by Lynne Olson
The French people, already restive over growing food and fuel shortages, were infuriated by the wanton killing of their compatriots, and resistance efforts against the Germans grew noticeably stronger, especially in the free zone. Vichy’s repression also increased, thanks to Admiral Darlan’s eagerness to conciliate the Third Reich. Believing that France’s destiny was to serve as the leading vassal state in a Germanized Europe, Darlan did all he could to make that happen, including overseeing the sale of more than seventeen hundred trucks and thousands of tons of fuel to the Germans for use in their fight against the British in North Africa.
Hoping to extend military collaboration even further, the admiral also signed a tentative agreement allowing German armed forces to use French airfields in Syria, submarine facilities at Dakar, and ports in Tunisia for resupplying German troops. There were, however, still some Vichy officials who believed that the government should maintain at least a semblance of independence. In their view, Darlan’s agreement was a step too far, and he was successfully pressured to cancel it.
But he suffered no such constraints when he allowed German security forces, including the Abwehr, SD, and Gestapo, to infiltrate the free zone, an action that violated terms of the armistice. An American diplomat in Vichy reported to Washington that he encountered Gestapo agents everywhere—“at bars, restaurants, and the opera.” Their presence was so ubiquitous, he said, that “you expect to find them in your bed—and perhaps you would not be wrong.”
Darlan was furious when he discovered that the French army’s counterintelligence branch did not share his laissez-faire approach to the presence of German spies throughout the free zone. In Marseille, for example, French counterintelligence agents had broken up an Abwehr espionage network operating on the Mediterranean coast. Eight radio transmitters were seized and twenty-six agents captured. By the end of 1941, more than three hundred Nazi operatives, many of them French nationals, had been arrested in the free zone and handed over to French military courts. Of these, sixteen had been executed.
During a cabinet meeting in the summer of 1941, Darlan attacked the army’s counterintelligence efforts and ordered them stopped. “It’s open war against us,” the Deuxième Bureau’s Colonel Louis Rivet later told a colleague. “We are now considered the bête noire of the regime.”
Obeying Darlan’s directives, Vichy’s interior ministry took control of the country’s urban police forces, and special police brigades were created to hunt down resisters. “At the grass roots, the police were torn between the directives they were being given and their deeply patriotic feelings,” an army counterintelligence officer wrote. “Many officials remained favorable to us and were ready to continue the fight against the enemy within, but we had to admit that we were completely short-circuited.”
Fourcade, for her part, had always been wary of putting any faith in Vichy. The crackdown ordered by Darlan simply confirmed her belief that no one in the government could be trusted. “Vichy is betting on a German victory,” she told Jean Boutron late that summer. “There may be in this regime men who will help us. But there are not many of them, and we will find it difficult to discover them. It is better to consider all of them as dangerous and sometimes ruthless opponents….So much the better if we have happy surprises.”
Yet even as reports of repression rolled in during the fall of 1941, Alliance continued to extend its reach throughout the country. Six of its MI6-supplied radio transmitters—in Pau, Marseille, Nice, Lyon, Normandy, and Paris—were now sending intelligence back to London. At the same time, the network’s operations in Paris and the rest of the occupied zone were rapidly growing. MI6 told Fourcade that it soon would send six additional transmitters to her, along with several million more francs to finance the network’s continued expansion. In mid-October, she dispatched Gavarni, Coustenoble, and two other lieutenants to tour the network’s sectors and urge their chiefs to redouble their efforts.
Although much of the intelligence she received from the sectors, particularly reports from the coastal areas, had been superb, some material, sent by operatives who clearly had a shaky command of the basics of intelligence gathering, caused her intense frustration. When she was sent reports, for example, about “a lot of Germans” observed traveling on trains, planes, or ships that were not identified, she shot back scathing responses demanding precise details of the enemy units and transports.
But that frustration was nothing compared to her anguish over the news she received one autumn day from Henri Mouren, the chief of the Saint-Nazaire shipyard. Bursting into her hotel room, he told her that postal inspectors had discovered incriminating documents in a Paris post office box, placed there by a postal worker who also served as an Alliance courier. French police shadowed the worker, who, over the next few days, met with more than a dozen other Alliance operatives. All were arrested.
“Who were they?” Fourcade whispered. She flinched when she heard the response. Antoine Hugon, who had brought her the Saint-Nazaire map, was among them. So were Lucien Vallet and Jules Sgier, Mouren’s deputy at the shipyard and his closest friend.
In the midst of dealing with this latest calamity, Fourcade was tasked with overseeing the preparations for MI6’s scheduled parachute drop, which yielded the biggest cache of money and materials yet. Containers holding 3 million francs and six transmitters floated down beneath their parachutes to a field in the Dordogne. Other parachutes carried new codes and questionnaires; an array of new devices for agents’ use, among them soapboxes and tooth powder tins with false bottoms; and treats for the Alliance staff, including coffee, sugar, and tea. Another 3 million francs were transported by Jean Boutron from Madrid, and 4 million more would be kept in reserve for the network at a Barcelona bank. The overall total—a heart-stopping 10 million francs—was unmistakable proof of Alliance’s importance to MI6 and the British war effort.
A million francs from the parachute drop were immediately dispatched to various patrols throughout the country to cover their expenses. Marie-Madeleine entrusted the remaining 2 million to Gavarni, whom she had just made her chief of staff. While presiding over the distribution of MI6’s largesse, she also was hard at work reorganizing the Paris patrols. Four new agents were about to leave for the capital. They would be accompanied by Mathilde Bridou, Marie-Madeleine’s mother, who wanted to visit friends in Paris and resisted her daughter’s arguments that going there now was too dangerous.
On the day they all were to depart, Marie-Madeleine felt the same sense of unease she had had before Navarre’s arrest. Coustenoble agreed. Together, they burned masses of intelligence reports stacked in her room, and Coustenoble spirited away the six new transmitters for safekeeping at his house in Toulouse.
Later that night, as Marie-Madeleine sat at her desk coding reports, two Alliance agents rushed into her room. Struggling to catch his breath, one of them shouted that Vichy police had raided the Etchebaster and rounded up everyone there. Now they were on the hunt for Marie-Madeleine. She must leave immediately.
With the exception of the two operatives, everyone at the Pau headquarters had been captured—Coustenoble, Gavarni, the rest of the staff at the Villa Etchebaster, the agents who had been dispatched to Paris, and several others who had come to Pau for consultations. Her mother, too, had been swept up in the net. The headquarters radio transmitter was destroyed before the police could seize it, but policemen found the new radios from London at Coustenoble’s house. There was one bit of good news: The remaining 5 million francs from the British had not yet been discovered.
Fourcade hurriedly gathered up her reports and packed a suitcase. After the owner of the hotel smuggled her out and into a waiting car, he put on his pajamas and moved into the room she had just vacated, prepared to claim to the police that the room was his and the woman they were seeking had never been there. As the car containing Fourcade drove away from the hotel, it passed a police car speeding toward it. Her agent
s took her to the home of a married couple they knew in the town of Tarbes, about thirty miles from Pau.
Distraught over these attacks on multiple fronts, she thought about whom she could approach for help. She had lost all the agents who had acted as her eyes and ears, had no transmitter to communicate with London or anywhere else, and ruled out traveling to Marseille or any of Alliance’s other sectors for fear of contaminating them. Concluding that her only hope was Jean Boutron, who had left Pau for Vichy several days before, she dispatched one of her rescuers to find him. Providentially, Boutron had not yet left on his return trip to Madrid, and when he heard what had happened, he rushed immediately to Tarbes, where Marie-Madeleine greeted him with a fervent embrace.
They discussed possible hiding places for her, all of which Boutron rejected. The only possible way to save her from prison and the network from destruction was to smuggle her across the border to Spain, he said. Like it or not, she must go with him to Madrid, reveal her true identity to the British, and seek their aid.
To smuggle Marie-Madeleine across the French-Spanish border was no easy task. Since she did not have official papers, real or forged, to cross into Spain, she had to be concealed somewhere in Boutron’s car. As he saw it, the only possible hiding place was in one of the official Vichy mailbags that he carried back and forth between the two countries.
The logistics of travel also presented a problem. During most of the year, Boutron could drive the car—Marie-Madeleine’s old Citroën—over a mountain pass in the central Pyrenees, which had served for centuries as a popular route for travelers between France and Spain. But it was now early December, and the pass was already heavily blanketed by snow. The only way for a vehicle to make a winter crossing over the mountains was to stow it atop a railway flatcar and take it by train to the Spanish border.
Marie-Madeleine wasn’t Boutron’s only stowaway. He would also smuggle to Madrid a young Frenchman who worked for an MI6 intelligence network based in Spain. The man would hide in the car’s trunk while Marie-Madeleine would take refuge in a mailbag.
For hours, Boutron tried to figure out how to squeeze his patronne, who stood five feet six inches tall, into a jute sack that measured two feet by four feet. After experimenting with a number of contorted positions, the two of them found that if Marie-Madeleine removed all her clothes except her underwear and crouched with her head and torso curled over her knees, the sack could be closed, if only barely. The position was extraordinarily uncomfortable: Her chin dug into her chest, and her displaced hip began hurting after just a few minutes of being in the bag.
But Boutron assured her that she would be in it for only about two hours—just enough time for the car to be loaded onto the train, which would then travel from a French rail station through a five-mile tunnel to the Spanish border. He cut a couple of small holes in the bag, next to her nose and mouth, so that she could breathe, and gave her a pair of scissors in case she needed to make a quick exit.
The morning following their reunion in Tarbes, Boutron, Marie-Madeleine, and the other agent traveled to the French mountain village of Urdos, where the train station was located. Boutron drove slowly, to avoid getting there too early but also to escape the attention of police who might be on Marie-Madeleine’s trail. In a wooded area outside the village, the male operative climbed into the trunk and Marie-Madeleine slipped into the sack, which Boutron closed and affixed with an official Vichy seal. He put it in the backseat of the car, along with two other mailbags. As he got back into the car, he asked Marie-Madeleine if she was all right. “From the bag,” he recalled, “came a murmur which I resolutely took for an affirmation.”
At the station, Boutron drove the car up a ramp to a siding, where the flatcar was waiting, along with the stationmaster, who delivered a jolt of bad news. The train for which Boutron had a reservation was arriving an hour earlier than expected, and there wouldn’t be enough time to perform the complicated maneuver of hoisting the Citroën onto the flatcar. He would have to wait eight hours for the next train to the border.
Boutron was horrified. Marie-Madeleine, he thought, couldn’t possibly survive in the bag that long. He told the stationmaster he had changed his mind and would try to cross the pass in his car. When the man responded that he was out of his mind, Boutron said he was used to driving in ice and snow and that he would take his chances. But he was turned back almost immediately by a French customs official, who said that traversing the pass was not only forbidden but impossible: The snow covering it was several feet deep.
Growing increasingly desperate, Boutron returned to the station, where railwaymen began the lengthy process of attaching ropes to the Citroën. More than two hours later, it had been raised onto the flatcar and moored. Watching the men work, Boutron tried to appear calm, but the effort was exhausting: Although the air was freezing, his face and hands were slick with sweat. When the train finally arrived and the flatcar was attached, Marie-Madeleine had been in the sack almost eight hours.
Boutron had planned to stay in the Citroën for the short journey, but the stationmaster ordered him off the flatcar and into a compartment. When he protested, he was told that it was far too dangerous: The tunnel had sharp curves, and the ropes mooring the auto could snap, hurling it against the tunnel wall. It had happened more than once before, the stationmaster added.
Painfully aware that Marie-Madeleine had heard everything the man said, Boutron made his way to his compartment near the front of the train. When it finally entered the tunnel, he clandestinely retraced his steps to the flatcar, struggling hard to keep his balance as the train rocketed around the seemingly endless curves. Finally reaching the Citroën, he climbed into it and announced with more good humor than he felt: “I’m back. If the car falls off, at least we’ll be together.” When Marie-Madeleine responded in a muffled voice, he let out a sigh of relief. He couldn’t understand what she said, but at least she was still alive.
After what seemed an eternity, the train finally emerged from the tunnel and headed toward the bright lights of the Spanish customs post. “We’re almost there!” Boutron exclaimed. “Just stick it out for a few more minutes. Courage!” At the moment, however, Marie-Madeleine had no courage to spare. Having been doubled up in the mailbag for more than nine hours, she was almost frozen and in excruciating pain.
She heard Boutron approach the flatcar with several workmen, who roughly unloaded the Citroën. From inside the sack, she could see the beams of flashlights sweeping over the mailbags. Boutron tried to speed up the process. “These are diplomatic bags with top secret information,” he said to the Spanish customs officials. “Please hurry…I must get to Madrid as soon as possible…Important diplomatic mission…The Marshal…”
Finally, his cargo was cleared. With hearty shouts of “Adiós” and “Vaya usted con Dios,” Boutron drove the car down a ramp and into neutral Spain. After a few miles, he pulled off into a wooded area by the side of a mountain stream and released the male agent from the trunk. The two of them then took the mail sack containing Marie-Madeleine out of the car and opened it. Still curled up in a fetal position, she had no feeling in her limbs and was unable to move any of them. As the two men gently pulled her from the bag, she fainted. When she regained consciousness, she saw Boutron’s stricken face. For a brief moment, he had thought she was dead.
He helped her sit up and gave her a cigarette. He also handed her a bottle of Napoleon cognac that he had bought on the black market in France as a gift for his MI6 contact in Madrid. The cigarette and a few sips of cognac revived her a bit, but she was still unable to walk. When she had recovered enough to travel, he carried her to the car, and once they reached Madrid early the following morning, he carried her up the steps of his rented house.
After telling his housekeeper that Marie-Madeleine was his cousin and that she would be staying with him for a couple of weeks, Boutron contacted Georges Charaudeau, a wealthy French businessman who li
ved part-time in Spain and was the intended recipient of the cognac. Charaudeau had formed a small anti-German intelligence organization of his own, in league with MI6, that operated in both Spain and France. Although he had no official connection with Alliance, he cooperated closely with Boutron in the Spanish capital.
Boutron asked Charaudeau to send a message to MI6’s Kenneth Cohen, informing him of the arrival of POZ 55 and ASO 45 (Boutron’s code name) in Madrid and the decimation of the network staff in Pau. Later in the day, Cohen responded, instructing POZ to travel to London via Lisbon. Marie-Madeleine adamantly refused, declaring that she must be back in France by the New Year at the latest. In a second message to Cohen, she informed him of her decision, then added a bombshell piece of news: POZ 55 was a woman. After a few hours of silence, Cohen answered. He would send his deputy to Madrid, with full power to act on his behalf. The meeting would take place within a week.
While they waited for the MI6 representative, Boutron reported back to his undercover job at the Vichy embassy, while Marie-Madeleine, consumed with worry over the arrests in Pau, particularly that of her mother, recuperated from her ordeal. After a few days, she had regained enough strength to wander a bit around Madrid, but her outing only increased her depression.
As she strolled through the center of the city, she vividly remembered the frequent trips she had taken with her mother to Madrid in the 1920s and early 1930s and their keen enjoyment of the lively, bustling Spanish capital. Now Mathilde Bridou was in a Vichy jail cell, while Madrid, having suffered serious damage during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, was a sad, tattered version of its former self. Many buildings were dilapidated and pockmarked with bullet holes, and the iron railings fronting their balconies were red with rust. Several had been reduced to rubble by the incessant bombing of Luftwaffe planes during the conflict, and weeds now flourished in the mountains of debris left behind.
