Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  By November 1943, de Gaulle was firmly in charge of the French Committee of National Liberation, the political entity set up in North Africa earlier in the year. Yet although Giraud no longer was co-chairman of the committee, he still retained some authority as head of French military forces there. Both in Algiers and London, a ruthless fight for power continued to rage between Giraud’s supporters, many of them former Vichy officials and military officers, and the backers of de Gaulle.

  Having long refused to take part in that political clash, Fourcade now found herself and her network caught in the middle of it. Soon after learning of the BCRA’s withholding of information about Jean-Paul Lien, she discovered that MI6, without her knowledge, had been turning over to Giraud’s secret service all the intelligence reports from her network. When she confronted Dansey with that fact, he blandly told her that the British had an agreement to exchange intelligence with the French military; since Giraud was commander-in-chief of the military, he was entitled to receive all of MI6’s information, regardless of its source.

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  WHILE ADHERENTS OF GIRAUD and de Gaulle battled for power and influence, a similar fight was raging between Gaullists in London and Algiers and the leaders of France’s major resistance movements. Earlier in the war, thanks to Jean Moulin, those leaders had been of inestimable help in de Gaulle’s fight for Allied recognition of him as leader of Free France. In the spring of 1942, Moulin had succeeded in extracting pledges of support for the general from the resistance heads; later, he forwarded to Churchill and Roosevelt a statement from the resistance movements calling for de Gaulle, whom they called “their uncontested leader,” to be named governor of North Africa.

  Yet as the war continued, these proclamations of unity proved to be a veneer that barely concealed the resistance chiefs’ increasingly deep suspicions of de Gaulle and his postwar ambitions. The more influence he acquired, the more suspicious they became.

  From the beginning, a gulf of understanding had divided the Gaullists and the leaders of the resistance movements, who risked their lives daily and who greatly resented their compatriots in London who, in their view, had lived out the war in comfort and safety, with none of the daily tension, terror, and privations of occupation.

  As the war progressed, the belief grew among some resistance leaders that de Gaulle was interested in their work only for what it could do for him and his forces. “The Resistance, for him, was one pawn among others,” Henri Frenay, the head of the Combat movement, wrote after the war. “The devotion and courage of its members, the dangers, the arrests, the executions were for him only an inevitable tithe paid to the gods of war.”

  As the war advanced, Frenay added, the rapid growth of resistance activities, which at first had been encouraged by the Free French, began to alarm them. “Despite our proven loyalty, they were afraid that a new force was on the upswing in France, a force with a will of its own and capable of open defiance of de Gaulle. In this view we were no longer friends but rivals—admissible rivals but rivals just the same. We were to be carefully watched and strictly controlled.”

  At the same time, as Fourcade knew only too well, the French were not the only ones caught up in the brutal feuds and infighting that raged in London and elsewhere. The British secret services had also erupted in what one historian called “full-scale and dangerous brawls the likes of which Whitehall bureaucracy had rarely if ever seen before.” MI6 and SOE were the major antagonists, and Claude Dansey was arguably the principal instigator in this “viciously petty, infantile, and time-wasting” vendetta, as the journalist and historian Tom Keene put it.

  Dansey and his boss, Stewart Menzies, were both highly skilled bureaucratic infighters, and they used every trick they could think of in their five-year attempt to bring SOE under their control or, failing that, to kill it outright. “Though SOE and MI6 were nominally on the same side in the war, they were, generally speaking, more abhorrent to one another than the [Germans] were to either of them,” noted the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who was a bemused witness to the bureaucratic mayhem.

  In his memoirs, Dr. Reginald Jones, Churchill’s chief adviser on scientific warfare, recalled being summoned to Dansey’s office to find the MI6 deputy chief “almost incoherent with indignation about those buggers in SOE.” Patrick Reilly, the young diplomat who served as Menzies’s assistant, meanwhile, had a vivid memory of his own. One day in June 1943, he wrote, a beaming Dansey marched into his office and exclaimed, “Great news! Great news!” Reilly expected to hear a report about “some splendid intelligence coup.” Instead, the source of Dansey’s glee was the complete destruction of the SOE Prosper network in France. “Misery, torture and death for many brave men and women, British and French—and Dansey gloated,” Reilly observed. “I remember feeling physically sick.”

  Reilly, who served as British ambassador to France and the Soviet Union after the war, called Dansey “an evil man—fierce, ruthless, venomous…I have often asked myself how it was possible that this wicked man…could hold a key position in [MI6] for the whole of the war.”

  The question then arises: How does this sinister depiction of Dansey by Reilly and others square with Fourcade’s warm memories of him as sensitive, kind, and understanding toward her and her network? She frequently bridled at his refusal to allow her to return to France, but there was no question, then or now, that he did this to save her life.

  In his unpublished memoirs, Reilly did acknowledge that Dansey “was said to be responsible for an occasional kind act.” He also observed that his MI6 superior was noted for his flashes of charm, especially toward attractive women like Fourcade. But far more important in Dansey’s eyes was the vital intelligence she and Alliance had provided MI6 throughout the conflict, not only significantly aiding the war effort but also his agency’s struggles for influence in Whitehall.

  Nonetheless, there were limits to Dansey’s sympathy. While he was caring and solicitous in Fourcade’s presence, he often referred to her behind her back as “Cohen’s bitch,” according to Reilly. Dansey was referring to Kenneth Cohen, the head of MI6’s intelligence operations in France, who, with his wife, Mary, became very close to Fourcade during the last months of her stay in London.

  There’s no evidence that Fourcade ever knew of Dansey’s duplicity toward her. But she repeatedly made clear how much she hated being enmeshed in the bureaucratic rivalries and feuds that were taking place around her—“all these cumbersome cliques and criminally childish antagonisms of the Secret Services!”

  On the same day that Marie-Madeleine learned about the treachery of Jean-Paul Lien, Ferdinand Rodriguez marked the seventy-first day of his nightmarish new life in a Nazi prison cell. Like his Alliance boss, he struggled not to give in to despair.

  For the first two weeks of his captivity, Rodriguez had been transported daily in handcuffs from Fresnes prison near Paris to the Gestapo headquarters on rue des Saussaies for interrogation. From the beginning, he was stunned by how much his questioners knew about Alliance.

  Rodriguez’s first inkling of the depth of their knowledge came when he was asked his name. Pierre Thomas, he replied, using his network cover name. One of his interrogators, however, addressed him as Edward Rodney. “A snake sliding along my vertebra could not have caused me greater surprise,” Rodriguez later observed. MI6 had given him the pseudonym of Edward Rodney in February 1942, and he was convinced that no one in France knew it, with the exceptions of Marie-Madeleine and Léon Faye. Lien had never heard it, he was sure, and Faye would never have revealed it to the Gestapo.

  Finally, he acknowledged that Edward Rodney was indeed his name—the Germans apparently had not yet heard of Ferdinand Rodriguez—but he dodged most of their other questions. When ordered to give them the names of his Alliance colleagues, he said he only knew their animal code names. He insisted he was an ordinary radio operator, not the chief of the network’s ra
dio service, as his interrogators claimed. When they told him to hand over his code, he responded that he didn’t have one, adding that the messages he sent had already been encoded. “I do not believe that you became an envoy from London without a code,” one of his questioners remarked. Rodriguez replied, “It was not necessary to possess a code as radio operator. I had a code operator who did that.”

  When he was sent back to Fresnes in the evenings, he worried that his continued silence would soon result in the torture he was sure was coming.

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  THE WHOLESALE CAPTURE OF Alliance agents sparked by Rodriguez’s and Faye’s arrests was the latest chapter in a sophisticated and ruthlessly efficient SS counterintelligence operation against the network that began in November 1942. It was then that a French spy arrested by the Gestapo in Strasbourg revealed he had been recruited to collect information by “an important British intelligence network,” whose two leaders were called Aigle (Eagle) and Hérisson (Hedgehog). The Strasbourg Gestapo reported to Paris and Berlin that it had launched an extensive investigation into this clandestine organization, whose members took the names of animals as pseudonyms.

  In January 1943, the Germans realized that the group was in fact a far-flung military intelligence network working with the British and mostly operating in the free zone, with strong points in Marseille, the Dordogne, and the Corrèze area. Both the Strasbourg Gestapo and the Paris SD, the SS’s counterintelligence branch, were placed in charge of the investigation.

  The first arrests began at the end of January, when Maurice Grapin, who had taken Gabriel Rivière’s place as the regional Alliance head in Marseille, was captured, along with his wife. When he was promised his wife’s release in exchange for his cooperation, Grapin gave his interrogators the information they wanted, including the identifications of other agents in his region. The copious information he provided the Germans, along with a number of agent reports they found on their own, led in the late winter and early spring of 1943 to the annihilation of the network’s sectors in Marseille, Toulouse, Tulle, Nice, and Lyon, among others. Because of the Strasbourg Gestapo’s early involvement in the probe, most of the agents arrested in the first part of the year were transported in the late spring, following their initial interrogations in Paris, to prisons near Strasbourg in northeastern France.

  To the frustration of the Germans, the heads of Alliance—“Hedgehog” and “Eagle”—were not swept up in this first wave. Thanks to the rogue agent Jean-Paul Lien, however, the German secret services were soon able to launch a new operation that they labeled Alliance II. A former railway worker from Alsace, Lien had earlier worked for Combat, one of the country’s largest resistance movements. Pierre Frenay, the former Vichy military intelligence officer who founded Combat, later wrote that he had had misgivings about Lien from the start. The Alsatian had been assigned to head Combat’s organization in Toulouse, but according to Frenay, he “had done absolutely nothing. He didn’t even try to excuse his idleness….I was dealing with an incompetent, shallow, characterless man who lacked any convictions.” Frenay eventually replaced Lien in Toulouse but never passed on his misgivings to other resistance groups.

  Lien then settled in Lyon, where he befriended Jean-Philippe Sneyers, whose small resistance organization had joined forces with Alliance. When Sneyers became head of Alliance’s protection team, he named Lien as his deputy, although he knew little or nothing about Lien’s background. No outside check was made.

  By then, Lien was firmly in the pocket of the Germans. With his help, the Gestapo arrested Alliance security chief Ernest Siegrist and his deputy in Lyon on June 11, 1943. During searches of the men and their apartments, a wealth of reports and other documents were seized, which included boxes of letters and the addresses of almost one hundred Alliance agents. According to a joint Gestapo/SD report, this bounty gave investigators “a much more complete overview of the organization.”

  That summer, Lien moved to Paris, where he cozied up to Pierre Dallas. Lien persuaded Dallas to include him and Sneyers in the planning and carrying out of future Lysander landings, arguing that protection must be increased because of a metastasizing Gestapo threat. That was how he learned the date of Faye and Rodriguez’s return from London—information that he immediately transmitted to the Gestapo. Other information that Lien supplied to the Germans, coupled with the documents they had recovered from Siegrist, led to the arrests of more than 150 additional Alliance agents in the months following Faye and Rodriguez’s capture. For his services to the Germans, Lien was awarded 2 million francs.

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  KEPT IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT at Fresnes, Rodriguez had no knowledge of any of this. His fears of torture were apparently never realized, and his interrogations stopped at the end of September. His only human contact from then on was with the German guards who brought him what constituted his daily food ration: a blackish, lukewarm liquid that was supposed to be coffee, a piece of wormy bread, and two bowls of watery soup.

  Feeling himself fading into nothingness, he struggled hard to resist such ennui. “I walk constantly in my cell, riveted by the concern of not letting go,” he wrote. “Five meters back and forth, back and forth. I have to stay alert.” Every morning, he exercised for twenty minutes.

  To impose intellectual discipline on himself, Rodriguez obsessively read and reread two prayer books, one in English and the other in French, given to him by the prison’s military chaplain. Memorizing the texts, he recited them over and over as he paced around the cell.

  Every few days, the soulless quiet of the prison was broken by the noise of other cell doors crashing open and the cries of fellow résistants, a few shouting “Vive la France,” as they were taken away, some for deportation to Germany, others for immediate execution. As agonizing as they were, “these separations, these amputations of our community, do not destroy me,” Rodriguez wrote. “They encourage me not to falter.

  “I count the steps, count the days, count the nights,” he added. “I pray, I think, and I count.”

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  FOR LÉON FAYE, NOVEMBER 24 was also spent in Nazi captivity. His place of confinement was a small attic room at 84 avenue Foch, the SD headquarters in Paris, where he’d been held since his arrest. But unlike Rodriguez, Faye did not view this day as just another in a seemingly endless chain. Later that night, he planned to break out of avenue Foch and, in a matter of days, be back in London.

  84 AVENUE FOCH

  The house’s top floor had been set aside for the SD’s VIP prisoners, most of them British agents from SOE. Faye was the only operative there who worked for MI6. He and the other inmates were held in twelve rooms directly above the office of Josef Kieffer, the chief of SS counterintelligence in Paris.

  During his lengthy interrogations, Faye was as aghast as Rodriguez had been by the extent of the Germans’ knowledge of Alliance’s workings. His questioners boasted to him about the three-hundred-plus network agents they’d arrested and the mountains of documents they’d acquired, as well as the information provided by informers and by agents who’d broken down under torture.

  As they did with other prisoners at avenue Foch, the SD interrogators repeatedly insisted to Faye that since they already knew everything about his network and its people, it made no sense for him not to cooperate. What they didn’t share with Faye and their other captives was that they had yet another valuable source for their information: a highly successful radio playback operation located on the building’s fourth floor.

  After extracting codes and other transmission-related information from captured radio operators, the SD “played back” the operators’ wireless sets, which meant that it sent messages to London as if the operators were still free. The “radio game,” as it was called, was aimed for the most part at SOE, which blithely accepted the bogus messages as valid, despite doubts r
aised by some within the agency. Thanks to this communication, the Germans were the recipients of a flood of valuable intelligence about the workings of SOE, including the arrival of new agents and equipment.

  Faye’s interrogators tried to persuade him that a leak from a traitor in London had resulted in his arrest, but he told them he knew that the traitor was their informer, Jean-Paul Lien. Their next ploy was to agree to one of his demands—to recognize Alliance as part of the French army and to treat its members as prisoners of war rather than enemy spies, which meant that their lives would be spared. But even this seeming concession, which had worked with other Allied agents, had no effect on Faye. He still refused to talk.

  The skillful mind games played by the Paris SD on its prize prisoners were encouraged by its chief, the wily Josef Kieffer, who believed that treating them well would yield far better results than threats or torture. Although some prisoners were certainly tortured at avenue Foch, Kieffer decided who would be spared. He occasionally brought his favored captives, usually British, to his high-ceilinged office with its Louis XV furniture for a meal, a drink, or a chat. The conversations often focused on England’s public schools and its officer class, both of which Kieffer said he greatly admired. He suggested to the agents that instead of fighting each other, British and German officers should be working together to combat their real enemy: communism.

  Lulled into a sense of security, a number of them began to trust and cooperate with their captors. Faye did not, and as a result, never received favorable treatment. During his first few days at the mansion, he thought about killing himself, believing that he soon would be tortured for refusing to say anything that might lead to the capture of his fellow operatives.