by Lynne Olson
But during his reconnaissance mission, Coustenoble also found that several of his imprisoned colleagues had smuggled out messages to their families, hidden inside parcels of soiled clothing that were laundered by family members and returned to Fresnes. Most of the messages detailed the extraordinarily harsh treatment the Alliance agents had received, including several instances of torture. But a message from Lucien Vallet, Fourcade’s former radio operator, provided the first bit of concrete evidence of Bla’s treachery. During an interrogation by the Gestapo, Vallet wrote, he had been shown the very radio set he had been using before his arrest—a set that had been spirited away by another Alliance agent before the Germans could find it and had been delivered by the agent to Bla.
Fourcade immediately passed on Vallet’s report to MI6 headquarters, which replied that Bla was still sending excellent information from Normandy and reiterated that she was mistaken about his guilt. This time, however, she refused to give up and dispatched yet another message arguing her case. MI6 failed to respond for several days. Then one morning, a top-priority message landed on Fourcade’s desk, with instructions to decode it at once. In it, MI6 officials acknowledged that Bla was indeed a traitor who had worked for the Germans. They ordered Alliance to execute him.
Not until months later did Fourcade find out that MI6, thanks to her pressure, had finally conducted an investigation into Bla’s past. In doing so, the agency discovered that he had been a member of the British Union of Fascists, founded by Oswald Mosley, a former member of Parliament who’d been arrested and jailed by the British government in 1940. MI6 officials came to the conclusion that Bla had been working for the Germans the entire time he had been in France. They immediately sent a cable ordering him to hide his radio set and travel to neutral Spain or Switzerland, where he was to report to British authorities. He never responded. It was then that the agency decided that because he was personally acquainted with leading members of Alliance, the danger to the network was grave enough to warrant his execution.
Eddie Keyser suggested that Fourcade try to set up a meeting between Bla and one of her top agents in Lyon, with the idea of executing him there. She agreed, and a message was sent to Bla in Normandy telling him to appear at the rendezvous on a certain date. When the Alliance agent showed up at the appointed place, Bla was nowhere in sight; German military police, however, were there in force. The agent barely escaped.
For the next several months, Bla’s trail went cold. There were reported sightings in Pau and Toulouse, but to Fourcade’s frustration, no solid leads regarding his whereabouts—until Gachet’s chance encounter with him in Marseille.
During their brief chat, Bla asked Gachet if he could help him get a job with another network. Gachet said he would see what he could do and arranged to meet him the following night at a bar in Marseille. The next morning, Léon Faye burst into La Pinède and told Fourcade about Gachet’s spotting of Bla and the scheduled rendezvous. He insisted that she stay away, and she agreed to let him take charge of Bla’s capture and interrogation.
At the bar that evening, Gachet told Bla that the head of his network was anxious to meet him and had asked Gachet to bring him to the network’s headquarters. Shortly after they left the bar, two men in raincoats, their hats pulled down over their eyes, stopped them on the street. Identifying themselves as Vichy police, they asked both for their papers. Gachet strongly objected, but Bla readily handed over an identity card that bore his real name, an address in Paris, and his nationality as a British subject. One of the policemen said they needed to check out his story and ordered him to come with them.
Gachet again objected, but Bla told him to be quiet, then handed the policeman a piece of paper with a phone number scribbled on it, saying that if he called the number, he’d find out that everything was all right. The number, it later turned out, was that of the Abwehr headquarters in Paris.
The policemen hustled Gachet and Bla into a waiting car, which raced through Marseille’s narrow streets, skirted the port, and headed along the Corniche for a mile or so before stopping at a building a few blocks from the coastal road. Once inside, the policemen’s courtesy vanished; they shoved Bla into a brightly lit room, where Gabriel Rivière stood, pointing a gun at the Englishman. Léon Faye, who was next to Rivière, grabbed Bla by the lapels of his jacket and barked, “We’ve got you at last!” Bla looked around the room in panic. The two “policemen” had taken off their hats and coats, revealing themselves to be Alliance operatives as well. Bla told Faye he’d made a mistake, that he was not the man Faye thought he was.
For more than an hour, Faye battered Bla with questions, but he insisted again and again that Faye and his colleagues were mistaken. None of the Alliance agents in the room had been in Pau when Bla had arrived by parachute in the spring of 1941; Fourcade was the sole member of the network in Marseille who could positively identify him. Although Faye had wanted to keep her involvement in this whole sordid business to a minimum, he reluctantly asked her to come to the office where Bla was being held, saying she was the only one who might be able to get him to talk.
When she entered the bare, smoke-filled room, lit only by a single unshaded bulb overhead, Bla recoiled in shock. Earlier, Fourcade had told Faye that although Bla should not be mistreated during his interrogation, he should be forced to stand throughout. He continued to do so as she questioned him, with only one other agent, who kept a gun trained on him, in the room. Bla readily admitted to her that he had indeed been a member of Oswald Mosley’s fascist party and had offered his services to the Abwehr in Paris shortly after leaving Pau. On the Abwehr’s orders, he had infiltrated Alliance’s sector in Paris, worming his way into its agents’ confidence and setting up their arrests.
When Fourcade asked if he had ever been in Normandy, he replied that he had rarely gone there. His radio set, which MI6 believed was being operated from there, was in fact at the Abwehr’s Paris offices. He did the actual transmitting himself, since each operator had his own distinctive style and he didn’t want to arouse any suspicions within MI6. Much of the information he sent was genuine although relatively unimportant, he said. Occasionally, though, the Germans slipped in a bit of false intelligence to send MI6 on a wild-goose chase. He’d come to Marseille on behalf of the Abwehr, he added, to find out where she was.
As forthcoming as he was about his activities in Paris, however, Bla fell silent when Fourcade asked him about his contacts in London. When he had first come to Pau, he had boasted to her brother that he had a secret high-level connection in the British capital. But when she mentioned that, he refused to say anything more. Exhausted, Fourcade finally gave up. Finding Faye in an adjacent room, she said that Bla had confirmed everything they already knew but had revealed little else. He told her to go back to La Pinède, adding that what happened next didn’t concern her.
Knowing that MI6 had confirmed the execution order for Bla earlier in the day, she asked Faye what he was going to do. He produced a packet of white pills from his pocket, saying he had been given them in London. Fourcade knew what they were: cyanide tablets issued to MI6 and SOE agents operating in occupied Europe to use in case of arrest and interrogation by the Gestapo. Faye said they worked very quickly. Nodding, she told him she didn’t want Bla to know what was about to happen.
As the sun rose over the Mediterranean, she left the building and caught a tram back to La Pinède. Several hours later, Lucien Poulard, one of the agents involved in Bla’s capture, rushed into the villa. He was distraught, and it took Fourcade several minutes to calm him down. Despite two separate attempts to kill Bla, Poulard told her, he was still alive. “You can’t imagine what it was like,” Poulard said with a shudder, as he described the macabre scene from the beginning.
After Fourcade had left, Poulard, on Faye’s orders, had given Bla a bowl of hot soup in which he had dissolved a cyanide tablet. Also on Faye’s orders, Poulard joined Bla at the table, eating
from his own bowl of soup so that Bla would not suspect that his had been tampered with. They began eating, but nothing happened. Finally, Bla complained of a stomachache and asked to lie down. Poulard agreed. After three hours, Bla was still conscious.
Faye told Poulard to try again, this time with a cyanide tablet dissolved in a cup of hot tea. Bla swallowed a mouthful, grimaced, and asked, “Is this an order from London?” Then he finished the tea and handed the cup back to Poulard with the remark, “It can’t be much fun for an officer to have to do this kind of thing.” Another two hours went by, and Bla was still very much alive.
Once Fourcade heard the story, she returned to the building near the Corniche, where she and Faye reluctantly agreed to a proposal by Rivière to recruit several gangsters from Marseille’s underworld, who were acquaintances of his, to help them dispose of the seemingly indomitable Bla. According to Rivière’s plan, he and the Alliance operatives would escort Bla late that night down to a small, secluded beach near the city’s Old Port, where the mobsters would meet them in a fishing boat. After boarding the boat, Bla would be taken several miles out to sea and then thrown overboard.
Again, Fourcade headed back to La Pinède, where she spent a sleepless night. Staring out a window early the following morning, she saw Faye’s tall, slightly stooped figure approaching the door. Without a word, he opened it, flung himself down on a couch in the ground-floor office, and began to tell her the latest chapter in this ongoing ghastly comedy of errors. The gangsters had failed to show up, and Bla was still alive.
They had waited for hours on the beach, Faye said. As the time crept by, he began losing his resolve to get rid of Bla. When Rivière told Faye that the gangsters obviously weren’t coming, Faye ordered everyone, including Bla, to return to the Corniche.
Fourcade realized that Faye was having a crisis of conscience, and she understood why. Like many of his Alliance colleagues, he was a career military officer, a toughened veteran of World War I who had never quailed at the thought of killing the enemy. But the cold, deliberate execution of a former colleague, even one who had admitted to betraying his comrades, was harder to stomach.
“You’re exhausted, and your men are worn out,” she told him. “To [them], this villain will soon seem like a nice person. They’ll pity him, whereas he is in fact an enemy.” Bla, she declared, must be put on trial for espionage: “We have the right to do so, and it’s our duty.”
A few hours later, she, Faye, Rivière, Lucien Poulard, and two other operatives sat around a large table in the room where Bla was being held. He was placed in a chair facing them. Faye, who presided over the improvised military tribunal, stood and read a lengthy indictment. When asked to respond, Bla said that all the allegations were true; he was indeed a German spy. Faye then condemned him to death. At that point, Fourcade left the room, returned to La Pinède, took a strong sleeping pill, and went to bed.
Bla’s fate was never made public. There was some talk after the war that Faye had been unable to go through with the execution and allowed Bla to flee to North Africa, where he settled down with his wife and children. In fact, Bla’s wife never saw him again. In late 1944, when she made inquiries to British authorities about his whereabouts, she was told that her husband had been turned by the Germans and, when found out, had committed suicide.
As October 1942 gave way to November, Fourcade’s nerves were stretched tight. She was doing her best to keep up with MI6’s incessant demands for intelligence while having to deal with Bla’s capture and execution and Germany’s crackdown against the resistance in the free zone. Rumors were spreading that German troops were on the verge of occupying all of France. Adding to the strain, MI6 had just catapulted her and Alliance into the midst of a political hornet’s nest involving the Allies’ top-secret planning for an invasion of North Africa.
Although she had no idea of its meaning, Fourcade had received the first hint of the coming operation six months earlier, when her daughter was convalescing at the clinic in Toulouse. Working one night by the dim light of the lamp in Béatrice’s room, she was deciphering the latest messages from MI6 brought to her by a courier from Alliance headquarters. She was puzzled by the last one she read. Sent to her by Eddie Keyser and marked “strictly confidential,” it noted the recent escape of a top French general from a German prison. Keyser wanted Fourcade to contact the general, who was believed to be in Lyon, to see if he would serve his country again.
The subject of Eddie Keyser’s inquiry was General Henri Giraud, the highest-ranking French officer captured by the Germans during the 1940 fighting in France. Taken prisoner when his headquarters was overrun during the third week of the Nazi blitzkrieg, Giraud had been jailed at Koenigstein fortress, on the banks of the Elbe River near Dresden. One of the largest hilltop fortifications in Europe, Koenigstein was known as the Saxon Bastille.
In the early hours of April 17, 1942, the sixty-three-year-old Giraud had lowered himself down a sixty-foot rope in an extraordinary escape engineered by anti-German military intelligence agents in Vichy. They spirited Giraud out of Germany, through Switzerland, and into the free zone. An infuriated Hitler demanded his return, and Pierre Laval, who had just taken over again as head of the Vichy government, insisted that Giraud must give himself up to the Germans. But Marshal Pétain, to whom Giraud had sworn his allegiance, would not hear of handing the general over. Laval did not dare to arrest Giraud on his own, knowing that the French armed forces would revolt if he tried. Although Giraud and his family were kept under police surveillance, he led a relatively unrestricted life near Lyon, making clear his opposition to German occupation and the need to combat it.
From the moment she read Keyser’s cryptic message about Giraud, Fourcade had misgivings about the motive behind it. Why were she and Alliance being asked to get involved in this? Clearly, MI6 officials had no intention of asking Giraud to gather intelligence for them. What, then, did the British government want from the general? Was Churchill thinking of setting up a rival to Charles de Gaulle?
Since the fall of 1940, Fourcade had resolutely avoided getting involved in issues relating to French politics, whether inside or outside the country. As she saw it, Alliance’s only mission was to collect information about the German military presence in France. While she supported the efforts of de Gaulle and the Free French, her first loyalty was to MI6. She wanted no part of the rivalries and feuds bedeviling other French resistance networks or the constant, often violent intrigues and power struggles raging at the Free French headquarters in London.
As it happened, her suspicions about the motivation behind the British government’s interest in Giraud proved to be correct. As a result of pressure from President Roosevelt, Churchill was reluctantly seeking another French general to work with the Allies in helping them win over Vichy French forces in North Africa.
In the spring of 1942, just four months after the United States entered the war, its military leaders had joined their British colleagues in preparing for the Allies’ first joint offensive against Germany. U.S. generals had pushed for an invasion of the Continent, but the British protested that Anglo-American forces were not ready for such a high-risk campaign. The two sides finally compromised on an alternative proposed by the British—an amphibious invasion of North Africa, to take place in November.
From the beginning, however, FDR had been adamant that de Gaulle and the Free French must have no involvement in either planning or carrying out the attack. Filled with disdain for both the French general and his country, the president had little understanding of the complexity of the situation in France and scant sympathy for its citizens. All he knew or cared about was that France had failed the Allied cause by capitulating to Germany. As for de Gaulle himself, Roosevelt considered him insignificant and absurd, a British puppet with grandiose ambitions.
It didn’t matter to Roosevelt that by late 1942, the Free French had recruited an army of more than a hundre
d thousand men, an air force exceeding a thousand pilots and crew, several dozen ships, and support from most resistance leaders in France. Roosevelt informed Churchill that the general and his followers “must be given no role in the liberation and governance of North Africa or France” and insisted that de Gaulle not even be told of the upcoming attack.
The president was far more cordial to Pétain and his government; unlike Britain, the United States had formally recognized Vichy as the legitimate government of France almost immediately after the country’s capitulation to Germany. Convinced that America was popular with Vichy, Roosevelt told Churchill he was confident that Vichy troops in North Africa would put up little or no resistance to the landings as long as U.S. soldiers took the lead and Free French troops were nowhere to be seen.
Churchill, for his part, was faced with an agonizing dilemma. In June 1940, he had made a solemn pledge to support de Gaulle, and he shrank from having to go back on his word. But he desperately needed Roosevelt and the United States to provide the manpower and industrial strength necessary for Britain to survive and, in tandem with Britain and the Soviet Union, to eventually win the war. Churchill considered himself FDR’s lieutenant and told his staff that “nothing must stand in the way of his friendship for the President on which so much depended.” The British ended up handing over all initiative for the invasion to the Americans.
