Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

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  IT REMAINS UNCLEAR WHY none of the Alliance members killed at Struthof and in the Black Forest had been tried by the Reich’s top military court. Many of them had not actively collected or transmitted intelligence—they had served as couriers or in other ways assisted the network—so the Germans could not legally charge them with espionage. But a number of them, like Koenigswerther and Stosskopf, clearly had been spies. Perhaps the reason for the lack of a trial in their cases lay in the fact that the SS was still gathering evidence, and with Allied troops drawing nearer, there was no more time for legal judgments.

  After viewing Struthof and most of the massacre sites in the Black Forest, Fourcade and Rodriguez moved on to Freiburg, where he and many others had been tried by the military court. On every floor of the prison there, Fourcade saw messages and drawings scrawled on the walls and carved in tables by her agents. In the prison’s office, Rodriguez examined a long list of names on the inmate register, pointing out to Marie-Madeleine that after their trials, Alliance operatives had been sent to several prisons, among them Ludwigsburg, Bruchsal, and Schwabisch Hall.

  The first set of trials involving the network had been held in December 1943; the operatives who were condemned to death then, most of them from the Dordogne and Corrèze sectors, were sent to Ludwigsburg, about 120 miles northeast of Freiberg. When Fourcade and Rodriguez arrived there, they learned that fifteen Alliance agents had been executed on May 25, 1944, outside the prison walls. A Protestant minister who had been with them at the end said that as they were bound to the execution posts, they shouted “À bientôt au ciel” (Until we meet again in heaven).

  The Ludwigsburg inmates were the only ones to have received proper burials immediately after their deaths. Their graves, which bore their names, had been well kept, with several covered with flowers. One of them belonged to Abbé Charles-Jean Lair, the vicar of Tulle Cathedral who had kept watch in the spring of 1943 while Rodriguez transmitted from the cathedral’s belfry. When he found Lair’s resting place, Rodriguez, with tears in his eyes, knelt and prayed.

  The next stop was Bruchsal, which Fourcade called “the most terrible of all the fortresses” she visited, perhaps because it was the place where Faye had been imprisoned. She was taken to his underground cell, where she saw the chains that had lashed his ankles to the foot of the narrow iron bed. At her request, a Free French general whom she knew had already retrieved the messages that Faye had left for her behind the cell’s radiator.

  When Faye left in the fall of 1944 for Schwabisch Hall, he had no idea that fourteen other Alliance agents, most of them from the Toulouse and Marseille sectors, had been imprisoned at Bruchsal, too. They were shot on April 1, 1944. At Fourcade’s behest, the bodies were disinterred from the pit that had been their mass grave. All of them remained recognizable. They included Jean Philippe, the police superintendent who oversaw the network’s intelligence operations in Toulouse, and Robert Lynen, the young actor who had claimed to Fourcade that his work with Alliance would be the greatest role of his career.

  And then there was the visit to Schwabisch Hall itself, which, for Rodriguez, was a particularly traumatic experience. As they entered the prison, Fourcade watched with concern as he seemed to metamorphose back into the prisoner he’d been, complete with waxen face and stooped, halting walk. Accompanied by a guard, they climbed the iron stairs to the cell in which he’d been incarcerated on the night of August 20, 1944. The guard had paid no attention to the officer in British uniform until they entered the cell and Rodriguez snarled, “Where are the manacles? What about the chains for the feet?”

  The guard recognized his former prisoner, and his face whitened. When Rodriguez demanded to know what had happened to his Alliance comrades, the man produced their luggage for his and Marie-Madeleine’s inspection. The suitcases were scuffed and filled with bloodstained underclothes, tattered wallets, and dog-eared photos and notes. When the agents were taken from the cells that August night, they were told that they were being transferred to a new prison but that their personal belongings would remain at Schwabisch Hall.

  The twenty-four men had been transferred by truck to a military camp at Heilbronn, about twenty-five miles to the west. There they were informed of their imminent execution. According to a Catholic chaplain who heard their confessions, the Alliance agents embraced one another and, on the way to the firing range, shouted as one, “Vive la France!”

  After they were shot, they were buried in a nearby apple orchard. Fourcade presided over the bodies’ disinterment. For her, it was an agonizing scene, especially the sight of Lucien Poulard wrapped in the dressing gown she had given him.

  At the end of her grueling mission, she concluded that the Germans had executed 438 Alliance members, some of whose bodies were never found. Because Sonnenburg prison was in the zone of postwar Germany occupied by the Soviets and declared off limits to their former allies, she and Rodriguez were not allowed to go there to investigate the fate of Léon Faye. But they soon learned what had happened to him.

  On January 30, 1945, fifteen days after Rodriguez had been freed, Soviet troops approached Sonnenburg from the east. Berlin sent orders that all inmates in the prison were to be killed before the Red Army arrived, and a special SS unit of twenty men was sent to conduct the executions.

  Although several dozen prisoners, aided by guards, managed to escape in the confusion, more than eight hundred did not. That night, the SS executioners escorted them in groups of ten to the back of the prison, where they were shot in the head. After the slaughter, which lasted two hours, the bodies were torched with flamethrowers.

  When Red Army troops arrived hours later, they found just four survivors among the heaped, partially burned corpses. Neither Léon Faye nor Robert Vernon was among them. Like the hundreds of other victims, whose charred remains were buried by the Russians in two mass graves, the bodies of Faye and Vernon were never identified.

  While the bodies of other Alliance agents were later brought back to France at Fourcade’s behest and given ceremonial burials, her beloved Eagle remained, as she put it, an isolated sentinel keeping watch over the wartime front.

  *1 In 1946, de Gaulle traveled to Lorient to rename the submarine base there in Stosskopf’s honor.

  *2 Shortly after the war was over, French troops discovered the mass grave at Pforzheim and forced the citizens of the town to remove the bodies, place them in coffins, and give them a proper burial.

  On a beautiful late-summer afternoon in 1977, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade took her place at the end of a wide grassy field near the town of Ussel, nestled in the verdant foothills of south central France. Standing to one side was a large crowd of onlookers, who had traveled from all over the country to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of Alliance’s first Lysander flight to Britain in August 1942.

  Plagued by arthritis, the sixty-eight-year-old Fourcade leaned heavily on a cane. Although her hair was now silvery blond and her face bore the lines of age, she still retained distinct vestiges of her once renowned beauty. For those who were there, most of whom had known her since the war, there was no question that her decisiveness, single-mindedness, and legendary organizational skills remained very much intact.

  It was she who had made all the arrangements for the festivities that day, including inviting as her escort the slim, elegant, middle-aged man in RAF blue whose arm she clutched tightly. He was Peter Vaughan-Fowler, who, as a twenty-year-old Lysander pilot, had flown her in 1943 from a field near Paris to Britain. Fourcade, whose appreciation of good-looking men had not declined with age, had earlier introduced him to the crowd, to his embarrassed amusement, as “our handsome hero, Peter Vaughan-Fowler.”

  It was she, too, who had arranged for the plane that would soon appear at the Ussel field to reconstruct the moonlit drama of the network’s first aerial pickup. The aircraft, unfortunately, was not a Lysander:
Only one wartime Lizzie was still in flying condition, and getting the official clearances needed to fly it from Britain to France proved impossible, even for Fourcade. But she discovered that a French plane, the Broussard, looked very much like a Lysander, and she wangled from French officials the use of one for the day.

  As the scheduled time for the plane’s appearance drew near, she, Vaughan-Fowler, and the others squinted up at the cloudless sky. And there the Broussard was, suddenly swooping down out of the sun. Its lights flashed a Morse code signal—the letter M—to a man standing on the field. A former Alliance agent who had been part of its wartime aviation service, he used a flashlight to beam back his own signal—the letter C. Waggling its wings in confirmation, the Broussard descended low over the pine trees surrounding the field and made a perfect landing on the grass.

  Climbing down from the little plane’s cockpit was another tall, slim, middle-aged man in an RAF uniform—Colonel Hugh Verity, who had led the squadron of intrepid young Lysander pilots during the war. After embracing Verity, Fourcade told the crowd that it was he who had assigned the missions and run the entire Lysander operation, while flying two dozen flights himself in and out of occupied France. “And somehow,” she added, “we were all spared to live to see this day.”

  Fourcade then turned and gave her hand to Jean Vinzant, the wood and coal merchant who had been chief of the Ussel sector and who had repeatedly risked his life by housing Alliance agents before they left for Britain by Lysander and when they returned. He also had allowed Ferdinand Rodriguez and other network radio operators to transmit from his attic, which almost resulted in disaster during a surprise Gestapo raid in 1943. Thanks to his quick-witted maid, Marie, who retrieved the transmitter before the Gestapo could find it, Vinzant managed to get through that incident—and the rest of the war—unscathed.

  While Fourcade planned this event as a commemoration of the Lysander operation and its importance to both Alliance and the British, it was also meant as a solemn tribute to Alliance’s dead. After all, the operative who had made that first flight twenty-five years ago was Léon Faye, the network’s most celebrated martyred hero, who had traveled three times by Lysander to Britain before his arrest and execution.

  Remembering Faye and the network’s other victims had been a top priority for Fourcade since the end of the war. On November 23, 1945, a solemn requiem mass in their honor had been said at Sacré Coeur Basilica in Paris, attended by hundreds of French and British mourners. In the months that followed, Fourcade made it her mission to bring back to France the bodies of Alliance members found in Germany and to give them proper burials with full military honors.

  On that lovely September day in 1977, she and the others honored the dead once more during a ceremony at the Monument des Morts in Ussel’s town square, which, like other war monuments throughout France, commemorated local residents killed in the two world wars. After a color guard presented arms, Jacques Chirac, the former French prime minister, made a short speech eulogizing Alliance and its lost members. Fourcade led the crowd in singing “Chant des Partisans,” the unofficial anthem of the French resistance, which begins:

  Ami, entends-tu

  Le vol noir des corbeaux

  Sur nos plaines?

  Ami, entends-tu

  Les cris sourds du pays

  Qu’on enchaîne? *

  Then it was time to toast the living, also per Fourcade’s plan. According to the American journalist and historian David Schoenbrun, who attended the gathering, its organizer saw it as “a weekend of celebration and nostalgia, of tears for those who had fallen and cheers for those who had survived.”

  After the ceremony at the monument, the hundred or so who were there adjourned to a local inn for a lavish lunch of sausages, ham, boiled potatoes, salads, and a salty local dish called potée Limousine, all washed down with multiple bottles of local red wine. It was exactly the kind of thing that Léon Faye had in mind when, in his last will and testament written at Bruchsal, he urged his Alliance comrades to “serve our unhappy country so that it may enjoy peace again and happiness, songs, flowers, and flower-covered inns.”

  Those at the lunch had traveled to Ussel from Paris and Marseille, Brittany and Nice, Lyon and Bordeaux, Normandy and Toulouse. Car mechanics and plumbers were there, alongside teachers, aristocrats, businessmen, and bureaucrats. Outside the inn, a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud from Paris was parked next to a small Renault 2CV from Lyon. Men in Guy Laroche sweaters and women in Chanel suits exchanged effusive greetings with wartime colleagues in denim and cotton dresses. Many had not seen one another since the war. Some were meeting for the first time. But none of that mattered: As members of Alliance, they were—and always would be—part of the same tight-knit clan. As Fourcade noted in her memoirs, “The connection formed by a threat to one’s country is the strongest connection of all. People adopt one another, march together. Only capture or death can tear them apart.”

  Throughout the weekend, the participants caught up on what their comrades had been doing since the end of the war. A sizable number of former military officers had returned to the French armed forces. Helen des Isnards, for one, rejoined the air force, serving as a military attaché at the French embassy in Turkey in the late 1940s. After leaving active service, he became president of the Paris subsidiary of an American oil company. But flying remained his great love, and he spent many years in the air force reserve, often delighting his six children by flying low over the family’s ancestral château in Provence in a P47 Thunderbolt, a “very loud and powerful American fighter-bomber,” his eldest son, Charles-Helen, remembered.

  Ferdinand Rodriguez also returned to active military service, but not before taking part in the arrest of Jean-Paul Lien, the network operative and Gestapo informer who had betrayed him, Faye, and more than one hundred other Alliance agents. On a spring night in 1945, Rodriguez was leaving Alliance’s Paris headquarters when another network operative ran up to him on the street. He grabbed Rodriguez’s arm and hurried him along to a popular bar nearby. Inside, sitting on a stool in the corner and nursing a drink, was Lien. After whispering to his colleague to alert the police, Rodriguez stationed himself at the door of the bar, ready to tackle the turncoat agent if he tried to leave. Within minutes, two plainclothes policemen arrived. They seized Lien, handcuffed him, and led him out. “I mastered the urge to slap him and contented myself with giving him the stare of a ghost,” Rodriguez wrote. “Neither Lien nor I exchanged a word. To facilitate the operation, I held the door open for the police.” Taken to police headquarters on the rue des Saussaies, the same building to which Rodriguez had been transported in 1943 by the Gestapo, Lien was later tried, convicted, and executed by a firing squad.

  Several months later, the former head of Alliance radio operations took part in another momentous occasion—this one filled with joy. On July 28, 1945, the twenty-nine-year-old Rodriguez married Monique Bontinck, twenty-five, at the Basilica of Saint Clotilde in Paris. Among the many guests was Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who wrote that the couple had “mapped out for us the way of hope.”

  Shortly after his wedding, Rodriguez was sent by the British army to Indochina, to serve as an intelligence liaison officer with French forces in the current-day countries of Vietnam and Cambodia. When he arrived in southeast Asia, he found another former Alliance colleague, the swashbuckling Jean Sainteny.

  Immediately after World War II, Sainteny, who had done business in Indochina in the 1930s, was sent there by de Gaulle’s provisional government to try to reestablish France’s control over its prewar colony. In 1946, he reached an agreement with Ho Chi Minh, leader of the wartime Indochinese independence forces, to keep the region in a loose union with France. But the tenuous relationship soon unraveled, and Ho Chi Minh and his band of revolutionaries launched a guerrilla war against French troops. When Indochina was divided in two by the 1954 Geneva accords, Sainteny was named France’s env
oy to North Vietnam.

  WEDDING OF FERDINAND RODRIGUEZ AND MONIQUE BONTINCK

  Throughout the years of tumult and violence in Vietnam, including America’s involvement in the conflict, Sainteny maintained a good relationship with Ho Chi Minh—so much so that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he served as an intermediary between the Nixon administration and the North Vietnamese leader in talks that eventually led to the secret negotiations ending the Vietnam War.

  Ferdinand Rodriguez, meanwhile, returned in 1946 to France and civilian life. Before he left active duty in the British army, however, he was summoned to London and, in honor of his work with the Alliance network, was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, the oldest British decoration for gallantry and one reserved for exceptional acts of bravery. King George VI personally presented the medal to Rodriguez at Buckingham Palace.

  Not long afterward, he became involved in the affairs of another Alliance leader—Paul Bernard, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade’s successor—who, like Rodriguez, had miraculously survived the horrors of German prisons after his arrest in March 1944. In the fall of that year, Rodriguez had caught a brief glimpse of Bernard at the prison in Kehl. But the former network chief was not among the Alliance operatives taken from there to the Rhine on November 23, 1944, and shot by Julius Gehrum and his henchmen. Two days before the executions, he had been transferred to Moabit prison in Berlin for questioning, and in April 1945, he was liberated by Red Army troops advancing on the German capital.

  During his long nights in prison, Bernard was buoyed by recurrent dreams about flying, and he decided that if he survived, he would create an airline. In 1946, he did just that, founding Intercontinental Air Transport (TAI), which became one of France’s leading airlines, specializing in routes to Africa, Asia, Tahiti, and other French islands in the Pacific.