Madame Fourcade's Secret War

by Lynne Olson

  THE LOCATIONS OF THE GERMAN PRISONS AND CAMPS IN EASTERN FRANCE AND WESTERN GERMANY IN WHICH ALLIANCE AGENTS WERE IMPRISONED AND EXECUTED

  As the Hudson flew across the north of France, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade remembered how dark and lifeless the country had appeared from the air during her Lysander flight to London the year before. Now she could see pinpricks of light below, which she realized were flashlight signals, blinking out letters in Morse code. She assumed they came from groups of resistance members who were awaiting RAF drops of weapons and other supplies.

  The Hudson made a perfect landing on a brightly lit field in north-central France, about forty-five miles southeast of Paris. The BCRA had handled all arrangements for the flight, including organizing the reception committee. When the bomber door was opened, Fourcade was surprised to hear someone on the ground shout up, “Where’s the lady?” As she was helped out of the plane by the committee’s chief, she was even more shocked when he casually said, “Hello, Marie-Madeleine.”

  For her safety, both the BCRA and MI6 had insisted that no one in France, with the exception of Helen des Isnards, be told of her return. When she quizzed the young reception leader about how he knew who she was, he replied that the BCRA headquarters in London had sent him a cryptic but revealing telegram informing him that a network leader would return to take command of Alliance during the next moon period. He assumed it was she—an assumption that was confirmed when he saw her emerge from the plane. He had been in London a few months before, he explained, and someone had pointed her out to him. So much for BCRA security, she thought grimly. She urged him not to tell anyone else, emphasizing that no one must know she was in France.

  Her unease increased when she and Pezet were taken to a nearby farmhouse, where they were joined by more than twenty resistance members for a late supper. As the eating and drinking continued, Fourcade, obsessed by what had happened to Léon Faye and Ferdinand Rodriguez, pulled Pezet aside and told him they must leave immediately. He tried to convince her to rest for a few hours, but she sharply reminded him of Faye’s capture after he failed to leave the landing ground as quickly as possible. She wanted them on the road now.

  Pezet, not surprisingly, shot her a look of disbelief. Their destination was Aix-en-Provence, more than four hundred miles away. “Do you mean to tell me we’re going to walk?” he asked. She nodded: at least, for the moment, until they were well clear of the farmhouse and landing area.

  After saying goodbye to the reception committee, the two, carrying their suitcases, set off along a road heading south. They passed cottages, fields, market gardens, roads, all shrouded in darkness. At one point, Fourcade reached down, picked up a handful of soil, and rubbed it between her fingers. The gesture brought it home to her: She was finally back in France.

  After three miles or so, the two hitched a ride in the cart of a peasant, who, for a hefty sum of money, took them to the next town. That was just the first leg of an exhausting, three-day hegira during which they walked; hitched more rides, usually in trucks and wagons; and traveled on slow-moving, packed trains, whose schedules were frequently disrupted by sabotage and Allied bombing. They stayed in hotels crowded with German soldiers and endured several inspections of their papers by German patrols. Although others were taken away during these random searches, which occurred most frequently in railway stations, Fourcade and Pezet escaped unscathed.

  On July 10, they arrived in Aix-en-Provence. Fourcade found herself a little nervous at the prospect of meeting Helen des Isnards, the French count whose skills as a resistance leader had so greatly impressed her and the leaders of MI6. Having corresponded with him for fifteen months, she wondered how she would get along with him in person.

  Tall, fair-haired, and dressed in denim, des Isnards made a striking first impression. After kissing her hand, he rattled off several sentences in machine-gun fashion. Why had it taken her so long to get there? He had sixty pounds of correspondence and reports waiting for her to see. And Sainteny had escaped in Paris….

  She stopped him and asked for more details about Sainteny. He had been tortured by the Gestapo, des Isnards said, and had been sent for a few days to the hospital. Shortly after being returned to Gestapo headquarters, he managed to escape by sawing through an iron bar in his cell.

  Then des Isnards put aside Sainteny’s escape for the moment and escorted Fourcade to the hideout he had arranged for her—a flat in a small apartment house in the middle of Aix. After he showed her around, he took from a cupboard several huge stacks of documents and papers—intelligence reports from the surviving Alliance sectors throughout France.

  As she began sorting them, she caught up on other network news from des Isnards, whom she quickly came to regard as a friend. She expressed her delight to him about the quality and diversity of the intelligence she was examining and about the large number of agents who seemed to have survived the relentless Gestapo dragnet.

  For six days, Fourcade worked virtually nonstop on the mass of documents, encoding the most important reports, including information on the Germans’ secret terror weapons and Wehrmacht troop movements on the Normandy front, for transmission to London.

  Nearly every day, des Isnards picked her up at the flat and brought her to his headquarters, located at the farmhouse in which he lived with his family just outside Aix. There she handed over the messages to his radio operator and stayed for lunch with des Isnards, his pregnant twenty-three-year-old wife, Marie-Solange, and their two-year-old daughter, Catherine.

  A graduate of Saint-Cyr, des Isnards had joined Alliance soon after the German invasion of the free zone. Taking a leave from the air force, he had been hired as an engineer by a regional electric company, which gave him a car, coveted gasoline allotments, and an official pass to travel—all invaluable tools for a spy.

  Marie-Madeleine was impressed by des Isnards’s daring, toughness, and steely nerves—qualities shared in equal measure by his petite, slender young wife, who was the sister of Élie de Dampierre. Marie-Solange and Élie’s father was a prominent figure in French horse racing circles, and the siblings had grown up in Paris and Deauville, an exclusive resort catering to France’s wealthy elite on the Normandy coast.

  Notwithstanding her privileged upbringing, Marie-Solange des Isnards was as cool, unassuming, and committed to her husband’s resistance work as he was. “She would accompany my father—no questions asked—when he went through German checkpoints, often with incriminating documents and other material stashed in the car,” said their son, Charles-Helen des Isnards. “She told us later that for her, what she did was ‘only normal.’ ”

  As Fourcade sat outside under the hot sun, talking to her hosts and watching Catherine play, she found herself unwinding for the first time in years. If there was a paradise on earth, she decided, it was this Provençal farmhouse, with its masses of geraniums blooming everywhere. But while it may have seemed a little bit of heaven to her, it wasn’t exactly an oasis of peace, disrupted as it was by the constant comings and goings of Alliance agents from sectors throughout the country. The security and reliability of des Isnards’s operation had made it the unofficial hub of the network, and streams of operatives—from Marseille and Pau, Brittany and Paris, Lyon and Verdun—reported to him from morning to night.

  Her confidence about Alliance’s survival came surging back.

  * * *

  —

  SINCE DES ISNARDS OBVIOUSLY had things well in hand in the south, Fourcade, after a week in Aix, decided it was time to move on to Paris to help Sainteny and her other beleaguered agents in the north. Georges Lamarque, who was then in Marseille, made arrangements to pick her up in Aix on July 17 and escort her to the French capital.

  HELEN AND MARIE-SOLANGE DES ISNARDS

  On the afternoon before she was to leave, she stood at an open window in her flat and gazed out at the narrow street below, watching housewives come back
from their daily food shopping trips. The day was hot and humid, and the scent of the roses that grew everywhere in the city was particularly intense. Lulled by the peaceful scene and the heat, she was startled by a knock at the door.

  When Fourcade opened it and saw the grim expression on des Isnards’s face, her lethargy instantly vanished. He’d just been informed, he said, that the Germans were planning to raid Aix the following morning. They were apparently trying to track down a group of maquis that had set up camp nearby. He urged her to pack up all the reports, and he would take them and her back to his farmhouse. She argued against leaving, noting that the raid wasn’t scheduled until the next day and that he could pick her up early in the morning. When she made clear that further arguments would not change her mind, des Isnards reluctantly agreed.

  After closing the door behind him, Fourcade went into the kitchen to get something to eat. Once she’d finished, she returned to the sitting room to tidy it up in preparation for her departure. At that moment, she heard a loud crescendo of voices speaking German in the stairwell. Realizing she hadn’t locked her door’s dead bolt after des Isnards’s departure, she rushed to push it into place, to give her time to escape out the back door and into the courtyard. Try as she might, though, she couldn’t resist the force of the men pushing in on the door from the other side.

  It crashed open, and well over a dozen gun-waving Germans rushed in, all but four of them in gray-green army uniforms. “Where’s the man?” they shouted at Fourcade, a couple of them pushing her back against the wall with their revolvers. Her heart thudding, she replied that no man was there; she was on her own. Then she went on the offensive, just as she had done during the Germans’ search of her Marseille headquarters almost two years before. Why did they think the man was in her apartment? There were plenty of other apartments in the building.

  Her playacting was convincing enough that the leader of the raid, dressed in mufti and clearly Gestapo, ordered all but one soldier to search the entire building. With the lone guard training a machine gun on her, Marie-Madeleine wandered around her sitting room, waiting for a moment when she could move a stack of intelligence reports from the table on which they were piled. When the man turned his head for a moment, she scooped up the papers and pushed them under a divan.

  Now that they were out of sight, she asked the guard to describe the man they were seeking. He was tall and fair, the guard said, and the Gestapo called him Grand Duke. Fourcade’s heart skipped a beat. So the Germans’ quarry wasn’t the maquis. It was des Isnards himself.

  After a few minutes, the rest of the raiding party returned, disgruntled over their failure to find the man they were after. They began searching the flat, turning over the mattress in the bedroom, pulling out the contents of the closets, and rummaging through the cupboards, bureaus, and her suitcases. She had wadded up and hidden much of the intelligence material inside two padded footstools in the sitting room, which the Germans ignored. They also had shown no interest, at least so far, in looking under the divan.

  As the search continued, Fourcade vigorously protested her innocence. She was Germaine Pezet, a native of Marseille, who had come to Aix to get away from the Allied bombing raids of her hometown. They were driving her mad, she said. She hated the war, and all she wanted was a little peace and quiet.

  The Gestapo leader of the group told her the man they were looking for was an important member of a terrorist resistance organization called Alliance. They obviously didn’t realize that the head of the network was standing right in front of them.

  No, she said, no one answering the man’s description had come to her door. In fact, no one had visited her at all since she’d arrived in Aix. She rambled on and on, continuing her complaints about the bombing and the war and trying to make herself sound as stupid as possible.

  Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the leader seemed convinced that she was telling the truth. He ordered her to let him know if she came in contact with the man they were seeking, and when she agreed, he motioned the other members of the raiding party toward the door. As they picked up their guns and headed out, one of them casually glanced under the divan. He looked again, and with a shout, sank to his knees and pulled out a large handful of coded messages on grid paper, holding them up in triumph.

  With his discovery, the others went berserk. They ripped open the upholstered furniture in the sitting room and found the papers hidden in the footstools. Several of them advanced menacingly toward Fourcade with their revolvers and machine guns, and for a moment, she was afraid they were going to shoot her on the spot. At that moment, her only thought was that at last, her turn had come—like Navarre, Faye, Schaerrer, and the hundreds of others who had come before her.

  Incandescent with rage, the Gestapo leader violently shook her. “Who are you?” he roared. She replied that she was a spy sent by London to meet some agents in Aix. The man for whom they were searching had indeed come to her door, but she didn’t know who he was. He was simply an emissary who was there to arrange an appointment between her and the operatives she was to meet the following day.

  When the German ordered her to give him her real name, she coolly responded that he was far too unimportant for her to tell him. She would speak only to the senior Gestapo officer in the region. The leader snapped an order to a subordinate, who ran off. In a few minutes, he returned and whispered in his boss’s ear. The leader told Fourcade that the senior Gestapo official in Marseille had agreed to come to Aix the following morning to question her. He ordered her to pack a suitcase, then hustled her down the stairs and into a black car that drove off at top speed, two Gestapo men flanking her in the backseat and the leader in the front.

  She was taken not to a prison but to an army barracks in downtown Aix, where she was pushed into a punishment cell for soldiers. The several men in the cell were rousted out, and she was left alone in the small, bare space that stank of urine, sweat, and tobacco. Sinking down on a cot covered with a filthy gray blanket, Fourcade glanced despairingly at the cell’s heavily bolted door.

  She suddenly felt sick to her stomach and ran to the corner of the room to vomit. Notwithstanding her outward composure in front of the Germans, she was in fact mortally afraid. Exhausted and gasping for breath, she returned to the cot and ordered herself to try to get some sleep, to be better able to stand up to the ordeal that assuredly would face her the following morning. By then they would have combed through her mail and found out who she was.

  Would she be able to remain silent and withstand the beatings and other forms of torture that would surely follow? She remembered confiding her fears about a Gestapo interrogation to the priest at confession and his response: Taking cyanide in such a situation would not be suicide but a necessary way of resisting the enemy.

  Marie-Madeleine found her handbag and opened it. Perhaps she should take the cyanide now in order to make sure she would never talk. But then she realized that if she did so, the Gestapo would be waiting the following morning for des Isnards to arrive at her flat. He and his operation, the bulwark of Alliance, would be wiped out, and almost certainly the entire network as well. Before she took that irreversible step, she must explore every possibility of escape.

  Feeling faint in the hot, stuffy cell, she walked over to the barred window to get a breath of air. As she stood there, she took a more careful look at the window, which was large and had no glass panes. A thick, horizontal wooden board was screwed into the window frame and blocked more than half the opening, leaving a relatively small space at the top to allow in air and a bit of light. There was also a space between the board and the bars covering the window.

  Without the right tools, it would be impossible, she knew, to remove the board and one or more of the bars. But could she possibly slip between the board and the bars and ease her body out? Marie-Madeleine remembered her father telling her how robbers in Indochina would oil their bodies to squeeze through
the bars of the gates and windows of houses they had chosen as targets. Thanks to fear and the stifling heat, her own slight, slender body was slick with sweat. Could she follow their example? She decided to try.

  She waited until about 3 A.M., when the guards outside her cell went off duty. Pushing the cot under the window, she picked up a large washing basin, turned it upside down, and put it on the cot. After taking off all her clothes, she climbed onto the basin, a light summer dress clenched between her teeth.

  She managed to pull herself up and over the board. With her body tightly pinned between the board and the bars, she began trying to ease her head between the gaps. The first two were far too narrow. The next one was wider, and she thrust her head as hard as she could through the opening. Although extraordinarily painful, the maneuver worked, and her head popped through.

  Just then, a German truck convoy lumbering down the street stopped outside the barracks, directly opposite Marie-Madeleine’s window. She quickly pulled her head back through the opening, with a pain so fierce she feared her ears had been torn off. It was the Gestapo, she thought. They’d come early, and they would find her pinned like a bug between the wooden board and the bars.

  An officer emerged from a staff car and shouted something at a sentry standing in front of the barracks, a few hundred feet from her window. With a great rush of relief, Marie-Madeleine realized he was asking for directions. The convoy was not Gestapo, as it turned out, just an ordinary army unit that had gotten lost. After the sentry responded, the officer got back in the car, and the line of trucks disappeared down the street.