Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  The rest of the fortress’s basement was occupied by a factory whose machinery roared night and day, adding to Faye’s sense of being in Dante’s Inferno. Because of the horrific noise, sleep was virtually impossible, and he spent most of his time in the early days at Bruchsal replaying the failed escape in his mind.

  As he knew, there was a bitter irony attached to the fiasco. For years, Fourcade had chided him for his rashness. To her chagrin, he had never given much thought to his safety or security—until the night of November 24. If he had not waited for Starr on the roof that evening, if he had escaped on his own as soon as he’d left his room, he might well be back in London now.

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  WHEN JOSEF KIEFFER ASKED John Starr why he had tried to escape, the SOE agent replied that he felt he had no choice. If Noor, a woman, had managed to get away, he told Kieffer, “she would have made it impossible for him in England had he, as a man, not displayed the same courage.”

  For several weeks, Kieffer refused to have anything to do with Starr. Eventually, however, he forgave his protégé when Starr not only renounced any plans to escape again but also pledged he would never work against the Germans in any way.

  Nonetheless, his charmed existence at avenue Foch was fast drawing to a close. Despite Kieffer’s promises that his VIP prisoners would be treated as prisoners of war, Starr and the others were sent in July 1944, a month after D-Day, to two of Germany’s most brutal concentration camps—Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen. Starr was one of a handful to survive the war.

  Although he was never prosecuted for his collaboration with the Gestapo, he was regarded as a traitor and shunned by virtually all his former colleagues for the rest of his life.

  For a few days near the end of 1943, Marie-Madeleine had a flicker of hope that Alliance, like a phoenix, was again rising from the ashes. Philippe Koenigswerther had finally made it back to France on November 25—the first Alliance agent to do so in more than two months.

  The late-night sea operation that delivered Koenigswerther to the coast of Brittany was a close-run thing. When the Royal Navy torpedo boat approached the designated rendezvous point, its captain failed to spot a prearranged signal from the reception committee and concluded, correctly, that the boat was at the wrong place. But Koenigswerther, still fuming over his failed attempt earlier in the month, was determined to land, regardless of the consequences. When the captain ordered his crew to turn back, the agent pulled out a revolver and waved it at the British sailors, shouting he’d had enough and was going ashore. The MI6 liaison man accompanying him begged Koenigswerther to wait. But he jumped overboard, found his footing in the shallow water, and splashed off into the darkness.

  Carrying 2 million francs and a sack of mail, Koenigswerther remained on the rocky beach, dodging German patrols until daylight, when he made his way to an inn in a nearby village. Serendipitously, he found there members of the Alliance reception committee, who, following their vain wait for him the night before, had retreated to the inn to get some sleep. Two days later, an anxious Fourcade finally heard from Koenigswerther. He had safely returned to Bordeaux and soon was sending a stream of messages about submarine and shipping traffic at the port. In Saint-Nazaire, André Coindeau (Urus), who had helped arrange Koenigswerther’s return, was equally prolific, reporting not only on activity at the submarine base there but also giving locations and descriptions of newly constructed V-1 rocket launching sites nearby.

  From Lille, in the far north of France near the Belgian border, Henri Fremendity (Osprey) was also providing plentiful intelligence about the rocket sites in his sector. On November 26, Fremendity signed off his latest report with “More follows…” But for several days afterward, there were no further transmissions from him. Then Koenigswerther’s transmitter went quiet, too. In his last message, sent December 5, he had requested an emergency parachute drop of three additional transmitters, as well as a variety of weapons that included Sten guns, revolvers, and knives. In his dispatch, he mentioned that the Germans had embarked on an intense radio detection campaign in the area.

  As the silence from both agents continued, Fourcade was forced to conclude that the Gestapo had launched yet another wave of arrests in the north. She sent out an urgent message to the operatives still at large in the region to stop all transmissions and go into hiding. André Coindeau’s operator replied that Coindeau would obey her order but only after presiding over an RAF parachute drop that had been scheduled for his sector. When the drop took place, the pilot ferrying the supplies reported to MI6 that he’d seen “a lot of activity” in the landing zone. Coindeau had been arrested, and Alliance’s only operation in December ended with all the equipment sent by the British falling into enemy hands. This time, the man known as “Nero” was unable to escape the flames.

  At a time when the British military command was particularly avid for intelligence about coastal defenses and rocket launch sites in the north of France, Alliance once again had suffered crippling losses there. Fourcade wondered if the British had decided to end their support for her network, even though she was sure that Alliance would revive if given help. But at least for the moment, the RAF and MI6 seemed loath to continue that assistance, despite repeated urgent requests from Paul Bernard and other Alliance operatives. “We have the impression London is losing interest in us,” Bernard said in one message. “We are now being exposed to exceptional new risks, and in order for us to continue, we must receive more aid immediately.”

  Fourcade asked herself if she had the right to force the network to carry on when there seemed to be nothing she could do to help her agents. She decided that if the situation did not improve soon, she would consider shutting it down.

  On Christmas Eve 1943, she attended midnight mass in the basement of her house in Carlyle Square. It was the saddest Christmas of her life. Once again, on this holiest of days, she was separated from her children, now including her infant son, who was still in hiding with Monique Bontinck in the south of France. As Fourcade listened to the priest read the liturgy, she thought back to the year before, when she had celebrated the holidays with Faye and other cherished associates—Gabriel Rivière, Ferdinand Rodriguez, and Lucien Poulard among them. All of them now were gone.

  On that melancholy night, she derived some comfort from the fact that her closest friend from Paris, Nelly de Vogüé, was at her side. A few weeks earlier, Nelly, who had been with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Algiers, had made her way to London. Determined to raise Marie-Madeleine’s spirits, she insisted that the two of them attend a New Year’s Eve party to which Nelly had been invited at the home of William Waldorf Astor II, the son of Viscount Astor and his flamboyant wife, Nancy.

  Marie-Madeleine reluctantly agreed, but from the moment she entered Astor’s house, she was sorry she had. It was like an evening before the war, she recalled. The long tables, set with the finest silverware and crystal, sparkled in the candlelight. Equally glittering were the diamond necklaces and tiaras of many of the female guests, who sipped champagne as they laughed and chatted with their equally well dressed male companions. Instead of lifting Marie-Madeleine’s depression, the gala scene only deepened it.

  Just before midnight, she wandered over to a window and gazed at the dense fog that hid Astor’s garden from view. What would 1944 bring? she wondered. Would it result in the liberation of France? Or would it merely continue the sadness and suffering of the “terrible year” of 1943? As she stared out at the fog, a wave of pain washed over her.

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  —

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, however, her anguish began to recede a bit, thanks to the entrance of Kenneth Cohen into her life. Cohen, who was now the head of all MI6 operations in France, had been the British official who’d met with Navarre in Lisbon in 1941 and authorized the partnership between MI6 and Alliance. Since November 1941, he had been very much aware of Fourcade and her importance to the netwo
rk; he had sent Eddie Keyser to meet her in Madrid and had overseen the relationship between MI6 and her group until mid-1943.

  Shortly before Fourcade arrived in London, Cohen had been assigned to organize Operation Sussex, a mission to parachute dozens of two-man French intelligence teams into France before D-Day. They were to provide the Allies, both during and after the invasion, with information about the movements, communications, and supplies of the German army, particularly its panzer divisions. After the teams were dispatched to France in January 1944, he returned to MI6 headquarters.

  Known for his warmth and sensitivity, Cohen deeply cared about the French agents with whom he associated, which made him a rarity in the bureaucratic confines of MI6. In his memoirs, Patrick Reilly noted how Cohen “won the lasting respect and affection of the Resistance leaders with whom he came to work.”

  His relationship with Marie-Madeleine was particularly close; indeed, in many respects, they were kindred spirits. For one thing, they both came from families that placed great value on culture and the arts. Cohen’s maternal grandfather, Meyer Salaman, was a wealthy businessman who made his fortune in the late nineteenth century importing ostrich feathers from South Africa. The feathers, worn on hats and in women’s hair, were so highly prized by the fashionable elite in Britain and the rest of Europe that their value per pound at the turn of the century was almost equal to that of diamonds.

  A voracious reader, whose favorite authors were Shakespeare and Dickens, Salaman opened his country house to young writers, actors and painters, among them Augustus John and William Orpen. Several of his fourteen children also turned to painting, including Cohen’s uncle, Michael Salaman, who was a good friend and associate of Augustus John. Cohen’s first cousin, Merula Salaman, was both a painter and actress—and the wife of the actor Alec Guinness.

  There was yet another renowned artist in Cohen’s family: his wife, Mary. The daughter of a prominent London architect, she had trained at the Slade School, arguably Britain’s most prestigious art academy. Her work—mostly landscapes, portraits, and still lifes—was displayed in a number of private and public collections.

  Shortly after Cohen’s first meeting with Fourcade, he and Mary took her under their wing. The Cohens, who had a young daughter, invited her often to their home and made her, in effect, a de facto member of their family.

  Yet as important as Cohen was to Fourcade personally, he had an even greater impact on the fortunes of her network. Strongly affected by the massive losses suffered by Alliance, he broke up the bureaucratic logjam preventing it from getting what it needed, insisting that top priority be given to restoring the broken link between London and the network. After Fourcade told him that because of the stoppage of the Lysander flights, she had received no intelligence reports or any other mail since August 1943, he asked the Royal Navy to authorize a sea operation to pick up the reports.

  A naval torpedo boat was sent on January 27, 1944, to a rendezvous point on the Côte d’Azur, near Saint-Raphael, to retrieve more than ninety pounds of mail collected by Helen des Isnards, head of the southeast region, from the other sectors. Dubbed Operation Popeye, it was far from an easy mission. As an icy rain pelted down, an Alliance operative spent three hours clinging to two enormous mailbags while perched precariously on a rocky jetty. The agent was Count Élie de Dampierre, the twenty-six-year-old scion of one of France’s oldest and most distinguished aristocratic families, who happened to be des Isnards’s best friend and brother-in-law. When Dampierre had told his father the year before of his decision to join Alliance, Guy de Dampierre stiffly responded, “We Dampierres are not spies”—a dictum that Élie promptly ignored. He and the mail were plucked off the rock by the British just minutes before a German patrol, alerted by the noise of the torpedo boat’s motors, arrived on the scene.

  In London, Fourcade avidly read through the massive backlog of letters and reports, much of it containing the heartbreaking human details of the disaster that had struck the network the previous fall, as well as the desperate efforts to survive it. The most agonizing news came from a letter informing her of the death of Maurice Coustenoble, the young pilot who had been one of her first recruits in Vichy and who, along with Henri Schaerrer, had served as her most devoted and trusted lieutenants in the early years of the network. Coustenoble, who had been based in the north of France since the summer of 1943, suffered from tuberculosis and had been in increasingly poor health. Tracked down by the Gestapo in October 1943, he died before he could be arrested, fulfilling his vow to Fourcade that “the Boches shall never get me alive.” Shattered by his death, she remembered what Coustenoble had repeatedly told her: “Little one, a soldier does not cry.” This time, however, she could not hold back the tears.

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  THANKS TO COHEN’S DETERMINED prodding of the RAF, a Lysander operation on behalf of Alliance was finally scheduled for March. Élie de Dampierre and another network agent were to return to the southwest of France, carrying with them an enormous amount of material, including mail, questionnaires, money, equipment, and other supplies.

  On the evening of March 3, the Lysander took off—and never returned. Again, Fourcade’s emotions ricocheted between hope and despair. After a couple of days, MI6 and the RAF gave up the plane and its occupants for lost. But this time, a seeming disaster had a happy ending. Word came that the Lysander had indeed crashed but that its passengers and pilot were alive, although the pilot had been injured. A new Lysander operation was immediately scheduled to retrieve him.

  On March 16, another plane was dispatched to a new landing ground in the Loire Valley. It returned with the flier, marking the first successful Lysander operation for Alliance in six months. The air link between France and Britain had finally been restored.

  Also aboard the plane was an unscheduled passenger who had been added at the last minute. He was Jean Sainteny, who headed Alliance’s sector in Normandy. Sainteny left the aircraft tightly clutching a large, bulging sack. It contained arguably the network’s most vital document of the war.

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  ONE OF ALLIANCE’S MOST skilled and daring agents, the thirty-six-year-old Sainteny was a native of Normandy and had run a thriving banking and insurance business in Paris before the war. He owned a farm near the Normandy coast, overlooking what would later become known as Omaha Beach.

  By all accounts, Sainteny was a natural-born spy. After taking part in the 1940 fight for France, he had set up his own personal intelligence network in the northwest region of the country, recruiting a number of his childhood friends, several of them seamen, to collect information about the burgeoning growth of German shipyards, submarine bases, and defense emplacements.

  After first making contact with Alliance in late 1940, Sainteny combined his group with the larger organization a few months later. He was captured by the Germans four times during the war, the first in September 1941. After several weeks in a prison in Caen, he was released for lack of evidence. His second arrest came in September 1943 during the massive Gestapo roundup of Alliance agents, but unlike most of his colleagues, the swashbuckling, dark-haired Sainteny managed to escape.

  In the fall of 1943, his informants had distinguished themselves with their detailed information on the construction of rocket launching sites. Late in the year, MI6 asked them to switch their focus to ferreting out intelligence for the American and British military commanders who were planning the upcoming invasion of Western Europe.

  Operation Overlord, as it was called, would be the most complex, fateful, and massive military venture in history. In less than twenty-four hours, hundreds of thousands of troops and their equipment, including some fifty thousand vehicles, would have to be transported across the English Channel, land on a heavily defended shore, and secure a bridgehead.

  Many of those involved in the planning of D-Day, including its commander, General Dwight D. Eise
nhower, were consumed with worry that the Allies were not ready for the operation and that it would end in utter failure—a “disaster,” as one British general put it, “of the most crushing dimension.” With Overlord, Eisenhower knew, there would be no second roll of the dice. “In this particular venture, we are not merely risking a tactical defeat,” he wrote, “we are putting the whole works on one number.”

  There were doubts about virtually every aspect of the operation, from insufficient numbers of landing craft to the notoriously fickle weather over the Channel to a shortage of supplies. But what most concerned the planners were the fearsome defenses that awaited them on the other side.

  Known as the Atlantic Wall, a formidable string of fixed fortifications—concrete gun emplacements, bunkers, beach obstacles, barbed wire, observation posts, and mine fields—stood guard over 2,800 miles of coastline in occupied Europe, from Norway to Spain. The most heavily defended shores, not surprisingly, were those of France and the Low Countries, viewed by the Germans as the likeliest targets for an Allied invasion. In Normandy alone, almost eight thousand Wehrmacht troops manned its fortifications.

  D-Day’s planners originally considered six possible landing areas, including the North Sea beaches of Holland and Belgium and beaches in Brittany, all of which were rejected because they were beyond the reach of Allied fighter planes. That left the coast of the Pas de Calais, opposite the cliffs of Dover, and the Normandy coast from Caen to Cherbourg.

  The D-Day architects eventually decided on Normandy, whose beaches seemed more suitable for the prolonged unloading operations that would be required. They also appeared to have adequate roads leading inland, which would allow for a swift and massive deployment of troops. The U.S. 4th Infantry Division would land on what was dubbed Utah Beach, while the U.S. 29th and 1st Infantry divisions would go ashore at Omaha Beach, less than a mile from Jean Sainteny’s farm. British and Canadian troops, meanwhile, would land on beaches with the code names Sword, Juno, and Gold.