Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  After Gavarni’s meeting with Henri Rollin, the head of the Surveillance du Territoire in Vichy, Rollin had ordered a more extensive investigation into Alliance, which led to the handing over of Marie-Madeleine’s records by the couple who had hidden her. An old acquaintance of Georges-Picot, Rollin passed on to him the fact that Marie-Madeleine was involved in suspicious activities with England and advised him to bring her to Vichy to explain herself.

  She had lost her mind, her brother-in-law exclaimed. For once she was going to follow his orders and accompany him by train to Vichy that evening. Marie-Madeleine, however, needed time to think about this bombshell—and to warn Faye, Boutron, Barjot, and other top Alliance operatives, as well as MI6. She asked Georges-Picot to give her two days. Then, she promised, she would go with him to Vichy. He grudgingly agreed, warning her that if she reneged, she would end up in prison and he could do nothing more for her.

  Fourcade immediately convened what she called a council of war with Faye, Gabriel Rivière, Émile Audoly, and other key operatives in Marseille. Both Boutron and Barjot, who was now in Algiers, were alerted, as were MI6 officials, who urged her not to go. But she saw no alternative. Faye would follow her, ready to warn the rest of the network if she was unable to talk herself out of this latest predicament.

  Two days later, accompanied by her brother-in-law, Fourcade was on her way to Vichy. As the train chugged along, she agonized again over how negligent she had been. If the network survived, she knew that at the very least, she would have to change the code names of its operatives. Her thoughts whirling, she closed her eyes, and while she dozed she had a dream in which she envisioned Alliance members as animals who were being hunted down by other predators.

  In her mind, she began to assign animal names to agents. Maurice Coustenoble would be Tiger; Gabriel Rivière, Wolf; Émile Audoly, Fox; Jean Boutron, Bull. She herself would be Hedgehog. When she alighted from the train in Vichy, she saw Faye leaving a rear car and following her and Georges-Picot. He would be Eagle, she decided—“a sharp-eyed, fearless high flyer.”

  * * *

  —

  HENRI ROLLIN, FOURCADE’S ADVERSARY in Vichy, was a man of many contradictions. A career naval intelligence officer, he had worked closely with MI6 before the war and had stayed in contact with Stewart Menzies, the agency’s head, after it began. Rollin was also noted as a staunch opponent of anti-Semitism in the French military and in 1939 had written a book that questioned the authenticity of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent document purporting to be the proceedings of an international Jewish conference plotting worldwide domination. After the German occupation of France, Nazi officials banned Rollin’s book, and all remaining copies were seized and destroyed.

  Yet at the same time, as chief of the Surveillance du Territoire, Rollin had led Vichy’s crackdown against Alliance and other resistance groups in the free zone, as well as against anti-German forces in French military intelligence. He was in fact playing a double game. Loyal to Pétain and Darlan, Rollin and others in Vichy had persuaded Darlan to adopt a more sophisticated strategy in his suppression of dissidents. While remaining ruthless in crushing violent Communist resistance, they said, Vichy should try to buy off more moderate resistants, promising them protection from persecution and imprisonment if they agreed to cooperate with the government. Groups like Alliance would even be allowed to provide the British with selected bits of intelligence, as long as they were given to Vichy first.

  Darlan liked the idea. By the spring of 1942, even though the Nazis still had the upper hand in the war, a German victory was no longer a foregone conclusion. Britain and the Soviet Union continued to hold out, while the United States, which had entered the war in December 1941, was fast mobilizing its vast war machine. Ever the opportunist, Darlan wanted to keep his options open. If Germany started losing the war, it might serve him and Vichy well to have established various secret channels with the Allies. And even if the plan did not succeed, the mere fact that Rollin had held discussions with resistance leaders would serve to compromise those leaders in the eyes of the British and members of their organizations. Gavarni was one of the first to fall into the trap. Now Rollin would try his campaign of seduction on Fourcade.

  She, for her part, entered his office determined to be the winner in this cat-and-mouse game. As she sat down, joined by her brother-in-law, she studied the short, thickset, graying man standing before her. Rollin went on the offensive immediately, pointing accusingly at papers scattered all over his desk. They were, Marie-Madeleine realized, her notes from Tarbes.

  “We’re going to arrest ASO 43 tomorrow morning,” Rollin said. “It’s Jean Boutron, isn’t it?”

  Fourcade acknowledged she knew Boutron; he had been a merchant seaman for the same shipping company that had employed her father. But she denied that Boutron had ever worked for her network.

  “Then who is ASO?” Rollin asked. Fourcade parried the question, saying she had no intention of giving any names to him. She had come to Vichy, she said, to see if she could find any “patriots” there. Rollin retorted that he and others in Vichy were far more patriotic than she, adding that he wanted to get rid of the Germans, too, but not in alliance with the British. In response, Fourcade said he knew very well that her network had collapsed and that she no longer had any contact with Britain.

  After another hour of questioning that went nowhere, Rollin abruptly broke off the session and ordered her to return the following day. “By the way,” he said as she prepared to leave, “your friend the vegetable dealer is going to have an interesting awakening tomorrow morning.” Fourcade hurried back to her hotel to warn Faye that ST officers were planning to arrest Gabriel Rivière the next day. Faye in turn dashed to a phone to tell Rivière of the raid and to order him to remove the transmitter and all other incriminating material from the shop.

  After a restless night worrying about Rivière’s fate and that of Alliance, Fourcade returned to Rollin’s office. She found that the stern, threatening man she had encountered the day before had transformed himself into an avuncular, fatherly figure who invited her to have lunch with him and his wife at his country house.

  There, Rollin seemed a different man, Fourcade remembered. His wife, a Russian Jew, expressed sympathy and understanding for Fourcade’s anti-German views and activities and said to her husband that he should leave her alone. Appearing to yield to his wife’s arguments, Rollin told Fourcade that his purpose was not to defeat her network but to make sure it was working in the best interests of the country. She was well aware that all of this—the lunch in the country, the display of sympathy by Rollin and his wife—were tactics meant to disarm her and to get her to do what he wanted. Nonetheless, she couldn’t help liking him.

  At the end of the lunch, he told her that her duty now was to her children. As long as she accepted that duty, he would protect her, even though that protection might not last long. He said that Darlan’s position in Vichy was not as strong as she might think and that Pierre Laval, supported by Berlin, was angling to return to power. If he succeeded, Marie-Madeleine and the other resisters would lose any hope of protection.

  That night, she decided to accept Rollin’s proposal. She would assure him that her days as a spymaster were over and that if Alliance was ever resurrected, its new master would be Vichy. Of course, she meant none of it. Because she was a woman, she knew Rollin underestimated her—a miscalculation on which she was determined to capitalize.

  Rollin, meanwhile, had summoned Gabriel Rivière and Jean Boutron to Vichy for questioning. Thanks to Fourcade’s warning, Rivière had had plenty of time to prepare himself for the interrogation. Yes, he told Rollin, he knew Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. She was an acquaintance who had lent him money to buy his vegetable business. When Rollin asked about his reported involvement in her resistance network, Rivière was aghast. Heaven forbid, he said, he would never get mixed up in any
thing like that! What about the use of radio transmitting sets? Again, Rivière was horror-stricken. Of course not, he declared. That would be sheer suicide. Was he involved in any resistance work? Heavens, no—he would never do something so dangerous! When Rollin’s agents had arrested Rivière, they found nothing incriminating in his warehouse and shop. After several hours of protesting his innocence, Rivière was finally let go. He traveled back to Marseille that night.

  Boutron was not as fortunate. For weeks, he had been aware that he was being followed in Madrid and other Spanish cities to which he traveled as part of his duties as Vichy’s deputy naval attaché. Although he didn’t know whether the men who shadowed him were French or German, he concluded that his cover had been blown.

  When ordered to report to Rollin in Vichy, Boutron decided to end the charade. He denied that he was a member of Alliance but acknowledged he had been sending information to London about German military operations in the free zone. His action, he said, had been taken on his own initiative. Responding to accusations that he had handed over state secrets to the enemy, he said such a charge was ridiculous, pointing out that his reports on the German military in no way harmed the national security of France. In addition, he insisted, Britain was not France’s enemy.

  For nearly a month, the French admiralty, which was eager to keep quiet the fact that it had a pro-British agent in its ranks, debated the question of what to do with Boutron. In the end, it imposed the relatively lenient sentence that Rollin had recommended: separation from the navy, reduction in rank, and, instead of prison, an indefinite internment at a sixteenth-century fort in the Alps, where his fellow internees would be Communist activists and black marketeers.

  Fourcade sent Boutron a message promising that Alliance agents in Grenoble would help him escape, although it might take some time to arrange. After agreeing to Rollin’s terms for herself, she was free to go. As she left Rollin’s office, she casually asked him about the 2 million francs that Gavarni had surrendered to him. “Rubbish,” he snorted: Gavarni had given him only 80,000 francs.

  Before she boarded a train for the Côte d’Azur and a reunion with her family, she tracked Gavarni down and told him about her meeting with Rollin. Now that she had reached her own agreement with Vichy, she said, she had no further need of his services. When he feebly accused her of ingratitude, she remarked that he had no reason to complain, given the fortune in francs that he had amassed for himself. His face turned a sickly green. She turned on her heel, confident that she needed to fear no more acts of betrayal from him.

  * * *

  —

  ACCOMPANIED BY HER EVER-VIGILANT brother-in-law, Marie-Madeleine traveled to her mother’s house overlooking the sea, near Mougins. She spent several weeks in that peaceful setting, ostentatiously cooking, tending the garden, playing with her children, mending their clothes, and engaging in other Vichy-approved “feminine” activities.

  But that did not mean she had given up her leadership of Alliance. Once she was sure she was not being shadowed by Rollin’s agents, she clandestinely reestablished contact with her headquarters and asked Maurice Coustenoble to act as her emissary between the Côte d’Azur and Marseille. During Coustenoble’s first visit to her mother’s house, Marie-Madeleine told him that in order to improve security and avoid the disasters of the previous year, several steps would have to be taken immediately: decentralizing the network, increasing the autonomy of individual sectors, and creating independent services for radio transmission, air operations, and sending mail. She also ordered Marseille to implement her decision to use animal code names for agents and sent, via Coustenoble, a list of names she had chosen thus far.

  With the many problems facing Alliance that demanded urgent attention, she was eager to leave the Côte d’Azur to take up her work, but she was concerned that if she returned too soon to Marseille, Rollin would discover that the network was not only still alive but flourishing. A family emergency provided a solution to her problem. During Marie-Madeleine’s stay at home with her family, a doctor had told her that her nine-year-old daughter, Béatrice, who suffered from a hip displacement like her mother, needed an operation to help correct the condition; the surgery, he added, would require a long period of convalescence. She was given the name of an eminent surgeon in Toulouse, a Dr. Charry, who reportedly was the only doctor in southwestern France who could perform the operation. She took Béatrice to see him, and he agreed to do it.

  The surgery was a success, and Marie-Madeleine was allowed to stay in Béatrice’s room at Charry’s clinic while the child recovered. The room was a large one, with enough furniture in which to hide the voluminous diagrams, maps, and organizational charts that Marie-Madeleine created as she sat by Béatrice’s bedside.

  While Léon Faye ran Alliance’s day-to-day operations in Marseille, Marie-Madeleine plotted its future. She worked on melding the new agents whom Faye had brought in with the network’s remaining old hands. She also made plans for resuscitating bases that had been entirely blown and plugging the holes with newcomers. She examined the strengths and weaknesses of the individual sectors and their chiefs and devised ways that she hoped would enhance the strengths and minimize the weaknesses. She dealt with endless logistical details—authorizing a transmitter to be sent to one place and more money to another, and setting up new bases in Bordeaux, Brest, and Strasbourg, among other locations. In addition, she directed Faye to send to Toulouse any agents he thought she should meet.

  During the several weeks that Béatrice and her mother spent at the clinic, Marie-Madeleine did her best to hide the documents on which she had been working before Dr. Charry and his nurses came into the room to tend to Béatrice. On a couple of occasions, however, Charry entered unexpectedly to find papers piled all over the floor.

  He asked Marie-Madeleine if she was writing a book. Actually, she said, she was doing some research for one. Charry stared at her for a moment, and she realized he had figured out what she was doing. But he said nothing. The next day, he ordered that a large table be brought into the room, on which she could spread out her papers, and asked if he could be of any further help. She replied that she would greatly appreciate it if he would allow her to have visitors for the rest of her and Béatrice’s stay. Charry readily agreed.

  At one point, he told Marie-Madeleine that he’d like to take a more active role in her resistance activities, but she gently declined his offer. He had already provided an essential service by sheltering her, she said, adding that his work as a surgeon was far more important to France and its people than his joining her network.

  Although she did not enlist Dr. Charry during her stay in Toulouse, Marie-Madeleine did not refrain from recruiting others. Toulouse—the fourth-largest city in France, with one of the oldest universities in Europe—was an important new base of operations for Alliance. To head the new sector, she named a married couple—Mouchou Damm, a local engineer of Polish descent, and his wife, Nelly. The Damms’ teenage son would serve as their adjutant. Soon their home would also house a radio transmitter, along with an operator sent by MI6 from Britain.

  The Damms were just one of dozens of married couples who worked for Marie-Madeleine and Alliance over the nearly five years of the network’s existence. Others included Gabriel Rivière and his wife, Madeleine, and the Duke of Magenta and his spouse, Marguerite. Sometimes whole families were involved, among them eight close relatives of Maurice Gillet, the fearless leader of the network’s sector in Brest, a key seaport in Brittany.

  A police superintendent named Jean Philippe was another important addition to the Toulouse operation. Philippe had many informants in the area who in the past had provided him with intelligence about criminal activities. He now instructed them to focus on ferreting out information about German military operations. He also used his position to prevent the arrest of a number of resistance fighters and to provide false papers to Jews.

  By the en
d of the war, more than 130 additional French policemen would join Philippe as Alliance operatives—proof that the much-hated French police forces, who were seen, quite rightly, as doing the Germans’ dirty work for them, had their fair share of members who passionately opposed the idea of being Nazi collaborators.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER TWO MONTHS IN the hospital, Béatrice was judged well enough to leave, and Fourcade rented a chalet in the foothills of the Pyrenees where her daughter could complete her convalescence in the company of Béatrice’s brother, grandmother, and other close relatives. For the little girl, the idea of another long separation from her mother, after so many months of being together, was devastating. On the day they left Toulouse, both mother and daughter were in floods of tears. More than two years would pass before Béatrice saw Fourcade again.

  Once again feeling profound guilt over her separation from her children, Fourcade returned to Marseille in June 1942. From the moment she arrived, she could see the progress that had been made in the reconstruction and expansion of the network. Her first stop was the Saint Charles bar, which was humming with activity. After meeting Faye there, she followed him back to the Alliance headquarters, a house at the highest point of the Corniche, a roadway that bordered the sea, with a panoramic view of the water. When they arrived, a servant in a white jacket appeared, bearing a tray of coffee and liqueurs. Faye introduced the man as Albert, a security man who doubled as a cook and butler. After taking a coffee and rejecting the liqueurs, Fourcade remarked tartly about how nice it was to have all these little luxuries, but what about the work of collecting intelligence?