Andrée's War

by Francelle Bradford White

  He was especially pleased to be reunited with his close friend, Orion’s Deputy Leader, François Clerc, who with Andrée’s help had kept the group going throughout 1943 and early 1944. It had been a difficult period for François, who had received no news from Alain or d’Astier and had been hit hard by the arrests of Escartin, Biaggi and Alliot. But despite the setbacks, he had continued to recruit new agents: in 1943 he met Patrick Dolfus, whose father was deeply involved with the Resistance despite having been forced to supply cars to the Germans from his manufacturing company.14 Dolfus supplied Clerc with economic intelligence on Germany’s industrial requirements throughout the country. François also met Claude Arnould, head of the Resistance group Jade Amicol. Under his assumed name of Colonel Ollivier, Arnould was one of SOE’s agents. François’s links with Ollivier and the ORA meant that both organisations allowed Orion access to their transmitters in order to forward on to British Intelligence certain time-critical information.

  Andrée had matured considerably since 1940 and with her increased confidence she understood that, with Alain back in Paris and the group operating at full tilt once again, their new role supplying OSS with intelligence meant heightened risks for everyone. As lead courier she was now undertaking a trip every two weeks – mostly to Orthez or Marseilles. This must have been extremely difficult – to gain permission for each trip, obtain an ausweiss and to get any necessary time away from work without arousing the suspicion of her colleagues. Yet Andrée managed it somehow. Civil servants were not allowed to leave the country, but her diaries show that she travelled to Brussels at least once.

  By May 1944, Andrée was relying on a group of women, some of whom had become agents in a sister group in Bordeaux named Cauderon. In Paris, her close friends Marthe and Margit shared courier duties with her, as did Ninon Pagezy in Orion (Madame Labbé’s daughter and sister of Paul). Twenty-one-year-old Guy Mangenot had created the Cauderon Resistance group with a team of eight agents under his command. Mangenot* gathered intelligence on the naval movements in the port of Bordeaux and details of how much fuel the German navy was stockpiling and where their sailors were stationed. He discovered the defences the Wehrmacht had installed on the coast surrounding Royan and the timetables of the planes landing and leaving the airport at Mérignac. He was supremely impatient, as was evident when, after the US landings on the Mediterranean coast in August 1944, he got so frustrated while awaiting Andrée’s arrival that he impetuously decided to give some gathered intelligence to a passing US Army Officer rather than waste more time waiting.

  With the increased dangers agents now faced, Alain instructed the entire group – by now over forty agents – that they were to carry a cyanide pill with them at all times. The suggestion (and it is assumed the supply) had come from OSS, who were concerned that if one of them was interrogated by the Gestapo, they might incriminate the others.

  These lethal pills had an important psychological value for Andrée and her colleagues. The main advantage of carrying them was that they could be concealed more easily than other methods. They were small (about the size of a pea) thin-walled glass ampoules, covered in brown rubber (to protect against accidental breakage) and filled with a concentrated solution of potassium cyanide. They were never swallowed whole. Instead, the user had to crush them between their teeth to release the fast-acting poison. Brain death occurred within minutes and the heartbeat stopped shortly after. Field Marshal Rommel committed suicide with such a pill following his implication in the July 20th plot against Hitler, and Pierre Laval, France’s Vichy prime minister, attempted to use something similar when awaiting execution after the liberation.*

  Biaggi, Alliot and Escartin had not been carrying pills at the time of their arrest but managed to withstand their interrogation without giving anything away. Most people in the group, however, were unlikely to be able to endure prolonged torture, as Andrée often explained: ‘It would not have been easy if they started to pull out your finger- and toenails.’

  Andrée and Alain were particularly vulnerable because of their knowledge of the other agents operating in the group – although Andrée always insisted that she was ‘merely’ a postman who knew nothing of what the others were up to. In her typically unassuming way, she said after the war that she merely typed the reports she was given without reading them, though she must have retained some of the information. There were other central figures within the group who also knew a certain amount about other Orion agents.

  Sometime in late June 1944, Andrée went to Marseilles on a courier trip to pick up some documents from a man named Albert Paoli. She was surprised and delighted when she arrived to find that her contact was none other than her old friend Biaggi, who now held a new ID card since his escape from the train to Germany. In Vergèze, a town on the Mediterranean coast, Biaggi had met up with Monsieur Joel, the manager of the French water company Perrier, whose son Rodolphe had been arrested by the Wehrmacht. On his release he had been made to work at a building company making cement used to build garrisons along the coast. Biaggi never missed an opportunity and brought Rodolphe Joel into his espionage network. At great personal risk he supplied Biaggi with details of the garrisons the Germans were installing along the coast, information which Biaggi passed in turn to Andrée.

  François de Rochefort had not been idle in Alain’s absence either. He was a good friend of General Verneau, head of the ORA, and the relationship between the two men enabled close cooperation between the two groups. Following the sudden arrest of Verneau,* de Rochefort subsequently became close to a new group of former army officers who, having left the army after the fall of France, were willing to supply him with military intelligence they thought might be of interest to OSS. François’s flat continued to be Orion’s informal Paris headquarters – a place for the collection of intelligence and occasional meetings. It was risky though: ten years older than most of the others, François moved in a sophisticated circle of wealthy Parisians and his discreet friendships within Paris’s gay community brought him into ‘unusual’ circles, including contact with Wehrmacht officers willing to exchange information for bribes.

  Martial de la Fournière joined the Orion group in 1941; in 1944 he was still working at the Ministry of Colonial Affairs where, because France had been cut off from her overseas dependencies, he found himself with little to do. Instead he used his time and the ausweiss he could obtain to infiltrate other ministries, where he networked with a group of like-minded people who supplied him with information from other Vichy ministries, intelligence they thought might be useful to the Resistance. Once again Andrée and her colleagues were there to take it to Orthez.

  Within six weeks of Alain’s return to Paris, Orion was running more successfully than ever before. With the money from OSS they were able to use informants more widely and pass on to other agents the skills Alain had learnt during his training.

  * Guy Mangenot was awarded two Croix de guerre – one for the dangers he ran while running the Cauderon group and the other while serving in the army under General Leclerc in 1945.

  * He may have been using a different type of pill, however, as when his guards realised what was happening, the prison doctor was instructed to pump the substance out of his stomach so that he could face death by firing squad.

  * Verneau was arrested after the Gestapo managed to infiltrate the ORA. He died while awaiting deportation to Buchenwald. Alain felt Verneau and his ORA colleagues took far greater risks, with less security, than the Orion Group. In his memoirs he described his horror at discovering after the war that de Rochefort had carelessly kept a note (a ‘pneumatique’) from Verneau, cancelling a meeting between the two men.

  23

  The Brothel

  In May 1944, on what proved to be yet another delayed journey, Andrée arrived in Biarritz late in the evening. She had some ‘post’ stitched into her suitcase as usual and nowhere to stay, as she hadn’t intended to have an overnight stop. She tried three hotels near the station, none of w
hich was able to give her a room, and (unusually for her) she started to worry. She knew no one in the town, curfew was about to fall and she was carrying incriminating material. Desperate times called for desperate measures, as she later recorded in her diary:

  I finally arrived at a brothel, ‘Chez Denise’. I was so relieved to have found somewhere to stay, I did not even begin to start thinking about the dreadful smell. I undressed, washed, got into bed and fell asleep but, at around two in the morning, I woke up scratching. I turned on the light and saw that I had been badly bitten by some sort of insect and there were several large red spots on my legs and then what did I see? A flea, sitting on the sheet; it was huge. I did not give it the benefit of the doubt and killed it instantly. It oozed blood. I then saw two more fleas and they were subject to the same fate. Had I been able to walk out of the house there and then I would have done so but I had to wait until after curfew had been lifted. So I had to sit for the next three hours upright in the most uncomfortable chair because there was no way I was going to go anywhere near the bed. Needless to say I did not sleep a wink.

  Andrée had ended up at the brothel thanks to an unlikely source of help: the local police station. Trying to batten down a rising feeling of panic, she decided to take refuge there – reasoning that her job at Police Headquarters in Paris might cause them to take pity on her. The duty sergeant – overweight, middle-aged and friendly – expressed concern at her plight. Briefly she hoped he might invite her to stay with his family, but to have invited in a stranger (even a charmingly naive young woman) was perhaps too great a risk for anyone to take. Instead he made a surprising suggestion.

  ‘I have an idea, Mademoiselle. You will not like what I am going to say, but there is no choice. There is a brothel near here and I think that is where you should go and stay the night. I will give you a letter of introduction to its owner, Madame Denise. Please do not worry: we know Madame Denise well and she will take good care of you. She allows travellers to stay in her rooms occasionally and there is never a problem.’

  Andrée was initially shocked that he would suggest such a thing. But she was a pragmatic young woman; the hotels were full and she had to be off the streets within fifteen minutes. She considered asking the sergeant whether she could stay in one of the cells, but then thought better of it: the Germans often visited police stations in the early morning and she did not want to risk an encounter. She would go to the brothel and see what happened. Her mind made up, she walked briskly out of the police station and to the address the sergeant had given her. She knocked on the door, which was opened by a peroxide-blond woman wearing a low-cut dress who looked at her sharply and asked her what she wanted.

  Trying to conceal her hesitation and unusual shyness, Andrée told her: ‘The sergeant at the gendarmerie gave me your address and said you might be able to put me up for the night. I have here a letter of introduction.’

  Madame Denise looked at Andrée suspiciously as she opened the envelope, but after reading it her attitude changed. She ushered her visitor in. ‘Yes, I can give you a room on the top floor; you won’t find it very comfortable but you will be safe. I want twenty-five francs for it and I need you out by 5.30 in the morning.’

  Andrée took the key, picked up her case and made her way slowly and somewhat hesitantly up the stairs. As she reached the first floor, she was quite taken aback by the huge number of mirrors hanging from all available surfaces. She was quickly brought back to reality as she came face to face with a couple of Wehrmacht officers flirting outrageously with two of the girls of the house. It appeared, however, that Andrée was totally invisible to them; they were off-duty, having a great time and uninterested in a shy-looking young girl who wore no make-up and was dressed in simple clothes.

  She reached the second floor and unlocked her room, closing the door behind her in relief. There was no point in panicking; she was in a whorehouse, by herself, in a town with no friends or contacts. The most important thing to do was to get some rest so that she could leave early in the morning and get to Orthez as quickly as possible.

  Andrée opened her little case, undressed and put on her nightdress. She hadn’t paid attention to the room’s decor until now but, as she looked around, she saw herself from every angle on a series of mirrors – covering not just the walls but the ceiling. She recoiled with surprise, but then suddenly started to giggle as she thought back to her smart English friends and wondered what they would have thought about the situation she now found herself in. She felt sure that an English brothel would not have been quite as opulent as this one. She looked at the bed with its silk sheets and started to laugh all over again.

  She turned off the light, closed her eyes and tried to go to sleep, but it was difficult; she hadn’t eaten and was hungry, but worse than that she could hear the sound of a couple making love in the adjoining room. What really upset her was knowing that the prostitute was French and the man was German.

  The final straw – as her diary entry above records – was when she fell asleep at last, only to be woken a few hours later by fleas biting her. Once she realised, she scrubbed herself all over in disgust, and waited in a chair until she heard the church bells chime 5.30 a.m. As she came downstairs, she walked into the middle of a heated argument between Madame Denise and a German officer complaining about his bill. He had obviously had a bad night and was in a filthy temper. Andrée considered returning to her room, but it was too late; she had been seen. The officer wheeled round and asked Madame Denise who she was and what she was doing in the brothel. Madame Denise calmly explained that her guest had stayed the night with her because all the Biarritz hotels had been booked up the previous night and the gendarmerie had sent her to them. In typically abrupt fashion, the officer turned to Andrée and demanded to see her identity card.

  Andrée put down her case, opened her handbag and took out her ID card. The card gave her occupation at Police Headquarters in Paris and upon reading that the officer’s body language changed instantly. Possibly concerned that if he pursued his line of questioning she might have friends in high places and report him to a senior officer in Paris, he clearly thought it best to let her on her way. He returned the card without a word as Andrée thanked her host and left the building.

  Relieved to have escaped a difficult situation, she made her way to the station where she ordered some breakfast and waited for her train. It wasn’t due for a couple of hours and so it was not until the late afternoon that she arrived at Orthez and made her way towards the address that François had given her. As she approached, she saw a man working on a car on the side of the road. She greeted him politely and he replied without hesitation: ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle, and how is life in Paris?’ This was her contact.

  Within minutes she was inside the house, opening her case and handing over the documents. She was now desperate to get back to the bus station for the last leg of her journey to Salies-de-Béarn. Stepping off the bus in the small Bearnais town, she headed straight to a café to place a call through to the château. The housekeeper was delighted to hear Andrée at the end of the line, and told her she would be picked up within the hour.

  Andrée sat down in the late afternoon sun and thought about the warm welcome awaiting her, along with a bath, the possibility of some soap, hopefully a dinner of fresh food and a good night’s sleep. There was only one question in her mind. Should she tell Madame Labbé about the brothel?

  24

  The Arrest

  The largest military operation in history began on the beaches of Normandy on 6 June 1944 – codenamed Operation Overlord. Approximately 150,000 men landed or parachuted into the area and thousands lost their lives. As the liberating troops advanced, the RAF and US air forces increased their bombing campaign, leaving much of the French railway network destroyed. Communication and travel throughout France became more difficult, compounded by many acts of sabotage, and for twenty-four hours after the D-Day landings the trains were at a complete standstill. In a recording made
some twenty years ago, Andrée spoke of the difficulty in getting around during this time: often she had very little notice before a trip and she frequently didn’t know how she would reach her destination. She recalled once having to go to Bordeaux by way of Marseilles, a huge detour.

  Between 6 June and 17 July 1944, Andrée made four trips from Paris to Orion. Each time she stopped in Bordeaux to link up with a Cauderon Resistance agent who gave her the Bordeaux post, which she then took down to Orthez or Orion. At other times she left the post she had brought down from Paris in Bordeaux for a Cauderon agent to take on to Orthez, in case anyone might have followed Andrée from Paris. One diary entry referred to a train journey back from Bordeaux to Paris where she said she was ‘joined in the carriage by members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. They had been playing in Spain. They were such fun but I will not admit this to anyone.’

  The intensity of Andrée’s travelling during this period proved exhausting – she was still working at Police Headquarters while obtaining permission to travel and coping with the unavoidable delays. The tracks were damaged so the trains were overcrowded, subject to air attacks and very hot due to the summer temperatures. Carriages were often requisitioned by the Germans. It was a punishing schedule and she was feeling the weight of her responsibilities. Her diary entries from this period were torn out of her journal and weren’t always dated, making it difficult to assess exactly where she was at any one time. They are surprisingly – even shockingly – detailed (though without, of course, referring to the real purpose of her travel), full of information about her journeys, including first names of people she was due to meet. Given everything Andrée had absorbed from her brother about the need for discretion and secrecy, it seems incredible that she should have written so much down: her journals would have been potentially damaging evidence, had they been found, but possibly her whirlwind activity and subsequent exhaustion meant she was not fully on her guard. And, of course, she was not a professional agent: she was a twenty-three-year-old young woman, charged with huge responsibility. On one trip to Orthez, undated but most likely sometime during the first half of June, she described the difficulties she had in returning to Paris: