part0011

The familiar shape of a 1936 black Citroën Traction Avant makes lurching, tail-first progress through a landscape of soaring snow-topped mountains. The car is not under its own steam but is shackled to one of several flatbed trucks which form part of a freight train groaning and wheezing against the gradient towards the Franco-Spanish border. The letters ‘CD’ are clearly visible on the vehicle’s sloping boot and, through the rear window, it is obvious that the back seat is piled high with sacks, packages and spare tyres.

Without any warning, the boot of the car springs open and a foot appears from inside, feeling gingerly for the wooden floor of the truck. It is followed by its twin and soon the stiffly unfolding shape of a man has emerged and is standing awkwardly beside the car, gripping the rim of the open boot tightly so as not to be bundled off the edge of the truck by the movement of the train. His breath is visible in the icy air and he stamps his feet on the planking and rubs a thigh with his free hand to encourage circulation. Slowly, he works his way to the back door of the car, opens it and begins to unclasp one of the sacks on the back seat. There is struggling movement inside the sack and a tear-stained, gasping face forces itself into the open air.

The face, with reddish hair swept back from it into a bun, belongs to a woman in her mid-thirties, whose striking good looks are scarcely dimmed by her distress. She is shivering fiercely, but regains some composure after several deep breaths of mountain air and, while not extricating herself from the sack, she massages and stretches every muscle she can. She exchanges some words with the man but then the train begins to slow, so she pushes her chin back down onto her chest and the man re-fastens the sack. He then makes his way back to the rear of the car and clambers once more into the boot, which he manages to pull tightly shut just as the train pulls into a station.

An hour later and the train is at last approaching the border at Canfranc. Its final stretch takes it into the long Somport tunnel. In the cacophonous darkness, a man slips out of the single passenger carriage behind the engine and makes his way cautiously back along the train, jumping from truck to truck until he reaches the black Citroën. The train emerges into the failing winter daylight, its brakes squealing as the lights of the frontier loom up ahead. The man is re-arranging the pile of tyres on the back seat, one of which had fallen onto the sack beside it.

Just before the train comes to a complete halt, the man jumps down from the truck and strides off along the track to where a group of railwaymen are gathered. Eventually, he persuades them that his car is a high priority and that they should unload it first from the train. In the process of unloading, all the tyres fall onto the sack and, while the border guards’ torches play over the irregular shapes in the back of the car, its driver explains impatiently that he is on an urgent mission for Marshal Pétain and that he must get the three diplomatic bags and the tyres to the French ambassador in Madrid without further delay.

Slowly, the inquisitive group disperses, but now another uniformed figure, a customs official, has opened the back door and is reaching inside. Before long, his hands find the sack with its human contents and have figured out the unmistakable shape of a head. He addresses the shape as ‘Schoofs’ and expresses surprise that he is not in the boot as he had been told to expect. When the shape neither moves nor answers, he becomes concerned and begins to pummel it as if to bring it out of unconsciousness and begs it to speak. Suddenly a voice from the boot exclaims, ‘Shut up!’ and the customs officer recoils as if he has been shot.

From the corner of his eye, the Citroën’s driver, now at the wheel, can see the German Abwehr official in earnest discussion with the Spanish border police inside their hut. But the sentry has just lifted the barrier and, needing no further encouragement, he accelerates away into Spain. After a succession of hairpin bends, the car eventually pulls up beside the road next to a mountain stream. Both the driver and the man who has extricated himself from the boot hasten to free their female cargo from its sack. She has finally passed out through the pain of her ten-hour confinement, but is eventually revived and they resume the long road to Madrid using a more conventional mode of travel.

The man responsible for this act of human smuggling was Commandant Jean Boutron, deputy naval attaché to the French Embassy in Madrid. He had been hand-picked by the Vichy government to reorganize its naval intelligence in Spain and was often involved in carrying the regime’s baggage under diplomatic seal across the frontier. As Boutron had been aboard one of the ships attacked by the Royal Navy at Mers-el-Kébir in July 1940, his superiors were especially confident that he would not be inclined to have anything to do with the British in Madrid. Little did they know that, even before his appointment as naval attaché, Boutron had already been recruited by Commandant Georges Loustaunau-Lacau into his underground intelligence-gathering network, Alliance , with its direct links to the SIS. His value to the network was enormous, as he was able to hide courier bound for London in the diplomatic bag. He also helped another British-inspired intelligence group, ‘Alibi’, based in Madrid, and this latest border crossing had not been the first time he had carried one of its agents, the Belgian Jean Schoofs, in the boot of his car. But it was the first time he had smuggled a second person and used the diplomatic bag for such a purpose.

The fugitive in question was Marie-Madeleine Méric, successor to Georges Loustaunau-Lacau as leader of the Alliance network after his arrest and imprisonment by the Vichy authorities five months earlier. Her escape across the frontier had saved her from a similar fate, but not the majority of her key agents who had been betrayed by one of their number and were now languishing in a police cell. When Kenneth Cohen of the SIS French section in London heard about this severe setback to one of his most prolific and valuable sources of intelligence, he immediately despatched a member of his team, Major Eddie Keyser, to Madrid to meet the network head, someone they only knew by the code name POZ 55 and to bring them back to London.

Keyser, expecting to meet a hardened military type, was astonished to find himself confronted by a stunningly beautiful woman who, far from grateful for the offer of a respite from her gruelling activities in France, was determined to return there as soon as possible. This was not just for the sake of her beleaguered network, which she was determined to safeguard and rebuild, but because her two young children would be wondering what had become of her.

Marie-Madeleine Méric (better known nowadays as Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, following her second marriage in 1947), unlike most of the other main players in this story, seemed almost destined for a life of intrigue and undercover work from an early age. The second of three children — she had an older sister and a younger brother — she was brought up in the wealthy European colonial community in Shanghai, learning almost as much about the English culture and language as those of China and her native France. Her father was a shipbroker, but he also worked covertly, gathering intelligence as the Shanghai correspondent for the French government’s Deuxième Bureau .

Marie-Madeleine was only eleven when, in 1922, her father died suddenly, having contracted a tropical disease, and the family returned to France. They settled in Paris where Marie-Madeleine finished her education at a well-to-do convent and the family enjoyed a life of considerable comfort, taking holidays at properties they owned in Villars-sur-Ollon in Switzerland and Mougins on the French Riviera. Although Marie-Madeleine displayed a marked talent as a pianist, she willingly abandoned any chance she had of turning professional when, at 17, she fell for handsome army officer Edouard-Jean Méric and soon married him. When he was posted to Morocco, she was keen to accompany him, satisfying, as it would, a taste for overseas adventure which she had acquired from her childhood in the Far East.

Again, in her young life Marie-Madeleine found herself close to the world of military espionage, her husband working as an intelligence officer among the quarrelsome North African tribes under French control. She would sometimes accompany him on horseback on his visits to tribal chiefs where, proud of her beauty and sharp-wittedness, he would involve her in his intelligence-gathering tasks. Marie-Madeleine was still not 20 when their first child, a son, Christian, was born in Rabat but, by then, the marriage had already begun to lose its shine. Edouard Méric’s pride turned to jealousy as he found his wife to be the focus of admiration among many of his fellow unmarried officers. She, in turn, resented the reclusive existence he now attempted to impose on her and they frequently argued. The couple returned to France for a two-year posting in Antibes and, when Edouard was recalled to Morocco, Marie-Madeleine, who gave birth to a daughter in 1932, announced that she would prefer to stay in France to bring up her children. An irredeemable separation had begun.

Marie-Madeleine returned to the sanctuary of her family in Paris, where the care of her children could be shared and where she began to enjoy an active social life, often in the company of her older sister and her husband, high-flying army commandant Georges Georges-Picot. It was at one of their tea parties that Marie-Madeleine met both Charles de Gaulle and his contemporary from the Saint-Cyr military academy, Georges Loustaunau-Lacau. Both had made names for themselves as army intellectuals whose advice was valued by the top brass, including ‘the hero of Verdun’, Marshal Philippe Pétain, on whose staff they both served at one time. While both men deplored the government’s apparent paralysis at the German occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, Loustaunau-Lacau’s political concerns were far more extreme than de Gaulle’s. He claimed he had evidence of joint Soviet and German military manoeuvres in the Russian plains and viewed every communist in France as a potential traitor to his country.

Marie-Madeleine was clearly intrigued by this man’s energy and enterprise and shared his pessimism at France’s ability to defend herself against the growing Nazi and communist threat. She therefore readily agreed, the day after their first meeting, to work with him in the clandestine task he had set himself of building intelligence networks against the Nazis and uncovering communist infiltration in the army. Even when, in 1938, Loustaunau-Lacau was dismissed from the army for becoming too involved with members of the outlawed ultra-right-wing Cagoulard movement, Marie-Madeleine continued to work for him as general secretary of the magazine publishing group into which his enterprises had metamorphosed.

At the outbreak of war, Marie-Madeleine was left to run the business almost single-handedly when her boss was remobilized and sent to the front line. There, so appalled at the state of the defences, he accused the high command of high treason and was promptly imprisoned. He was freed at his trial, however, and immediately asked for a new command. By then, though, France was all but overrun and his last piece of advice to Marie-Madeleine as he returned to confront the Germans was to head south in her prized black Citroën Traction Avant and he would rendezvous with her in his home town of Oloron-Sainte-Marie in the Pyrenees in due course.

So, with her children in the care of their grandmother on the west coast island of Noirmoutiers, and her maid beside her in the passenger seat, Marie-Madeleine joined the almost static exodus on the crowded roads out of Paris. The journey took several days, the early part of which was often to the sound of bombs and gunfire only a few miles away. For someone who had dedicated the last few years of her life to the task of alerting fellow countrymen to their vulnerability to such a fate, the agony of defeat was intense. ‘You hoped for an earthquake that you might escape the shame’, she recalled in her memoirs, ‘you were glad of the pall of soot veiling the long lines of vehicles, four abreast, that suddenly blocked the great arteries leading to the south.’

The news at Oloron-Sainte-Marie was far from encouraging. Loustaunau-Lacau — or Navarre, as he was now more frequently known by his friends — had been wounded and captured and was in a German military hospital in Eastern France. Marie-Madeleine, together with a young publishing colleague of hers, Jean-Philippe Salmson, and his parents, who had also escaped to the Pyrenees, were utterly disheartened by the heavy concentration of German troops they had observed in the newly formed occupied zone. The widespread acceptance of defeat by those under Pétain’s new Vichy government perplexed them. They were desperate to carry on the fight in some way, but were at a loss to know how to start.

The answer came with the shock appearance of Navarre himself. In typical swashbuckling style and in spite of unhealed wounds, he had eluded his captors while in transit by slipping out of one train and into another and had then made it across the demarcation line to his home town. By September 1940, he had installed himself, Marie-Madeleine and the Salmsons at the very heart of collaborationist France, Vichy itself. Once again, as in peacetime, his weapon would be the covert gathering of intelligence. Where better to carry this out than the new seat of French power where his past life gave him access to those with greatest influence, including the Marshal himself? Navarre took over the Hôtel des Sports in Vichy which, with Pétain’s blessing, would become a reception centre and lodging for escaped or demobilized military personnel looking for a role to play in the new order. While Navarre would front up the Légion des Combattants , as the organization was known, he would put Marie-Madeleine in charge of the underground element. Her sex was a perfect cover, he explained to her when she protested that no one would listen to a woman.

The plan was to recruit, from those who came to the Hôtel des Sports, men who could not accept the armistice and to organize them into a network of intelligence patrols on both sides of the demarcation line. Navarre, meanwhile, had made contact with the agent working for the Free French intelligence service, Pierre Fourcaud, and asked him, on his return to London via Spain, to explain to General de Gaulle and the British his intention to supply them with intelligence. While requesting resources to carry out his plan, he also made it plain that he saw himself as a parallel source of French resistance rather than one that was subjugated to de Gaulle, the need for independent command on French soil being paramount. To ensure his message got back to London and that he received a response, Navarre also asked Marie-Madeleine’s brother, Jacques Bridou, another demobilized soldier recently arrived in Vichy, to find a way to London via Morocco and Gibraltar to duplicate the mission.

Meanwhile, Marie-Madeleine set about her work, dividing the country up into regions and allocating men to set up patrols in each one and working out lines of communication back to the Vichy headquarters. Her task was helped considerably by the widespread contacts of her military recruits from the Légion des Combattants , although any means of vetting new agents for potential duplicity were non-existent, something that would come back to haunt the network as time went on. By the early spring of 1941, patrols had been established in the areas surrounding Marseilles, Lyons, Dijon and Périgueux in the Dordogne area, where an undercover line crossing gave them access to Bordeaux and the Atlantic coast.

On her first return to Paris since the armistice, Marie-Madeleine was able to enlist the support of a number of people involved in Navarre’s old intelligence-gathering and publishing organization, and to create their first cell in the occupied zone. Even at this stage, however, there were plenty of danger signs; the Germans had ransacked the offices of the old publishing business as soon as they had entered Paris, showing that they had wind of Navarre’s pre-war activities. They also singled out Marie-Madeleine for an intimate search on both entering and leaving the occupied zone. She later discovered that the code on her Ausweis , obtained through a duplicitous Vichy contact, marked her out as a high security risk to the Germans.

A little while after the Paris adventure, Pierre Fourcaud arrived back in Vichy with the unwelcome message from de Gaulle that ‘whoever is not with me is against me’, and his consequent refusal to help Navarre in any way. Fourcaud was as dismayed as any of Navarre’s team and promised them use of the radio (Romeo) he had smuggled into France for his and Gilbert Renault’s use and insisted Navarre took half of the one million francs the British had given for his use. This was especially welcome, as Navarre and Marie-Madeleine had funded their entire operation themselves to date and had practically run out of money. The other good news from Fourcaud was that the British were highly sympathetic with Navarre’s wish to remain independent of de Gaulle and wanted to meet him personally with a view to supporting his network directly.

Before such a meeting could take place, the network suffered its first betrayal. An air force glider pilot and one of the first recruits among the demobilized servicemen to be recruited at the Légion des Combattants turned out to be in the pay of a Gestapo agent based in Vichy. The first piece of information he handed over was the name of his closest air force comrade, Maurice Coustenoble, who had become Marie-Madeleine’s right-hand-man. Coustenoble had managed to escape capture and, with his jet black hair dyed peroxide yellow, made it to the network headquarters to warn them that their cover in Vichy was blown.

The entire outfit retreated to the Pyrenees and set themselves up in a small hotel in Pau, where Marie-Madeleine had already established a colonel from the pre-war Deuxième Bureau , Charles Bernis, who had volunteered to collate intelligence reports prior to their despatch to London, once there was someone to receive them. Among the latest reports delivered to him by the breathless party that had descended from Vichy was a rumour among White Russians living in Paris that Hitler was about to turn on Stalin.

Soon after the network’s enforced move to Pau, Navarre was contacted by a messenger for the British to say that an agent was waiting for him in Lisbon. Friendships that dated back to his trainee days at the Ecole de Guerre meant that his passage into and across Spain was assured, with no questions asked, by the head of Franco’s Seguridad . Armed with the fruits of his network’s intelligence-gathering, he spent three days in Lisbon with Kenneth Cohen, the SIS’s head of French intelligence, where they agreed to co-operate fully and worked out a modus operandi. Cohen provided a radio transmitter for their exclusive use, codes for the encryption of messages and questionnaires to fill out about German military information across France. All of these, together with five million francs (worth about £25,000 in 1941), Navarre carried back to France across two borders in the French ambassador’s diplomatic bag.

At last, the Alliance network, as it was now known, had a purpose to all the hard work and the risks its agents were taking. Moreover, it had more than enough money now to keep it going. Very soon, they had moved to a new headquarters in Pau, the Villa Etchebaster, a private house which gave them more freedom to come and go unobserved and allowed them ample space for their activities and to conceal the transmitter behind a mirror over a washbasin. The apparently bottomless source of money risked becoming a distraction to some of the network’s recruits, however. Marie-Madeleine, on her second visit to Paris to deliver the questionnaires and codes to her agents there, noticed how much better dressed her head of patrol had become and that his estimated costs for carrying out his work seemed excessive. Later, he was found to have been using the network’s money to engage in the black market and was frozen out of any further involvement.

Elsewhere throughout the network, though, there was palpable progress, so it came as a shock to Marie-Madeleine when, in May 1941, Navarre announced that he was leaving for Algeria and wanted her to take charge of the operation in France. For some time, Navarre had been encouraged to believe that the French army under Vichy control in North Africa was susceptible to a revolt by which it would transfer its allegiance to the British. His main ally in this plan was a virulently anti-collaborationist air force Commandant, Léon Faye, who Navarre had already sent to Algiers to drum up support among the military for such action.

The plot was either ill-timed or ill-conceived, because it resulted in both Navarre’s and Faye’s arrest, along with their co-conspirators. They were returned to France to await trial in Clermont-Ferrand prison, although Navarre, with the help of a sympathetic police commissioner, escaped his captors. Heavily disguised, he surprised Marie-Madeleine on a train to Marseilles, where she had planned to set up new headquarters, fearing that Pau’s cover would be blown following the arrests. With typical audacity and believing the police would never look for him on home territory, Navarre persuaded her to turn back to Pau, where they would continue to direct operations together, both with false identities.

Throughout June and the first part of July, the network continued to grow. They had more than 100 people working for them with every area of the country covered and cells or informants operating within Tunis, Belgium, Italy, the Vichy Deuxième Bureau and even the Abwehr itself, thanks to Navarre’s extraordinary influence and enterprise. Three more radios had also been smuggled across the border by Jean Boutron, who was now using Marie-Madeleine’s Citroën as an official embassy vehicle for his journeys to and from Madrid. The operation was producing a large volume of high-quality intelligence back to London at a time when morale on both sides of the Channel had been boosted by the news of Hitler’s power-sapping invasion of Russia.

But on 18 July the police, having followed Navarre’s wife and daughter to a secret meeting he had arranged with them in Pau, recaptured their elusive quarry and carried him off to Clermont-Ferrand, this time ensuring his pre-trial incarceration. (Three months later, he was sentenced to two years in prison for leading the attempted revolt in North Africa; Léon Faye received five months). Once again, Marie-Madeleine found herself in charge of the network and, in spite of her concern that some of its members would find it difficult to follow the orders and direction of a woman, she was determined not to let such an effective intelligence-gathering machine disintegrate. She was also well aware that the Vichy police were hunting her down as a known accomplice of Navarre. Making it appear that she had left for Marseilles, she remained in Pau, but could not visit the Villa Etchebaster and relied on her closest lieutenants to bring her messages and reports for encoding to the hotel room where she was necessarily confined.

One such report was the devastating news that Henri Schaerrer, who, with Maurice Coustenoble, had become her most trusted aide, had been captured by the Germans. They had discovered him in the uniform of a German sailor having infiltrated a U-boat nest on the Gironde estuary in an attempt to supply accurate answers to one of the SIS questionnaires. The fact that the Pau headquarters had remained unmolested since his arrest was enough to confirm Marie-Madeleine’s faith in his courage to stay silent under torture.

The August moon marked the network’s first parachute drop to be organized with the RAF. Together with some new, smaller radios and other supplies for clandestine work such as invisible ink and extra fine silky paper for messages, came an Englishman, Arthur Bradley Davies, whom they codenamed Bla. This Cockney, who spoke fluent French, had been sent by the SIS to show members of the network how to operate the new radios and to teach them revised methods of ciphering. That job done, he was to be escorted across the demarcation line and taken to Normandy, where he would set up a new, independent network.

Things could not have started less auspiciously for the Englishman. Firstly, his attire, chosen supposedly to blend in with the locals, caused helpless laughter when he was presented to the headquarters team at Villa Etchebaster. Marie-Madeleine, who made a rare visit there from her hideout to meet him, described the scene:

Before me stood the most ridiculous, the most grotesque parody of a ‘typical’ Frenchman. He was attired as if for a village wedding — short jacket and waistcoat, striped trousers, a spotted cravat, a stiff shirt with cutaway collar beneath a little goatee beard, a pair of pince-nez and, as a crowning glory, a bowler hat.

Far worse, however, was that the man was dangerously ill. He had acute appendicitis and his life was only just saved at the local hospital. When he came round from the operation, he began to speak in English and Josette, the Villa Etchebaster housekeeper, pretending to be a concerned wife at his bedside, threw herself on him with kisses and much louder words of her own to drown out the incriminating language. As he began to recover, his minders grew concerned about his behaviour. He began to take advantage of Josette by playing the English-speaking game on purpose and, out of hospital, was surreptitiously helping himself to other people’s meagre food rations. The agents were also all aghast at Bla’s disregard for security. Surely, they felt, a man sent by the British, of all people, should not give his encoding lessons in a loud voice in the public park, nor exchange names and addresses with every visitor to the Etchebaster?

Marie-Madeleine wondered if London had sent this man deliberately to test them out. He stayed in Pau far longer than originally intended and, when he eventually set off for Normandy, he spent the whole train journey asking inane questions of his escort in a loud Cockney-French accent or fiddling with the radio transmitter he was carrying. At his destination, he vanished without trace. News did later reach Marie-Madeleine from London that Bla had established radio contact with them and that they were pleased with the information he was transmitting.

They must also have been delighted with the volume of intelligence emanating from the five other Alliance radios distributed throughout France by the autumn of 1941. As well as those at Pau, Marseilles, Nice and Lyons, a Paris transmitter was now up and running, the first direct link to London from the occupied zone. Another coup for the network came when one of its Paris agents arrived in Pau with a giant plan of the entire complex of U-boat pens newly built at St Nazaire wrapped around his body. Unfortunately, however, in this unending game of snakes and ladders, disaster always followed on the heels of triumph, this time in the shape of the arrest of six of the network’s Paris agents, including Lucien Vallet, the radio operator. No one knew how the police had received wind of their operation, but at least the incriminating transmitter had not been discovered and it was the French police, not the Gestapo, handling the case.

Marie-Madeleine leaned heavily on her second-in-command, Maurice Coustenoble, at times of such harrowing setbacks. He even had an eerie knack of predicting disasters, having been certain, without any evidence, of Navarre’s impending apprehension in Pau. A short time after that, an internal voice having told him that Admiral François Darlan, Pétain’s hard-line deputy, would die by the revolver, Coustenoble resolved to carry out the deed himself to avenge Navarre’s imprisonment. When he announced his plan to Marie-Madeleine, she forbade it on the grounds that assassination was beyond the remit of an intelligence-gathering network. Darlan did indeed die by a revolver just over a year later in Algiers when he was shot in a corridor outside his office by a 20-year-old member of the Resistance .

Now, on a November afternoon, Coustenoble came to her with another premonition, this time about an impending raid on the Villa Etchebaster. She agreed to let him burn all unnecessary records kept there, to give her what was left and to organize for the radio transmitter to be removed and hidden. Sure enough, the following evening, Jean-Philippe Salmson, who was due that night to return to Paris with a number of other volunteers to reinforce the depleted patrol there, rushed into Marie-Madeleine’s room to say that all the members of his party had been arrested and the Etchebaster raided. Nearly everyone in the network in Pau, including Coustenoble, was behind bars except for him and Marie-Madeleine, and the police were looking for her everywhere. Even Marie-Madeleine’s mother, who had arranged to cross the demarcation line with the Paris-bound party, and Navarre’s wife and son were in police custody.

The escape to Madrid in the diplomatic bag had been the only possible option left to Marie-Madeleine after this disastrous development. At least it provided a temporary respite from never knowing whether it was friend or foe knocking at the door, but it also brought still worse news about the network. In the first of a series of meetings with Eddie Keyser of the SIS (known to her as Major Richards), she learned that her Paris agents were all now in the Abwehr’s hands, that the Lyons patrol had been betrayed by one of its members and in the Dordogne, where the network’s parachute drops were organized, the entire reception team had also been picked up. (She would later learn that it had been the head of the Dordogne patrol, a man by the name of Lagrotte, who had not only betrayed his own team but had been responsible for all the arrests in Pau as well. He was, moreover, the person who tipped off the police about Fourcaud’s and Renault’s shared radio transmitter at La Bardonnie’s château which led to the latter’s arrest — proof, if it were needed, of the dangers of inter-network dealings).

The meetings with Keyser also gave Marie-Madeleine the opportunity to question him about the reliability of their envoy Bla. She had grown more suspicious than ever since she heard that he was seldom in Normandy but constantly appearing in Paris, pestering the families of the imprisoned agents there. Could he, she asked, be responsible for their betrayal? Having checked with his superiors back in London, Keyser still insisted that the man was sound, but assured her he would, nonetheless, be eased out of the Alliance network.

The conversations with Keyser also revealed that not all the courier from the network was getting beyond the British Embassy to London. One report to which Marie-Madeleine had been particularly keen to hear a reaction was about certain American and British firms that were still making deals with the Nazis through Swiss and Vichy intermediaries. It seemed that the ambassador, the former conservative cabinet minister Sir Samuel Hoare, had decided the document was not serious and had prevented it from leaving Madrid. Keyser promised that such interference would not happen again.

Marie-Madeleine returned to France once more as the contorted contents of Vichy’s diplomatic sack. The task which lay ahead would, to most, seem an impossible one: revive a network whose heart had been torn from it while playing cat-and-mouse with the Vichy police, whose dossier on her was growing all the time. She was left in no doubt about how much the British needed her to succeed. Above all, it was intelligence on U-boat installations and shipping movement that they craved; anything that could help safeguard the Atlantic supply convoys and seaborne troop transportation would be vital in the coming months.

Marseilles was to become the new centre of operations for the Alliance network. It was in the back office of the vegetable shop there, used as cover by the still-unscathed local patrol, that Marie-Madeleine was reunited with the man known simply as ‘Gavarni’ who had been acting as her chief of staff in Pau. Although he had also been arrested in the police swoop, he had demanded to see Commandant Rollin, the chief of state security in Vichy, telling him that the network was dead, and agreeing to hand over their radios and all the money provided by London in return for the release of all the free-zone agents. Once again, however, it was the presence of large amounts of cash which was clouding the issue. Gavarni, the first to be freed by Rollin, tried to persuade Marie-Madeleine that the Alliance’s future was now working with Vichy’s Deuxième Bureau . They were to amass vast sums of money by pretending to the British that the network was still working for them and in need of constant financial support.

Horrified by the corruption of one of her most trusted men, Marie-Madeleine nevertheless allowed Gavarni to return to Vichy to ensure the release of the other agents. Ceasing all further contact with him, she later discovered that he had only handed over to the Vichy police some 80,000 of the two million francs of network money in his care, keeping the rest for himself. The timely arrival of Léon Faye in Marseilles, newly released from his prison sentence, came as a godsend to Marie-Madeleine at a time when everything else was conspiring to drain her of confidence. News that her beloved Henri Schaerrer had been executed by his Nazi captors two months previously affected her greatly. Even her trust in the competence of her London masters was shaken when a parcel arrived through the post with writing scrawled all over the outside of its brown wrapping paper describing anti-aircraft sites in the Boulogne area. The agent who had sent it was using the SIS-recommended practice of writing his messages in invisible ink on the outside of a package — the least likely part of it to arouse suspicion in a search. Unfortunately, the ink supplied by London was substandard and had revealed itself in the heat during delivery. By a miracle, no postman had reported it.

The year of 1942 proved, if anything, more turbulent for Marie-Madeleine and her network than the previous one. Optimism grew in the early months thanks to the injection of Léon Faye’s dynamic involvement. As Marie-Madeleine’s new chief of staff, he set about recruiting high-calibre fellow demobilized air force officers and, in a very short period, new regional patrols had grown up out of the ashes left by earlier denunciations. SIS HQ were particularly pleased to have so many airmen involved, as they would understand the special requirements of the Lysander pilots, who they were keen to start sending out on a regular basis for courier and personnel exchanges.

While all the new blood lent vigour to the enterprise, there were still parts of the old organization which were providing considerable practical value and experience. There was a direct radio link between Madrid and the Marseilles network HQ through which Jean Boutron had been able, among other things, to relay yet further unheeded warnings of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau ’s imminent departure from Brest. Marseilles had also organized, through two merchant ships which plied regularly between the French port of Sète and Barcelona, a regular means of delivering despatches to Spain. This means of communication later turned sour on the network after the skipper of one of the ships claimed that he had thrown a package entrusted to him into the furnace, as he feared a search. The package had contained two million francs which Marie-Madeleine had asked to be sent from her reserve in Barcelona.

The entire headquarters team in Pau was also brought back into the fold after their release by the Vichy police. Coustenoble, in particular, had been given a rough time in prison, being made to sit on the edge of a ruler for hours at a time to reveal the identity of his boss, but without success. He had managed to hide two radio transmitters before his arrest, and these could now go straight back into operation.

His courage under interrogation might have been all for nothing had not Marie-Madeleine the advantage of friends in high places. Her army brother-in-law, Commandant Georges-Picot, had, through his Vichy connections, heard that incriminating documents, traceable to her, had been handed to the police by a couple from Tarbes. These were the records that Marie-Madeleine had taken away with her from Pau during her escape across the Pyrenees and which she had hidden in the coal shed of the couple she thought she could trust. They were now in the possession of Commandant Rollin, head of security in the free zone, who happened to be a good friend of Georges-Picot. The latter had persuaded Rollin that he would bring his sister-in-law to Vichy to explain herself on the condition that she would not be thrown immediately into jail.

The first thing she had to account for was a sheet of paper with the words ‘Darlan will die by revolver’ scrawled repeatedly across it. This had, in fact, been the ‘voice’ speaking to Coustenoble and manifesting itself through his pencil onto the paper. Marie-Madeleine insisted that it was nothing more than the ramblings of a professed clairvoyant she had known in Paris who occasionally sent her these strange messages. She managed to convince Rollin that Pétain’s deputy was in no danger from her or any of her acquaintances. It was impossible, however, for her to deny her involvement in an undercover network, as a list of code names of her agents were among the records. The police had already deduced that ASO 43 was Jean Boutron and he had been arrested in Madrid and put on a plane back to France. Rollin also accused her of having been to Madrid and back to make contact with the British, which she hotly denied.

Marie-Madeleine claimed that any radio links her group had had with London had been destroyed in the police raid in Pau and brazenly accused her interrogator of lacking patriotism by disabling a network set up to oppose a foreign occupation of his country. Throughout their interview, Commandant Rollin’s attitude had swung from anger and frustration at his interlocutor’s stubborn defence of her activities to one of grudging admiration and, at times, to something close to sympathy. His view, not unique among some of the powers of Vichy, was that, while he deplored the German occupation, resistance groups only made the task of handling the occupiers more difficult and any liaison with the British was a waste of time, as they would never be of any help .

The extraordinary result of Marie-Madeleine’s summons to Vichy was a promise by Rollin of protection under a false identity provided by him on the condition that she ceased her activities and returned to her family and children on the Riviera. He warned that Admiral Darlan ran his own police force which was far more sympathetic to the Nazi cause and methods than his men. Jean Boutron, meanwhile, was sent to a prison in the Alps, partly for his own protection, since he had been followed by two Abwehr agents on the plane from Madrid who he was convinced had orders to kill him. He would later be sprung from jail by members of the Alliance in Grenoble and eventually escaped France aboard a submarine to Gibraltar.

It was Marie-Madeleine’s daughter who eventually provided her with the pretext to leave the Riviera without arousing the suspicions of her brother-in-law or the Vichy police that she might be resuming her undercover work. The young girl needed to go to Toulouse for an operation which would keep her in hospital there for some weeks. It was only natural for her mother to accompany her and to stay there while she recovered. Through the sympathetic connivance of the head of the clinic where she was given a room to stay, she was able to establish a temporary headquarters there, receiving visitors from the network and setting up a local Toulouse patrol.

She was able to make a brief visit to Marseilles during that spring when she saw for herself how much Léon Faye had achieved in her absence. Marie-Madeleine had devised a new system of agents’ code names, whereby every individual became an animal. She became Hérisson — Hedgehog — Faye was Eagle and Coustenoble was Tiger. There were now outposts of the menagerie in every corner of free and occupied France, including the forbidden north-eastern zone where Coustenoble had revived previously severed contacts. Valuable information was even coming from inside Italy thanks to the work of Colonel Charles Bernis in Nice who was in contact with anti-fascists in Turin. They were monitoring air force movements for signs of reinforcement of Rommel’s desert campaign, which was in full swing at the time. This source would later obtain the timetable for different squadrons’ departures for North Africa and the information was relayed back to London in time for their interception by the RAF, thus depriving Rommel of vital air support for his advance on Tobruk. The Marseilles patrol was equally important to the British desert war effort, giving details of German arms consignments transported across the Mediterranean under the disguise of French commercial shipping. Torpedo boats were also reported being sent down the Rhône into the Mediterranean in large numbers .

If all was going well for the rejuvenated network, the outlook was far more grim for the men of the old Paris patrol, half starved and under constant brutal interrogation by the Nazis in Fresnes prison on the outskirts of the capital. In spite of their misery, they continued to try to thwart their tormentors by smuggling out messages made with pinpricks on tiny scraps of rolled up paper when their families were allowed a rare visit to them. Lucien Vallet, who had been the patrol’s radio operator, had written one of his messages in a code which only Marie-Madeleine could decipher. Coustenoble brought it to her while she was still in Marseilles and its content was shocking, if not entirely unexpected. In order to demonstrate to Vallet how much they knew about his activities, his interrogators had placed before him the radio transmitter that he had been using before his arrest but which had been sent to Bla for repair. How did the Germans obtain the radio, considering that Bla was still free? What was more, the entire patrol that he had set up in Normandy was now in German captivity and yet the Englishman himself was, according to London, still transmitting useful material to them on his own set.

Here was proof positive that the man was a German agent and Marie-Madeleine radioed London immediately to that effect. Their first response was simply to say that he was continuing to send excellent information. Utterly exasperated, Marie-Madeleine radioed again. A day elapsed until finally the following message arrived from London:

‘Everything Bla knew that was still intact’ included just about everyone involved with or visiting the Pau headquarters before his departure to Normandy. Shocked that London now expected them to kill the traitor that they themselves had put into their midst, Marie-Madeleine and her lieutenants nonetheless realized its necessity, even if most of the damage had already been done. In his transmissions to London, Bla had bemoaned his loss of contact with the Alliance network, so an attempt was made to lure him to a rendezvous in Lyons. He never turned up, but two Abwehr agents did and they nearly succeeded in grabbing Marc Mesnard, Marie-Madeleine’s trusted treasurer, who had volunteered to meet Bla and lead him into the hands of the network .

This would not be the end of the Bla story. About three months later, by which time Marie-Madeleine was again permanently based in Marseilles, one of the Alliance agents, who had been trained with Bla in London, bumped into him at Marseilles train station. His story was that his old network had been smashed, that he had just avoided capture by the Gestapo and that he was now penniless and looking for a new network to serve. Told that he had come to the right place, Bla agreed to be driven by two supposed policemen to a house on the Corniche, where Faye was waiting for him. Before he carried out the execution, Faye wanted to extract as much information as he could from the Englishman about how much the Germans now knew about their network. Bla flatly refused to admit to any treachery, saying that he had no idea who Faye was and nor did he know any of the men holding him.

Marie-Madeleine had originally agreed not to be involved in Bla’s despatch — her men felt it was inappropriate for a woman — but now Faye realized that his denials would become futile when face to face with the leader of the network. Sure enough, as soon as Marie-Madeleine walked into the room, a look of terror swept across Bla’s face and his defiance turned into an immediate readiness to admit his duplicity. Originally, he had infiltrated British Intelligence on behalf of Oswald Mosley’s fascists. His allegiance switched to the Nazi variety of republican fascism when he found himself excluded by social divisions within Mosley’s movement. After he had left Pau, he spent all his time in Paris rather than Normandy and, with the help of his German masters, used his transmitter to send genuine information to London that they knew they already had, laced occasionally with something false which was sure to send them into unnecessary circles.

Frustratingly, although they could not stop him from talking, he told them very little they did not already know, but confirmed that he had indeed betrayed the Paris and Normandy patrols. The Gestapo had sent him to Marseilles with the express purpose of tracking down Marie-Madeleine which, if he failed, he should get himself to Algeria where he would carry out further undercover work for the Nazis. The one question he refused to answer was who his German contact was in London.

To kill someone you know in cold blood is no easy task, as Christian Pineau discovered, walking away from a wrecked Lysander beside the Saône. The attempts by Faye and other Alliance members to carry out London’s orders on Bla would, in other circumstances, be almost comical. Explaining to Bla that they intended to send him back to England, to allay his immediate fears, they dissolved one of the SIS standard-issue suicide pills in a bowl of soup which Bla devoured, and which produced no ill-effect other than increasing his verbal diarrhoea. Next, they gave him a cup of tea with the same deadly ingredient. Probably through the foul taste of the tea, Bla showed now that he understood what they were doing, expressed his sympathy at the painful task they were having to perform and swallowed the rest in one gulp. This dose appeared to be as harmless as the last and failed to stop his talking, let alone his breathing.

In exasperation, and perpetuating the mythical plan to transport him to London via a submarine, they led him down a precipitous cliff at night to a small beach where they had arranged for a fishing boat skipper with gangster connections to pick him up and dispose of him while at sea. The fishing boat never materialized and, the next morning, Marie-Madeleine received an embarrassed account of how the Englishman was still alive. Finally, abandoning the humane approach, Marie-Madeleine decided that they should stage a proper hearing in front of her, Faye and the others. An indictment was read out to which Bla readily owned was true. Then, by the power of their execution order from SIS headquarters, they condemned him to death. Marie-Madeleine then left the proceedings and the next day, Lucien Poulard, one of Faye’s lieutenants, reported to her that the deed had been done.

She never heard how it was done and was never party to an altogether different account of Bla’s fate. According to Patrice Miannay in his 2005 Dictionary of Double Agents in the Resistance , Robert Alesch, a priest originally from Luxembourg and another SIS agent working for Germany who controlled Bla, reported at his trial in 1945 that he had provided Bla with 75,000 francs of SIS money to flee France. He later received a thank-you note from Bla who claimed to have settled with his wife and children in Bizerte on the Tunisian coast. If, through religious or other scruples, Faye had ultimately been unable to carry out the execution, he never owned up to it to Marie-Madeleine. His own eventual execution by the Nazis would preclude any post-war confession. It has to be said, however, that the only author to have been given access to SIS files, Keith Jeffery, reports no record of this alternative version of events in his 2010 book, MI6 , The History of the Secret Intelligence Service , 1909 -1949 . In fact, he finds an enquiry from Bla’s wife in 1944 asking of his whereabouts with a reply from the authorities that they had neither seen nor heard of him since 1942.

If the treachery of Bla and the failure of espionage essentials such as invisible ink and suicide capsules had shaken the Alliance’s trust in the infallibility of His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, a new line of communication had opened up with London a few weeks earlier in this summer of 1942, which helped restore confidence in their ability to deliver. Up until then, they had relied on parachute drops for the delivery of men and material but, with the arrival of the Anglo-French Arthur-Louis Gachet by the same means, they had an RAF-trained Lysander landing expert in their midst. The network already had a patrol dedicated to aerial operations under the command of a 26-year-old air force lieutenant, Pierre Dallas, who had been investigating potential landing sites in both the Auvergne, west of Clermont-Ferrand, and on flat land beside the rivers Saône, Rhône and Ain to the north and east of Lyons. Dallas was a keen canoeist and, in landings close to a river, planned to make his getaway with incoming agents by paddle power, thus avoiding any roadblocks set up if the alarm had been raised.

The Alliance’s first Lysander exchange took place on the night of 23 August from the comparative luxury of an actual disused airfield at Thalamy, near Ussel in the Auvergne. It was Guy Lockhart’s penultimate operation for 161 Squadron and it successfully delivered Léon Faye to the Sussex coast. His return a month later was far from smooth. Thick cloud and heavy rain over the landing site close to where the rivers Rhône and Ain converged prevented any chance of putting down and the Lysander returned to Tangmere. The next night, the operation was on again, although the weather was hardly any better. John Bridger, at the controls, was forced to fly very low in near total darkness, relying on glimpses of the Loire, whose upstream course led towards Lyons and the target. When they reached the mountains of the Lyonnais, the plane flew below the level of their ridges as the pilot picked his way around their contours.

At the landing site, no signal could be seen through the mist and heavy rain until, to Bridger’s astonishment, the expected letter ‘A’ was flashed from a field on the opposite side of the Rhône to the agreed target. In spite of this misunderstanding, Bridger brought the plane down, only for its right front wheel to sink up to its axle in mud. Faye disembarked, but the outgoing passenger, Jean Boutron, recently sprung from prison, was nowhere to be seen. He was, in fact, back at the auberge where they had been staying, as Dallas had judged that no plane could possibly land that night and had gone to the site with the outbound courier only as a precaution. Waiting now for Boutron to be fetched was out of the question, so Faye and the reception crew began to dig a furrow with their hands to free the sunken undercarriage. With the propeller at full throttle and the four men heaving on the fuselage, they eventually got the Lysander free and, within seconds, it was airborne again and on course for the Channel.

A similar missed opportunity occurred during the October moon when a new radio expert for the network, the Anglo-Spanish Ferdinand Rodriguez, was flown in to the Thalamy airfield, again by John Bridger. Marie-Madeleine’s brother, Jacques Bridou, was the intended return passenger. He had been working with the Alliance ever since his return from his mission to London in late 1940 and was now keen to return there and offer his services to the Free French cause. Unfortunately, Dallas, who was to meet him at Ussel station and take him to the airfield, slept through his stop on the train and the two men arrived breathless at the landing site, only to witness the Lysander disappearing into the night sky. Arthur-Louis Gachet, Dallas’s deputy, had arrived at the field separately and improvised a set of flares.

By the autumn of 1942, rumours were rife about major developments in both France and North Africa. The Alliance was only too aware of the increasing number of thinly disguised German agents operating in Marseilles and throughout the free zone. The last message Bla sent to Marie-Madeleine via his ‘executioners’ was that Hitler planned to march into the free zone on 11 November and that she should leave Marseilles before that date. There was good reason to believe him, as there were also signs that American and allied forces were about to land in Algeria. Hitler would badly need control of the south of France to resist any threat from across the Mediterranean.

At the same time, it became known that a key French military figure, General Henri Giraud, had recently escaped from the German fortress of Koenigstein, where he had been held since the armistice, and was now in Vichy. Although prepared to support Pétain, Giraud was clearly an embarrassment to the government, declaring, as he did, open opposition to the German occupation and urging Pétain to take up arms against them. This was at a time when, according to General Camille Raynal, one of the Alliance’s moles in Vichy, Pétain had sent a telegram to Hitler promising his armed support against any allied invasion of France.

A message came from London asking Marie-Madeleine to sound out General Giraud and see whether he would make a Lysander flight to Britain. He was senior in rank to de Gaulle, and Churchill was desperate to find a more co-operative French ally to work with. Marie-Madeleine arranged for one of her best-connected agents, Maurice de McMahon, Duc de Magenta, a stunt pilot and head of her Paris operation, to meet the General, but Giraud had a deep-seated loathing of the British and he was determined to see France liberated without any British involvement.

During Léon Faye’s subsequent visit to London, he was able to plant the idea of getting Giraud to North Africa instead where he could take command of French forces once the allies had made their landing in Algeria and Morocco and overcome any Vichy-inspired resistance. This suggestion was put to Giraud via the Americans and some tenuous links they had with the General who reluctantly agreed to leave France in a clandestine mission by submarine and be taken to Gibraltar to meet General Eisenhower just before the allied invasion. Giraud’s one stipulation was that the submarine, necessarily a British one, should have an American skipper for his passage, such was his Anglophobia.

Responsibility for the mission, code-named Minerva, was given to Marie-Madeleine and her team who arranged an embarkation point close to Le Lavandou, where a small fishing boat would ferry the General, his son, two officers on his staff and a personal bodyguard out to the submarine, HMS Seraph , on 3 November. Although eventually postponed for two nights, the mission went as planned and Giraud was delivered to Gibraltar two days before the invasion began on 8 November. For some reason, he had presumed he would be given supreme command of the operation and, when told that General Eisenhower was holding the reins, Giraud decided not to accompany the invasion fleet but to observe the outcome from Gibraltar. Although the allies fairly soon took control of the key targets of Casablanca, Oran and Algiers — thanks, in part, to anti-Vichy resistance cells in Algeria — there were nonetheless nearly 500 allied and 1,300 French soldiers killed in the various engagements. When Giraud finally crossed the Mediterranean, he discovered that Admiral Darlan, on a chance visit to Algiers, had been put in overall charge of French forces in North Africa by the allies and he had to accept second-in-command — at least until Darlan was assassinated the following month.

Giraud had, in fact, ordered a second submarine operation to follow the night after his embarkation, as he expected a number of generals to follow his lead and join him in Gibraltar. This additional request caused a flurry of radio transmissions between Madrid and London to arrange the operation and would have disastrous consequences for the Alliance network. Marie-Madeleine knew that she and her team were running an ever-increasing risk, as German detector vans, disguised as French police vehicles, were now appearing in towns throughout the free zone, especially in Marseilles. Such was the price on her own head that Marie-Madeleine could only make brief visits to the headquarters there, returning either to Toulouse or to the seaside hideout near Le Lavendou, where the submarine evacuees gathered.

It was during one of her visits to La Pinède, the villa in Marseilles now serving as their headquarters, that the police made their move. Not one of the generals that Giraud was expecting to follow him had turned up in Marseilles and, so as not to waste the opportunity of an escape route to London, Marie-Madeleine was organizing a substitute party, including her brother and Jean Boutron. Last minute messages to London had been enough to lead the detector van to the door and, before they had time to destroy any evidence, French police, led by a bespectacled Gestapo agent brandishing a revolver, were in the house. It soon transpired that the French policemen were extremely reluctant players in the raid, resenting being forced by the Vichy government to round up their countrymen on behalf of the Gestapo.

An extraordinary scene ensued whereby every time the German’s back was turned, one of the French policemen assisted Marie-Madeleine in her desperate task of hiding or destroying network documents. Unfortunately, they could not destroy everything, including the most potentially damaging of all, which gave frequencies, call signs and locations of every transmitter in use by the network throughout France. It was taken, along with the six people arrested at the villa, to the headquarters of the Surveillance du Territoire . These included Léon Faye, Marie-Madeleine and her brother Jacques, who had arrived at the villa at the worst possible moment, during the raid, to say goodbye to his sister before leaving by sea that evening.

Fortunately, there was no sign of any Germans at the police headquarters, and a mood of wanting to help their prisoners wherever possible prevailed among the officers. News of the successful allied landing in North Africa arrived during their interrogation to the joy of the Alliance members and their captors alike. Faye had been summoned to Vichy, where he was confident he would persuade Pétain and Laval, apparently thrown into panic by the developments across the Mediterranean, that now was the time to take up arms against the Germans, forestalling their almost inevitable invasion of the free zone. Meanwhile, realizing the network’s transmitter details could not simply be destroyed as it had been seen by the German Gestapo agent, the police inspector in charge and Marie-Madeleine colluded in making what appeared to be an identical copy, except that the information on it was false. This one act would save the network and also many lives.

As well as the good news about the allied landings, Marie-Madeleine also received word from Dallas, via one of the sympathetic policemen who had raided her headquarters, that the second submarine embarkation had gone ahead successfully. On 11 November, came the news they had all been dreading — German forces had marched across the demarcation line. This altered everything. Firstly, it sealed the fate of Léon Faye, who very quickly found himself in prison, his proposition considered nothing short of treason by Vichy’s puppet rulers. Secondly, it meant that, as soon as the Nazi advance party had reached Marseilles, the French police would be forced to hand Marie-Madeleine and her fellow prisoners over to their new masters.

But there was such repugnance at the German invasion among the Marseilles police that they took it upon themselves to conspire with members of the network still at large to stage a fake ambush of the police van carrying the prisoners to Castres gaol. So, by midday of the German invasion, Marie-Madeleine and her friends were once again at liberty. Liberty would have a different meaning for them from now on, however. Before, even when captured in the previously free zone, they could hope for a degree of sympathy from the authorities and a chance to negotiate their release. Now, capture would almost certainly mean torture and death, particularly for Marie-Madeleine, whose arrest had become a key objective for the Germans.

In London, Kenneth Cohen had been following his network’s recent fortunes with deep concern and, when he received news of Marie-Madeleine’s escape, he ordered a Lysander flight for her immediate evacuation to London during the forthcoming moon. Such was his and his whole organization’s admiration for their ‘Hedgehog’ that he and others from the office went in person to Tangmere to greet her on the tarmac. As Peter Vaughan-Fowler’s plane taxied to a halt in front of them, instead of the single graceful shape of Marie-Madeleine, no fewer than three swarthy-looking men extricated themselves with considerable difficulty and cramp from the rear cockpit. They turned out to be the three Corsican policemen who had been driving the police van which had set Marie-Madeleine and the others free. She had promised them a passage to England in return for their assistance and was herself in no mood to leave her post in France at such a critical moment. Barbara Bertram always cherished the memory of the trio’s wide-eyed arrival on her doorstep at Bignor, each clad in a peculiar assortment of clothes. She immediately christened them the Marx Brothers.