For Marie-Madeleine, the month spent in London with Léon Faye and Ferdinand Rodriguez was a cherished interlude in a difficult time. Thanks to Jeannie Rousseau’s astonishing report about the new German terror weapons, Alliance’s standing with the British had never been higher. And under the direction of Paul Bernard in Paris, key intelligence continued to pour in from network agents throughout France.
During a visit to MI6’s communication center, Rodriguez proved his point about the importance of initiating broadcasts from London when he used a transmitter at the center to call several Alliance sectors. They responded with more than fifty intelligence messages within a few hours. Impressed, Dansey decreed that London would now originate calls, at prearranged times, to the network’s highest-priority sectors, including those covering the ports and submarine bases at Caen, Brest, Saint-Nazaire, and Bordeaux. Meanwhile, Fourcade and Faye worked out a plan to increase the network’s security by further decentralizing its operations.
In the evenings, her English friends occasionally took her, Faye, and Rodriguez to some of London’s most popular nightclubs. She loved to dance and spent considerable time on the clubs’ tiny dance floors as the orchestras played such wistful hits of the day as “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” and “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Yet although she enjoyed the evenings out, she couldn’t rid herself of a lingering sense of melancholy. As cigarette smoke spiraled to the ceiling, she watched the other dancers—the bomber and fighter pilots in RAF blue who might soon be killed in action and the agents from European countries who would be heading back to highly uncertain futures on the Gestapo-infested Continent. She was clearly thinking about Faye and Rodriguez.
Fourcade’s gloom increased as the September full moon approached and her two colleagues prepared to return to France. A week before they were scheduled to leave, Claude Dansey treated Fourcade and Faye to lunch at Brown’s, one of London’s most luxurious hotels. The meals there were lavish, Fourcade remembered. Also on offer was a dazzling array of the finest French wines.
But thanks to an announcement by Dansey, she found herself unable to enjoy any of this bounty. He told her with an air of great satisfaction that she soon would move out of the hotel where she’d been staying into a house of her own in west London. Stunned, she exclaimed that she didn’t want a house; she wanted to go back to France.
Impervious to her outburst, Dansey responded that it was more important for MI6 to have her in London than in Paris. Her network was the largest and most important French spy organization reporting to his agency, he went on, and it was vital for her to stay in Britain so she could have a bird’s-eye view of Alliance’s far-flung operations. When she failed to accept his reasoning, Dansey said bluntly that the Gestapo was stepping up its campaign against the French resistance and that only by staying in London would she be able to survive.
A few nights later, Fourcade, her mind awhirl, dreamed again of the landing field surrounded by pink heather. In her nightmare, she saw the Lysander touching down, Faye and Rodriguez getting out, the Gestapo closing around them as the plane took off, and the German voice saying, “We have gotten Faye! We are delighted.”
The next morning, Dansey paid her a visit. This time, he insisted that both she and Faye must stay in London. The network was running well without them, he said. Why not let Paul Bernard take charge for a little longer? There was an advantage, he added, in dividing the direction of the network between France and England. Rumors were swirling that the Allies would soon mount an invasion of Western Europe, with France as the odds-on favorite landing site. It was far better, Dansey argued, for Alliance’s two top leaders to remain in London to help plan their network’s role in the attack.
Fourcade didn’t deny the logic of what he said but insisted that if she were to extend her stay, she must first go back to France to explain in person to her headquarters staff and agents why she was doing so. Dansey curtly replied that her job was to give orders, not explanations. That might be true in the military but not in the resistance, Fourcade retorted. Her agents were volunteers, not soldiers subject to military discipline.
Then changing the subject, she asked Dansey why he didn’t want Faye to leave. Because, he said, Faye would surely be captured if he returned to France; he was already living on borrowed time. When Marie-Madeleine said Faye would never agree to stay, Dansey replied, “If you order him not to return, Poz, we won’t provide him with a Lysander. I’m putting his fate in your hands.”
Marie-Madeleine’s nightmare, coupled with Dansey’s warning, made her sick with anxiety. At lunch with Faye that day, she repeated word for word her conversation with Dansey. Then she told him she agreed with their MI6 boss. He leaped to his feet, his eyes blazing. “Damn their law of averages!” he shouted. “Tell them that I’ve got fifty bombing missions to my credit and that I was a volunteer at the age of seventeen in the trenches. According to their calculations, I should have been dead long ago!” He could not allow the agents he had recruited for Alliance, particularly his former air force comrades, to be caught in his place, he said.
Realizing that no argument would dent Faye’s intense sense of honor, Fourcade backed down. She wouldn’t force him to stay in London, she said, but he must agree to take special care the moment the Lysander arrived in France. This would be the first landing operation not directly supervised by either her or him, and she was concerned that the inexperienced Bernard would not insist on the strictest possible security. She would let him go back only if he promised to travel to Paris as soon as he landed in France. After finding out what was going on in the network, he would return to England by Lysander in October, and she would fly to France in November. In that way, they would alternate direction of Alliance until the invasion.
After Faye promised to do as she said, she phoned Dansey to explain how passionately he had fought the idea of his staying. She had agreed to his return, she added, but with two conditions—he must come back to London after a month and take exceptional precautions while he was there. “It’s up to you, my dear,” Dansey replied with a sigh. “You’ve made a very grave decision.”
The final few days before the September 13 Lysander flight passed in a flurry of last-minute consultations with British military officials, who outlined the specific information they needed most urgently. Many of the requests, Fourcade noted, focused on the German defenses on Normandy’s Cotentin Peninsula. She speculated to Faye that the peninsula might be the landing site for the long-awaited Allied invasion.
When they were not in meetings, Fourcade, Faye, and Rodriguez packed up cases with a profusion of supplies—crystals and operating codes for the radio operators; dozens of questionnaires; millions of francs; new directives for agents; a variety of equipment; and material needed for the forging of documents, including rubber stamps, Red Cross cards and armbands, and identity and ration cards. Faye and Rodriguez would take a couple of the cases with them on the plane, while the others would be dropped by parachute over a new Alliance landing ground in Normandy.
All the while, Fourcade’s mind kept returning to Dansey’s statement—“It’s up to you.” Her intuition, which had saved her from disaster again and again, was working overtime now. Why was she so loath to obey it? Was she a coward for not stopping her two closest associates from going back?
September 13 dawned cool and clear—perfect weather conditions for that night’s flight. Early in the evening, just before sunset, Fourcade, Faye, and Rodriguez, accompanied by an MI6 liaison officer, set out for Tony and Barbara Bertram’s cottage. With everyone lost in his or her own thoughts, it was a silent, somber trip.
As the rolling, wooded countryside flashed by, Fourcade suddenly spotted a field filled with heather. The pink rays of the setting sun shone down on the pale purple of the heather bushes that spread as far as the eye could see. Her nightmare had come to life, and she sat frozen in shock. Should she order the driver to turn around? Should she explain the dream to Faye and Rodriguez and tell them that because of it, they could not go? And if they were going to their deaths, how could she not stop them?
In the end, she said nothing. When the group arrived at their destination, Barbara Bertram had a light supper ready, but it went mostly untouched. At ten o’clock, Faye and Rodriguez, together with Tony Bertram, left for the airfield. Arriving on that night’s Lysander were two key Alliance agents—Maurice de MacMahon, who had eluded the Gestapo and escaped to Switzerland in the spring, and Philippe Koenigswerther, the head of the network’s operation in Bordeaux. Bored by the peace and quiet of Switzerland, MacMahon had left his wife and children there and slipped back into France, where arrangements were made to fly him to London as soon as possible. As for Koenigswerther, the British Admiralty was anxious to quiz him about the current status of German submarine bases on the Atlantic coast.
The next few hours seemed like an eternity to Marie-Madeleine, who stayed behind at the cottage with Barbara Bertram. Finally, at about two in the morning, the phone rang. “Tea for the same guests,” Tony Bertram told his wife. The flight had been aborted and Faye and Rodriguez were back at Tangmere.
Marie-Madeleine was as jubilant as Faye was furious. He growled that even though the moon was full, there were no signals from the reception team on the landing field. Tony Bertram speculated that the brightness of the moon had prevented the pilot and passengers from seeing the flashlight signals below them—a guess that was validated later that day when Pierre Dallas, in a message to London, confirmed that the team had indeed been in place and had seen the plane but received no response when they signaled.
Marie-Madeleine didn’t care what had prompted the Lysander’s return. All that mattered was that Faye was back. In the previous seventeen months, he had flown three times from London to France aboard a Lysander; each time, the aircraft had had to return. For Marie-Madeleine, this third return was confirmation that her premonition was right. Pleading with Faye to stay, she argued that the plane was refusing to take him back and that he should heed its warning.
He would not reconsider. Two nights later, the Lysander, with Faye and Rodriguez on board, took off again. Marie-Madeleine watched Faye go with the “absolute conviction” that she would never see him again. After their wrenching farewell, she helped Barbara change the sheets on the beds that her lieutenants had vacated. Then, as Barbara remembered it, the two women sat talking for hours, with Marie-Madeleine opening up to Barbara in a way she had never done before. Among other things, she confided that Faye was her fiancé.
Shortly before 3 A.M., the phone rang. “Tea for our new guests,” Bertram told his wife. Faye and Rodriguez had landed in France, and MacMahon and Koenigswerther were on the return flight. When they walked in a few minutes later, Marie-Madeleine embraced MacMahon, then asked him how the landing had gone. Very badly, he replied. Even before he and Koenigswerther had arrived at the landing field, he’d had misgivings about the area. His father had fought in a bloody battle there during World War I and later had told his son that it was “cursed ground.” The situation was made worse, MacMahon added, by the confused and disorderly scene at the landing ground. With the exception of Pierre Dallas, the members of the reception team were all new. He also thought there were far too many people milling around on the field before the Lysander arrived.
After Faye had jumped out of the plane, MacMahon had only enough time to embrace him and whisper in his ear to get out of there as soon as he could. Koenigswerther echoed MacMahon, telling Marie-Madeleine that the scene was chaotic on the ground and that he had the feeling they were being watched.
Marie-Madeleine struggled to keep her emotions under control. All she could think of was Rodriguez’s next transmission from Paris, scheduled for one o’clock that afternoon. Its purpose was to let her know that he and Faye were safe.
LATE THE PREVIOUS NIGHT, as Rodriguez removed his bags from the Lysander, he overheard MacMahon’s whispered message to Faye. Already uneasy about returning to France, Rodriguez became even more anxious, not only because of MacMahon’s warning but also because of the sight of unfamiliar faces in the crowd at the landing site.
Faye, too, was troubled. After everyone had piled into Dr. Gilbert’s car for the short trip to the farm that served as the reception center, he sharply quizzed Pierre Dallas about the reason for the presence of so many people. The Avia chief replied that he’d brought reinforcements because of the growing danger posed by the Gestapo. Dallas added that instead of following the usual procedure of an immediate departure for Paris, everyone would spend the night at the farm and catch the early morning train, which, he assured Faye, would be perfectly safe.
When the travelers arrived at the farm, they discovered that Dallas’s “reinforcements” included two members of the network’s protection team—its head, Jean-Philippe Sneyers, and Sneyers’s assistant and friend, Jean-Paul Lien. The security team had never been part of a Lysander landing before, and there was no reason for two of its members to be there now. Faye was particularly concerned by the presence of Lien, whose carelessness had been responsible for the capture of Ernest Siegrist in Lyon.
The owners of the farm had laid out an early morning feast of roast chicken and wine for the throng of agents, more than a dozen in all, who gathered around their kitchen table. Faye seemed to be the only one not enjoying the meal. He brusquely asked a number of questions about what had gone on in his absence and showed particular irritation when Lien spoke boastingly about his own activities. Faye again chided Dallas for the size of the crowd on the field and rejected his argument about the need for reinforcements.
Yet although he clearly sensed danger, Faye did not leave immediately for Paris, as he had promised Marie-Madeleine. Rodriguez would later speculate that as one of Alliance’s leaders, Faye felt that if he saved only himself, he would be abandoning his fellow operatives. Whatever the reason, he spent the night at the farmhouse, sharing a bedroom with Rodriguez, although neither was able to sleep.
At a quarter past five the next morning, Faye, Rodriguez, Sneyers, Lien, and three other Alliance operatives set off by foot for the train station at the village of Nanteuil-le-Haudouin. Walking in groups of two and three, with several hundred feet between each group, they were followed at one point by a car with its headlights out. Dallas dispatched Lien to find out the identity of the car’s occupants, while he and the others hid in a ditch. When Lien returned, he said the driver had told him he was lost and had asked for directions to Paris. The car then sped away.
At the station, each man bought his own ticket, then waited on the platform several feet away from each other. As Rodriguez lit his first cigarette of the day, a tall, stocky man in a trench coat and felt fedora approached him and asked for a light. The train steamed in, and the Alliance group, at Lien’s direction, entered a first-class carriage and took seats throughout the car. Although riding together in one compartment was another violation of network security, Lien insisted that it would enable him and Sneyers to protect the others more easily in case of a problem.
Rodriguez, his hands in the pockets of his raincoat, slouched down in his seat and, lulled by the rhythm of the train, drifted off to sleep. A few minutes later, the train jerked to a stop, a movement so abrupt that he nearly fell off his seat. The door of the compartment opened with a crash, and a throng of men, wearing trench coats and armed with machine guns, burst in. One of them was the man who’d asked Rodriguez for a light.
Shouting “French police,” they ordered the car’s occupants to put their hands up. Like everyone else, the network’s security men—Sneyers and Lien, who were both armed—obeyed. Two of the intruders headed straight for Faye, pulled him out of his seat, and dragged him out of the compartment. The other Alliance agents were handcuffed and hustled from the car. As he left the train, a gun pointed at his back, Rodriguez had no doubt that their assailants were members of the Gestapo.
He and his colleagues were herded along the platform of the station—Aulnay-sous-Bois, the last stop before Paris—as dozens of travelers waiting on the platform nervously looked on. Four black cars, their engines idling, waited in front of the station. Approaching Rodriguez, one of the Germans said in fluent English, “Good work, don’t you think?” Shrugging his shoulders, Rodriguez instantly understood the man’s underlying message: They already knew he was an Englishman.
Faye was put in the first car, Rodriguez in the third. The Gestapo man in the front passenger seat of Rodriguez’s vehicle slapped the driver on the back and told him in fluent French, “We will have champagne tonight.”
In less than half an hour, the cars pulled up in front of 11 rue des Saussaies, a massive gray building that served as the Paris headquarters of the Gestapo. Before the war, it had housed the French secret police, the Sûreté Nationale. Rodriguez and the other Alliance operatives were pulled from the cars and taken to a bare fourth-floor room, where they stood for hours, guarded by two gun-toting German soldiers.
Léon Faye was not among them. Veering off, his car had headed to 84 avenue Foch, the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS’s counterintelligence unit, which also served as a jail for the Reich’s most high-profile French prisoners. Armed guards pulled back the ornate iron gates, and the car disappeared into the darkness of an underground tunnel.