As soon as Fourcade climbed down from the Lysander, she was surrounded by a crowd of men in British army and air force uniforms. At the back of the group, she spotted a familiar face—Eddie Keyser, her main link to MI6 since their meeting in Madrid more than two years earlier. “Here you are at last!” he said as he clasped her hand. “We were terribly worried about you. Why didn’t you come before this?”
After a flurry of introductions, Keyser and the other officers took her and her two agents, accompanied by Peter Vaughan-Fowler, to a small seventeenth-century cottage opposite the gates of Tangmere RAF station. Entrance to the cottage, which served as the headquarters for the top-secret Lysander operation, was restricted to pilots, crew members, MI6 staffers, and French intelligence agents.
At two in the morning, the officers’ mess was jammed. There was no pause in the cheerful buzz of conversation when the newcomers walked in; indeed, as a bemused Fourcade noted, no one even looked up. It was clear that the arrival of foreign civilians in the middle of the night was not an uncommon occurrence.
Fourcade was offered a choice from what seemed a vast array of different kinds of cigarettes and alcoholic drinks. Sitting at a table, she took pleasure in watching Lucien Poulard, a former fighter pilot himself, sprawled in an easy chair and eating a ham sandwich with gusto, all the while observing Vaughan-Fowler and his RAF comrades with wide-eyed admiration.
After about an hour, she, Keyser, and her French colleagues were taken by car to their quarters for the night. Fourcade expected the lodging to be a barracks on the base. Instead, she and the others were driven to a small stone manor house, surrounded by a garden that, in her words, looked like it had been lifted from the nursery rhymes of her childhood.
The house was leased to Major Anthony Bertram, a French-speaking liaison officer between MI6 and the agents from Alliance and other intelligence networks who flew back and forth from France. Bertram, an Oxford graduate who’d published several novels before the war, lived there with his wife, Barbara; two small sons; and a menagerie of animals that included Duff the dog, Peter the cat, Caroline the goat, and an assortment of unnamed rabbits and chickens.
Set well back from the road, the Bertrams’ home—with its glorious view of the South Downs, a range of chalk hills in Sussex—was as enshrouded in secrecy as the cottage adjacent to Tangmere. To the outside world, it was billed as a hostel for Free French officers. Few people knew its true purpose—a way station for French spies, who stayed there when they first arrived in Britain and then just before they returned to France. To keep the house’s secrets safe, Barbara Bertram did all the cooking and cleaning herself; no servants were allowed on the premises.
To the two-hundred-plus French men and women who visited the Bertrams’ home during the war, it was an oasis of gaiety, caring, and warmth, thanks in large part to Barbara Bertram’s extraordinary hospitality. “A delightful hostess, she was…first up in the morning and last to bed at night, looking after her guests and her family…but always with time to spare for a hand of bridge, a walk, or that favorite diversion of the British, a game of darts,” one of the Bertrams’ French guests recalled. He added that Bertram’s efforts to soothe and distract were especially important for the agents about to go back to France: “They were nervous, short-tempered, impatient, and let’s face it, scared stiff….But so good was she with them that I have often heard them say, ‘Our best memory of England was the time we had to spend in Mrs. Bertram’s house.’ She won the hearts and the gratitude of all the French who passed through it [and] many left her with their courage renewed.”
Among the many ways in which Barbara Bertram endeared herself to her guests was her habit of collecting the dried mud that the agents scraped off their shoes and boots when they first arrived. Like Marie-Madeleine, many had tramped through muddy French pastures to get to their Lysander’s landing field. After they’d removed the mud outside her front door, Bertram would use it in her garden to grow mustard greens and watercress, so that she could offer a salad grown in French soil to the next group of Frenchmen that arrived.
As it happened, Bertram felt as strongly about her guests as they did about her. After the war, she noted the bonds of “intimacy and love” that had grown up between them and her family. “When they arrived, I always went to the front door to greet them,” she recalled. “It was lovely to welcome old friends who had been to the house before, and I prided myself on always remembering them. The men would call me ‘Madame Barbara’ and would ask after the boys by name.”
Bertram grew particularly fond of “the beautiful Marie-Madeleine,” as she referred to the Alliance leader. “She came several times,” Bertram said, “and never looked the same twice running—sometimes red-haired and sometimes black—but always elegant and lovely.” Fourcade felt warmly toward Barbara Bertram, too.
But when she first arrived at the Bertrams’ home, the only thing she cared about was sleep. She had trouble keeping her eyes open during an early morning breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon; when she was finally shown to a room, she collapsed, fully clothed, into bed. She was awakened late that morning by a loud rapping on the bedroom door. “The Gestapo!” she thought—and jumped out of bed, her heart pounding. After a few seconds, she remembered where she was and opened the door. It was Keyser, who told her it was time to go to London.
Later, as their car sped toward the British capital, Fourcade stared out the window at the English countryside. Here she finally was, in the nation that had been the focus of her attention and work for the past three years. But all she could think of was the people she had left behind in France.
BARBARA AND TONY BERTRAM
To Keyser’s consternation, she burst into tears. When he said he had thought she’d be happy to be there, she replied that she wished her friends could be with her. She should never have left them, she declared, and she had a terrible feeling she would never see them again. With that, the tears flowed once more, despite her efforts to stop them.
To the great relief of the bewildered Keyser, they soon arrived at the posh hotel near Buckingham Palace where Fourcade was to stay. The young major announced he was going for a doctor and after an hour or so he returned with one, who prescribed vitamins, a sedative, and plenty of sleep. Keyser insisted on filling the sedative prescription himself. When he came back with the bottle, she thanked him politely, and after he’d gone, relegated it to the back of a bathroom shelf.
Before he left for the evening, Keyser told her that “le grand patron”—Claude Dansey, the deputy head of MI6—would pay a call on her at eleven the following morning.
PRECISELY AT 11:00 A.M, a balding, bespectacled man in his late sixties, bearing a bouquet of flowers, rang the bell at the flat. When Fourcade opened the door, the man put the flowers down on a table, took both her hands in his, and gazed at her paternally. “So this is the terrible woman who has had us all scared!” Claude Dansey said. “I’ve often wondered what you were like, Poz. It’s good to have you safely here.”
When Fourcade told him that she couldn’t stay in London for long, Dansey replied that for her own safety, she needed to remain there. She had been head of Alliance for two and a half years, he noted, pointing out that most leaders of French resistance networks were caught by the Gestapo within six months of assuming command.
“You mean you’re not going to let me go back?” she asked, an edge of anxiety in her voice.
Not immediately, he said. Swiftly changing the subject, he told her how important her network’s intelligence had been for British military planning and operations. Then he asked her if he could do anything for her in return. Encouraged by his solicitousness, she asked him to help her get in touch with her children in Switzerland. He promised to do so.
Later, Fourcade referred to Dansey at their first meeting as “a charming older gentleman.” For those who knew Dansey well, “charming” and “gentleman” would hardly be the first—or last—words they would use to describe him.
Although Stewart Menzies was the official head of MI6, Dansey, in the opinion of most of his colleagues, was the man who really ran the service. A shadowy, ambiguous figure well versed in stealth and deceit, he was, in the words of the writer Ben Macintyre, “a most unpleasant man and a most experienced spy.”
An anomaly in MI6’s upper-crust world, Dansey—who, according to Macintyre, had the sharp, penetrating “eyes of a hyperactive ferret”—had not gone to Eton or served in one of the army’s posh regiments. Instead, he had spent much of his early career as a military intelligence officer in Africa, where he ran spy networks that gathered information on and helped put down rebellious native groups. During World War I, he worked for British intelligence in London, where his myriad duties included rounding up suspect aliens and engaging in counterespionage in Britain and Western Europe.
“Everyone was scared of him,” said the journalist and author Malcolm Muggeridge, who worked for MI6 during the war. “He was the only real professional there. The others at the top were all second-rate men with second-rate minds.” The eminent historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was also at MI6 then, was far more jaundiced in his view of Dansey, describing him as “an utter shit; corrupt, incompetent, but with a certain low cunning.” Patrick Reilly, a young diplomat who worked temporarily as Stewart Menzies’s assistant, remembered Menzies’s deputy as being “consumed by hate of everything and everybody.”
Although Fourcade apparently never knew it, one of Dansey’s greatest antipathies was the idea of women playing any kind of leadership role in public life. A thoroughgoing misogynist, he never let on to her how appalled he’d been when he first learned that the leader of MI6’s most successful French network was a beautiful young mother of two.
She also had no idea that Dansey had been responsible for dispatching the traitor Arthur Bradley Davies, also known as Bla, to Alliance. Anthony Read and David Fisher, who wrote a largely sympathetic biography of Dansey, called the Davies/Bla affair “one of Dansey’s most serious mistakes”—a blunder that “brought almost total disaster to the Alliance network.” Read and Fisher added, “It’s hard to explain or understand how Dansey could approve sending him. But send him he did.”
In the days and weeks ahead, Fourcade would come to realize that her views on how to run her network were often in sharp conflict with those of Dansey and MI6. One of her first frustrations came when Major Keyser, her longtime MI6 liaison whom she considered a friend, was suddenly reassigned. His successor was an officer whom Fourcade identified only as Tom and who was a thorn in her side from the start. He ignored her questions and advice and kept from her much of the material sent by Alliance to MI6.
Another early source of vexation was her visit to MI6’s radio transmission center—a Tower of Babel in which hundreds of operators received the coded messages streaming in from Alliance and the other intelligence networks in France and elsewhere in Europe. She was there to pass on a request from Ferdinand Rodriguez that MI6 stop the practice of requiring radio operators in the field to initiate contact with London; instead, he said, MI6 should call first. One of the main reasons for the arrest of so many operators in Alliance and other networks, Rodriguez told Fourcade, was having to be on the air for long periods waiting for London to respond.
She agreed. “The unnecessary risks run by our operators, crouching in the front line, seemed to me utterly cruel,” she wrote. “I had so often heard them sending out their desperate calls and saying ‘They don’t answer, the sods!’ ” Still fresh in her memory was the police raid on her Marseille headquarters the previous year, after her operator had been up half the previous night trying to raise London. But the head of the MI6 center was hostile to her suggestion and adamantly refused to do as she asked.
AS SHE TRIED TO NAVIGATE the shoals of British bureaucracy, Fourcade was also caught up in the poisonous quarrels and rivalries of her countrymen in London. Her first inkling of the situation came when, a few days after she arrived, she hailed a taxi and gave the driver the address of her destination. Turning around, he asked her if she was French. When she nodded, he asked, to her astonishment, which side she was on—de Gaulle or Giraud.
By the summer of 1943, despite continuing opposition from the American and British governments, Charles de Gaulle clearly had the edge in his leadership battle with his fellow general Henri Giraud. Thousands of Vichy French soldiers in North Africa had switched sides, joining the Free French and making de Gaulle’s movement a much more potent military force.
Finally bowing a bit to what most people saw as inevitable, President Roosevelt acknowledged that de Gaulle could not be wholly excluded from the North Africa government and authorized his association with Giraud. In June 1943, the French Committee of National Liberation was formed in Algiers, with Giraud and de Gaulle as co-chairmen. Within weeks, however, it became apparent that a struggle for power was taking place within the committee and that de Gaulle was winning it.
The feud between the two sides was as vitriolic in London as it was in Algiers, where Giraud supporters accused the Free French intelligence agency of ordering its agents there to spy on Giraud and his men. Giraud’s adherents, meanwhile, were suspected of hatching a plot to kidnap de Gaulle and hold him hostage.
A number of those backing Giraud in Algiers were anti-German military officers who’d served in the Vichy government and had fled to North Africa when the Germans invaded the free zone. While they were eager to take up arms again against Germany, they refused to have anything to do with de Gaulle. The Free French leader, in turn, rejected the idea of cooperation with anybody who had worked in Marshal Pétain’s regime.
Fourcade and her network were caught in the middle of this bitter power play. Because of Alliance’s help in arranging Giraud’s escape from France, many in both camps considered it a Giraud ally. Some in Alliance, including Léon Faye, were in favor of that idea and advocated that their group become affiliated with the general’s military command in North Africa.
Determined as ever to stay out of politics, an exasperated Fourcade wanted nothing to do with the scheme. In France, supporters of both generals were active in the resistance, risking arrest, torture, and execution for their efforts to rid France of its occupiers. In London and Algiers, they treated each other as enemies.
Announcing her intention to work with both sides, Fourcade agreed to be at the disposal of the French military command, headed by Giraud, while insisting that the intelligence generated by her network be shared with de Gaulle and the Free French. At the same time, she made it clear that Alliance’s first loyalty was to MI6 and the British.
IN THE MIDST OF ALL these distractions, Fourcade never lost sight of her main focus: her agents back home. Early in her London stay, she made the rounds of the big department stores there to buy gifts for them—kilos of hand soap for Dr. Gilbert; Ceylon tea for Marguerite Berne-Churchill; sweaters, stockings, blouses, and underwear for her other female operatives. She packed these presents, along with “surprises of every possible kind” for her male agents, in a large suitcase, to be carried by Lucien Poulard when he returned to France at the next full moon.
During her first month in the British capital, Fourcade frequently saw Poulard, who loved everything about his time there. He told her with boyish enthusiasm how, during intensive debriefing sessions with the British Admiralty and War Office, he had spent hours describing in detail the coastal terrain and enemy defensive positions of Brittany. He also had given the British information about his various agents and their methods of operation.
At the end of one of the young agent’s visits, she told him she wanted to buy him some new clothes before he returned to France. When she asked what he’d like, his answer was immediate: a dressing gown. When she laughingly said that he wouldn’t be able to wear a dressing gown in his secret work, he said he didn’t care. Giving in, she took him to one of London’s poshest stores, where “under the astonished but discreet eyes” of the saleswomen, he tried on dressing gown after dressing gown. His final choice, according to Fourcade, was the longest and most English-looking of all of them.
Poulard was scheduled to return to France on August 15. The night before his departure, he and Fourcade discussed in detail MI6’s new assignments for his subnetworks in Brittany. She gave him a sheaf of reports for the network’s headquarters staff, along with the large suitcase filled with the gifts she had bought.
LUCIEN POULARD
The two incoming passengers aboard the Lysander that would take Poulard to France had been specifically requested by Fourcade. One was Ferdinand Rodriguez, whom she wanted to bring in so he could discuss with MI6 officials his proposal for ending the requirement that radio operators initiate contact with London. The other was Léon Faye.
From reports Faye had sent, she knew that Gibbet—the code name that Alliance had given to the Gestapo and Abwehr—had rounded up several more of the network’s agents in Paris and elsewhere. Among them was Pierre Dayné, the redoubtable Paris policeman who served as her personal bodyguard. In his messages, Faye had connected the latest arrests to the capture of Ernest Siegrist in Lyon. According to Faye, the Gestapo had found a notebook in Siegrist’s pocket with the code names of a number of agents, including those just arrested. She had asked him to come to London so that the two of them could come up with a comprehensive plan for tightening the network’s security to prevent such lapses from happening again. But she also just wanted to be with him again, even if only for a month.
In the late afternoon of August 15, Fourcade accompanied Poulard to Tony and Barbara Bertram’s cottage to see him off and to welcome Faye and Rodriguez. “Barbara did her best to cheer me up by chatting gaily away,” she recalled, but, haunted by her perpetual fear of losing Faye aboard a Lysander flight, she failed to respond. It was not until Tony Bertram called from Tangmere to tell his wife to “put the kettle on for tea”—a code message that meant the Lysander had arrived—that Marie-Madeleine came to life. Jumping up, she embraced Barbara and helped her set the table for the light meal she had prepared for the travelers.
Faye’s and Rodriguez’s arrival was boisterous. Both had stayed with the Bertrams before, and they greeted Barbara with exuberant hugs, kisses, and gifts. In her wartime memoirs, Barbara recalled all the presents Faye had showered on her in his several visits, among them oranges from Algiers and a large bottle of Schiaparelli perfume. Rodriguez, meanwhile, spent his first few minutes at the cottage entertaining the others with an off-key rendition of the song “Home, Sweet Home.”
Later that morning, Fourcade, Faye, and Rodriguez traveled to London. There she and Faye examined the rich bounty of intelligence reports he had brought with him. One of them immediately caught her eye. She skimmed its contents, then looked at Faye in astonishment. “I see it’s made the same impact on you that it did on me,” he said.
GEORGES LAMARQUE
Faye had received the document from Georges Lamarque, a twenty-eight-year-old native of Paris who, in the eleven months he’d been with the network, had become one of its top agents. Before the war, Lamarque had distinguished himself as a brilliant up-and-coming mathematician, writing his doctoral dissertation on the calculation of probabilities and making plans to create an institute for the study of public opinion in Paris.
When the Germans invaded France, Lamarque had fought in the Battle of Samaur, a last-ditch stand by French forces along the Loire River. Wounded in the fighting, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He refused to accept Pétain’s capitulation to the Germans and joined a fledgling resistance network, which was soon decimated. Not long afterward, he took a position with the Compagnons de France, a scouting movement sponsored by the Vichy government and aimed at teenage boys. The group’s members, thirty thousand in all, worked on farms and were assigned to construction projects, such as rebuilding roads and bridges that had been damaged by the fighting. They also participated in cultural and social activities.
Although Vichy had putative control of the youth organization, its head was an anti-German liberal who had already joined the resistance and who saw the Compagnons de France as a possible vehicle for such work. He enlisted Lamarque as its inspector general; his job was to travel around the country and keep an eye on the group’s young members, as well as on the activities of German forces in the various places he visited.
Lamarque joined Alliance in August 1942 and was initially assigned to distribute new radio transmitters to its sectors around France and to recruit and train their operators. Four months later, he came to Fourcade with a startling proposal: He asked to be put in charge of an autonomous group within the network, which would draw its agents from the Compagnons de France.
At first, Fourcade regarded the idea as an implicit criticism of Alliance and its operations, which Lamarque insisted was not the case. He told her that granting autonomy to this new subnetwork would create protective walls for both it and Alliance. She promised to think about the plan, and as she grew more convinced over the next few months that the network needed to decentralize, she decided to approve it.
While Alliance provided financial and other resources, Lamarque, whose code name was Petrel, was solely responsible for recruiting agents and administering his new organization, which he called the Druids after the Celtic priesthood in the pre-Christian British Isles. The new subnetwork immediately proved its value following the mass Gestapo arrests in the early months of 1943 that decimated many of the Alliance sectors in southern France. At Fourcade’s urging, Lamarque recruited from the Druids new sector leaders who were dispatched to rebuild the devastated areas. The result was the rebirth of sectors in Lyon, Nice, Vichy, Toulouse, and other cities, “conjured into life as if by magic.”
Fourcade was so impressed by Lamarque’s organizational skills that she had sent him to London in June 1943 for advanced training by MI6. He returned to France in July, aboard the same Lysander that then flew her to Tangmere. Now, less than a month later, Marie-Madeleine had in front of her, thanks to Lamarque, a report that was better than anything she had read in more than two years. In his foreword to the document, Lamarque had written, “This material looks preposterous. But I have total faith in my source.”
Marie-Madeleine asked Faye who the source was. A young woman with the code name of Amniarix, Faye replied. Lamarque had refused to divulge her real name. All he would say was that she was a gifted linguist and that she had acquired all the intelligence firsthand.
In less than a week, the voluminous report would be on Winston Churchill’s desk. Not long afterward, it and its author would help determine the course of the war.