Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  As Fourcade often noted, radio operators had the most perilous jobs in the network because they were so highly vulnerable to detection. “They were on the front lines, in the line of fire,” she said. “It’s as if they were manning the cannons.” And now, with Germans’ detection techniques growing increasingly sophisticated, heightened safeguards were essential. In a secret headquarters in Paris, dozens of German clerks worked around the clock to monitor radio frequencies in the area. When they found signals they considered suspicious, they would often cut off the electricity supply to the neighborhoods in which the transmitter was thought to be operating. If the transmission stopped when the current was cut and started again when it was restored, the headquarters would alert agents who were cruising nearby in unmarked vans containing sophisticated direction-finding equipment. As Alliance operators knew only too well, the longer the transmission continued, the easier it was to find the exact location. Once a van arrived near the transmission site, German agents, carrying portable detectors, would get out and, with few exceptions, could easily pinpoint the apartment in which the radio set was operating.

  After collecting Fourcade at the Gare de Lyon, Rodriguez took her with him on his transmission rounds to show her how the new system worked. Traveling by vélotaxi, they proceeded from one apartment to another. As she kept watch from the apartment’s balconies to spot any suspicious vans or cars on the street, Rodriguez transmitted that day’s messages to London. At one of the stops, Fourcade heard him cursing under his breath. It had taken him ten minutes to raise the London operator, and he was now approaching twenty minutes on the air—the limit he had given himself and his operators. He abruptly cut off the transmission, and he and Fourcade moved on to the next apartment.

  After a reunion with Faye, she and he joined Rodriguez for a celebratory dinner at a black-market Paris restaurant, whose other patrons were mostly uniformed German officers. Even though all three had bounties on their heads, none seemed bothered that they were flirting with danger. Indeed they seemed to revel in the fact. “Who would ever think we three were being hunted by the Gestapo?” Faye murmured, as he smiled and raised a glass of Beaujolais in the Germans’ direction. “To your health, gentlemen!” he called out.

  But for Fourcade, such displays of audacity were increasingly rare. Keenly aware of the peril surrounding her, she traveled around Paris with a personal bodyguard—her old police friend Pierre Dayné, who had helped her hide during her first trip to occupied Paris in early 1941. He was still a member of the city’s police vice squad and, as such, was authorized to carry a gun. When they went out together, he and Fourcade had agreed that at the first sign of danger, she would pose as his prisoner. As part of that plan, she had, thanks to Ernest Siegrist, a complete set of false papers under the exotic-sounding name of Pamela Trotaing.

  Yet, for the moment at least, things seemed to have quieted down in Paris and elsewhere. After the debacle in Ussel, Alliance had found a new Lysander landing site, set amid sprawling cornfields near the village of Nantheuil-le-Haudouin, less than thirty miles from Paris.The RAF was thrilled with the new location, which was considerably closer to England than the ones near Ussel and the Saône River. The first landing on the new field, in early June, went perfectly.

  Also seemingly working well was Alliance’s new headquarters, housed in a luxury apartment on the rue Raynouard, in Paris’s elegant 16th Arrondissement. The apartment, with its thick pile carpets and expensive furniture and art, had been loaned to the network by Alliance’s new treasurer, a wealthy Paris businessman.

  During Fourcade’s first visit, the headquarters was bustling with activity. A constant flow of staff members and agents from Alliance’s fourteen sectors came and went. In its intelligence center, workers collected, sorted out, cataloged, and analyzed incoming messages, reports, and other documents. A duplicate of each was typed out, then kept until the network received word that the documents, sent by Lysander, had arrived in London. Once that occurred, the copies were burned.

  Yet as professional as the operation on rue Raynouard obviously was, Fourcade felt alienated by it. To her, the headquarters and its staff had become too bureaucratic, impersonal, and centralized. There was little of the warmth and camaraderie she had treasured in Alliance’s early years—the laughter and conversation at the many meals she and her agents had shared, the fellowship that bound them together.

  Soon after she arrived in Paris, she noticed a distinct unraveling in those ties of fraternity. Agents were arguing among themselves about political matters, including which wartime general they should support: de Gaulle or Giraud. They’re thinking of the future, Faye said when she expressed her worry about these emerging rivalries. The future? she thought to herself. Which of them will actually see the future? Alliance operatives who had already been swept up in the German net were certainly not debating the future. The first priority of those still free must be to concentrate on their intelligence work and avoid getting caught. When she said as much to Faye, he replied that she had become overly gloomy and desperately needed a rest.

  As it turned out, she was just being realistic. In late June 1943, the Gestapo resumed its orgy of arrests. Among those captured was Ernest Siegrist, Alliance’s indispensable chief of security. Just days before he was to come to Paris, Siegrist, along with his deputy, was seized in Lyon. The news was brought to Alliance headquarters by Jean-Philippe Sneyers, one of the four young agents who had joined Alliance in Lyon as members of the network’s new protection team.

  Devastated by Siegrist’s capture, Sneyers, who was the team’s leader, admitted to Fourcade that he had assigned a newcomer to the squad, a former railway worker from Alsace named Jean-Paul Lien, to guard Siegrist, instead of doing it himself. Lien had bungled the mission.

  Fourcade blamed herself for the debacle. Sneyers was too young and inexperienced to be in charge of this kind of dangerous, delicate work, she concluded. Also of concern was the incompetence of Lien, whom Sneyers had recruited and whom she had not yet met. Who was he? Why had he joined Alliance? When Sneyers told her that Lien wanted to meet her to apologize for what had happened, she snapped that Lien was either a fool or a traitor and must be kept away from Alliance headquarters.

  The day after Siegrist’s arrest, Jean Moulin, the movement’s most important and powerful figure, was captured by the Gestapo, along with six key resistance leaders with whom he was meeting at a safe house in a Lyon suburb. Less than two weeks later, during what would become the worst month of the war for the French resistance, Francis Suttill, a British lawyer who headed SOE’s largest network in France, was arrested in Paris, together with his courier and radio operator. Within days, the Gestapo had slashed through Suttill’s network, arresting hundreds of local resistance members and seizing dozens of arms caches throughout central and northern France.

  For Alliance, there were near escapes as well. Lucien Poulard, the young head of the network’s Brittany operations, had returned from Brest to the village of Redon, where his parents lived, carrying reports detailing the identities of ships and submarines at the port there, along with coastal defense plans. Early the next morning, he heard a car pull up outside his parents’ house and had just enough time to climb out a window in the back, clutching his documents, when Gestapo agents began pounding on the door. Neighbors across the street took him in.

  Fourcade suspected that Poulard had been betrayed. But by whom? The latest round of arrests strengthened her conviction that Alliance had grown too large and that its agents, some of whom had not been carefully vetted, were spending too much time together. She was haunted by the fear that this intricate spiderweb of a network she had woven might be swept away in an instant.

  Fourcade had been living in a state of high anxiety for the previous two and a half years, and the constant tension and dread, coupled with the stress of her pregnancy and childbirth, had exacted a significant physical and emotional toll. Long plagued
by nightmares, she began having a new, recurring one. In it, a Lysander landed in a field surrounded by pink heather. Faye and Rodriguez emerged from the plane and were greeted by a group of fellow agents. As the Lysander flew away, a throng of Gestapo agents, waving guns, suddenly appeared and grabbed her two top lieutenants. “We have gotten Faye!” one of them crowed. “We are delighted.”

  The first time she had the dream, she called Pierre Dallas, who had just returned from London, to ask him if any of the Lysander landing fields had heather in bloom. After thinking for a moment, Dallas answered no. Fourcade asked if he was sure. Yes, he said. She then made him promise never to schedule a landing on any field containing heather. Fourcade knew what he was probably thinking: that she’d lost her mind. She wondered if he was right.

  For more than a year, MI6 had been urging her to go to London for a respite. Now Faye pressed her to do so as well. Before, she’d always refused, arguing that she could not leave her agents. But now she wondered whether she should follow MI6’s and Faye’s advice. It was not because she feared, as they did, that her luck was bound to run out and that she would be captured. It was more a realization that for her own well-being, she needed a break from the ceaseless strain. She also recognized the importance of face-to-face meetings with MI6 officials to discuss the future status and activities of the network. She decided, albeit reluctantly, to leave on the next Lysander flight, scheduled for the next full moon period, in mid-July.

  Before her departure, she installed an interim leader for the network to run it while she was gone. Faye, of course, was the logical choice, but he was focused almost exclusively on operational activities and was not eager to assume the administrative burdens of the top post. Her choice was fifty-one-year-old Paul Bernard, an old friend of Fourcade’s and the managing director of the French and Colonial Financial Society, a leading investment bank with major holdings in businesses in French possession in Asia, notably Indochina.

  From the first days of Alliance’s existence in 1940, Bernard had expressed interest in joining it, but Fourcade had told him that the important position he held would make him more useful to the network at a later date. In early 1943, he had taken over responsibility for running the network’s intelligence center in Paris, and, when she suggested to him that he succeed her temporarily as Alliance’s head, he readily agreed.

  But, as she discovered at a meeting of her top agents two days before her departure for London, some of the others did not share her enthusiasm for Bernard’s selection. As armed sentries stood guard on the street outside, more than a dozen key figures in Alliance gathered around a large table at the Paris headquarters. A few operatives from its first wave, Gabriel Rivière and Faye among them, were joined by representatives of the second wave, including Édouard Kauffmann, Lucien Poulard, Émile Hédin, and Ferdinand Rodriguez. Also present were Bernard and a few new recruits from the third wave.

  Fourcade explained what she hoped to accomplish in London: improve the security of radio communications between MI6 and Alliance, secure more financial aid and equipment, and discuss changes in the network’s structure to increase the safety of its people. She reaffirmed her “total solidarity with the English,” a statement that was greeted with raised eyebrows by a few of those present.

  At her behest, Faye introduced a motion calling for Alliance to remain united and to work as a group to continue intelligence activities for the benefit of Allied troops until the end of hostilities. Several of those who thought the network should align itself with either Giraud or de Gaulle objected to the motion, but Fourcade insisted that the vote must be unanimous, and it finally passed.

  At that point, she announced that Paul Bernard would take over her duties as Alliance chief while she was gone. Several of the veteran operatives greeted the news with frowns. No one said a word, however, and a second motion, to approve Bernard’s promotion, was adopted.

  After the meeting, Colonel Kauffmann reproached her for choosing a newcomer, rather than one of the old hands, to take control of the network. She watched sadly as the old colonel, whose direction of the Dordogne sector had been stellar, stalked off. Would internecine quarrels and rivalries accomplish what the Gestapo had yet failed to do—tear apart this group before the final Allied victory?

  In the hubbub of her preparations for London, however, she had little time to dwell on this latest worry. The day before her departure, she gave Marguerite Berne-Churchill, who also had fled from Lyon to Paris, instructions about providing aid for the families of arrested agents. In addition, Berne-Churchill and her sister, who lived in Paris, had assumed responsibility for watching over Alliance’s safe houses in the French capital, as well as monitoring the apartments in which the transmitters were kept and the locations, used as letterboxes, where intelligence material was stored for other agents to collect.

  Before Fourcade left, the wife of Paul Bernard, who acted as a courier for the network, insisted that she needed some stylish new clothes to take with her to London. Although Marie-Madeleine had not thought much about fashion for the past three years, she accepted with guilty pleasure the offerings of Bernard’s wife, which included a tailored suit and an outfit designed by the popular couturier Maggie Rouff.

  The night before she left, a small group of Alliance agents, including Faye and Rodriguez, held a farewell party for her at a fashionable Paris bar, which was a favorite hangout for German officers. It was owned by Bernard de Billy, who occasionally provided bits of intelligence to the network that he had picked up from his German customers.

  After the party, she and Faye strolled down the Champs-Élysées in the golden twilight of what had been a beautiful, clear summer day. The unaccustomed drinks had induced in her a state of well-being, and when she and Faye stopped at the Arc de Triomphe to take in the view, she gave Paris an appreciative smile. But the sight of the ubiquitous swastika flags flapping in the breeze swiftly dimmed her sense of elation.

  That exhilaration had vanished altogether by the next morning. When Faye came by to confirm that the Lysander operation was on for that night, he sensed the shift in her mood. “Be brave,” he said. “You know perfectly well that you must go.” She did know—but at the same time, she later noted, she could “not bear the thought of cutting the umbilical cord between Alliance and myself.” Left unsaid was her sadness over yet another separation from Faye.

  A few minutes before seven that evening, Fourcade put on her hat and trench coat, grabbed her suitcase, and walked down the street to meet Pierre Dayné, who accompanied her in a vélotaxi to the railway station. On the way, she saw Faye standing on a street corner to watch her go by.

  At the Gare de l’Est, she spotted Pierre Dallas, who carried the case containing the intelligence reports she would take on the Lysander, and the two agents who would accompany her, one of them Lucien Poulard, whose near capture in Brittany had convinced her he must leave France for a while. None showed any recognition of each other. While Fourcade and Dayné took their seats in a first-class carriage, the others split up and occupied nearby compartments. After getting out at the stop for Nanteuil-le-Haudouin, about thirty miles from Paris, they walked separately from the little station and followed Dallas by foot for a mile or so, until he reached a large ditch by the side of the road. They would wait there until dark.

  When night fell, they set out again and were picked up by Dr. Marcel Gilbert, an elderly country physician who moonlighted as an Alliance operative. After driving for several miles, Gilbert turned down a narrow side road and then bumped his way onto a newly threshed cornfield, stopping his car behind a huge pile of cornstalks, which was, he told his passengers, less conspicuous than parking on the road.

  Next to the corn rick was the landing strip. As she crouched beside Dr. Gilbert under the rick, Fourcade watched Dallas and the other members of the aviation crew mark out the strip for the incoming plane. Looking up at the brilliant full moon, Gilbert murmured to he
r about how lovely and peaceful the evening was. She glanced at him. He had an intellectual manner and appearance—spectacles, a mane of gray hair, and bushy eyebrows and mustache—but his clothes were threadbare. Dallas had earlier told her that he had spent his life ministering to the poor.

  Impulsively, she asked Gilbert if there was anything she could do for him when she got to England. After thinking a moment, Gilbert replied that he’d love to have some English toilet soap so that he could clean his hands really well before treating the sick. Fourcade promised she would send the soap to him by the next Lysander.

  Shortly after midnight, Dallas and two other members of the crew took their places on the field in the shape of a large L, pointing to windward. They switched on their flashlights. A few minutes later, Marie-Madeleine heard a sputtering sound that reminded her of the noise made by a motorcycle. As the hum grew louder, the three men aimed their flashlights in its direction, and Dallas began flashing the letter M in Morse code. In a moment or two, Fourcade could make out an approaching shape in the sky, coming in from the northeast. The Lysander blinked back its own code letter—R. With the signaling completed to everyone’s satisfaction, the little plane swooped down, came to a stop and taxied toward Dallas, who swung it around and readied it for takeoff.

  As he did so, the rear cockpit popped open, and three Alliance agents jumped out, pulling their luggage out after them. They then grabbed the bags and cases of the outgoing passengers and placed them in the tiny cubbyhole where their own had been moments before. Fourcade had just enough time to hug each of her arriving operatives before she was hoisted up into the plane, along with Poulard and the other outbound agent. Pierre Dallas, meanwhile, exchanged greetings and small presents with the twenty-year-old Lysander pilot, Flight Lieutenant Peter Vaughan-Fowler, who had befriended him during Dallas’s stay in London two months before. Moments later, the plane was airborne. From the time it touched down to when it took off, less than seven minutes had elapsed.