux to Cherbourg in Normandy, which undoubtedly had been used during and after D-Day to pass on the information to which the judge referred.

  Although a guilty verdict was never in doubt, Rodriguez still felt a jolt when the sentence was pronounced. He ordered himself to stay calm; when he was asked if he had any final words, he declared, “God save the king!” As a guard led him from the courtroom in handcuffs, the thought came to him that he’d never be free again but that at least he’d lived long enough to learn about D-Day and know that he and his comrades had helped make it possible. He also knew that he had at least twenty-one more days to live.

  Two days after the trial, he and the others from Alliance were loaded onto a train and taken to Schwabisch Hall, a massive fortress in south central Germany. As the days ticked by, Rodriguez tracked them with increasing dread. On July 3, his head was shaved, along with his beard and mustache. Shackled all the time now, he found it almost impo
ssible to eat and dress himself, much less perform the physical exercises he had used over the past fifteen months to keep up his strength. There were no more courtyard promenades, no more sightings of his friends. The twenty-one days had passed, and he was living on borrowed time. All he could do was pray, as he had done from the beginning of his confinement.

  On August 18, he heard rapping on the water pipe in his cell. It was Morse code, coming from several of his Alliance comrades, all of whom, as it turned out, were on the same floor. They apparently believed that he had not yet been sentenced to death because they asked him to seek out their families after the war and pass on their love. He promised to do so, deciding not to tell them that he, too, had been condemned and would never have a chance to fulfill his pledge.

  Two days later, in the late afternoon, two jailers entered Rodriguez’s cell. One removed his chains and placed a set of handcuffs around his wrists. Draped over the other jailer’s arms were more than twenty additional sets. As Rodriguez silently held out his wrists, he was aware that fifty-seven days had passed since his verdict was pronounced.

  He opened his mouth to ask the jailers what was happening but was unable to utter a word. As the cell door closed behind them, he was sure that the day he had feared since his capture had finally arrived. Several hours went by, and he fell asleep on his pallet. In the middle of the night, he was awakened by footsteps. He heard a nearby cell door creak open.

  He lay there, clutching his rosary and telling himself that he must remain strong and continue to say his prayers until his own door was unlocked. Heavy footsteps descended the iron staircase, and then another door opened. Images of his friends—Rivière, Dallas, Siegrist, Poulard, and the others—flashed through his mind.

  Every time another door swung open, his heart skipped a beat. Three…four…five…six. There were no words or cries, nothing but the sound of footsteps trudging down the stairs. Rodriguez began reciting the rosary out loud: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…”

  Seven…eight…nine…ten.

  “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

  Eleven…twelve…thirteen.

  “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

  The sound of creaking doors came closer. Fourteen…fifteen…sixteen.

  Hearing a guard stop outside his cell, Rodriguez, struggling for breath, began another Hail Mary. The guard passed by, and the door of the cell next to him swung open, then closed.

  Determined to show no emotion when they finally came for him, he tried to control his shaking hands.

  Seventeen…eighteen…nineteen…twenty.

  How many more until his turn came?

  Twenty-one…twenty-two…twenty-three…twenty-four.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…”

  His face bathed in sweat, Rodriguez pulled a coarse gray blanket tight around him. The sounds slowly died away. There was no more clanking of doors or steps on the stairs. As silence returned to the prison, he yearned to run after his companions and join them, shouting that he was there, too.

  The next day, he was moved to a cell on another floor. When he was served his morning food ration, he asked the prisoner who brought it if he knew what had happened to the inmates who’d been moved the night before. “Your friends…all gone,” was the reply.

  Summer faded into fall, then into winter. For Rodriguez, every day was the same. Covering his shoulders with his blanket, he immersed himself in prayer. He celebrated Christmas Day by singing carols in a faltering, cracked voice. He would never see a Christmas tree again, he thought, nor celebrate the holiday with his mother, sisters, and friends.

  Then, a week later, he was pulled from his cell, herded down the stairs, and reunited with Faye. When, during their whispered conversation on the train, he told his friend about the deaths of their old comrades, Faye sank into a deep depression. It was not right, he told Rodriguez, that they should be shot before him, their military leader.

  Faye had touched on the question that had puzzled Rodriguez. “Why are we still alive?” he asked. “What are they going to do with us?” Faye said he thought they were being kept as hostages, in the event that the Germans wanted to trade for German spies being held prisoner by the Allies.

  Rodriguez could understand why Faye—a major leader of Alliance—would be chosen as a hostage. But why him? In any event, he thought, the odds of a hostage exchange were so small as to be infinitesimal. When so many others had been killed, why would they be spared?

  Their train journey took three days, covering almost four hundred miles from Schwabisch Hall to the Sonnenburg fortress, just north of Berlin. Before Hitler had come to power, Sonnenburg had been a penal colony. When the Nazis took over, they turned it into a concentration camp for their political opponents, one of whom described it as a “hellhole of torture.” During World War II, many if not most of its inmates were members of the French, Dutch, and Belgian resistance.

  At Sonnenburg, Rodriguez and Faye were assigned adjoining cells. On the other side of Rodriguez was an Alliance agent he’d never met before—a young Irishman named Robert Vernon, who’d worked as a courier in the Marseille sector and had been captured with the actor Robert Lynen and other sector members in the spring of 1943.

  The cell was the smallest Rodriguez had been in—no more than three feet by six feet. It was unheated, and there was no electric light. But knowing that Faye and Vernon were next to him, he realized he was the happiest he’d been since his capture. The three were not prevented from talking, and he and Faye conversed constantly, mostly about faith and religion. If he survived the war, Faye said, he wanted to spend some time in meditation every year at a monastery he’d discovered in Algiers before the war.

  Rodriguez continued his daily practice of saying the rosary and reciting from beginning to end the prayerbooks he had memorized. Occasionally, Faye asked him to sing hymns so that he could sing along. Rodriguez did so with the ironic thought that he had become “a choirmaster in a crypt.”

  On January 13, eight days after they’d arrived at Sonnenburg, Rodriguez heard a jailer slide open the small square hatch in the door of Faye’s cell. A minute later, he did the same to the hatch in Rodriguez’s door. He pointed his right index finger at Rodriguez, then curled it to imitate the shooting of a gun. “Tomorrow!” he barked. Then he moved on to Vernon’s cell.

  Rodriguez stood stock still. “Am I mistaken about what just happened?” he shouted to Faye, who answered no. He then asked Vernon, “Were you told it was tomorrow?” The response was affirmative.

  If this was the end, Rodriguez thought, he would spend the last hours in prayer with Faye and Vernon. “Our three lives are no longer separate,” he thought. “We will pray together, leave together, and die together.” When Vernon asked him in a quavering voice if it would hurt when the bullets struck him, Rodriguez responded that it would be over in an instant and that he would support him until the end.

  Throughout that interminable night, the three repeatedly called out to each other. As Rodriguez recited rosary after rosary, his thoughts flickered back to his mother and three sisters and to his childhood in France. Through the tiny window of his cell, he observed the coming of dawn. Minutes crawled by, then hours.

  In midafternoon, he heard the sound of approaching footsteps. They stopped in front of his cell. Mechanically, he rose, watching as a key turned in the lock. When the door opened, three men were standing there—a jailer, the prison’s warden, and an unknown man in a gray suit. The jailer signaled him to leave the cell; unsteady on his feet, he did so. The warden ordered him to come with them. In a low voice, he added, “You are being exchanged.”

  Rodriguez almost collapsed. He couldn’t believe the callousness of this perverted practical joke. Staring at the warden, he said, “It’s not true.
This is just another of your methods of torture.” The man returned his gaze. “Come with me to my office,” he said. “You are going to Switzerland.”

  As Rodriguez and the others passed Faye’s cell door, he wanted to call out but didn’t know what to say. Dazed and shaken, he was taken to an office with a large desk, green-shaded lamp, bookshelves, and two leather armchairs. The warden motioned him to an armchair and took his seat behind the desk. He introduced the civilian, who sat in the other chair, as a member of the Gestapo from Berlin who, along with a prison guard, would escort Rodriguez to the Swiss border.

  He was then taken to another cell, where his chains were removed. Left alone, he fell to his knees and thanked God and the Blessed Mary for sparing his life. That evening he received two helpings of a thick soup and for the first time in months slept free of nightmares.

  The following day, he was allowed to take a bath, his first since his capture. Viewing his wasted body in the hot water, he was reminded of a plucked chicken. A guard brought him the wrinkled, dirty clothes he’d been wearing when he was arrested in 1943: a raincoat, shirt, slacks, and blue-and-green club tie. As he put them on, he thought of Faye and Vernon. Were they to be exchanged, too? He refused to think about the alternative.

  A few hours later, accompanied by the Gestapo officer and a guard, Rodriguez walked, handcuffed, out of Sonnenburg. It was freezing outside, but he was so euphoric that even in his light summer clothing, he didn’t feel the cold. The three took a train to Berlin, where they were to transfer to another train that left later in the day. With several hours to kill, Rodriguez’s companions decided to have lunch at a nearby beer hall. Outside its entrance, they conferred with each other, then motioned him to follow them inside. After a waiter escorted them to a table, Rodriguez nudged the guard and indicated his handcuffs. His meaning was clear: Did his escorts really want the attention that the handcuffs would attract in the noisy, crowded hall? The guard took him behind a screen and removed the cuffs.