Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  Another member of the police team—a short, wiry, dark-haired man—rushed in and grabbed her by the throat. She loudly swore at him while trying to swallow. When the German went back into the office, her assailant loosened his grasp and whispered in her ear that he was not German. He told her to continue shouting but to chew everything up as quickly as she could. She did as he instructed, but in between the insults and chewing, she asked him who he was.

  A friend, he answered: a French policeman forced by Vichy to escort the Germans in their raids on the resistance. She turned her head and stared at him. She desperately wanted to trust him, but her two years in the spy business had taught her the importance of doubt. When she said she didn’t believe him, he sighed and gave his name—Jean Boubil.

  He was in fact who he said he was—Inspector Jean Boubil of the Surveillance du Territoire, who’d been placed in charge of a squad of four French policemen assigned to accompany German agents in their raid on La Pinède. He and his French colleagues, not the Germans, were supposed to take into custody any resistance members and material captured in the raid.

  Fourcade decided she had no alternative but to trust him. She told him that she had a parcel of incriminating documents beneath her bed and that she was expecting visitors that day who must be stopped from coming in. Boubil retrieved the parcel from under the bed and stashed it out of sight atop a cupboard. He then summoned a young French policeman to the room and told him to go outside and stop anyone who wanted to enter the house.

  Boubil whispered to Fourcade to keep on struggling as he pushed her into the office. To her horror, she saw that the German—an Abwehr agent, she discovered later—was closely examining a sheet of paper that he’d picked up from the table on which the transmitter sat. It was a diagram, made by her brother months before, that listed the locations, call signs, wave-length details, and transmission times of all of Alliance’s transmitters in France. Waving it triumphantly at Boubil, the German exclaimed, “It’s the plan of their whole radio circuit!” Fourcade grabbed the paper from him. As he lunged toward her to retrieve it, Boubil intervened. He took the list from Fourcade and stuffed it into his pocket, telling the German that he’d give it to him later.

  At that moment, the network’s radio operator began shouting, “QS5, QS5!” The Abwehr operative slapped him across the face and yelled, “The man is mad!” A slight smile flickered across Fourcade’s face; he was agitated, certainly, but not mad. “QS5” was the code for a successful transmission: he was telling her that London had received his warning about the need to change that night’s embarkation site.

  Close to collapse from the high-wire tension of the last few minutes, Fourcade thought the day could not possibly get worse. And then it did. She looked up to see her brother, Jacques, who was due to leave that night on the British submarine, walk through the front door. In his hand was an old, muddy, moldy suitcase. He told her he’d come to say goodbye but that it hadn’t been easy. Somebody standing near the door had shouted at him that the Gestapo was inside.

  Her heart sinking, she stared down at the suitcase, knowing what it contained: the early records of Alliance, including the 1940 letter from Charles de Gaulle to Navarre, that she and Jacques had buried almost two years before in the pigsty at their mother’s villa on the Côte d’Azur. In a faltering voice, Jacques said he thought the papers would be ruined if they stayed in the pigsty. His voice trailed off. Watching the interaction between the siblings, Boubil figured out what was going on. He put the suitcase in a corner and threw an eiderdown quilt over it.

  It was at that point that a short, youthful, fair-haired Frenchman named Xavier Piani appeared on the scene and began to restore order to the chaos. Piani, a Surveillance du Territoire superintendent, calmly but firmly ordered the Abwehr agents to leave. He reminded them that under the terms of Germany’s agreement with Vichy, they were obliged to leave these prisoners and all the incriminating material that had been gathered in the custody of the French police. The Germans did as they were told but made it clear that they would inform their superiors about the importance of the resistance members who had just been captured.

  After the Abwehr men were gone, Piani formally arrested Fourcade and the other Alliance agents, telling them to pack overnight bags and accompany him and his men to the police headquarters in Marseille. Seven in all were taken to jail, including Fourcade, Faye, Jacques Bridou, Monique Bontinck, and the radio operator. As they emerged from the villa and were placed into police cars, Fourcade noticed Ernest Siegrist watching from across the street. Her heart lifted: He had undoubtedly already sounded the alarm of their capture.

  As soon as they arrived at the headquarters, it became clear that Boubil was not the only French police official who secretly sympathized with Fourcade and the network. She and her staff were immediately given a good meal and then subjected to several hours of relatively gentle interrogation.

  That night, they were escorted to L’Évêché prison on the outskirts of Marseille. Fourcade was taken to a cell containing a cot, toilet, and a naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Sitting on the cot, she took a cigarette from the lining of her coat. As she lit it, she saw bugs and a few rats emerging from the cell’s darkened corners. Wrapping her coat closely around her and shrinking back on the cot, she forced herself to focus on the rescue operations that her network had just overseen. “I only hoped that Giraud had arrived safely at Gibraltar and that the second submarine had managed to get away,” she recalled. “Only that would justify our present plight.”

  * * *

  —

  GIRAUD HAD INDEED ARRIVED safely in Gibraltar, but nothing after his arrival had gone according to plan. Shortly after his seaplane landed, the French general had been escorted to a warren of tunnels that burrowed deep inside the Rock of Gibraltar. Excavated by the British army more than a century before, the tunnels were in effect a huge, dank underground fortress, housing barracks, offices, hangars, and stores of guns and ammunition. General Eisenhower had taken over one of the offices as his headquarters for Operation Torch. It was there that he and his deputy, General Mark Clark, welcomed Giraud.

  The Americans were greatly relieved to see the Frenchman. They had hoped to have him in North Africa by the time of the invasion so that they could announce his appointment as leader of the Vichy forces there. But with the launch of the attack only eight hours away, that was clearly impossible; he would not be able to travel until the landing forces had captured an airport. In the meantime, the Americans planned to broadcast a statement to France’s colonies in North Africa in Giraud’s name, urging French troops to cooperate with the Allies. It would be transmitted as soon as word came that the landings had been successful.

  Because time was short, Eisenhower and Clark had already written the statement for Giraud. It declared that the United States, in order to stop Germany from invading North Africa, had acted first. It then called on French officers and troops to join the Americans in their fight against the occupiers of France. The statement, ostensibly from Giraud, concluded by saying, “I resume my place of combat among you.”

  But before Eisenhower and Clark could explain the statement to Giraud, he let them know what he expected from them. “As I understand it,” he said, “when I land in North Africa, I am to assume command of all Allied forces and become the Supreme Allied Commander in North Africa.” The two Americans were incredulous. “I think,” Eisenhower said cautiously, “there is some misunderstanding.”

  Later, Clark would write that “Ike had never been so shocked and showed it so little….There was no question in my mind that [Giraud] was stating what he believed to be in the agreement. Furthermore, he was under the impression that there would be an almost immediate Allied effort to invade France proper to forestall the German occupation of Vichy territory. Just how he had gotten this impression I was never able to clear up….As we talked it over, it became obvious that we were in for som
e serious trouble.”

  The three generals argued for hours, with neither Eisenhower nor Clark able to change Giraud’s mind that only a Frenchman could be in charge of an Allied assault on French territory. At his wit’s end, Clark finally told Giraud that while he and Eisenhower were happy to have him commanding all the French forces in North Africa, they were not prepared to offer him anything more.

  “Then I shall return to France,” Giraud replied.

  “How are you going back?” Clark asked.

  “By the same route I came here.”

  “Oh, no, you won’t,” Clark snapped. “That was a one-way submarine. You’re not going back to France on it.” The Americans then accused Giraud of putting his personal ambition before the best interests of France. He answered the insult with a shrug.

  Clark had had enough. Turning to the American colonel who was acting as translator, he snarled, “Tell him this. Tell him that if you don’t go along with us, General, you’re going to be out in the snow on your ass!”

  * * *

  —

  AT THE SAME TIME that the generals were wrangling in Gibraltar, Jean Boutron arrived at the Saint Charles station in Marseille. He had been in hiding near Lyon since his failed attempt to escape by Lysander two months before. A few days earlier, Marie-Madeleine had sent a messenger to inform him that he was to leave by British submarine on November 7. The messenger told him to go to the Saint Charles bar that morning and await instructions.

  When he arrived, Émile Hédin was standing behind the bar. The two, who had never met, introduced themselves by their animal code names. “Bull,” Boutron said; “Beaver,” Hédin replied. They grinned and shook hands. “In a second,” Boutron later wrote, “two animals that did not know each other became fast friends.”

  Boutron and Hédin were expected at La Pinède at eleven o’clock that morning. After being briefed by Marie-Madeleine, Boutron, along with the other submarine passengers, was scheduled to travel to Cros-de-Cagnes late that afternoon. As she had predicted, none of the generals had shown up.

  Shortly before they were to leave, the phone rang. When Hédin answered it, a male voice said hurriedly: “You were to come with someone at eleven o’clock for a rendezvous on the Corniche. Do not come at any cost! Do you understand, at any cost!” The caller abruptly hung up, and a shocked Hédin relayed the message to Boutron. “We looked at each other with anguish,” Boutron recalled. He and Hédin had no idea what had happened, but “it clearly was a catastrophe.”

  Soon afterward, Ernest Siegrist hurried into the bar. It was he who had made the call. Siegrist, who had been outside La Pinède from the beginning of the raid, described to Hédin and Boutron what had happened. He then left to find out the latest news about his arrested colleagues.

  Meanwhile, Pierre Dallas, who, together with Colonel Bernis was to direct the second submarine operation, arrived at the bar, along with the other passengers. After absorbing the shock of the arrests of Marie-Madeleine, Faye, and the rest of the Alliance headquarters staff, Dallas decided that the network must carry on with that night’s operation. The Avia head had no way of knowing what had happened in the villa that morning, and, for him, the blow of the arrests was compounded by the fear that London had not been informed in time of the change in embarkation sites.

  Late that afternoon, Dallas and seven passengers boarded a train to Cros-de-Cagnes. In addition to Boutron, the travelers included two other Alliance agents, two aides of General Giraud, and a friend of the general’s who at the last minute had taken the place of Marie-Madeleine’s brother. When they arrived, they were escorted to a small hotel near the sea, run by supporters of the network, where Colonel Bernis was waiting for them.

  Bernis, too, was stunned by the news from Marseille and worried that the submarine might not show up at the new embarkation point. But he and Dallas shrugged off their concern and followed the same plan they had employed at Lavandou. Although it was cloudy, the weather was far better than it had been two nights before: There was no wind, and the sea was calm, almost flat.

  A few minutes before midnight, Dallas and the seven travelers boarded a fishing boat and headed out to sea. Standing in the bow, Dallas flashed the prearranged signal. Consumed with anxiety, Boutron scanned the darkness. Would this be another fiasco, like the Lysander mission? He heard a muffled exclamation from one of his companions, who pointed his finger to the right and exclaimed, “There!” Turning his head, Boutron saw “a low, elongated mass that became more defined as the boat moved forward.” Suddenly, he spied the vessel’s conning tower. “The message had been received,” he later wrote. “There was no trap. The submarine was there.” His initial feeling—an enormous sense of relief—was followed by pure euphoria. After all the fears and disappointments of the last seven months, he was finally on his way to London.

  A slight problem arose when the British submarine captain, who thought he was rescuing a group of distinguished Vichy generals, saw instead, as one observer put it, “a bunch of ordinary people in tattered old clothes and shivering with cold.” Boutron told him he and several of the other travelers were agents of a French intelligence network working with MI6, mentioning the name of Major Richards as their main British contact.

  Although he was clearly still suspicious, the commander brought everyone on board. As the sub headed out to sea, Boutron watched Pierre Dallas, who was heading back to shore. “I was going toward freedom,” he recalled, “while he was returning to the enemy and bondage.”

  Before retiring to the bunk to which he had been assigned, Boutron asked the captain to send a message to MI6 reporting the arrests of Marie-Madeleine and his other colleagues. As soon as the officials there received it, they sent a coded warning over the BBC to all of Alliance’s sectors.

  In addition to providing news and commentary to occupied Europe, the BBC also served as a conduit of information between the British secret services—MI6 and SOE—and the European resistance networks. The information was sent in the form of brief, cryptic coded messages whose meaning was known only by the networks to which they were directed. MI6’s message to Alliance was succinct: “Be careful. In the south of France, the animals are ill with the plague.”

  * * *

  —

  AT DAWN THE NEXT day, Fourcade was awakened from a restless sleep by a police inspector who rushed into her cell with a big grin on his face and some “absolutely marvelous” news: The Allies had landed in North Africa. With a smile as wide as his, she embraced him.

  When she and the others were taken back to police headquarters later that day for more questioning, they were greeted with even greater warmth by police officials than the day before. Everyone, she recalled, was celebrating the Allied landing.

  Jean Léonard, who was the chief police commissioner in Marseille and the man in charge of the agents’ interrogation, told Faye that the Allied landing had thrown the Vichy government into a state of turmoil and that police officials there had requested that Faye be brought to them. Buoyed by the enthusiastic response of the French police in Marseille to the Allied invasion, Faye told Fourcade he was sure that Vichy would be receptive to the idea of armed opposition to the Germans, especially in light of the rumors of Germany’s imminent occupation of the free zone.

  Remembering the disastrous outcome of Faye’s earlier efforts to launch a mutiny of French military forces in North Africa, Fourcade urged him to try to escape during the trip to Vichy. A police inspector named Simon Cottoni, who had been assigned to drive Faye there, supported Fourcade’s argument. Cottoni, as it turned out, was himself an Alliance agent, recruited by another of Fourcade’s lieutenants, and was meeting her and Faye for the first time. He told them the Germans had been on a rampage since their capture and were determined to take them into custody. Cottoni offered to drive Faye to neutral Switzerland, a suggestion that Fourcade emphatically seconded.

  She told Faye that
his Vichy plan wouldn’t work and that everyone there was “rotten to the core.” She added that she herself was going to do everything she could to get away. Faye refused to listen. If he didn’t at least try to persuade Vichy officials to do the right thing, he said, he would feel like a deserter. His departure with Cottoni, Fourcade later wrote, left her heartbroken.

  The next morning, she saw from the pained expression on Jean Léonard’s face that the news from Vichy was not good. Friends of Faye’s had met with Marshal Pétain, pleaded Faye’s case, and urged that Pétain and his government leave for Algiers before the Germans marched into the free zone, which was expected any day now. Pétain refused, and Faye was put in jail. The armistice army did nothing to prepare to resist a German incursion.

  Meanwhile, the Abwehr and Gestapo had ordered the Marseille police commissioner to turn over all the papers captured at Alliance’s Marseille headquarters, including the diagram with the locations and other details of the network’s radio transmitters. Fourcade exclaimed that if Léonard did as the Germans ordered, he would in effect be surrendering all her network’s radio sets to them, which would mean the destruction of Alliance.

  Léonard responded that he had no option, although Fourcade could see that he was badly shaken by the order. She pleaded with him to allow her and her brother to make a copy of the diagram that would look like the original but with false information. After considerable argument, Léonard agreed, as long as the two documents appeared identical.

  Accompanied by two policemen, Fourcade returned to La Pinède to pick up the same items Jacques had used to create the diagram, including squared paper, pens, and a variety of colored inks. Back at the police headquarters, as three inspectors looked on, she and another Alliance agent dictated to Jacques the apocryphal details, including hundreds of incorrect call signs and frequencies. The work was laborious and lasted throughout the late afternoon and well into the night. When it was done, Léonard looked closely at both documents, declaring admiringly that he couldn’t tell them apart. To make sure there was no mixup of the two, he took out a cigarette lighter and burned the original in front of Marie-Madeleine and her brother.