While she was still in Paris, Fourcade received an urgent message from Navarre asking her to return immediately to the south. He did not explain why. Even though she had not finished all her work in the capital, she did as he asked, albeit reluctantly. Once again, she was searched by the “gray mice” as she crossed the demarcation line into the free zone.
At their meeting in Marseille, Navarre delivered some staggering news. He was leaving the next day for Algeria, he said, to help organize a coup against Vichy by dissident French army and air force officers in North Africa. If successful, they and the rest of the French armed forces there—140,000 men in all—would join with the British to fight the Germans. While he was gone, she would be in complete charge of Alliance.
Marie-Madeleine considered the idea of a coup to be stunningly wrongheaded. Yet she wasn’t surprised that he supported it. Like many of the young former servicemen he and she had recruited, Navarre had made it clear he’d much rather fight the Germans than collect information about them. Indeed, he had told Kenneth Cohen in Lisbon that his eventual aim was to take up arms when the time was ripe.
But at the moment, Fourcade argued, that time was still in the far distant future. During her stay in the occupied zone, she had witnessed firsthand how dominant the Germans were; they had enough troops in France and elsewhere to crush any revolt. Even the mere thought of a revolt was premature, she declared, to which he shot back that nothing was premature in war.
While Fourcade was well aware of Navarre’s taste for conspiracy and political intrigue, she knew that he was not the mastermind behind this audacious plot. Its architect was a buccaneering forty-one-year-old air force pilot named Léon Faye, who currently headed Alliance operations in North Africa.
WHEN FOURCADE FIRST MET FAYE in January 1941, she’d been immediately taken with him. Standing ramrod-straight in his dark blue uniform, the tall, lean major was physically attractive, she noted in her memoirs, with thick dark hair, an aquiline nose, and penetrating gray-green eyes. He possessed an unmistakable air of authority and more than a hint of roguish charm. But what struck her most were his passion, daring, and steadfast determination to strike back at France’s occupiers.
An anomaly in France’s military officer corps, Faye came from a much more modest background than did most of his cohorts. One of seven children of a police gendarme in the Dordogne, he had left high school at the age of seventeen to fight in the 1914–18 war. He’d distinguished himself in several major battles, including the bloodbath at Verdun. After the war, at the age of twenty, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre.
Bored by peacetime army life in France, Faye won a transfer to North Africa, where he discovered a new passion: flying. He transferred to the air force and became a pilot, eventually earning a promotion to head a squadron. In recognition of his obvious leadership skills, he was invited to apply for entrance to the elite, highly competitive war college, the École Supérieure de Guerre. Faye was at a significant disadvantage in terms of qualifications, not only because, unlike most of the other applicants, he had not attended the military academy at Saint-Cyr, but even more damning, he was a high school dropout. Still, he was fiercely determined to succeed, and after an intensive, months-long study regimen, he passed the examinations with distinction.
LÉON FAYE
Shortly after he graduated from the military postgraduate school, World War II broke out. During the fighting in France, Faye commanded an air force reconnaissance group and was cited several times for bravery in his superiors’ dispatches. Horrified by the armistice, he wangled another transfer to North Africa, where he became deputy chief of the air force and launched a campaign to persuade his aviator colleagues to continue the fight. At that point, the French air force in North Africa still had more than eight hundred planes but was woefully short of fuel, aircraft parts, and ground crew.
In January 1941, Faye traveled on an unofficial mission to Vichy to petition Pétain’s government for more resources for his squadrons. His request was rejected outright, and he poured out his anger and disappointment to a former commander of his, General Pierre Baston, who happened to be a member of Navarre’s and Fourcade’s fledgling spy network. Baston stopped Faye from having a confrontation with Pétain and introduced him instead to Navarre and Marie-Madeleine. During their meeting, Faye talked about a potential uprising in a manner that, in Marie-Madeleine’s words, “left me gasping.” Since the government refused to support his plans to renew armed combat against the Germans, he would work to recruit other officers to take part in a putsch against Vichy to prevent the enemy occupation of North Africa.
To Fourcade’s dismay, Navarre was entranced by the idea, asking how far the plot had advanced. Faye said that he was relatively confident of the support of the air force in Tunisia and Algeria and was now working on the navy, but that it would be more difficult with the army.
Neither Fourcade nor Jean Boutron, who also was present at the meeting, shared Navarre’s enthusiasm. Boutron knew from firsthand experience that many if not most navy and army officers in North Africa—particularly in Algeria, where the Mers-el-Kébir sinkings had occurred—were violently pro-Vichy and anti-British. “Algeria had felt Mers el-Kébir as if she had been assaulted,” he later wrote. “She was thoroughly anglophobic and anti-Gaullist.”
Following their spirited discussion, Faye acknowledged that considerably more spade work needed to be done before the conspiracy could be launched. He returned to North Africa with two missions: to recruit spies for Alliance and to continue laying the groundwork for the mutiny.
Five months later, while Fourcade was in Paris, Navarre received a coded message from Faye that the time for the uprising was drawing near. He had been joined by a well-connected coconspirator, a young army captain named André Beaufre, who was on the staff of the governor general of Algeria and who had attracted support from a number of like-minded colleagues. Faye urged Navarre to travel to Algiers to take part in the final preparations. Knowing that Marie-Madeleine would surely oppose the idea, Navarre completed plans for his departure while she was gone and presented them to her as a fait accompli on her return.
He told her that army intelligence officials in Marseille, who were also working surreptitiously against the Germans, had supplied him with false identity papers and other travel documents. He would pose as a Monsieur Lambdin, a wine merchant who was traveling to Algiers to negotiate the purchase of the latest vintage of Algerian wine. “The next time you hear from me, I’ll have taken over Algiers,” he said.
Predictably, Marie-Madeleine was livid. He had interrupted her work in Paris for this? A rash scheme that in her view had virtually no chance of succeeding? Less than two months after making a pact with MI6 to supply critically important information to Britain, he was abandoning it, her, and the dozens of other people who were risking everything, including their lives, to work for Alliance. Indeed, his actions might well make their mission more dangerous. For the first time in their long association, she felt as if a wall—invisible and unbridgeable—divided them.
The following day, Navarre sailed for Algiers. The morning after his arrival, he met clandestinely with Faye, Captain Beaufre, and three other officers to discuss their progress toward activating the coup. Faye asked the Alliance chief to get in touch with his contacts in the officer corps of the French army in Morocco, which Navarre promised to do. But he also brought up the name of another possible coconspirator—an old friend of his from his Saint-Cyr days who was now deputy chief of staff of the 19th Army Corps in Algiers. Navarre had mentioned the plot to his friend, who had expressed great interest in it.
At Navarre’s request, the others asked his friend to lunch, where further discussions were held. When the meal ended, the officer shook hands with everyone and told Navarre he would join the conspiracy.
Later that afternoon, the plotters met again. The table around which they sat was covered with maps and reports outlining possible means of attack. Suddenly the door to the room burst open, and a throng of Vichy policemen rushed in. One of them, a superintendent, brandished search and arrest warrants. The maps and reports were swept up, and Navarre, Faye, and the others were hustled into cars and taken to the main police station in Algiers.
AFTER NAVARRE’S DEPARTURE FOR ALGERIA, Fourcade had remained in Marseille, feeling more secure there than in Pau, thanks to the blind eye that many members of the local police force turned to burgeoning resistance activities in the city. Summoning her radio operator, Lucien Vallet, from Pau, she continued her work while waiting to hear from her absent leader.
A few days later, Gabriel Rivière, the head of Alliance’s Marseille operations, burst into her office and shouted that Navarre and his fellow conspirators had been arrested in Algiers and that she had to leave at once. For a moment or two, Fourcade couldn’t move or speak. When the shock wore off, she ordered Rivière to inform local agents immediately of the arrests. She then traveled to Pau to tell Bernis and the others.
As Fourcade knew, the question of whether the network was doomed by the jailing of its founder would be uppermost in the minds of its operatives. Bernis, for one, thought the answer was yes. When she told him about the arrest, he began to pack up his intelligence maps in preparation for returning to Monte Carlo. He had agreed to work with her, he made clear, only because Navarre had been in overall charge of Alliance. Now that his old friend had been captured, he said, his work was over.
Fourcade knew she could not afford to lose Bernis’s support. Assuring him that the network would continue, she said she would inform the British that he was going to Monaco to take charge of the entire Mediterranean region. He thought for a moment, then agreed. He was giving her a chance, she knew, to prove she could hold Alliance together.
Another senior officer in the network—General Baston, who had introduced Faye to her and Navarre—was also dubious about its future. When Fourcade told Baston she planned to continue, he frowned and asked if she was going to carry on alone. Although his facial expression and tone of his voice indicated he didn’t think she was up to the challenge, he agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to continue Alliance’s work in Vichy.
As it happened, Fourcade had misgivings herself about whether she would be accepted as Alliance’s leader. She also feared the impact of Navarre’s arrest on the network’s security. But those concerns soon faded. She was sure that Navarre would never reveal the group’s existence to Vichy officials in Algiers, and they had no other way of knowing about it. As for her ability to command the network, hadn’t Navarre emphasized to her and others that she was his designated successor? “She is the most valuable of us all…the pivot around which everything turns,” he had told Jean Boutron. Once, when she told him that everything would end if he were captured, his response was: “No, you will simply carry on.”
And while Bernis and Baston might still have their doubts about her, most of the younger operatives did not. To them, Navarre was a distant figure, while they had been operating under Fourcade’s command since the network’s beginning. As chief of staff, she had recruited many of them; found hiding places for them; taught them how to do their jobs, including coding and deciphering messages; received their information; provided money and other essential supplies; and presided over the meals they shared whenever they came to Pau. “She had a natural authority about her,” recalled her daughter, Pénélope Fourcade-Fraissinet. “When she spoke, she made clear that that was the way it was going to be, that her directions must be followed.” To the agents of Alliance, she was la patronne, the boss.
Her confidence restored, at least in part, she decided to move the Alliance headquarters to Marseille and returned there by train to begin the transfer. She had not yet figured out how and when she was going to tell MI6 about Navarre’s arrest. Her main worry now was how British intelligence would respond to the news.
On the train, she wore a broad-brimmed hat to avoid being recognized and kept her head buried in a book, the philosopher René Descartes’s classic treatise Discourse on the Method. As the stations rolled past, a man seated opposite her began nudging her foot with his. The third time it happened, she looked up with annoyance. He was wearing one of the most extraordinary outfits she had ever seen: checked trousers, a black jacket with a purple rosette, a wide cravat, and a Stetson hat, similar to the ones worn by American cowboys. She glanced at his face. It was Navarre.
He stared ahead with a blank expression. Her stomach churning, she looked down again, pretending to read Descartes. After a few minutes, he went out into the corridor to smoke, and she followed him. He whispered to her that he’d escaped from jail with the help of a high-level official in the Algiers office of the Surveillance du Territoire (ST), a branch of the French national police responsible for counterintelligence.
When they reached Marseille, he told her the full story of his arrest and flight from Algiers. He and the other conspirators had been betrayed by his friend from Saint-Cyr, who, after his lunch with them, had immediately informed Vichy authorities about the plot. Navarre, Faye, and the rest had been rounded up by French military police loyal to Vichy. However, as in Marseille, others in the police and state security agencies in Algiers secretly supported the British, including the ST commissioner there, who returned Navarre’s false passport to him and let him go.
When Fourcade mentioned her plan to move Alliance’s main operation to Marseille, he disagreed, saying they should return to Pau. Vichy, he said, wouldn’t dare arrest him there; he had too many influential friends. Fourcade doubted that was true. Admiral Darlan, who had replaced Pierre Laval as leader of the Vichy government, had been enraged when he learned of the plot in Algiers, which marked the first time since the armistice that members of the armed forces dared to rise up against Vichy.
Convinced that Darlan would do his best to track down Navarre and make an example of him and the other conspirators, Fourcade urged him to flee to London. But he insisted he must carry on the fight in France. Finally, she agreed to return with him to Pau but said that he had to hide from public view. At her request, Henri Schaerrer, back from his assignment in Bordeaux, found Navarre an apartment overlooking Pau’s main boulevard. The only other place he frequented was Alliance headquarters. He traveled there by bicycle, leaving his apartment at dawn and returning at dusk or later, when few people were around to observe him.
Two months earlier, the network had moved most of its operations to Villa Etchebaster, a large one-story house surrounded by a walled garden, on the outskirts of Pau. It was considerably more secluded and secure than Alliance’s previous base, the Pension Welcome. Navarre’s close call in Algeria prompted Fourcade to tighten security even more, transforming the villa into a kind of fortress, with hiding places for the network’s radio transmitter, codebooks, and reports. She and others on the staff rarely ventured outside and designated Josette, their housekeeper, to do all their shopping.
Even though Navarre was back, Fourcade remained in charge. With almost two hundred agents now on Alliance’s rolls and MI6 deluging the network with floods of questionnaires, she barely had time to draw a breath. To help speed up the transmission of intelligence to London, the British had dispatched three more transmitters. One was sent to Marseille, a second to Colonel Bernis’s operation in Monaco, and a third held in reserve.
All of them were transported into France by Jean Boutron, who now served in an undercover role as Vichy’s assistant naval attaché in Madrid. Although a godsend for Alliance and the British, Boutron’s surprising new posting was his worst nightmare come true. In early 1941, while working for the network in Marseille, he had informed French naval officers there, as part of his cover, that he was preparing a study on the need for reorganization of the country’s merchant marine. He did in fact complete the study, and the navy higher-ups were so impressed with it that they asked him to go to Madrid to give them ideas for reorganizing Vichy naval intelligence in Spain.
Boutron, who passionately hated Vichy and Pétain, was horrified by the offer. Navarre, however, was thrilled. “For months, I’ve been trying to think how to create a link to Spain to send messages and people back and forth from here to London,” he said. “And now you’ve been handed this job on a golden platter. You’ve got to take it.” With great reluctance, Boutron gave in.
Once in Madrid, he found the atmosphere in the embassy even more disagreeable than he had imagined. Before entering the French government in 1940, Pétain had been ambassador in Madrid, and the embassy staff talked of him as if he were a god. “Everyone worships Pétain here,” Boutron grumbled in his diary. “Some can’t speak for more than five minutes without mentioning something wonderful that the Marshal said or did.” His new colleagues, he added, “pronounce the name of England with a pout and that of General de Gaulle with total contempt….I am an iconoclast in a milieu of idolators.”
As uncomfortable as Boutron was in this den of Vichy true believers, Navarre was right in his judgment of the extraordinary advantage his position gave to both Alliance and MI6. After making contact with an MI6 agent in Madrid, Boutron persuaded Vichy embassy officials to give him yet another assignment: to carry its diplomatic mailbags, which were sealed and thus exempt from customs inspection, back and forth between Spain and France. Marie-Madeleine had lent him her Citroën for his journeys between the two countries.
In his new role as courier, Boutron was able to transport questionnaires and other secret messages, along with equipment such as radio transmitters, from British intelligence to Alliance headquarters and carry the network’s voluminous responses back to Madrid. In addition, Marie-Madeleine and the others at Pau were given a chance, albeit briefly, to examine some of the embassy’s communications to the Vichy government and vice versa.
Yet for all of Alliance’s successes that summer, Marie-Madeleine was plagued by a lingering sense of unease. She was still concerned about Henri Schaerrer, who, after reporting on the German submarine base near Bordeaux, was about to assume his new post as chief of Alliance’s operations in the occupied zone. Just before he was to leave, MI6 sent an urgent message requesting information about the sailing of specific U-boats from the Bordeaux base. Marie-Madeleine was loath to send Schaerrer again, but he insisted on going, although not with his usual ebullience. She considered calling on another agent to do the job but in the end let Schaerrer go. When she urged him, as she always did, to take the greatest possible care, he muttered that no one was irreplaceable. With that, she later wrote, “the intrepid, the irreplaceable Schaerrer disappeared into the night.”
A week later, Maurice Coustenoble, looking unusually worried and exhausted, returned from a mission to the southeast with the warning that Vichy was closing in on Navarre. His coconspirators in Algiers, Léon Faye and André Beaufre, had been transferred to a jail in Clermont-Ferrand to await trial for their part in the abortive mutiny, and Vichy officials were determined to see that Navarre joined them in the dock.
Coustenoble blurted out to Marie-Madeleine that Navarre must leave Pau immediately. She stood up, and the two of them went to find him. When she told him what Coustenoble had said, he replied he knew he had to leave but couldn’t do so until the following day, when he planned to meet his wife and daughter at the cathedral in Pau to say goodbye. When Marie-Madeleine said the police surely had Navarre’s family under surveillance, he shrugged, sat down at the desk where he had been working, and picked up his pen. She knew there was nothing she could say that would change his mind.
As the day crept by, she struggled to carry on with her usual routine—arranging new missions, encoding messages for Lucien Vallet to send to London, and deciphering MI6 transmissions that had just come in, including an announcement that its first parachute drop to Alliance would be made in two days.
When Navarre rose to leave late in the evening, Marie-Madeleine and Coustenoble said they were going with him. On their bicycles, the three pedaled silently down into the sleeping town, along the boulevard overlooking the valley. They slipped into Navarre’s apartment, and Coustenoble insisted on a thorough search for anything incriminating. Finding stacks of compromising papers and reports in every corner of the apartment, he took them out and burned them.
As dawn approached, Navarre offered each of them a glass of Armagnac. Sipping from hers, Marie-Madeleine stared out an open window at the peaks of the Pyrenees some thirty miles away, glowing like beacons in the early morning light. Navarre told the two to go back and get a few hours’ sleep. After he saw his family, he’d be with them at noon.
Neither did as he suggested. Coustenoble stood guard outside the apartment while Marie-Madeleine wandered around Pau until late morning, doing some shopping and spending a couple of hours at the hairdresser’s. Because she and her Alliance colleagues had closeted themselves away during their time in Pau, few people in the town had any idea who she was. But instead of savoring her few hours of freedom, she felt sick from anxiety and lack of sleep. Late in the morning, she cycled back to Villa Etchebaster. When Josette came to open the garden gate, Marie-Madeleine saw from her agonized expression that the worst had happened.
In the drawing room, her staff stood silently, their faces a tableau of shock and despair. Coustenoble took her arm and hurried her upstairs to tell her what had occurred. Navarre’s family had been followed from their home in Oloron-Sainte-Marie by more than a dozen Vichy policemen, who had been told their quarry was a German spy. They had stationed themselves in the back of the cathedral, and when Navarre came in, they rushed him. When he tried to run, he was fired at but not hit. He was now in the Pau jail, waiting to be transferred to the prison at Clermont-Ferrand.
Overcome by exhaustion, fury, and anguish, Marie-Madeleine broke down in tears. Coustenoble put his arms around her. “Enough, little one,” he murmured. “A soldier doesn’t cry.” She needed to eat, he said, and he urged her to come to lunch. She shook her head.
He insisted she had to come: If she didn’t, her staff would feel leaderless. She told him that she had to think for a while and that she would join them later. After a few minutes, she got up and went downstairs to the dining room. Taking a seat next to Lucien Vallet, she surreptitiously slipped the food on her plate onto his. Then she asked him the time of his next transmission to London. Three P.M., he replied.
About ten minutes before Vallet’s transmission time, she handed him an encoded message. It read: N1 ARRESTED THIS MORNING STOP NETWORK INTACT STOP EVERYTHING CONTINUING STOP BEST POSTPONE PARACHUTING NEXT MOON STOP CONFIDENCE UNSHAKABLE STOP REGARDS STOP POZ 55.
MI6’s reply, filled with expressions of regret and sympathy, came a few hours later. It ended with a terse question: “Who is taking over?”
Marie-Madeleine’s answer was brief and emphatic. I AM AS PLANNED STOP SURROUNDED BY LOYAL LIEUTENANTS STOP POZ 55.