For two days, Fourcade waited. There was no word from Ferdinand Rodriguez on September 16, nor did he send a message the following day. Adding to her worry was the failure of any of the seven radio sets in Paris to transmit during that time.
Alliance’s chief tried to convince herself that the situation wasn’t as dire as she feared. It wasn’t uncommon for a radio operator to have problems establishing contact. But how did one account for the silence of all the transmitters in the capital?
Finally, on the evening of September 18, she received a black leather briefcase from MI6 containing the latest messages from France. Although most of them came from Paul Bernard, she saw to her surprise that they’d been sent from a transmitter in Le Mans, a city in the northwestern part of the country. As she read Bernard’s reports, she understood why.
The network’s interim head informed her of the capture of Faye and Rodriguez on the train to Paris, along with Jean-Philippe Sneyers, Pierre Dallas, Jean-Paul Lien, and two other agents. On the same day, four Alliance radio operators had been arrested in Paris and all their sets confiscated.
Bernard and the rest of the headquarters staff, meanwhile, had had a narrow escape of their own. On the morning of September 18, they had been waiting in their office for the arrival of Faye, Rodriguez, and the others who had taken part in the Lysander landing. At midmorning, Marguerite Berne-Churchill spotted more than a dozen Gestapo agents swarming into the building and sounded the alarm. Everyone there—including Bernard; Berne-Churchill; Joël Lemoigne, head of the Sea Star subnetwork; and Lucien Poulard, who was now Bernard’s top lieutenant—managed to flee before the Germans made it to their floor. Jean Raison, a former Vichy police superintendent who had replaced the captured Ernest Siegrist as the network’s expert in forged papers, unwittingly walked into the building during the Gestapo raid but was saved by its concierge, who threw her ams around him, called him her nephew, and exclaimed how happy she was to see him. He realized what was happening and got away, too.
As she struggled to absorb the calamitous news, Fourcade came close to breaking down. She had barely slept for a week, and the reflection of her pinched, haggard face in the bathroom mirror frightened her. She said out loud, “I’m going mad. I have no right to go mad.” Spying the liquid sedative prescribed by the MI6 doctor two months earlier, she opened the bottle and gulped its contents down.
The next thing she knew, it was morning, she was lying on her camp bed, and the phone was ringing. When she finally picked it up “with a hand as heavy as a block of stone,” she heard Claude Dansey on the other end, saying he had been on the verge of sending someone to break down her door. Within minutes, Dansey was there. When he saw her, he said, in a failed attempt at lightheartedness, that the London air didn’t seem to agree with her. What she needed was French air, she exclaimed. She had to go back to France.
Shaking his head, he said he could not authorize her return. Alliance was far from the only French resistance network currently under brutal German attack. Throughout the autumn of 1943, the Gestapo, like a giant scythe, had swept through dozens of resistance groups—some supported by MI6; some by the BCRA, de Gaulle’s intelligence and sabotage department; and others by SOE. A number of intelligence networks were totally wiped out, among them the Confrérie de Notre Dame, which, next to Alliance, was the largest and most important spy group in France.
With the Allied invasion of Europe looming, it was vital for the British that Alliance—and Marie-Madeleine—survive. If she went back now, Dansey argued, she would be immediately arrested and the network she had so painstakingly built would be destroyed. But if she remained in London, she could help guide it through the extremely difficult months that lay ahead.
As she always did when facing such crises, Marie-Madeleine finally pulled herself together and doggedly got on with her work. She sent an urgent message to all her sectors not to communicate with one another by radio and ordered radio operators in the critical areas on the Atlantic coast to strictly limit the number of their messages to London. She told Paul Bernard via Le Mans that he and the others in Paris must go into immediate hiding until they received further instructions.
On September 19, word reached her of yet another hammer blow in Paris: the arrests of two of her most trusted veterans—Gabriel Rivière and Alfred Jassaud. The loss of the burly, jovial Rivière, recruited by Henri Schaerrer in Marseille in 1940, was especially devastating. “Good God, a woman,” he had shouted when he first met her, yet in time, he had become not only one of her most loyal lieutenants but an extremely close friend and adviser.
On the same day, a Gestapo raid in central France netted Colonel Édouard Kauffmann, Léon Faye’s former air force colleague, and more than a dozen of his agents. In Autun, a town in eastern France, sixteen Alliance operatives were also captured. The deputy head of the sector, a banker, was taken away in chains, with two machine guns that had been found in his bank hanging around his neck.
Less than a week later, one of Fourcade’s favorite young operatives—the boyishly enthusiastic Lucien Poulard—was taken by the Gestapo while walking down the Champs Élysées, only six weeks after he had returned to France with the dressing gown that she had bought him in London. The capture of the twenty-four-year-old Poulard was immediately followed by the collapse of the Brest sector and the arrests of most of its agents, including its head, Maurice Gillet, and seven members of his family. Also captured in Brest was Joël Lemoigne, who had hidden there after escaping the mass arrests in Paris ten days before. The network’s sector in the town of Rennes, in eastern Brittany, was decimated, too. Among those caught was its head, Pierre Le Tullier, one of the Vichy policemen in Marseille who had helped Fourcade escape after her arrest at La Pinède in November 1942.
In little more than a week, Alliance’s operations in Paris, central France, and eastern Brittany had been annihilated, with dozens of agents swallowed up in the Gestapo maw. “Since September 16, Eagle, my magnificent Eagle, had fallen, and with him more than 150 members of my beloved network,” Fourcade wrote. How many of her agents were now in the Gestapo’s clutches? Three hundred, perhaps four hundred?
Throughout all of France, only six Alliance transmitters had not been shut down, and just a few of Marie-Madeleine’s major operatives remained at large. Besides Paul Bernard, they included Georges Lamarque, head of the Druids; Jean-Claude Thorel, who replaced Joël Lemoigne as chief of Sea Star; Henri Battu, a businessman from Lyon, in southwestern France; and Count Helen des Isnards, who headed the network’s activities in the southeast. A former air force pilot, the twenty-eight-year-old des Isnards was the scion of a prominent aristocratic family with centuries-old roots in Provence. His region was considered the most secure of all, and his radio transmissions from Aix-en-Provence were so regular and frequent that MI6 dubbed his operation “the post office.”
And although Brittany had been badly hit, key operatives continued their work there, among them Jacques Stosskopf, Alliance’s uber-spy in Lorient, and André Coindeau (Urus), an engineer from Nantes who was in charge of intelligence gathering at the port of Saint-Nazaire. (Coindeau was also known as Nero because he carried on his work seemingly heedless of the fires consuming the other sectors in Brittany.)
In a message to Marie-Madeleine, sent this time via Aix-en-Provence, Paul Bernard begged her to dispatch new transmitters, money, and other urgently needed material to a new landing field near Verdun, in eastern France. Marie-Madeleine was as desperate as he to reestablish the air link between Britain and Alliance. She assured him that help would soon be on the way.
But the full-moon period in October came and went with no RAF operation to the Verdun landing ground, to the anger and dismay of Bernard and his reception committee who waited there for several nights. Bernard directed his wrath at both Fourcade and MI6, blasting what he called “the indifference…the unexpected and disappointing attitude of London.” Bernard thought she had deserted him, Fourcade recalled, and she couldn’t tell him the truth—that the RAF had cut back on its commitment to ferry Alliance agents and supplies to and from France. Fourcade was aware that the Lysander operation had recently experienced a number of losses, but she also worried that British air force officials considered Alliance on the verge of extinction.
PAUL BERNARD
With the Lysanders unavailable, at least for the moment, Fourcade decided that her only option for forging a new link to Bernard was to send an agent by sea to the coast of Brittany, which was closed to all small craft and heavily guarded by German patrols. André Coindeau, in Nantes, was tasked with finding a location and organizing the reception committee for this extremely difficult mission.
As the landing place, Coindeau chose a cove near Cape Frehel, a cliff-lined peninsula in northern Brittany. The British Admiralty agreed to provide a torpedo boat for the operation, and Marie-Madeleine appointed as her emissary Philippe Koenigswerther, the young head of the Bordeaux sector, who had spent the last two months in London.
Because of bad weather, the initial landing attempt, in early November, was a failure, and Marie-Madeleine was informed that another one couldn’t be staged for several weeks. In the meantime, she appealed to the RAF to consider a myriad of other possible operations, including parachute drops in three areas: Aix-en-Provence, Brittany, and near Verdun. She also came up with another idea for a sea operation, this one on the Mediterranean coast, to pick up a huge backlog of agent reports and other crucial mail.
All the while, she attempted to fend off a growing sense of despair. As she learned of the capture of more agents and crossed off their names on her network chart, she said, “I experienced the feeling of having wielded the executioner’s axe….I was dying of grief.”
In late September, Fourcade had moved into a stately four-story townhouse that MI6 had found for her in Carlyle Square, in the fashionable London borough of Chelsea. The house’s interior was painted pale green, and its more than a dozen rooms were filled with flowered chintz furniture. Fourcade, however, spent virtually all her time in her ground-floor office, sleeping on a camp bed next to her desk so that she could be close to the phone, with its direct line to MI6.
From there, she fought to keep her network alive. Despite the wholesale pillaging of Alliance, intelligence reports from surviving agents kept trickling in. As she read the messages, she often thought of something Colonel Bernis had once told her, that each bit of information, dry as it appeared on paper, “represented a wealth of suffering.”
It troubled her that some of the French and British officials whom she encountered in London seemed to have little concern for the human tragedies behind the intelligence they so eagerly sought from France. One evening in late November, she was reminded of the chasm between London officialdom and her colleagues back home when a London-based agent for BCRA surreptitiously came to see her at Carlyle Square. The operative, who had met Fourcade in Lyon in the spring of 1943, handed her a radio message sent to BCRA that he had just found in its files.
The cable, sent from Paris, informed BCRA that Léon Faye had been arrested on a train with Pierre Dallas and “a British radio operator,” along with Jean-Philippe Sneyers and Sneyers’s lieutenant, whose first name was Jean-Claude. The message went on to say that Jean-Claude was a German collaborator and had been released by the Gestapo after the others were imprisoned. BCRA had received the message in mid-October.
Marie-Madeleine felt a chill. The Alliance protection team had no member named Jean-Claude. But it did have a Jean-Paul—Jean-Paul Lien, who was Sneyers’s deputy. More than a month had passed since the Free French received this report, and they had not seen fit to forward it to her. In the meantime, Lien had been free to continue his work of betraying his colleagues.
She suspected that the oversight was a deliberate act on the part of BCRA officials, particularly the agency’s icy young chief, André Dewavrin. Free French officials had long fumed about Alliance’s close ties with MI6, criticizing the network and Fourcade for sending their intelligence to the British rather than to de Gaulle’s intelligence operation. Ever since she’d arrived in London, those attacks, particularly by the BCRA, had grown noticeably sharper.
To prove themselves to the Allies, the Free French needed to produce as much information as possible about German military activities in France, as well as to establish themselves as a significant presence on the battlefield. But the BCRA’s obsessive quest for intelligence was also part of its struggle to win its brutal internecine war with the secret services of de Gaulle’s archrival, General Henri Giraud.
By November 1943, de Gaulle was firmly in charge of the French Committee of National Liberation, the political entity set up in North Africa earlier in the year. Yet although Giraud no longer was co-chairman of the committee, he still retained some authority as head of French military forces there. Both in Algiers and London, a ruthless fight for power continued to rage between Giraud’s supporters, many of them former Vichy officials and military officers, and the backers of de Gaulle.
Having long refused to take part in that political clash, Fourcade now found herself and her network caught in the middle of it. Soon after learning of the BCRA’s withholding of information about Jean-Paul Lien, she discovered that MI6, without her knowledge, had been turning over to Giraud’s secret service all the intelligence reports from her network. When she confronted Dansey with that fact, he blandly told her that the British had an agreement to exchange intelligence with the French military; since Giraud was commander-in-chief of the military, he was entitled to receive all of MI6’s information, regardless of its source.
WHILE ADHERENTS OF GIRAUD and de Gaulle battled for power and influence, a similar fight was raging between Gaullists in London and Algiers and the leaders of France’s major resistance movements. Earlier in the war, thanks to Jean Moulin, those leaders had been of inestimable help in de Gaulle’s fight for Allied recognition of him as leader of Free France. In the spring of 1942, Moulin had succeeded in extracting pledges of support for the general from the resistance heads; later, he forwarded to Churchill and Roosevelt a statement from the resistance movements calling for de Gaulle, whom they called “their uncontested leader,” to be named governor of North Africa.
Yet as the war continued, these proclamations of unity proved to be a veneer that barely concealed the resistance chiefs’ increasingly deep suspicions of de Gaulle and his postwar ambitions. The more influence he acquired, the more suspicious they became.
From the beginning, a gulf of understanding had divided the Gaullists and the leaders of the resistance movements, who risked their lives daily and who greatly resented their compatriots in London who, in their view, had lived out the war in comfort and safety, with none of the daily tension, terror, and privations of occupation.
As the war progressed, the belief grew among some resistance leaders that de Gaulle was interested in their work only for what it could do for him and his forces. “The Resistance, for him, was one pawn among others,” Henri Frenay, the head of the Combat movement, wrote after the war. “The devotion and courage of its members, the dangers, the arrests, the executions were for him only an inevitable tithe paid to the gods of war.”
As the war advanced, Frenay added, the rapid growth of resistance activities, which at first had been encouraged by the Free French, began to alarm them. “Despite our proven loyalty, they were afraid that a new force was on the upswing in France, a force with a will of its own and capable of open defiance of de Gaulle. In this view we were no longer friends but rivals—admissible rivals but rivals just the same. We were to be carefully watched and strictly controlled.”
At the same time, as Fourcade knew only too well, the French were not the only ones caught up in the brutal feuds and infighting that raged in London and elsewhere. The British secret services had also erupted in what one historian called “full-scale and dangerous brawls the likes of which Whitehall bureaucracy had rarely if ever seen before.” MI6 and SOE were the major antagonists, and Claude Dansey was arguably the principal instigator in this “viciously petty, infantile, and time-wasting” vendetta, as the journalist and historian Tom Keene put it.
Dansey and his boss, Stewart Menzies, were both highly skilled bureaucratic infighters, and they used every trick they could think of in their five-year attempt to bring SOE under their control or, failing that, to kill it outright. “Though SOE and MI6 were nominally on the same side in the war, they were, generally speaking, more abhorrent to one another than the [Germans] were to either of them,” noted the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who was a bemused witness to the bureaucratic mayhem.
In his memoirs, Dr. Reginald Jones, Churchill’s chief adviser on scientific warfare, recalled being summoned to Dansey’s office to find the MI6 deputy chief “almost incoherent with indignation about those buggers in SOE.” Patrick Reilly, the young diplomat who served as Menzies’s assistant, meanwhile, had a vivid memory of his own. One day in June 1943, he wrote, a beaming Dansey marched into his office and exclaimed, “Great news! Great news!” Reilly expected to hear a report about “some splendid intelligence coup.” Instead, the source of Dansey’s glee was the complete destruction of the SOE Prosper network in France. “Misery, torture and death for many brave men and women, British and French—and Dansey gloated,” Reilly observed. “I remember feeling physically sick.”
Reilly, who served as British ambassador to France and the Soviet Union after the war, called Dansey “an evil man—fierce, ruthless, venomous…I have often asked myself how it was possible that this wicked man…could hold a key position in [MI6] for the whole of the war.”
The question then arises: How does this sinister depiction of Dansey by Reilly and others square with Fourcade’s warm memories of him as sensitive, kind, and understanding toward her and her network? She frequently bridled at his refusal to allow her to return to France, but there was no question, then or now, that he did this to save her life.
In his unpublished memoirs, Reilly did acknowledge that Dansey “was said to be responsible for an occasional kind act.” He also observed that his MI6 superior was noted for his flashes of charm, especially toward attractive women like Fourcade. But far more important in Dansey’s eyes was the vital intelligence she and Alliance had provided MI6 throughout the conflict, not only significantly aiding the war effort but also his agency’s struggles for influence in Whitehall.
Nonetheless, there were limits to Dansey’s sympathy. While he was caring and solicitous in Fourcade’s presence, he often referred to her behind her back as “Cohen’s bitch,” according to Reilly. Dansey was referring to Kenneth Cohen, the head of MI6’s intelligence operations in France, who, with his wife, Mary, became very close to Fourcade during the last months of her stay in London.
There’s no evidence that Fourcade ever knew of Dansey’s duplicity toward her. But she repeatedly made clear how much she hated being enmeshed in the bureaucratic rivalries and feuds that were taking place around her—“all these cumbersome cliques and criminally childish antagonisms of the Secret Services!”