Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

Stosskopf had fought in World War I and won a Croix de Guerre. After the war, he studied maritime engineering at the prestigious École Polytechnique near Paris, which produced elite technocrats to run French industry and the government. In 1938, he had been brought to Lorient to help monitor the construction of new ships. He was soon promoted to chief engineer. As part of his job, he worked closely with French naval intelligence officials in Paris.

  When the Germans arrived in June 1940, the word spread that Stosskopf had heartily welcomed them. In fact, he hated the intruders and initially had tried to avoid any contact with them. But his friends at naval intelligence, who were now in Vichy but who remained resolutely opposed to German occupation, persuaded him that with his knowledge of German, he could provide them with invaluable information about the enemy’s activities at the base. He agreed.

  Stosskopf then launched a campaign to win the Germans’ trust. It proved so successful that when the submarine base became operational, he was one of the few Frenchmen in a high-level position to be allowed to enter it. Under the pretext of supervising French workers, he could come and go as he wished without arousing suspicion.

  Stosskopf regularly traveled to Vichy to hand over the fruits of his labor: details about the submarine pens, the number and identification of the U-boats housed there, the names of their captains, the dates of their missions. In addition, he noted the technical innovations in submarine warfare made by the Germans.

  JACQUES STOSSKOPF

  His reports also contained details of the homecoming ceremonies of subs returning from their missions, to which he was always invited. When a sub entered the harbor, it displayed victory pennants on its forward stay, one for each ship the crew had sunk. A white pennant signified a merchant ship, a red pennant meant a warship, and a red-and-white pennant was a cruiser. Stosskopf noted the number and color of the pennants and cross-checked them with the insignias painted on the submarines. Instead of a number, each sub was identified by a distinctive emblem, such as a bull’s head, cupid, fish, iron cross, heart, or four aces. In that way, he could identify the U-boats and the precise successes—or failures—of their missions.

  His friends at naval intelligence, meanwhile, passed on all this information to the British, who were anxious to learn as much about Dönitz’s operation as they could. Shortly before the Germans occupied the free zone, Stosskopf began working for Joël Lemoigne and Alliance’s Sea Star group. As the war progressed, he also transmitted information from a group of young French engineers who worked for him and whom he recruited as subagents.

  For Marie-Madeleine and the British, Stosskopf was a gift from the gods. Their constant worry was how long he could continue this extraordinarily risky double life before the Abwehr and Gestapo finally caught up with him.

  AFTER GERMAN TROOPS OCCUPY ALL OF FRANCE IN NOVEMBER 1942, MARIE-MADELEINE FOURCADE IS CONSTANTLY ON THE RUN, JUST ONE STEP AHEAD OF THE GESTAPO. DURING THE NEXT EIGHT MONTHS, SHE MOVES HER HEADQUARTERS TO EIGHT DIFFERENT PLACES, STARTING IN MARSEILLE AND ENDING IN PARIS.

  For the rest of her life, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade would refer to 1943 as “the terrible year.”

  Faced with the looming Allied triumphs in North Africa and Stalingrad, the Reich, once seemingly omnipotent, was under threat and on the defensive, which made life even more perilous and menacing for those under its thumb and especially for those who actively resisted it.

  The Reich’s military defeats in 1943 coincided with a sharp increase in resistance activity in France, sparked primarily by Germany’s decision to draft hundreds of thousands of French citizens to work as forced labor in its industrial war effort. Initially, Pierre Laval had called on the French to volunteer, but when few responded, he issued an order requiring all Frenchmen between the ages of eighteen and fifty and all unmarried women between twenty-one and thirty-five to give two years of service to German war work. The Service du Travail Obligatoire (or STO, as it was commonly known) was in effect a national draft for slave labor—imposed by the French government itself.

  Until the work draft, the lives of most of the French had not been deeply affected by German repression. STO, however, hit home in the most literal way: Virtually every family had a loved one in danger of being rounded up. For many, enduring the occupation was now no longer an option; it was time to work toward ending it. As a result, the resistance finally became a true force in French society. Clandestine newspapers called on all French citizens to refuse to obey the order. Worker strikes and protests multiplied. More important, tens of thousands of men left their homes and went underground. The lightly populated, heavily wooded French countryside, along with mountainous regions in the east and south of the country, became favorite hiding places; in those out-of-the way places, members of newly formed quasiguerrilla groups, called maquis, lived off the land and began to plot sabotage and subversion.

  Once it had wrested control of policing and security from the German military, the SS set out to destroy the increasingly audacious resistance networks and movements. “If there had been any bridle upon the terror before 1943, it was swept away now,” recalled Pierre de Vomécourt, a prominent resistance leader.

  From mid-1942 to mid-1943, German security forces, along with French police, arrested some sixteen thousand resistance members, many of whom were tortured and put to death. Also taking part in the purge was a brutal new French paramilitary force called the Milice, whose members, according to Vomécourt, were, “almost to a man, thugs on the make.”

  For the Abwehr and Gestapo, the Alliance network was a key target. In late 1942, a suspected French spy was arrested in the Alsatian city of Strasbourg. Under harsh interrogation by the Gestapo, he revealed he had been recruited to collect information in Alsace by “an important British intelligence network” and had met its two leaders, whose code names were Aigle (Eagle) and Hérisson (Hedgehog). The Strasbourg Gestapo reported to its headquarters in Paris that it had opened a full investigation into this clandestine organization whose members took the names of animals as pseudonyms. The Germans began referring to the group as Noah’s Ark.

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  WHILE MARIE-MADELEINE LOVED THE peace and security of Ussel, she knew that her presence there was putting at risk the clandestine Lysander landings at the nearby airfield. So two days before the 1943 New Year, she, together with Faye, Bontinck, and Rodriguez, moved to an abandoned château on the outskirts of Sarlat, a medieval town in the Dordogne, about ninety miles to the southwest.

  The capital of the Dordogne in the Middle Ages, Sarlat looked, in the words of one writer, “as if it had been preserved in aspic since the 16th century, a glorious jumble of medieval houses, narrow alleyways, dank tunnels, and grand Renaissance townhouses.” But Fourcade was in no mood to appreciate the beauty of the town, with its honey-colored stone buildings, gracious central square, and imposing cathedral. She was gloomy and on edge, a state of mind not helped by her stay in the dark, dusty, neglected château that had become her new headquarters.

  Her spirits rose briefly on New Year’s Day when the château’s ancient stove rumbled to life and more than a dozen Alliance agents and staff members came together again to enjoy a holiday feast. She, Faye, Bontinck, and Rodriguez were joined by, among others, Maurice Coustenoble, Philippe Koenigswerther, Lucien Poulard, Ernest Siegrist, and Colonel Édouard Kauffmann, the head of the Dordogne sector. The dinner was made even more cheerful by the largesse of Kauffmann, who owned a farm near Sarlat. He had brought with him a cornucopia of foods that were unavailable even on the black market, including a ham and some of the famous Dordogne truffles, along with a selection of wines from his extensive cellar. As Fourcade listened to the laughter, lively conversation, and clink of glasses, her eyes filled with tears at the sight of her veteran agents and newcomers celebrating together.

  But when they left the next day, her distress returned. In her increasingly unsettled and dangero
us life, she was now forced to deal with yet another complication: She was expecting Faye’s child. Her pregnancy could not have come at a more inopportune time, but it did not deflect her from her commitment to Alliance. Faye knew about the pregnancy, as did Bontinck and Rodriguez, but it’s unclear how many others were aware of her condition. Fourcade, who was extremely slender, likely did everything she could to conceal it, keeping it a closely guarded secret both during the war and afterward. In her memoirs, she made no mention of it, just as she never discussed the nature of her relationship with Faye.

  Her emotional state, already fragile, suffered another blow when on January 13, Faye left for Ussel, where he would board his second Lysander flight to London. While she knew it was important, for the network’s sake, that he go, his departure hit her hard. She couldn’t rid herself of a sense of impending danger, and, on the night he left, she wrote to Mouchou Damm, the leader of Alliance’s Toulouse sector, asking him to find her a new, less isolated headquarters as soon as possible. Unable to sleep that night, she barricaded herself inside the château.

  Before dawn the next morning, she heard the crunch of tires on the gravel drive outside. Turning out the light, she hid behind the massive front door, a small revolver in her hand. To her relief, the door opened to reveal Ferdinand Rodriguez, who had driven Faye to Ussel. He walked in, carrying a suitcase, and told her to relax: Everything had gone as planned.

  After giving her a British cigarette from a cache in his pocket, he opened the suitcase, which the Lysander had brought from London, and took out a tin of powdered coffee, one of the many small gifts that the British routinely included when they sent questionnaires, along with thousands of francs in brick-like bundles plus letters, reports, and various other items. For the next hour or so, Fourcade smoked, slowly sipped her coffee, and read the piles of papers which she had been sent, most of them dealing with top-secret problems on which information was urgently needed. Later that morning, she summoned Colonel Kauffmann and told him she was leaving early the following day. Damm had found her a house in Cahors, another charming medieval town, about thirty miles south of Sarlat.

  At first light, the two vehicles sent by Kauffmann to take her, Bontinck, Rodriguez, and Ernest Siegrist to Cahors, along with all their papers and equipment, stood waiting outside the château’s front door. Once again, Fourcade had not slept, and she knew from experience that her insomnia often presaged imminent peril.

  Before she and the others left, Rodriguez tapped out some last-minute messages to London. The reception was excellent, and he wanted to continue for another few minutes. Gripped by a premonition, Fourcade demanded that he stop immediately and told Siegrist to turn off the power. The network’s security chief did so. Rodriguez folded his aerial and put his transmitter into its case. As they hurried out the door, he shot her a doubtful look that she interpreted as questioning her nerve.

  The next day, Siegrist returned to the château to retrieve a reserve transmitter that Rodriguez had hidden in a small copse of trees at the back of the garden. Two peasants who lived nearby stopped his car before he reached the château. They said that several Germans, their guns drawn, had surrounded the place right after Siegrist and the others had left. The Germans said they were after a “Mrs. Harrison” and were furious to find out she had vanished.

  When Siegrist told Fourcade about the raid, she laughed. The Germans clearly didn’t know who she was. Someone had told them her alias of “Hérisson” and they interpreted it as “Harrison.” They thought she was an Englishwoman.

  Deep down, however, she knew this was no laughing matter. Her pursuers were closing in on her.

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  FOURCADE’S NEW HIDING PLACE was in another jewel of a medieval town, tucked into a bend of the Lot River and almost completely surrounded by water. Cahors was known not only for its dramatic setting and distinctive historic buildings but also for the dark red wines it had produced since the Middle Ages.

  Again, none of that meant anything to Fourcade. All she cared about was the security offered by the house in which she and her staff took refuge. Located on a hill, it had several exits and overlooked all the roads approaching it.

  As soon as they moved in, she imposed strict security measures. Rodriguez’s radio transmitter was hidden in a secret space behind a dining room wall. A twenty-four-hour guard was mounted, with everyone, including herself, taking turns keeping watch. Any visitor to the house could be observed while still a long distance away, and if an unfamiliar car should appear, she and the others would have time to escape into the countryside from a rear door.

  They had been in Cahors for two weeks when Fourcade received an anonymous warning that the Gestapo was on the trail of her agents in Toulouse. She dispatched Rodriguez there to tell Mouchou Damm and his family to leave their house immediately and go into hiding. When Rodriguez returned the following morning, he was furious. He had passed on Marie-Madeleine’s orders to Damm and his son, but they had insisted on staying one more night.

  A few hours later, an agent arrived with the news that the Damms had been arrested at their house at dawn and that several other agents in Toulouse had also been rounded up. Then word came that Jean Philippe, the police superintendent who covertly oversaw Alliance intelligence operations in Toulouse, had also been taken. Just a few days before, Philippe had resigned from the Toulouse police after he’d received orders from the Vichy government to turn over local Jews for deportation. “I refuse to persecute Israelites who, in my opinion, are as much entitled to happiness and life as Mr. Laval himself,” he wrote in his letter of resignation. “I believe that…any Frenchman who is complicit in this infamy acts as a traitor.”*

  Late that afternoon, the cascade of horrific news continued: Colonel Bernis and several of his men in Nice had been captured by Italian secret police. Just before midnight, Fourcade learned by phone that a number of Alliance agents in Pau had been taken into custody. In less than a day, three major Alliance sectors—Toulouse, Nice, and Pau—had been wiped out.

  JEAN PHILIPPE

  Fourcade told Rodriguez and Bontinck they all must leave the house immediately. Some of the arrested agents had been there, and the Gestapo would torture them to make them talk. She sent a message to MI6 officials detailing the disaster and asking them to pass on the news to Alliance’s other sectors. She also urged them to send Faye back as soon as possible. Once Rodriguez had finished his transmission, he, Fourcade, and Bontinck hurriedly packed their belongings and papers. Then, as Marie-Madeleine remembered, “we marched off into the cold night and its army of hostile shadows to catch the dawn train.”

  The next stop for the three fugitives was the town of Tulle, about sixty miles north of Cahors. Louis Lemaire, the head of the Alliance sector there and a close friend of Jean Vinzant in Ussel, had readily agreed to Vinzant’s request to find a new hideout for them. A fifty-year-old plumber and the father of five, Lemaire installed the three in a hotel for the night after instructing the owner not to list their names on the hotel’s register. Emotionally and physically exhausted, Marie-Madeleine retreated to her room and collapsed, fully clothed, on the bed. She knew, she later said, how an ant felt when a boot came down on its nest.

  How had the Gestapo known where everyone was? Fourcade acknowledged—then and later—that lax security was undoubtedly a key reason. Like most other French resistance groups, Alliance was hardly known for its obsessive attention to safety. With the exception of Colonel Bernis and a few other senior agents, the men and women of the network, most of them young, were amateur spies, including herself. They had joined this clandestine world with little idea of what was required for success or even simple survival. Few of them copied the tactics of French Communist resistance groups, which were organized into cells of a few men, with each cell having minimal contact with one another. Members of the cells had to abide by strict rules, including not sleeping in the same
place for more than two or three nights in a row and not gathering together in public places like bars and restaurants.

  As much as Fourcade tried to combat it, she was well aware that indiscretion was endemic among members of Alliance, as it was among most of the resistance rank and file in France. She found it impossible to prevent her agents from getting together and telling each other about their discoveries.

  As the French American historian Ted Morgan saw it, this type of secret work was not something that his French compatriots were very good at. Morgan wrote that the French “have a hard time taking security measures seriously because they interfere with their social habits and natural garrulousness.”

  But Fourcade knew that there was another reason for the trouble in which Alliance found itself: its extremely rapid growth. “For a clandestine network to work well, one must understand that two agents are weaker than one, three are weaker than two, four are weaker than three,” she told an interviewer after the war. “Each one that you take on is an additional security risk, an additional person who can betray you all.” It was particularly vexing, she added, when an operative who had been carefully vetted and trained proudly announced later that he had brought in several new agents who had not been properly scrutinized before joining the network. Such casual recruitment made Alliance vulnerable to being infiltrated by Frenchmen acting as German informers.

  At the same time, as she later noted, what was the alternative? As deficient as their sense of security undoubtedly was, she and her agents were living in the reality of an extremely dangerous and unpredictable world, risking their lives every day to foil the Germans and help the Allies win the war.

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  AFTER A COUPLE OF DAYS at the hotel in Tulle, Fourcade, Rodriguez, and Bontinck moved to a small château outside the town that had been turned into a kind of boardinghouse for French refugees. But Rodriguez, fearing that the noise of his transmitter would alert the château’s owners and other inhabitants to the true activities of the newcomers, decided he could not safely send messages to London from there. It was Louis Lemaire who came up with an ingenious solution.