As she struggled with the trauma of Navarre’s arrest, Fourcade found solace in the knowledge that the British had no idea that POZ 55 was a woman. Navarre had never told them the name or gender of his deputy. And she, concerned that they would reject her out of hand, had no intention of enlightening them.
Besides, she had other, more pressing matters to worry about, including how to prevent the Vichy police dragnet from closing around her and the rest of the network. With Navarre in jail, Boutron in Madrid, Bernis in Monte Carlo, and Schaerrer in Bordeaux, she was left with few confidants who could advise her in her battle to keep Alliance afloat.
But her sense of isolation didn’t prevent her from acting. She immediately severed all connection with Pension Welcome, where Navarre had been a frequent and highly visible visitor. She informed its owners about his arrest, telling them that if the police came looking for her, they should say that she had gone to the Côte d’Azur.
After two sleepless days and nights, she finally collapsed into bed at the Villa Etchebaster, only to be awakened in the early morning by a new headquarters staffer named Gavarni—a tall, lean former air force officer with a quick temper and commanding presence—who told her that the police were ransacking the Pension Welcome and that she must leave immediately. He took her to the home of a friend for a few days, then installed her in a hotel in the center of Pau, whose anti-Vichy owner agreed to serve her meals in her room and not to fill out the forms required by the police for guests. In the interests of security, she never left the hotel during the day and only rarely at night.
The rest of the headquarters staff continued their work at the Villa Etchebaster, which, after careful consideration, was judged to be relatively safe, at least for the moment. The network’s operations intensified, and huge stacks of intelligence reports, delivered to the hotel by Fourcade’s radio operator, Lucien Vallet, piled up on the desk in her room. She spent her days reading them and encoding the most urgent, which were transmitted to MI6 by radio. The rest were dispatched to London via Madrid in Boutron’s Vichy mailbags.
She held clandestine meetings with a steady stream of agents at the hotel to discuss the details of the intelligence that MI6, in its queries, asked them to track down. The majority of the questions, not surprisingly, had to do with the location and movements of German ships and U-boats to and from the French coasts. Alliance now had agents in place in twelve coastal ports, stretching from Normandy to the Côte d’Azur. Thus far, the best intelligence had come from agents in Saint-Nazaire, on the Brittany coast. One of the largest ports in Europe, Saint-Nazaire housed not only a large U-boat fleet but also some of the German navy’s biggest ships, such as the battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz.
Antoine Hugon, the garage owner whom Fourcade had chosen as the network’s leader in Brittany, was the conduit for the information from Saint-Nazaire, much of it coming from two spies Hugon himself had recruited—Henri Mouren, chief of the Saint-Nazaire shipyard, and Mouren’s deputy, Jules Sgier.
One morning in the late summer of 1941, Hugon arrived unexpectedly at the Villa Etchebaster. To the astonishment of the Alliance staff, he began taking off his clothes—first his jacket, with the Iron Cross on the lapel, then his tie and shirt. Wrapped around Hugon’s ample torso was an enormous cloth map, which he unwound and presented to his astonished audience for inspection. The map depicted the layout of the Saint-Nazaire submarine base and shipyard, including the recently built U-boat pens—all reproduced by Henri Mouren to scale, down to the last inch.
A major coup for Alliance, the map only increased MI6’s insatiable appetite for information. In early August, the intelligence agency informed Marie-Madeleine that it was about to parachute in more support, including a new type of wireless transmitter and a British radio operator who would train her agents in the transmitter’s use and also instruct them in an improved method of coding. When finished with those duties, he would travel to Normandy, where he had been assigned to create a new Alliance sector. The first Englishman to work in the field with the network, he would be known to Marie-Madeleine and her operatives only by his code name, Blanchet.
The parachute drop proceeded without a hitch, and she was thrilled with the bounty that MI6 sent. The new transmitter was smaller and easier to operate than its big, bulky predecessor; a new type of paper to be used for messages was silky and tissue-thin, making it easier to hide; and there were “lots of other little gadgets to help us in our work.” The only potential problem was the radio operator himself.
To meet him, she abandoned the safety of her hotel room for a rare foray to the Villa Etchebaster. When she entered the drawing room, she stopped and stared. Standing before her was a living parody—a figure who looked as if he had just stepped out of a low-budget Hollywood movie made by a director who knew nothing about the French. The man sported a goatee and pince-nez and wore a short jacket and waistcoat, striped trousers, stiff shirt with cutaway collar, and a cravat. On his head was a bowler hat. Marie-Madeleine’s agents burst into gales of laughter.
Trying to smooth over the awkwardness of the moment, she delivered a few words of welcome in English, only to be interrupted by Blanchet, who said in fluent French, albeit with a Cockney accent, that he had spent more of his life in France than England. It wasn’t until after the war that she found out his real identity: Arthur Bradley Davies, a thirty-nine-year-old former farm manager who had lived in Normandy for some twenty years. After the Germans invaded France, he had fled to England and was recruited there by MI6.
Marie-Madeleine ordered Blanchet, whom she called Bla, to shave off his beard and to tone down his flamboyant appearance. But his outrageous outfit wasn’t the only way in which he called attention to himself. From the beginning, he acted oddly, giving his coding lessons in a loud voice in public places, asking too many questions about the network’s operations, and showing too much interest in everyone who came to the Villa Etchebaster. Lucien Vallet advised her to get rid of him.
But how could she turn down an agent from MI6, which, by all accounts, was the most skilled intelligence service in the world? Although she didn’t get rid of Bla, she remained uneasy about him until he finally left for Paris, on his way to Normandy. Preceding him to Paris was Vallet, the warm, witty young former army officer who had worked with her as the network’s chief radio operator for almost a year and whom she regarded with great fondness. Fourcade had assigned him to take charge of the network’s expanding radio operation in the capital, but his departure was a loss she felt keenly.
Her regret over Vallet’s leaving was followed by a far more shattering blow. For weeks, she had been deeply worried about Henri Schaerrer, who had left for Bordeaux more than a month earlier. Since then, she had heard nothing from or about him. Then, shortly after Bla’s and Vallet’s departures, word came that the Gestapo had captured Schaerrer, his pockets stuffed with documents from the submarine base, on the outskirts of Bordeaux. The first Alliance agent to be arrested by the Germans, Schaerrer had been taken to Fresnes prison outside Paris, the Germans’ central holding facility for captured British agents and members of the French resistance.
The report of Schaerrer’s arrest was accompanied by additional bad news. The Vichy government, under increasing pressure from the Nazis, had ordered its security agencies and police to take the toughest possible action against all resistance movements and networks in the free zone. The repression began soon after the surprise German invasion of Russia in June 1941. In response to the German attack, Moscow had ordered the French Communist Party to launch an armed struggle against munitions factories and German troops in France, in hopes of weakening the Reich’s Russian campaign. The Communists’ first strike came on August 21 with the fatal shooting of a young German naval cadet in a Paris subway station. The Vichy government, in an attempt to appease Nazi authorities, ordered the execution of six French Communists who had had nothing to do with the ambush. Rather than halting the Communist attacks, the reprisal was followed by more assassinations: On October 20, a high-level German official was killed in Nantes, followed by another in Bordeaux. In retribution, ninety-seven additional French hostages were shot.
The French people, already restive over growing food and fuel shortages, were infuriated by the wanton killing of their compatriots, and resistance efforts against the Germans grew noticeably stronger, especially in the free zone. Vichy’s repression also increased, thanks to Admiral Darlan’s eagerness to conciliate the Third Reich. Believing that France’s destiny was to serve as the leading vassal state in a Germanized Europe, Darlan did all he could to make that happen, including overseeing the sale of more than seventeen hundred trucks and thousands of tons of fuel to the Germans for use in their fight against the British in North Africa.
Hoping to extend military collaboration even further, the admiral also signed a tentative agreement allowing German armed forces to use French airfields in Syria, submarine facilities at Dakar, and ports in Tunisia for resupplying German troops. There were, however, still some Vichy officials who believed that the government should maintain at least a semblance of independence. In their view, Darlan’s agreement was a step too far, and he was successfully pressured to cancel it.
But he suffered no such constraints when he allowed German security forces, including the Abwehr, SD, and Gestapo, to infiltrate the free zone, an action that violated terms of the armistice. An American diplomat in Vichy reported to Washington that he encountered Gestapo agents everywhere—“at bars, restaurants, and the opera.” Their presence was so ubiquitous, he said, that “you expect to find them in your bed—and perhaps you would not be wrong.”
Darlan was furious when he discovered that the French army’s counterintelligence branch did not share his laissez-faire approach to the presence of German spies throughout the free zone. In Marseille, for example, French counterintelligence agents had broken up an Abwehr espionage network operating on the Mediterranean coast. Eight radio transmitters were seized and twenty-six agents captured. By the end of 1941, more than three hundred Nazi operatives, many of them French nationals, had been arrested in the free zone and handed over to French military courts. Of these, sixteen had been executed.
During a cabinet meeting in the summer of 1941, Darlan attacked the army’s counterintelligence efforts and ordered them stopped. “It’s open war against us,” the Deuxième Bureau’s Colonel Louis Rivet later told a colleague. “We are now considered the bête noire of the regime.”
Obeying Darlan’s directives, Vichy’s interior ministry took control of the country’s urban police forces, and special police brigades were created to hunt down resisters. “At the grass roots, the police were torn between the directives they were being given and their deeply patriotic feelings,” an army counterintelligence officer wrote. “Many officials remained favorable to us and were ready to continue the fight against the enemy within, but we had to admit that we were completely short-circuited.”
Fourcade, for her part, had always been wary of putting any faith in Vichy. The crackdown ordered by Darlan simply confirmed her belief that no one in the government could be trusted. “Vichy is betting on a German victory,” she told Jean Boutron late that summer. “There may be in this regime men who will help us. But there are not many of them, and we will find it difficult to discover them. It is better to consider all of them as dangerous and sometimes ruthless opponents….So much the better if we have happy surprises.”
Yet even as reports of repression rolled in during the fall of 1941, Alliance continued to extend its reach throughout the country. Six of its MI6-supplied radio transmitters—in Pau, Marseille, Nice, Lyon, Normandy, and Paris—were now sending intelligence back to London. At the same time, the network’s operations in Paris and the rest of the occupied zone were rapidly growing. MI6 told Fourcade that it soon would send six additional transmitters to her, along with several million more francs to finance the network’s continued expansion. In mid-October, she dispatched Gavarni, Coustenoble, and two other lieutenants to tour the network’s sectors and urge their chiefs to redouble their efforts.
Although much of the intelligence she received from the sectors, particularly reports from the coastal areas, had been superb, some material, sent by operatives who clearly had a shaky command of the basics of intelligence gathering, caused her intense frustration. When she was sent reports, for example, about “a lot of Germans” observed traveling on trains, planes, or ships that were not identified, she shot back scathing responses demanding precise details of the enemy units and transports.
But that frustration was nothing compared to her anguish over the news she received one autumn day from Henri Mouren, the chief of the Saint-Nazaire shipyard. Bursting into her hotel room, he told her that postal inspectors had discovered incriminating documents in a Paris post office box, placed there by a postal worker who also served as an Alliance courier. French police shadowed the worker, who, over the next few days, met with more than a dozen other Alliance operatives. All were arrested.
“Who were they?” Fourcade whispered. She flinched when she heard the response. Antoine Hugon, who had brought her the Saint-Nazaire map, was among them. So were Lucien Vallet and Jules Sgier, Mouren’s deputy at the shipyard and his closest friend.
In the midst of dealing with this latest calamity, Fourcade was tasked with overseeing the preparations for MI6’s scheduled parachute drop, which yielded the biggest cache of money and materials yet. Containers holding 3 million francs and six transmitters floated down beneath their parachutes to a field in the Dordogne. Other parachutes carried new codes and questionnaires; an array of new devices for agents’ use, among them soapboxes and tooth powder tins with false bottoms; and treats for the Alliance staff, including coffee, sugar, and tea. Another 3 million francs were transported by Jean Boutron from Madrid, and 4 million more would be kept in reserve for the network at a Barcelona bank. The overall total—a heart-stopping 10 million francs—was unmistakable proof of Alliance’s importance to MI6 and the British war effort.
A million francs from the parachute drop were immediately dispatched to various patrols throughout the country to cover their expenses. Marie-Madeleine entrusted the remaining 2 million to Gavarni, whom she had just made her chief of staff. While presiding over the distribution of MI6’s largesse, she also was hard at work reorganizing the Paris patrols. Four new agents were about to leave for the capital. They would be accompanied by Mathilde Bridou, Marie-Madeleine’s mother, who wanted to visit friends in Paris and resisted her daughter’s arguments that going there now was too dangerous.
On the day they all were to depart, Marie-Madeleine felt the same sense of unease she had had before Navarre’s arrest. Coustenoble agreed. Together, they burned masses of intelligence reports stacked in her room, and Coustenoble spirited away the six new transmitters for safekeeping at his house in Toulouse.
Later that night, as Marie-Madeleine sat at her desk coding reports, two Alliance agents rushed into her room. Struggling to catch his breath, one of them shouted that Vichy police had raided the Etchebaster and rounded up everyone there. Now they were on the hunt for Marie-Madeleine. She must leave immediately.
With the exception of the two operatives, everyone at the Pau headquarters had been captured—Coustenoble, Gavarni, the rest of the staff at the Villa Etchebaster, the agents who had been dispatched to Paris, and several others who had come to Pau for consultations. Her mother, too, had been swept up in the net. The headquarters radio transmitter was destroyed before the police could seize it, but policemen found the new radios from London at Coustenoble’s house. There was one bit of good news: The remaining 5 million francs from the British had not yet been discovered.
Fourcade hurriedly gathered up her reports and packed a suitcase. After the owner of the hotel smuggled her out and into a waiting car, he put on his pajamas and moved into the room she had just vacated, prepared to claim to the police that the room was his and the woman they were seeking had never been there. As the car containing Fourcade drove away from the hotel, it passed a police car speeding toward it. Her agents took her to the home of a married couple they knew in the town of Tarbes, about thirty miles from Pau.
Distraught over these attacks on multiple fronts, she thought about whom she could approach for help. She had lost all the agents who had acted as her eyes and ears, had no transmitter to communicate with London or anywhere else, and ruled out traveling to Marseille or any of Alliance’s other sectors for fear of contaminating them. Concluding that her only hope was Jean Boutron, who had left Pau for Vichy several days before, she dispatched one of her rescuers to find him. Providentially, Boutron had not yet left on his return trip to Madrid, and when he heard what had happened, he rushed immediately to Tarbes, where Marie-Madeleine greeted him with a fervent embrace.
They discussed possible hiding places for her, all of which Boutron rejected. The only possible way to save her from prison and the network from destruction was to smuggle her across the border to Spain, he said. Like it or not, she must go with him to Madrid, reveal her true identity to the British, and seek their aid.