by Lynne Olson
When Fourcade mentioned her plan to move Alliance’s main operation to Marseille, he disagreed, saying they should return to Pau. Vichy, he said, wouldn’t dare arrest him there; he had too many influential friends. Fourcade doubted that was true. Admiral Darlan, who had replaced Pierre Laval as leader of the Vichy government, had been enraged when he learned of the plot in Algiers, which marked the first time since the armistice that members of the armed forces dared to rise up against Vichy.
Convinced that Darlan would do his best to track down Navarre and make an example of him and the other conspirators, Fourcade urged him to flee to London. But he insisted he must carry on the fight in France. Finally, she agreed to return with him to Pau but said that he had to hide from public view. At her request, Henri Schaerrer, back from his assignment in Bordeaux, found Navarre an apartment overlooking Pau’s main boulevard. The only other place he frequented was Alliance headquarters. He traveled there by bicycle, leaving his apartment at dawn and returning at dusk or later, when few people were around to observe him.
Two months earlier, the network had moved most of its operations to Villa Etchebaster, a large one-story house surrounded by a walled garden, on the outskirts of Pau. It was considerably more secluded and secure than Alliance’s previous base, the Pension Welcome. Navarre’s close call in Algeria prompted Fourcade to tighten security even more, transforming the villa into a kind of fortress, with hiding places for the network’s radio transmitter, codebooks, and reports. She and others on the staff rarely ventured outside and designated Josette, their housekeeper, to do all their shopping.
Even though Navarre was back, Fourcade remained in charge. With almost two hundred agents now on Alliance’s rolls and MI6 deluging the network with floods of questionnaires, she barely had time to draw a breath. To help speed up the transmission of intelligence to London, the British had dispatched three more transmitters. One was sent to Marseille, a second to Colonel Bernis’s operation in Monaco, and a third held in reserve.
All of them were transported into France by Jean Boutron, who now served in an undercover role as Vichy’s assistant naval attaché in Madrid. Although a godsend for Alliance and the British, Boutron’s surprising new posting was his worst nightmare come true. In early 1941, while working for the network in Marseille, he had informed French naval officers there, as part of his cover, that he was preparing a study on the need for reorganization of the country’s merchant marine. He did in fact complete the study, and the navy higher-ups were so impressed with it that they asked him to go to Madrid to give them ideas for reorganizing Vichy naval intelligence in Spain.
Boutron, who passionately hated Vichy and Pétain, was horrified by the offer. Navarre, however, was thrilled. “For months, I’ve been trying to think how to create a link to Spain to send messages and people back and forth from here to London,” he said. “And now you’ve been handed this job on a golden platter. You’ve got to take it.” With great reluctance, Boutron gave in.
Once in Madrid, he found the atmosphere in the embassy even more disagreeable than he had imagined. Before entering the French government in 1940, Pétain had been ambassador in Madrid, and the embassy staff talked of him as if he were a god. “Everyone worships Pétain here,” Boutron grumbled in his diary. “Some can’t speak for more than five minutes without mentioning something wonderful that the Marshal said or did.” His new colleagues, he added, “pronounce the name of England with a pout and that of General de Gaulle with total contempt….I am an iconoclast in a milieu of idolators.”
As uncomfortable as Boutron was in this den of Vichy true believers, Navarre was right in his judgment of the extraordinary advantage his position gave to both Alliance and MI6. After making contact with an MI6 agent in Madrid, Boutron persuaded Vichy embassy officials to give him yet another assignment: to carry its diplomatic mailbags, which were sealed and thus exempt from customs inspection, back and forth between Spain and France. Marie-Madeleine had lent him her Citroën for his journeys between the two countries.
In his new role as courier, Boutron was able to transport questionnaires and other secret messages, along with equipment such as radio transmitters, from British intelligence to Alliance headquarters and carry the network’s voluminous responses back to Madrid. In addition, Marie-Madeleine and the others at Pau were given a chance, albeit briefly, to examine some of the embassy’s communications to the Vichy government and vice versa.
Yet for all of Alliance’s successes that summer, Marie-Madeleine was plagued by a lingering sense of unease. She was still concerned about Henri Schaerrer, who, after reporting on the German submarine base near Bordeaux, was about to assume his new post as chief of Alliance’s operations in the occupied zone. Just before he was to leave, MI6 sent an urgent message requesting information about the sailing of specific U-boats from the Bordeaux base. Marie-Madeleine was loath to send Schaerrer again, but he insisted on going, although not with his usual ebullience. She considered calling on another agent to do the job but in the end let Schaerrer go. When she urged him, as she always did, to take the greatest possible care, he muttered that no one was irreplaceable. With that, she later wrote, “the intrepid, the irreplaceable Schaerrer disappeared into the night.”
A week later, Maurice Coustenoble, looking unusually worried and exhausted, returned from a mission to the southeast with the warning that Vichy was closing in on Navarre. His coconspirators in Algiers, Léon Faye and André Beaufre, had been transferred to a jail in Clermont-Ferrand to await trial for their part in the abortive mutiny, and Vichy officials were determined to see that Navarre joined them in the dock.
Coustenoble blurted out to Marie-Madeleine that Navarre must leave Pau immediately. She stood up, and the two of them went to find him. When she told him what Coustenoble had said, he replied he knew he had to leave but couldn’t do so until the following day, when he planned to meet his wife and daughter at the cathedral in Pau to say goodbye. When Marie-Madeleine said the police surely had Navarre’s family under surveillance, he shrugged, sat down at the desk where he had been working, and picked up his pen. She knew there was nothing she could say that would change his mind.
As the day crept by, she struggled to carry on with her usual routine—arranging new missions, encoding messages for Lucien Vallet to send to London, and deciphering MI6 transmissions that had just come in, including an announcement that its first parachute drop to Alliance would be made in two days.
When Navarre rose to leave late in the evening, Marie-Madeleine and Coustenoble said they were going with him. On their bicycles, the three pedaled silently down into the sleeping town, along the boulevard overlooking the valley. They slipped into Navarre’s apartment, and Coustenoble insisted on a thorough search for anything incriminating. Finding stacks of compromising papers and reports in every corner of the apartment, he took them out and burned them.
As dawn approached, Navarre offered each of them a glass of Armagnac. Sipping from hers, Marie-Madeleine stared out an open window at the peaks of the Pyrenees some thirty miles away, glowing like beacons in the early morning light. Navarre told the two to go back and get a few hours’ sleep. After he saw his family, he’d be with them at noon.
Neither did as he suggested. Coustenoble stood guard outside the apartment while Marie-Madeleine wandered around Pau until late morning, doing some shopping and spending a couple of hours at the hairdresser’s. Because she and her Alliance colleagues had closeted themselves away during their time in Pau, few people in the town had any idea who she was. But instead of savoring her few hours of freedom, she felt sick from anxiety and lack of sleep. Late in the morning, she cycled back to Villa Etchebaster. When Josette came to open the garden gate, Marie-Madeleine saw from her agonized expression that the worst had happened.
In the drawing room, her staff stood silently, their faces a tableau of shock and despair. Coustenoble took her arm and hurried her upstairs to tell her what h
ad occurred. Navarre’s family had been followed from their home in Oloron-Sainte-Marie by more than a dozen Vichy policemen, who had been told their quarry was a German spy. They had stationed themselves in the back of the cathedral, and when Navarre came in, they rushed him. When he tried to run, he was fired at but not hit. He was now in the Pau jail, waiting to be transferred to the prison at Clermont-Ferrand.
Overcome by exhaustion, fury, and anguish, Marie-Madeleine broke down in tears. Coustenoble put his arms around her. “Enough, little one,” he murmured. “A soldier doesn’t cry.” She needed to eat, he said, and he urged her to come to lunch. She shook her head.
He insisted she had to come: If she didn’t, her staff would feel leaderless. She told him that she had to think for a while and that she would join them later. After a few minutes, she got up and went downstairs to the dining room. Taking a seat next to Lucien Vallet, she surreptitiously slipped the food on her plate onto his. Then she asked him the time of his next transmission to London. Three P.M., he replied.
About ten minutes before Vallet’s transmission time, she handed him an encoded message. It read: N1 ARRESTED THIS MORNING STOP NETWORK INTACT STOP EVERYTHING CONTINUING STOP BEST POSTPONE PARACHUTING NEXT MOON STOP CONFIDENCE UNSHAKABLE STOP REGARDS STOP POZ 55.
MI6’s reply, filled with expressions of regret and sympathy, came a few hours later. It ended with a terse question: “Who is taking over?”
Marie-Madeleine’s answer was brief and emphatic. I AM AS PLANNED STOP SURROUNDED BY LOYAL LIEUTENANTS STOP POZ 55.
As she struggled with the trauma of Navarre’s arrest, Fourcade found solace in the knowledge that the British had no idea that POZ 55 was a woman. Navarre had never told them the name or gender of his deputy. And she, concerned that they would reject her out of hand, had no intention of enlightening them.
Besides, she had other, more pressing matters to worry about, including how to prevent the Vichy police dragnet from closing around her and the rest of the network. With Navarre in jail, Boutron in Madrid, Bernis in Monte Carlo, and Schaerrer in Bordeaux, she was left with few confidants who could advise her in her battle to keep Alliance afloat.
But her sense of isolation didn’t prevent her from acting. She immediately severed all connection with Pension Welcome, where Navarre had been a frequent and highly visible visitor. She informed its owners about his arrest, telling them that if the police came looking for her, they should say that she had gone to the Côte d’Azur.
After two sleepless days and nights, she finally collapsed into bed at the Villa Etchebaster, only to be awakened in the early morning by a new headquarters staffer named Gavarni—a tall, lean former air force officer with a quick temper and commanding presence—who told her that the police were ransacking the Pension Welcome and that she must leave immediately. He took her to the home of a friend for a few days, then installed her in a hotel in the center of Pau, whose anti-Vichy owner agreed to serve her meals in her room and not to fill out the forms required by the police for guests. In the interests of security, she never left the hotel during the day and only rarely at night.
The rest of the headquarters staff continued their work at the Villa Etchebaster, which, after careful consideration, was judged to be relatively safe, at least for the moment. The network’s operations intensified, and huge stacks of intelligence reports, delivered to the hotel by Fourcade’s radio operator, Lucien Vallet, piled up on the desk in her room. She spent her days reading them and encoding the most urgent, which were transmitted to MI6 by radio. The rest were dispatched to London via Madrid in Boutron’s Vichy mailbags.
She held clandestine meetings with a steady stream of agents at the hotel to discuss the details of the intelligence that MI6, in its queries, asked them to track down. The majority of the questions, not surprisingly, had to do with the location and movements of German ships and U-boats to and from the French coasts. Alliance now had agents in place in twelve coastal ports, stretching from Normandy to the Côte d’Azur. Thus far, the best intelligence had come from agents in Saint-Nazaire, on the Brittany coast. One of the largest ports in Europe, Saint-Nazaire housed not only a large U-boat fleet but also some of the German navy’s biggest ships, such as the battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz.
Antoine Hugon, the garage owner whom Fourcade had chosen as the network’s leader in Brittany, was the conduit for the information from Saint-Nazaire, much of it coming from two spies Hugon himself had recruited—Henri Mouren, chief of the Saint-Nazaire shipyard, and Mouren’s deputy, Jules Sgier.
One morning in the late summer of 1941, Hugon arrived unexpectedly at the Villa Etchebaster. To the astonishment of the Alliance staff, he began taking off his clothes—first his jacket, with the Iron Cross on the lapel, then his tie and shirt. Wrapped around Hugon’s ample torso was an enormous cloth map, which he unwound and presented to his astonished audience for inspection. The map depicted the layout of the Saint-Nazaire submarine base and shipyard, including the recently built U-boat pens—all reproduced by Henri Mouren to scale, down to the last inch.
A major coup for Alliance, the map only increased MI6’s insatiable appetite for information. In early August, the intelligence agency informed Marie-Madeleine that it was about to parachute in more support, including a new type of wireless transmitter and a British radio operator who would train her agents in the transmitter’s use and also instruct them in an improved method of coding. When finished with those duties, he would travel to Normandy, where he had been assigned to create a new Alliance sector. The first Englishman to work in the field with the network, he would be known to Marie-Madeleine and her operatives only by his code name, Blanchet.
The parachute drop proceeded without a hitch, and she was thrilled with the bounty that MI6 sent. The new transmitter was smaller and easier to operate than its big, bulky predecessor; a new type of paper to be used for messages was silky and tissue-thin, making it easier to hide; and there were “lots of other little gadgets to help us in our work.” The only potential problem was the radio operator himself.
To meet him, she abandoned the safety of her hotel room for a rare foray to the Villa Etchebaster. When she entered the drawing room, she stopped and stared. Standing before her was a living parody—a figure who looked as if he had just stepped out of a low-budget Hollywood movie made by a director who knew nothing about the French. The man sported a goatee and pince-nez and wore a short jacket and waistcoat, striped trousers, stiff shirt with cutaway collar, and a cravat. On his head was a bowler hat. Marie-Madeleine’s agents burst into gales of laughter.
Trying to smooth over the awkwardness of the moment, she delivered a few words of welcome in English, only to be interrupted by Blanchet, who said in fluent French, albeit with a Cockney accent, that he had spent more of his life in France than England. It wasn’t until after the war that she found out his real identity: Arthur Bradley Davies, a thirty-nine-year-old former farm manager who had lived in Normandy for some twenty years. After the Germans invaded France, he had fled to England and was recruited there by MI6.
Marie-Madeleine ordered Blanchet, whom she called Bla, to shave off his beard and to tone down his flamboyant appearance. But his outrageous outfit wasn’t the only way in which he called attention to himself. From the beginning, he acted oddly, giving his coding lessons in a loud voice in public places, asking too many questions about the network’s operations, and showing too much interest in everyone who came to the Villa Etchebaster. Lucien Vallet advised her to get rid of him.
But how could she turn down an agent from MI6, which, by all accounts, was the most skilled intelligence service in the world? Although she didn’t get rid of Bla, she remained uneasy about him until he finally left for Paris, on his way to Normandy. Preceding him to Paris was Vallet, the warm, witty young former army officer who had worked with her as the network’s chief radio operator for almost a year and whom she regarded with great fondness. Fourcade ha
d assigned him to take charge of the network’s expanding radio operation in the capital, but his departure was a loss she felt keenly.
Her regret over Vallet’s leaving was followed by a far more shattering blow. For weeks, she had been deeply worried about Henri Schaerrer, who had left for Bordeaux more than a month earlier. Since then, she had heard nothing from or about him. Then, shortly after Bla’s and Vallet’s departures, word came that the Gestapo had captured Schaerrer, his pockets stuffed with documents from the submarine base, on the outskirts of Bordeaux. The first Alliance agent to be arrested by the Germans, Schaerrer had been taken to Fresnes prison outside Paris, the Germans’ central holding facility for captured British agents and members of the French resistance.
The report of Schaerrer’s arrest was accompanied by additional bad news. The Vichy government, under increasing pressure from the Nazis, had ordered its security agencies and police to take the toughest possible action against all resistance movements and networks in the free zone. The repression began soon after the surprise German invasion of Russia in June 1941. In response to the German attack, Moscow had ordered the French Communist Party to launch an armed struggle against munitions factories and German troops in France, in hopes of weakening the Reich’s Russian campaign. The Communists’ first strike came on August 21 with the fatal shooting of a young German naval cadet in a Paris subway station. The Vichy government, in an attempt to appease Nazi authorities, ordered the execution of six French Communists who had had nothing to do with the ambush. Rather than halting the Communist attacks, the reprisal was followed by more assassinations: On October 20, a high-level German official was killed in Nantes, followed by another in Bordeaux. In retribution, ninety-seven additional French hostages were shot.
