Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  Having made their choice, the planners had to find out everything they could about the area—not only its coastal defenses but also troop deployments and the status of German communications and transport. In late 1943 and early 1944, high-altitude reconnaissance planes flew over the beaches to photograph their terrain. But the planners needed much more minute detail of the German fortifications than what was evident in the aerial photos.

  For months, the operatives of dozens of networks—the largest of which were Alliance, Confrérie de Notre Dame, and Jade Amicol—had been collecting such information. But the Gestapo’s savage crackdown in the fall of 1943 had taken a huge toll on most of these groups. Indeed the Confrérie de Notre Dame was virtually wiped out in November 1943. Such losses threatened the flow of vital information on which the success of D-Day depended.

  Serendipitously, although Alliance had been hit extremely hard, too, the subsector responsible for information about the D-Day beaches remained relatively unscathed. The extraordinary fruits of the work of that group and its leader—a sculptor and artist named Robert Douin—were stuffed into the cumbersome bag that Jean Sainteny had lugged with him from Normandy.

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  ON THE SURFACE, ROBERT DOUIN seemed an unlikely spy, especially if one believed the maxim that spies should never call attention to themselves. Douin, by contrast, drew attention like a magnet, in large part because of his appearance. Tall and dark-haired, he sported a bushy mustache and goatee and was usually seen in a velour suit, cravat, and large, wide-brimmed felt hat. Reminding some of his acquaintances of the playwright Edmond Rostand’s great literary creation Cyrano de Bergerac, Douin had a personality as outsized as his looks. He was gregarious, witty, and opinionated and had legions of friends.

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  ROBERT DOUIN

  In 1930, he had succeeded his father, also an artist, as director of the École des Beaux Arts in Caen, a bustling city eight miles inland from the Channel coast. But since the fall of France, Douin’s main obsession had been to rid his country of the Germans. He was furious when Pétain capitulated and considered the marshal a traitor—opinions that he was not shy in expressing.

  In November 1940, Douin joined one of the first resistance groups in Caen. Contacted by Sainteny at the end of 1941, he enlisted in Alliance in February 1942 and soon became head of its Caen subsector, which had some forty members, among them fishermen, teachers, shop owners, and a blacksmith.

  In August 1943, MI6 asked Sainteny to provide maps as detailed as possible of the German defenses on the Normandy coast—a request that Sainteny passed on to Douin. After mobilizing his agents, the art school director embarked on what he viewed as the master work of his life.

  Aided by his fourteen-year-old son, Rémy, Douin walked and cycled up and down the coast, from the mouth of the Dives River east of Caen to the Cotentin peninsula, sketching in detail all the fortifications he saw and taking copious notes, all the while keeping a wary lookout for German sentries. He had restored a number of local churches in the past, which gave him an entree to their bell towers and the towers’ sweeping views of the countryside and coast—vistas that helped him in his work.

  Joining his father on the days he wasn’t in school, Rémy was passed off by Douin as his apprentice. The boy made significant contributions to Douin’s efforts, spotting antitank trenches as well as access paths from the beaches that would later be used by Allied troops. Another important contributor was a member of Douin’s group, a fisherman, who noticed that whenever Wehrmacht officials installed a new coastal battery, they scheduled a practice bombardment over the Channel. Before doing so, they posted flyers warning fishermen and ship captains to keep away from the practice areas. The fisherman stole the flyers, which included the batteries’ locations, and passed them on to Douin.

  As he worked, Douin was well aware that the tentacles of the Gestapo were closing in on him and his group. The house of one of his key lieutenants was searched by German police in late 1943, and two other members of the subsector went into hiding after being warned their arrests were imminent. In early 1944, the Gestapo in Normandy intensified their crackdown. Sainteny offered to evacuate Douin and his family to London by Lysander, but knowing the importance of the map on which he was working, Douin refused to leave until it was done.

  Finally, after six months, the map was finished. In early March 1944, Douin dispatched a long, rolled-up canvas by courier to Sainteny. When the Normandy chief unrolled it, he knew he had to get it to London as quickly as possible. When he learned about the March 16 Lysander operation to pick up the injured pilot, he made sure that he and the canvas were on the plane.

  After landing at Tangmere, Sainteny immediately brought his precious cargo to Marie-Madeleine. As he pulled it out of the bag and unfurled it, her astonishment matched his. On the floor before her was a fifty-five-foot-long map of the beaches and roads on which the Allies would land on June 6. It showed every German gun emplacement, fortification, and beach obstacle along the coast, together with details of German army units and their movements. As one military historian wrote, Douin’s masterpiece was “the most complete, detailed military picture of the landing sites” that the Allied command would be given in the course of the war.

  Marie-Madeleine was transfixed by Douin’s map. Even though the location of the D-Day landing was a closely guarded secret, she had long suspected it would be Normandy. If that indeed were the case, her agents there had seemingly provided the Allied chiefs with every detail they could possibly need.

  The young MI6 officer who served as her liaison wanted to rush the map immediately to the War Office, but she told him to wait a few minutes so she could savor it. She later asked Sainteny for a list of those who had been involved in its making.

  The map, as she would learn, had been whisked away to London just in time. On March 17, as she was admiring it, its creator was being rounded up by the Gestapo in Caen, along with fifteen members of his group.

  Two more Alliance agents who, like Robert Douin, had provided vital intelligence to the Allies—Jacques Stosskopf and Jeannie Rousseau—were also swept up in early 1944 in the latest paroxysm of Gestapo raids in the north of France. Stosskopf, who had reported on German submarine operations at Lorient since the fall of 1940, finally saw his luck run out. A German officer at Lorient who was secretly anti-Nazi warned a subordinate of Stosskopf’s that he was in imminent danger of arrest. When the subordinate passed the word on to his boss, Stosskopf replied, “I can’t stop now. I’m the head of a sector that could not exist without me, and my desertion would have serious consequences for my agents.” In early February 1944, his name was found on a list of agents in the pocket of a captured Alliance operative, and he was immediately seized. When Stosskopf disappeared from the Lorient base, there were rumors that he had been promoted to a better job elsewhere. In fact, he had been deported to Germany.

  Jeannie Rousseau was captured in April. She had become so important to the Allied scientific intelligence effort that British officials decided to bring her to London for an extensive debriefing. She was to be picked up by a Royal Navy boat off the coast of Brittany, but the operation went awry and she, too, was taken by the Gestapo and dispatched to a German concentration camp.

  Just as devastating for Fourcade was the news that Paul Bernard, her replacement as Alliance’s chief in France, had been arrested in Paris on the same day as Douin and his group. Nine other agents in the French capital, including her close friend Marguerite Brouillet, had been captured as well. Fourcade would not learn until near the end of the war that Bernard had been subjected to intense torture, including waterboarding, to force him to divulge the whereabouts of other agents. He remained silent.

  Her mind reeling from these latest calamities, Fourcade forced herself to focus yet again on saving her network. She would send Jean Sainteny to Paris to replace Bernar
d and resuscitate Alliance in the north. She would also call on the resources of the three leaders whose operations were still functioning well and whom she said were her last hope: Helen des Isnards in the southeast; Henri Battu in the southwest; and Georges Lamarque, who covered all regions of the country with his Druids. Each of them would be given money and autonomy over their own regions. She hoped to rejoin them in France as soon as possible.

  Determined to circumvent Claude Dansey’s adamant refusal to send her back there, she found an unlikely ally in her campaign to return—none other than the BCRA, the Free French intelligence service. By 1944, Charles de Gaulle had won his political battle with Henri Giraud and was widely regarded as the sole leader of Free France. He and his lieutenants were anxious to bring all French intelligence networks into the Gaullist camp in order to present a united front to the British and American governments.

  Although Fourcade had long had a testy relationship with André Dewavrin, the head of the BCRA, both realized the importance of their organizations joining together. In exchange for Alliance becoming part of the Free French, Fourcade was promised continued autonomy for her network and independence for its air and radio links. The BCRA also agreed that Alliance could still send MI6 the intelligence it had gathered for as long as the war lasted.

  Now that she was no longer subject to Dansey, she began getting ready for her return. MI6 provided her with a new false identity as Germaine Pezet, the wife of Raymond Pezet, an Alliance agent and former air force pilot. She changed her appearance as well, complete with dyed-black hair, a pair of round spectacles, and a “dental masterpiece” concocted by an MI6 dentist—a yellow plastic prosthetic that fit over her own teeth.

  On April 11, Jean Sainteny flew back to France by Lysander. He more than lived up to Fourcade’s expectations, restoring radio transmissions between Paris and London as soon as he returned. He also recruited a wave of new agents, including several radio operators. Within weeks, nine transmitters were operating in northern France.

  As Fourcade made preparations to join Sainteny, she couldn’t help but be aware of the growing carnival atmosphere in London over the long-awaited invasion. For anyone living in the south and east of England in the spring of 1944, there was little doubt that it was imminent. Truck convoys, tanks, and speeding jeeps choked roads and lanes in the south, while camouflaged artillery and weapons, along with millions of crates of supplies, were piled high in woods, fields, playgrounds, village greens, and along roads. The docks of the country’s southern ports were crowded with seagoing vessels of all descriptions—British and American warships, landing craft, and merchant freighters from around the world. London, noted Marie-Madeleine, was like “a boiling kettle.” Traffic was gridlocked, and restaurants were packed. Rumors about the invasion’s date and destination swept through the city like a virus.

  She expected to return to France during June’s full moon period—probably June 9 or 10. As she was finishing some final paperwork late on the evening of June 5, she heard a humming noise outside that grew increasingly loud. When she opened a window in her Carlyle Square house, the humming became a thunderous roar, sounding, as one observer put it, “like a giant factory in the sky.” Looking up, she saw fleets of Allied bombers flying wing to wing and heading east—toward France. The long-awaited invasion was about to begin.

  The following night, Kenneth and Mary Cohen invited her to their home to celebrate what Fourcade later called the greatest event of the century. Cohen opened a bottle of vintage Bordeaux that he had been saving, and the three toasted the apparent success of D-Day. By day’s end, some 150,000 Allied troops, along with their vehicles, equipment, and munitions, were on French soil and heading inland. When Fourcade wondered if it weren’t a bit too early to celebrate, Cohen shook his head. The hardest part was over, he said. From then on, everything would go smoothly.

  But as it turned out, he was far too sanguine about the future. After leaving the beachheads, Allied forces found themselves in an intractable battle against a still deadly foe. It would take them another two months to pick their slow, bloody way across Normandy and finally break out into the heart of the country.

  The invasion, meanwhile, only increased the ferocity of the Gestapo’s vengeful campaign against the French resistance. Early in the morning of June 6, as the Allied invaders neared the Normandy beaches with detailed maps of German fortifications in their hands, Robert Douin and the rest of the group that had provided much of that intelligence were rousted out of their jail cells in Caen. Along with some sixty other resistance members, they were taken down to the prison yard and shot. Their bodies—eighty in all—were loaded into trucks and taken to an unknown location. They were never found.

  Six days later, Fourcade received word from Helen des Isnards that Sainteny and most of his agents in Paris had been arrested the day after the landing. Shortly after Sainteny’s capture, Claude Dansey appeared in her office. If she insisted on returning, he said, she wouldn’t last more than six days before being arrested herself. She paid no heed to his warning. As it happened, she had had few dealings with him since Cohen’s return. It may well have been out of pique over her close relationship with Cohen that Dansey had begun referring to her as “Cohen’s bitch.”

  While Fourcade was thrilled that the liberation of France had finally begun, the invasion, to her great frustration, had scotched the possibility of any Lysander flights in June. The earliest she would be allowed to travel was during the next full moon period, to take place in early July. As she waited, she wrestled with the question of where she herself should land in the tinderbox that France had become. She finally decided on the southeast, which, under the direction of Helen des Isnards, was the most stable and secure Alliance operation in the country. The heads of the network’s other sectors were sending most of their radio messages and mail to des Isnards in the hope and expectation that he and his astonishingly productive radio operator could relay them to London. To reinforce the region, Fourcade persuaded MI6 to schedule a massive parachute drop of radio transmitters, arms, money, and supplies near des Isnards’s headquarters, just outside the city of Aix-en-Provence.

  On July 5, after nearly a year away from her homeland, she was told by the BCRA that her return flight was imminent; in fact, she was given just two hours to get ready. After packing her clothes in a light fiber suitcase, she placed transmitter crystals, codes, money, and her dental prosthetic in the false bottom of a small holdall bag. In her purse were her papers, including her false identity card as Germaine Pezet, and a packet of what looked like large aspirin tablets but were in fact cyanide pills.

  A few days before, she had gone to confession and told the priest about the poison she was taking with her and her concerns about being damned in the eyes of the church if she used it to kill herself. She hoped she would have the courage to resist torture, but she worried that she might not be able to do so and might, in the end, inform on her colleagues. The priest allayed her fears, saying her death would not be a suicide but rather a necessary means of resisting the enemy. He gave her absolution in advance.

  Early on the evening of her departure, she headed for the airfield with her MI6 liaison officer and Raymond Pezet, the agent posing as her husband who would accompany her back to France. To her surprise, she discovered they were not going to the RAF base at Tangmere, where the Lysander operation had been based. Instead, she and Pezet would fly out of the Tempsford base, which lay a little farther north. The plane that would carry them back to France was a larger aircraft—a light bomber called a Hudson—which would also transport several BCRA agents heading home. As the car passed through the English countryside, Marie-Madeleine felt a deep nostalgia for this nation that she was eager to leave but that had done so much to give refuge and assistance to her and tens of thousands of others in occupied Europe when they needed it most.

  Instead of Tony and Barbara Bertram’s cozy manor house, she was taken to Farm
Hall, a grand country mansion commandeered by the RAF near Tempsford, where she and the others were ushered into a baronial dining room that had been converted into a mess. After drinks and dinner, served by waiters in white jackets, she was escorted to the bedroom where she would spend the night before her flight.

  The following afternoon, Kenneth Cohen, dressed in his naval uniform, came to escort her to the airfield. Before they left, he took out of his pocket an exquisite ring with a heart-shaped stone and handed it to her. It was a family heirloom, he said, and he and Mary wanted her to have it as a memento of them. Her voice choked with emotion, she protested that it was too valuable for her to keep. But Cohen insisted she take it, saying it would bring her luck.

  As they approached Tempsford, Marie-Madeleine witnessed an extraordinary sight: row upon row of bombers on the runways as far as the eye could see. Cohen told her that they were heading out on raids to Germany that night and that her plane would take off immediately after them so that enemy radar would think it was one of the raiders.

  As the sun began to set and the first wave of bombers headed eastward, Marie-Madeleine and Pezet were driven onto the tarmac and dropped off at the side of a Hudson. After bidding farewell to Cohen with a kiss and hug, she made her way up the ladder, followed by Pezet and half a dozen other agents, none of whom she knew. There was no attempt to provide any passenger comfort aboard the plane: Marie-Madeleine and the others had to sit on their luggage or on the floor, with their backs against the sides of the fuselage.

  After a huge mound of baggage had been loaded and the door shut, she stood up and looked out a window, trying to catch a final glimpse of Cohen. Seeing her, he stood stiffly at attention and snapped off a smart salute. As her eyes filled with tears, the Hudson rumbled down the runway and lifted off, on its way to France.