Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  As he headed toward the door, Fourcade asked him why he had handed over the entire 2 million francs to Rollin, pointing out that he probably could have gotten the same result by surrendering just a few thousand. Gavarni didn’t answer. Jassaud escorted him out the door and to the station.

  Fourcade had no intention of abiding by her pledge to Gavarni. By seemingly agreeing to end the network, she and it had gained a reprieve. But she knew that the respite could not last long and that at some point she herself would be challenged by Vichy. For now, however, her most immediate problem was to find a new chief of staff.

  * * *

  —

  IT TOOK HER ABOUT A WEEK. When she showed up at the vegetable warehouse one morning, Léon Faye was on the doorstep. The last time she had seen him was a year earlier, when, having been recruited by Navarre, he had left for North Africa to head the network’s operations there and to embark on his ill-fated plan to organize an anti-Vichy coup.

  After he, Navarre, and the coup’s other ringleaders had been arrested in May 1941, Faye had languished in jail until the plotters were put on trial in September. Found guilty, he was sentenced to an additional two months and was released in late November. Navarre, meanwhile, received a much more severe sentence in retaliation for his escape from North Africa—two years in prison.

  Just before the disaster in Pau, Marie-Madeleine had received a letter from Faye informing her of his release. He went on to say that his role in the failed coup had sparked the interest of a large number of his anti-German colleagues in the air force, who were eager to join him in fighting back against their country’s occupiers. He, however, was not sure how to translate that interest into action. Caught up in the chaos of the arrests in Pau, Marie-Madeleine had destroyed his letter to prevent Vichy officials from finding it and then put it out of her mind. Once she reached Madrid, however, she was sorry she had done so, belatedly realizing that Faye and his friends could provide the reinforcements that Alliance so desperately needed.

  And now, like magic, he was here. Although he had enticed Navarre to join the mutiny, thus setting in motion the cascade of problems now plaguing Alliance, Marie-Madeleine’s heart skipped a beat when she saw him. His dark, unruly hair contained strands of gray, but other than that, his ordeal in jail seemed to have left little mark on him. He flashed a broad grin and embraced her.

  Trying to hide her delight, she said, “At last! Is this the soonest you could get here?” He answered in the same playful vein: “I know—it’s very bad of me.” He spun a fanciful story of having just returned from a grand tour of Italy, North Africa, and the châteaux of France. Then, turning serious, he told her that he had promised Navarre after their trial he would return to see her once his sentence was completed. He wanted to take her to safety in Algiers, where friends of his would hide her.

  When she asked what would happen to the network if she accepted his invitation, he said he’d been informed that Alliance no longer existed. In response, she invited him to join her for the day.

  Her first visitors that morning were Ernest Siegrist and Georges Guillot, two Paris policemen who had been part of another anti-Nazi intelligence network, based in the French capital, that had been smashed by the Gestapo. Wanting to continue the fight, they had been put in touch with Alliance, which had asked MI6 to check them out. Marie-Madeleine told them that London had confirmed their story and that she would take them on as security men in Marseille. One of them would forge identity papers while the other would guard the headquarters and its agents.

  The morning’s next visitor was Denise Centore, a short, stocky professional historian whom Marie-Madeleine had just hired as her assistant. Centore complained about problems with the latest batch of invisible ink that had been dispatched from MI6 and brought in by Jean Boutron in his diplomatic bags. She showed Fourcade a recent message from an agent—a piece of light brown wrapping paper covered with dark brown writing that described German antiaircraft sites in Boulogne. The heat, Centore said, brought out the writing. After she explained to Faye how Alliance used innocent-looking parcels from the occupied zone to smuggle in information written in invisible ink, Marie-Madeleine instructed her to warn London about the problem.

  Next to arrive was a courier bringing in copies of the radio messages sent that day from Marseille to London by Émile Audoly. One of them reported how an Alliance agent at the port had managed to open packing cases that ostensibly were the property of the German armistice commission. Inside were rifles and other war matériel destined for General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, which was fighting the British in Libya. The message to MI6 included the sailing date of the ships carrying the supplies. Thanks to the intelligence, Marie-Madeleine later wrote, British bombers intercepted and destroyed the convoy.

  One after another, the parade of visitors continued. Finally, early in the afternoon, Faye asked for a temporary halt. Fourcade had made her point: The network was alive and well, he acknowledged. Now he and she needed to get something to eat—and to talk. He suggested one of the black-market bars on the Canebière, but, fearful of being recognized, she said no. He finally took her to his room at a nearby hotel, where he laid before her a feast of bread and foie gras—gifts from a former air force colleague who had turned to farming in the Dordogne after the 1940 armistice.

  As they enjoyed the foie gras and a bottle of Monbazillac, a fine dessert wine that also came from Faye’s friend, she told him about the network’s activities since Navarre’s arrest. She described the raid in Pau, her meeting with Keyser in Madrid, and the program they had mapped out, including the new aircraft pickup operations and the urgent need for intelligence to help the British in the Battle of the Atlantic and in its struggle to close the Germans’ Mediterranean Sea routes.

  When Faye asked what her greatest concern was, she replied that she was in desperate need of new people who could rebuild the existing sectors and create new ones. He was silent for a moment, and then, as she hoped, he suggested himself and his former air force colleagues—about a dozen at first but, he assured her, soon to be followed by many more.

  Marie-Madeleine was thrilled with the idea of his rejoining the network, along with a throng of new recruits, but she had to be extremely careful about how she handled the situation. She needed to make it clear to this assertive, charismatic officer that although she would love to have him, she would continue to lead Alliance, while he would act as her deputy. In making her pitch, she focused more on the responsibilities they would share than on his subordinate position, noting that if she were captured, he would ensure the survival of the network by continuing as its leader.

  Then, indirectly, she mentioned her greatest concern about his plan: Would these friends of his, some of them senior officers whose world was totally male-oriented, be willing to take orders from a woman? Faye resolved her dilemma with a laugh and the remark: “I’m prepared to.”

  By the time she and Faye returned to the warehouse, it was dark, snowing, and bitterly cold. But warmed by her sense of triumph, Marie-Madeleine was unperturbed by the dreadful weather. Her euphoria lasted until she saw the stricken expression on Gabriel Rivière’s face. He stood up, held her by the shoulders, and said she needed to be brave. Then he told her that Henri Schaerrer had been executed by the Germans.

  According to Rivière, Schaerrer had been executed on November 13, 1941, four months after his arrest by the Gestapo near the submarine base outside Bordeaux. Rivière, who had been recruited as Alliance’s Marseille chief by Schaerrer, said with a ferocity that Marie-Madeleine had seldom heard from him that Schaerrer would be avenged. She shook her head. Schaerrer would not want that, she said. She added, “We must carry on.”

  At the moment, however, she was incapable of doing anything. From the day she learned of Schaerrer’s arrest, she had feared this would be the outcome. But she was unprepared for the devastation she felt when faced with the reality. It wasn’t jus
t that Schaerrer was the first Alliance agent to die. It was the loss of the man himself—this exuberant, fun-loving, incautious whirlwind of energy who had been there from the beginning and had done so much to breathe life into the network. Her grief was matched by a sense of guilt for putting him in harm’s way.

  Although she wanted to be alone, Rivière insisted she share that evening’s meal with the rest of the Alliance staff, along with their tearful sharing of memories of their fallen friend. Later that night, she caught a tram to her apartment on the outskirts of Marseille. As she climbed the steep stone steps leading to her building, she prayed to the Virgin Mary for help in dealing with Schaerrer’s death. She had no idea how terrible it would be, she murmured. She begged to be given the strength to continue.

  In the darkness of her apartment, she opened the shutters and gazed out the window at the churning sea below her. Maybe she should cross it and go to Algiers, as Faye had first suggested. Maybe she should shut the network down and save its members from Schaerrer’s fate. Her sleep that night was filled with nightmares.

  She was awakened the following morning by a pounding at the door; when she opened it, she saw that the sun was already high in the sky. Standing before her was Marc Mesnard, the agent who handled Alliance’s financial and other administrative matters. The staff was worried about her, he said, and had sent him to find her. She asked if he had heard about Schaerrer. Of course, he replied: It was awful, but she needed to focus on those who were still living. He urged her to get dressed and return with him to headquarters. She did so. She would mourn Schaerrer for the rest of her life, but Mesnard was right: She must think of the others and carry on.

  * * *

  —

  AN HOUR OR SO LATER, Fourcade stood in front of her staff and told them that she had just appointed Léon Faye as her chief of staff. Looking out at her agents, she did her best to conceal her nervousness. Although most knew who Faye was, they had never worked with him directly. She also knew that her announcement put an end to the hope held by some of them that Navarre would somehow find his way back to the network. With her appointment of Faye, she was making it clear that she, and she alone, controlled Alliance. In an effort to reassure them, she added that it was Navarre himself who had asked Faye to come to their rescue.

  Hearing that, the crowd, which had been silent until then, burst into scattered applause and then surrounded Faye to congratulate him. After sending out messages to Alliance’s other sectors announcing Faye’s appointment, Fourcade joined him on a journey around the free zone to begin the job of melding the survivors of the crippled network with its new members.

  Their first stop was Pau, where Fourcade introduced Faye to Maurice Coustenoble and the other members of her team who had been captured there the previous November. They had just been freed from jail in Vichy, with the proviso that they were now to be intelligence agents for the Vichy government.

  She ordered them to go into hiding and added that after they had recovered from their ordeal she would assign them to new sectors. She wanted Coustenoble to join her in Marseille in his old role as her adjutant, but he seemed wary about the idea and distant toward her. When he said he hoped she was still in charge, she realized that he was upset about Faye and his new position, and feared he was taking over. She assured Coustenoble that was not the case, making it clear she had missed him and wanted him back by her side. With that, his coolness vanished, and he began to call her “little one” again.

  After Pau, Fourcade and Faye traveled to Toulouse, where he introduced her to some of the men he had recruited, among them Colonel Édouard Kauffmann, who had provided the foie gras and Monbazillac she had so enjoyed in Marseille the week before. A graduate of Saint-Cyr, Kauffmann had distinguished himself in the fighting at Verdun in World War I, then switched to the air force after the war, serving in Morocco and Indochina. In the 1940 battle for France, he had commanded air force units assigned to an army motorized division. Demobilized after the armistice, he had taken up residence at his country property in the Dordogne, where he cultivated artichokes and, according to Faye, “was thoroughly bored.”

  When Fourcade and Faye offered him the job of rebuilding Alliance’s Dordogne sector, which had been destroyed in the November Vichy raid, Kauffmann accepted with alacrity. He told them he’d have things running well in no time. And, he added, he had no problems with a woman as leader of the network.

  Another pilot recruited by Faye was Maurice de MacMahon, the Duke of Magenta, a colorful young flying ace who had been a member of the air force acrobatics team before the war and whose pedigree was arguably the most illustrious of any Alliance agent. His great-great-great-grandfather, John MacMahon, was an Irish doctor who immigrated to France, married a French noblewoman, and was given a title by Louis XV in 1750. John’s son became aide-de-camp to the Marquis de Lafayette in America’s Revolutionary War, and his grandson, Patrice MacMahon (Maurice’s grandfather), was a Crimean War hero, a marshal in the French army, and the first president of France’s Third Republic.

  Fourcade had met Maurice de MacMahon in Morocco when she lived there in the late 1920s with her husband. She found him elegant, dashing, and audacious. She was equally enchanted by his wife, Marguerite, who also joined the network and who was described by Marie-Madeleine as “tall, willowy, and radiant: she was born a princess and looked like one in everything she said or did.”

  After the armistice, MacMahon had become a key official of the French Red Cross and, in that role, was given an ausweis, the German identity document that allowed him to cross at will from the free zone to the occupied zone. In the summer of 1942, Fourcade would put him in charge of the network’s activities in the occupied zone.

  Having added Kauffmann, MacMahon, and a dozen other airmen to the Alliance fold, Faye went out looking for more. From the day he became Marie-Madeleine’s deputy, he was constantly on the move. Sleeping no more than a few hours a night, he crisscrossed France, recruiting and training new agents and creating new sectors. Thanks to his obvious leadership skills, coupled with his notoriety as the main orchestrator of the failed coup, he was regarded as a hero by many of the young operatives he brought in. But he always made it clear to them and others that Fourcade was la patronne. Officially, that was true: She was the head, he the deputy. Unofficially, however, they ran Alliance together, although when they disagreed, he accepted her word as final. Both personally and professionally, no one was closer to her during the war years.

  As Alliance regrouped and expanded, its operations spread out across Marseille. While its local sector, run by Gabriel Rivière, continued to operate from the vegetable warehouse and shop, its national headquarters was located in a sprawling apartment on the city’s Corniche, a picturesque roadway that overlooked the sea. A nearby villa was used to house visiting agents. Fourcade also bought a bar at the foot of the steps of the Saint Charles railway station, to serve, like the vegetable warehouse, as a cover. Managed by an agent named Émile Hédin, the bar not only provided drinks for the public but also was a place where operatives and couriers on the move could leave messages and receive instructions. Ernest Siegrist and Georges Guillot, the two recently hired policemen from Paris, provided the security for the entire complex in Marseille, which now included a dozen letterboxes, transmitter sites, and hideouts.

  After all the chaos of the previous six months, the network and its operations were not only back on an even keel but thriving. The Marseille-Madrid-London radio link was working well, and, every other week, Jean Boutron brought in other essential material from London in his mailbags.

  But that sense of well-being did not last long. Once again, the network found itself at risk. This time, however, the problem was not the result of an agent’s negligence or betrayal. This time the fault lay with Marie-Madeleine Fourcade herself.

  The origin of Alliance’s latest crisis could be traced to the previous November, when, in her rush to flee
the Vichy net and travel to Madrid, Fourcade had left behind all her network records at the home of the couple who had briefly sheltered her in Tarbes.

  The papers, deposited under the coal bin in the couple’s cellar, contained information about the organization of Alliance, a chronology of its operations, and various messages to and from London, all in code. Jean Boutron, whom she’d consulted about what to do with them, later acknowledged that to keep such confidential and compromising notes was courting trouble, but worth the risk as long as they could be safely hidden. He admitted that it was not prudent to leave them in Tarbes with people whom neither he nor Fourcade knew well. At the same time, he added, it would have been far more dangerous to take the papers with them in the car to Spain.

  When Fourcade sent an agent to retrieve the records after she returned from Madrid, the couple were evasive, telling her emissary that they had given them to another friend for safekeeping and would return them as soon as possible. In all the furor over Gavarni’s machinations and Faye’s reappearance, she had put off further efforts to get them back.

  Thanks to a surprise visit from her brother-in-law, Colonel Georges Georges-Picot, in early March 1942, she realized the folly of her procrastination. Although Georges-Picot was a loyal Pétain supporter and had not followed Marie-Madeleine and other members of her family into resistance work, he had maintained a close relationship with his headstrong young sister-in-law. But when he confronted her on that chilly March morning, he showed few signs of affection. “Who is ASO 43?” he snapped. “Who is PLU 122?”

  Marie-Madeleine was stunned. He was referring to the code names of Jean Boutron and another agent, Admiral Pierre Barjot, a former submarine commander whom Boutron had recruited in Marseille. Where could Georges have gotten such information? Almost immediately, she figured out the answer: from the papers she had left in Tarbes. She had rebuilt her broken network, and now, through her carelessness, it was once again in danger of collapsing.