ALLIANCE NETWORK
LEADERS
GEORGES LOUSTAUNAU-LACAU—A former French military intelligence officer and aide to Marshal Philippe Pétain, he founded what would become the Alliance intelligence network in the fall of 1940.
MARIE-MADELEINE (MÉRIC) FOURCADE—Originally Loustaunau-Lacau’s deputy, she took over command of Alliance in July 1941 and led it until the end of the war.
LÉON FAYE—The former deputy chief of the French air force in North Africa, he became Fourcade’s second in command in January 1942.
PAUL BERNARD—A banking executive and old friend of Fourcade’s, who succeeded her as head of Alliance operations when she traveled to London in the summer of 1943.
FIRST WAVE (RECRUITED 1940–1941)
MAURICE COUSTENOBLE—A former air force pilot who was one of Fourcade’s first recruits and became one of her key lieutenants.
HENRI SCHAERRER—A daredevil former naval officer who, along with Coustenoble, was one of Fourcade’s closest deputies in the early days of the network.
JEAN BOUTRON—A survivor of the British attack on the French naval fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in July 1940 and another key figure in Alliance’s initial operations, who took an undercover job as Vichy’s deputy naval attaché in Madrid.
CHARLES BERNIS—Regarded as the leading theoretician of French military intelligence, he coordinated and supervised the flow of information sent by Alliance to the British. He later was the network’s chief in the south of France.
GABRIEL RIVIÈRE—Burly and ebullient, he headed Alliance’s operation in Marseille and ran a fruit and vegetable shop as cover for his clandestine activities.
ÉMILE AUDOLY—A Marseille grain merchant who was in charge of collecting intelligence about cargoes and ship movements in the Mediterranean.
JACQUES BRIDOU—A former Olympic bobsled racer and Fourcade’s brother, he served as Alliance’s first emissary to MI6 in London.
HENRI MOUREN—Chief of the Saint-Nazaire shipyard in Brittany, he provided the network with a detailed map of the important German submarine base there.
ANTOINE HUGON—A garage owner and chief of Alliance’s operations in Brittany, who delivered Mouren’s map of Saint-Nazaire to Fourcade.
LUCIEN VALLET—A young former army officer who served as the network’s chief radio operator in the first year of its existence.
GAVARNI (FIRST NAME UNKNOWN)—A hot-tempered former air force officer who worked briefly as Fourcade’s chief of staff.
JEAN SAINTENY—One of Alliance’s most skilled and daring agents, he ran its sector in Normandy, which played a major role in the success of D-Day.
SECOND WAVE (RECRUITED 1942–1943)
MONIQUE BONTINCK—Fourcade’s young personal courier and assistant, whose demure appearance was at odds with her bold fearlessness.
FERDINAND RODRIGUEZ—A British radio operator sent to Alliance by MI6, he, along with Bontinck and Faye, was among Fourcade’s closest colleagues and confidants in 1942–43.
ERNEST SIEGRIST—A former Paris policeman who was in charge of Alliance’s security and was also a master forger of identity cards and other documents.
COL. ÉDOUARD KAUFFMANN—A former air force colleague of Léon Faye’s, he was head of Alliance’s sector in the Dordogne.
MAURICE DE MACMAHON, THE DUKE OF MAGENTA—A colorful flying ace and scion of one of France’s most illustrious noble families, who was put in charge of Alliance operations in the country’s occupied zone.
LUCIEN POULARD—An air force pilot recruited by Faye, he served as Faye’s adjutant and then as chief of Alliance’s sector in Brittany.
PIERRE DALLAS—Another air force recruit of Faye’s, he headed Alliance’s Avia unit, which handled the logistics of parachute drops and aircraft ferry service from Britain.
MARGUERITE BROUILLET—A social worker who sheltered Fourcade and other Alliance agents from Vichy and German police and later became a close friend of Fourcade’s and a key Alliance operative herself.
PHILIPPE KOENIGSWERTHER—A former spy for the BCRA, the Free French intelligence agency, who became head of Alliance operations in Bordeaux.
GEORGES LAMARQUE—A brilliant young mathematician, he ran an Alliance subnetwork called the Druids that covered all of France and played a major role in keeping the faltering network alive in the last two years of the war.
JEANNIE ROUSSEAU—One of Lamarque’s Druids, she was responsible for one of the greatest Allied intelligence coups of the war through her collection of information about Germany’s V-1 and V-2 terror weapons.
ROBERT LYNEN—The most celebrated child actor in France in the 1930s, he was recruited by Fourcade as a courier in Alliance’s Marseille headquarters.
JEAN VINZANT—A coal and wood merchant, he oversaw Alliance’s operations in the Corrèze, which included clandestine landings of RAF aircraft to pick up and drop off network agents at an airfield near the town of Ussel.
ANDRÉ COINDEAU—An engineer from Nantes who was in charge of Alliance’s intelligence gathering at the port of Saint-Nazaire later in the war.
JEAN PHILIPPE—A police superintendent in Toulouse who joined Alliance in 1942 while still working for the Vichy government. After the war, he was honored by Yad Vashem for his refusal to round up Jews.
ANNE DE MEREUIL—A reporter for the French fashion magazine Marie-Claire and an old friend of Fourcade’s who hid Fourcade and two members of her staff in her apartment in Lyon.
MARGUERITE BERNE-CHURCHILL—A doctor in Lyon who also offered Fourcade a hiding place there and who later joined the network’s headquarters staff in Paris.
THIRD WAVE (RECRUITED 1943–1944)
ROBERT DOUIN—A sculptor and artist whose hand-drawn map of German gun emplacements and fortifications on the Normandy beaches played a role in the Allied success of D-Day.
JACQUES STOSSKOPF—A naval engineer at the Lorient submarine base who was regarded by his countrymen as a Nazi collaborator but who was in fact providing valuable intelligence about the German U-boats to Alliance and the British.
HELEN DES ISNARDS—A former air force pilot and the scion of a prominent aristocratic family, he headed Alliance’s operations in southeast France.
PIERRE NOAL—A young doctor who served as Fourcade’s deputy when she crossed enemy lines in late 1944 to provide intelligence to the Allies on German troop movements in eastern France.