When they twice saw ski patrols coming down from the summit, Virginia’s party fell to the snow-covered ground at Juan’s signal. Otherwise, they trod lightly and quietly, picking their way past the village of Meranges and into the Serge River valley. Still on Benzedrine, they needed to stop only a few times for a bite to eat, before they moved on, arriving at their goal, San Juan de las Abadesas, by early evening on November 13. Juan wasted no time with long good-byes. At the outskirts of town, he collected the rest of his money from Virginia, tipped his hat, and was gone.
The group had been prepared for their arrival before they left France. Virginia and Jean each had the name of a safe house for that night, and Antoine and Henri would share a third. They were to clean up, eat whatever the homes’ owners could provide, and not leave the houses. Being housebound was not a problem since they were all so worn out.
The foursome agreed to meet at the train station the next morning and take the earliest train to Barcelona, scheduled to depart at 5:45. They had been told it was never patrolled by any police agency and they would avoid any passport searches.
They agreed to meet before 5:45, in case the train schedule had changed, and then entered San Juan separately so as not to arouse the suspicion a group of bedraggled strangers would draw. After arriving at her safe house, Virginia was so exhausted she mumbled a few words of thanks to the homeowners for the food, clean clothes, and warm water in the washbasin. She then fell into a dead sleep in the bed they provided. The next morning she awoke with the señora gently patting on her shoulder.
Virginia asked her if she had any salve. She told the señora she had blisters from the hike. She just didn’t go into any detail about where the blisters were. The woman returned with the salve and told Virginia to keep it for the rest of her journey. The donation was truly generous and one from the heart; medical treatments were precious in these hard times. After cleaning and medicating her blisters, Virginia tore up the leg of her long johns to fashion a new stump sock and packed its remains and the salve in her bag.
It was 4:30 AM when Virginia arrived at the practically empty station. Henri, Antoine, and Jean arrived shortly after and they all settled separately on wooden benches to wait for the train. Just minutes after they had sat down, four Spanish civil guards appeared and rounded them up into a group at gunpoint.
One of them demanded their pasaportes. Their passports, of course, did not have the entrada stamps required for a legal entry into Spain. The plan was that they would get them from a contact in Barcelona, avoiding authorities until then. That was the whole purpose of going on this early train.
Virginia smiled at the guards and began digging through her pockets and rucksack, stalling for time, and hoping for a plan to come to her. The three men did the same thing. But the guards were not patient men, and the one who had demanded their passports took Virginia’s arm. The three men were shoved roughly into place behind her, surrounded by the other guards still brandishing their weapons. They were marched the few blocks to the police station and deposited in jail cells.
13
Biding Time
On Friday the thirteenth of November, the same day that Virginia was thrown into a jail cell in San Juan de las Abadesas, the Gestapo appeared at Dr. Rousset’s office and took him to their headquarters. Two days earlier, the Nazis had swept into all of unoccupied France. The armistice army was disarmed and Pétain pleaded with his countrymen to obey the new government. When the Nazis arrived in Lyon, with them came a new Gestapo chief, SS Obersturmführer Klaus Barbie, whose job it was to ferret out Resistance members, suck out as much information as possible from them, and have them eliminated.
Dr. Rousset was shown a poster with a sketch of Virginia. Directly beneath it were the words, “La Dame qui Boite” (the Limping Lady). The poster continued with information about Virginia and ended by stating, “She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find her and destroy her.” Rousset had seen other wanted posters hung around the city. He assumed Virginia’s image would now join the others. When asked, he acknowledged that he knew the woman on the poster. Anyone with half an eye for observation would have seen her coming and going from his office, he said. She was a patient who suffered from a variety of maladies so she saw him frequently for treatment. But he had no idea that she was an enemy of the state. Had he known so, he assured the agents, he would have gotten in touch with them immediately. The questioning continued in this vein for hours.
Meanwhile, Alesh was questioning the doctor’s maid, Eugénie. The abbé had just returned to Lyon and arrived at the doctor’s home shortly after the Gestapo had been there. Eugénie was close to hysterical about the doctor’s arrest, and Alesh attempted to calm her by telling her they needed to find the woman named Marie Monin. She could fix the whole mess, he told her. Eugénie blubbered through her tears that she hadn’t seen the “Englishwoman” for over a week; that she had just disappeared.
Still attempting to calm her, Alesh suggested that perhaps visiting some of Marie’s other friends would shed light on her whereabouts. The sooner they found Mlle Monin, the sooner they could help Dr. Rousset. Eugénie brightened at this idea and told him what she knew: the addresses of the Joulians and Mme Guérin. Alesh told the maid not to worry, that he would undertake to resolve this whole issue himself, and made an immediate visit to the Joulians and then to Mme Guérin. All of them were very distressed to hear about Rousset’s arrest. Although they’d never met Alesh, he seemed to know so much about Virginia and the doctor, they assumed he could be trusted. Over the next several days, they gradually allowed him into their circle of confidence. They agreed that finding Virginia would be useful, although they had no idea where she was. Alesh encouraged them to speak with all of their contacts and to introduce them to him. Together, the abbé told them earnestly, they might be able to arrange for Rousset’s release.
After several hours in the jail cells of the Seguridad General in San Juan de las Abadesas, a group of officers came in and took Virginia and her three companions to an office. Sitting behind a tall desk was another member of the Spanish Guard. Virginia told him she wanted to speak to the American consul in Barcelona. “Silencio!” he told her and shoved a register at her. She and the others signed their names and the guards took them out of the station to a waiting horse and wagon. Under the curious stares of the passersby, the wagon creaked out of town, heading east.
Virginia had no idea where they were going and her questions were ignored by the guards on the wagon. Three hours later they arrived at the town of Figueras and were taken to the train station. When the train arrived, a new group of Civil Guards got off and collected Virginia and the three men.
“I want to see the American consul in Barcelona,” Virginia told the new group.
“Si, mañana,”one of them said, and the rest laughed.
Two hours later she was sitting in a cell in the wretched Miranda del Ebro prison outside Figueras. She had been separated from the men upon arrival, taken to a wooden barracks, given a thin, filthy blanket, and ignored when she again requested contact with the American consul. Her cellmate was a pitiful-looking young woman named Elena, who had a wracking cough. Elena said shed been there for five months, with one month remaining on her sentence. Virginia asked what her crime had been.
Elena explained that she was a punta in Barcelona, a prostitute.
Virginia’s rucksack had been gone through multiple times since her initial arrest. The end result was that while all of her papers and money were gone, the guards had allowed her to keep her few personal belongings, including the salve. She had continued to apply it and since she wasn’t walking much anyway, the blisters were beginning to heal. Elena was amazed when she first saw Virginia take off her wooden leg.
She told Virginia shyly that she had never known anyone missing a limb. This admission was followed by a dozen questions about how and when the accident had happened. Virginia never talked about it to anyone, but for some reas
on, locked in the godforsaken Spanish prison, discussing it with a complete stranger was not the least bit uncomfortable.
Their cell was damp and cold. A winter rain fell every day, interspersed with gloomy gray skies. They slept on the ground like animals, huddled under their threadbare blankets and ate pale, mustard-colored soup, with an occasional green glob floating in it. She asked to see the American consul every time a guard came to the cell.
After she’d been in prison for a week, Virginia awoke one morning to find Elena trembling from chills and burning with fever, complaining about a knifelike pain in her chest. Virginia got the attention of the guards and demanded that they send in the doctor. A dirty little man who called himself a physician arrived an hour later. He identified Elena’s problem as pleurisy, and began to leave the cell. Virginia was horrified, and insisted, as Elena’s illness was obviously serious, even life threatening, that the doctor not leave before giving her something.
The doctor was not moved, saying that Spain was a poor country without enough medicine for the citizens, let alone enough to share with the prisoners. Elena would either survive or not. By the sheer will of both Virginia and Elena, the young woman survived to her release day three weeks later. The first thing she would do, she swore to Virginia, would be to mail the letter Virginia had written to the American consul in Barcelona.
On December 2, after twenty days of incarceration, Virginia was finally released to a representative of the American consulate. And twenty-three days after that, she was having Christmas dinner with Vera Atkins and a group of friends in London.
Conversation was kept light; there was no discussion of missions or Germans, scarcely a mention of the war. When the others left, Vera toasted Virginia’s success in France.
Virginia thanked her politely, but explained that her return was merely a stopover. Her real interest was getting back into the fray. Vera tried to discourage her impatience. She’d only returned and was still much too hot to go back to France. My New Year’s resolution for 1943 then, Virginia thought, is to cool off in a hurry.
At the same time Virginia was sharing the holidays with her friends, a great deal of turmoil was boiling in France. Darlan, Eisenhower’s pick for civil and military chief of French North Africa was assassinated on Christmas Eve. Henri Giraud was his successor and immediately alienated the Allies by arresting several Frenchmen who had aided Eisenhower in TORCH.
Giraud met Churchill, Roosevelt, and de Gaulle in Casablanca at a war conference, which took place between January 14 and 29, 1943. It was decided that de Gaulle and Giraud would become copresidents of the French Committee of National Liberation.
In Lyon, despite his promises to the contrary, Alesh, of course, had made no headway in securing the release of Dr. Rousset from the Lyon Gestapo. It was now April and he had been in regular contact with the remnants of Virginia’s HECKLER circuit for four and a half months. He knew their code names and the roads they traveled to the neighboring cities to conduct their sabotage. He knew how they spirited away downed pilots. He was beginning to understand how they ushered in arriving aircraft loaded with supplies. And he told them daily that if only Marie Monin could be found, Dr. Rousset’s fate would surely have a different outcome. Then, mysteriously, the abbé disappeared and those in the circuit never saw him again.
By this time, Gestapo chief Barbie had moved his office from the Hôtel Terminus to the Ecole de Santé Militaire, where construction on his specially ordered torture chambers was now completed. The posters with Virginia’s likeness, shown months earlier to Dr. Rousset, had been his idea, and it infuriated him that he had not yet captured her or even received any useful information about her. The doctor had been of no help and had been sent to Fresnes prison, outside Paris, where he was kept in solitary confinement. From there he had been shipped to Buchenwald. Barbie’s patience had worn thin and he felt it was time to round up the rest of the “Limping Lady’s” rebels.
The Joulians were arrested on April 6. They were taken to the École de Santé Militaire and tortured. Mme Joulian’s teeth were knocked out and her arm was broken. Mme Guérin was the next to be picked up on April 8 at one of her flats, which also housed two Canadian airmen. Before answering the door, she helped the airmen escape out a back window. Then, in her inimitable style, she managed to delay the Gestapo long enough for the airmen to get away.
Mme Catin was arrested as well, although M. Catin was able to escape to the mountains. Mme Guérin’s friend, M. Genet, was arrested on April 10, and Labourier, le Provost, and the Marchands were picked up in the ensuing days. Only Maggy (Andrée Michel) evaded immediate capture, although the Gestapo eventually caught up with her, too. None of them acknowledged being a part of any Resistance organization or of knowing an individual by the name of Marie Monin. Enraging the Gestapo with their silence, they were all sent to prison camps.
In the south of France, more trouble erupted for the SOE. Peter Churchill had made another submarine trip to the Mediterranean coast, this time bringing in Victor Gerson, who went on to establish the “VIC” escape line across the Pyrénées. Churchill then moved on to Montpellier where he organized the SPINDLE réseau. London sent him a very brave, and very lovely, courier by the name of Odette Sansom, code-named Lise.
Without realizing it was happening to them—and as frequently happens when members of the opposite sex are forced together under stressful situations—they fell in love. However, Lise was being trailed by an Abwehr agent, Hugo Bleicher. She and Churchill were arrested in southeastern France on April 16, 1943, and sent to Fresnes Prison.
Life was changing for Pierre de Vomécourt as well. In solitary confinement in Fresnes for ten months, the Nazis announced to him one day that he was being moved to a camp in Germany where hostages were being assembled should they be needed later on to negotiate with the Allies. The Nazis already knew who he was and what he’d been doing before they arrested him. A catch such as he was would be highly valuable. But de Vomécourt announced he wasn’t leaving Fresnes without the other members of his réseau who’d also been arrested with him.
To make his point, de Vomécourt threatened suicide rather than accepting preferential treatment. The Nazi guards were not about to risk such an important prisoner and agreed to move his cohorts along with him to Colditz Castle, a prison near Leipzig in Germany.
In May of 1943, Spain was a boiling cauldron of espionage and intrigue. To keep an eye on activities there, both Great Britain and the United States had agents in the country. So did Germany and Japan. The SOE placed such importance on the country that they assigned Virginia, one of their most valuable agents, to a post there. She would again go in undercover as a journalist, this time as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Times. After arriving in Madrid, she was instructed to take two or three months to establish her cover and allow the Spanish authorities to become convinced of her bona fides. She would officially work within SOE’s Section D, which was responsible for investigating “every possibility of attacking potential enemies by means other than the operations of military forces.”
Virginia was briefed ahead of time on her potential nemeses. First, and most disturbing, was American Ambassador Carlton Hayes, who considered espionage in a country friendly to the Allies to be “un-American.” Far more threatening were the myriad Gestapo agents lurking everywhere in Madrid. And even more prevalent were the members of General Franco’s Seguridad General. Virginia had already encountered them during her arrest and imprisonment.
Spain was under the leadership of the Fascist Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who had come to power in 1936 during Spain’s Civil War by squelching the Republicans who had earlier exiled him. He had been approached by Hitler to join the Axis on several occasions, but refused. In meetings with the Nazi leader, Franco frequently rambled with self-importance. But his underlying reason for refusal was that his country was still recovering from its own war. Plus he was not anxious to elicit bomber attacks from Great Britain. Their joint m
eetings were so unproductive that when Hitler finally stormed out of the last one, he said he would rather visit the dentist to have his teeth removed than have another meeting with Franco.
The fact that these tête-à-têtes did not go smoothly boded well for the Allies. If Franco decided to throw in with Hitler, it could mean the closure of the Straits of Gibraltar to Allied ships. Furthermore, using Spain as a new base, German bombers would be able to fly farther south and west in their attacks against those ships. And with Spain as an Axis country, dreams of an Allied invasion of southern France would fade.
When Virginia arrived in Madrid in the early afternoon of May 17, it was a bright spring day. She had not seen the capital city since her European tour with her family years earlier as a child. She took a cab to her hotel, freshened up, and asked the hotel desk clerk for directions to the restaurant where she was to have lunch with her superior, Hugh Quennell, head of SOE’s Iberian Section.
Quennell told Virginia it was his understanding that they were to meet socially through a member of the press department at the British Embassy. Tom Burns, John Stordy, or John Walter were his contacts. Virginia said she didn’t know them as yet but had planned to drop in on them to make their acquaintances. She found the mention that they were to meet socially odd, after the struggle she’d left in France and asked Quennell if there many social events.
He laughed at her naïveté. Social events were the only sanity they had. Life in Spain was a game of hurry up and wait. A message would arrive from London stating that they needed something immediately. His team would leap into action at the order and then would hear nothing more for another week, leaving them completely unoccupied.
The whole setup sounded completely foreign to Virginia, so she changed the subject and asked Quennell if he had any contacts that she could approach to find out about her friends in Lyon. Quennell took on a genuinely solicitous air. He’d heard that she’d just come off a rather event filled year and a half and he promised to see what he can do about information from Lyon. Work in Spain was different from that in France. Agents were forbidden from any involvement in direct action or sabotage. But they did have some interesting things in the works concerning wolfram.
The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy Page 19
