It was Susanna Agnelli’s mother, Virginia, who unwittingly drew Frances de Chollet into the hunt for the Ciano Diaries.
When Frances and Louis were forced to flee occupied Paris in 1941, Le Guintzet was a huge, shuttered estate with more than a dozen bedrooms spread out across two vast wings, set upon cavernous working cellars. Perched on the top of a hill outside the village of Fribourg, with views of the snowcapped Alps in the distance, the location was remote and private.
Virginia Agnelli had foolishly found herself in Italy in the winter of 1944, arrested by the fascists. When she had a second chance, she fled to Switzerland, aided by the same Eugen Dollmann who had helped Edda and Galeazzo arrange their ill-fated flight to Munich. Virginia managed to cross the border that summer—the summer of 1944—with only her jewels, which were famously splendid. She needed someone willing to mortgage the gems, advancing her the funds to live in Switzerland until her vast Italian assets as part of the Fiat dynasty could be liberated. Louis de Chollet, who had made his wartime career in Paris moving funds across borders, was working in Switzerland as a banker. He agreed to advance Virginia funds and to hold the jewels. Jacqueline de Chollet, the older of Frances and Louis’s two daughters, was six years old in 1944, and she remembers her mother wearing the Agnelli jewels during the war.
A fast friendship sprang up at the end of that summer between Frances and Virginia. They may well have met before the war, in some high-society watering hole like Deauville or Paris. Such a connection between the two families would have surprised no one. They ran in the same social circles. In Switzerland in the summer of 1944, the two women connected following Virginia’s flight across the border. The pair, both middle-aged, had a good deal in common. Virginia’s mother was American, and, like Frances, Virginia had fought a vicious and highly publicized custody battle, in her case with her wealthy father-in-law over her seven children. At least three of Virginia’s now grown daughters, Clara, Maria Sole, and Susanna, were in Switzerland, and all three were frequent visitors to Le Guintzet. Frances and her daughters also spent long afternoons in the Agnelli family garden, where there were parties for the children.
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Virginia and the three Agnelli daughters quickly became part of the salon at Le Guintzet, but the house, staffed in the grand country-estate fashion with gardeners, cooks, maids, nannies, liveried staff, and a solemn butler, was full of guests, some who came and went and others who stayed on as semi-permanent, occasionally immovable, residents.
Visiting artists sketched the gardens and painted serious-faced portraits of the two de Chollet daughters, who suffered under the iron rule of a particularly unkind English nanny. The family housed other children, as well, including a string of young wartime refugees from the Swiss camps. These were mostly orphaned girls whose parents had worked for the resistance and who had been separated from them in their flight across the border, or girls whose parents were Jewish and had perished in the concentration camps.
Upstairs, in the bedrooms, were the aristocrats. To Frances’s considerable ire, Marie Thérèse, the Countess de Monléon, moved into one of the bedrooms and declined to vacate, passing her days drinking vodka martinis in bed and chain-smoking. Accompanying the countess was her thirty-one-year-old daughter, Princess Roselyne Radziwiłł, the wife of Polish nobleman Prince Stanisław. The countess hated Frances, a fact that was, perhaps, not unconnected to the liaison that sprang up between Roselyne and Frances’s husband, Louis. Frances, humiliated, suffered not only a younger mistress in the house but also the mistress’s imperious pro-German mother, who calmly warned Frances that, when the Germans came, she would happily denounce her.
There were a dozen bedrooms, and they were rarely vacant. Frances and Louis kept a guest book at the estate, and five or six couples coming for cocktails or weekend house parties was common. But nearly all those who came and went had some connection, in one way or another, with the Allied military command or with its espionage operations. Frances’s daughter Jacqueline put it simply: “most of the visitors…were affiliated in some way with British or American intelligence,” although many of the most senior among those spies signed only fanciful nicknames or refused to write anything. The guest book at Le Guintzet recorded the comings and goings of well-connected men and women like Victor Seely, Rudolph de Salis, Colonel George Banshawe, Colonel Younghusband, Donald Bigelow, Phyllis B. Legge and Barnwell R. Legge, and General Raymond Duval and his wife, Jeanine.
Sympathetic experts of other sorts also passed through those doors, with their own connections to the intelligence service. Swiss psychiatry then was dominated by Dr. Carl Jung, who had close ties with American intelligence through an OSS agent named Mary Bancroft, his patient. During the war, Mary was the acknowledged mistress of American spymaster Allen Dulles, one of the visitors to Le Guintzet who declined to record his presence but whom Jacqueline remembers. Allen Dulles later said of Carl Jung, whom the Americans code-named Agent 488, “Nobody will probably ever know how much Professor Jung contributed to the Allied Cause during the war, by seeing people who were connected somehow with the other side.” The guest book at Le Guintzet from the war period includes a cryptic reference to “the doc,” whom the family thinks may have been Carl Jung. Certainly the guests included other of the doctor’s famous patients.
Among the guests too were Swiss authorities who were sometimes less than entirely neutral. Another guest-book regular was the friendly chief of police for the Swiss Federal Public Ministry, the same Werner Balsiger who was charged with oversight of Emilio Pucci’s internment. Frances de Chollet told her daughter after the war that Werner’s wife provided intelligence for the Americans.
Little surprise, then, that this house of spies, with its walled gardens and odd visitors, garnered raised eyebrows.
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Frances was drawn into the affair with the diaries sometime in the late summer of 1944. That summer, Edda was still incarcerated in the psychiatric hospital in Monthey and desperately unhappy. Emilio Pucci was still interned as a school tutor not far from Fribourg. Hilde was back in Weimar, translating the cache of Galeazzo’s diaries for the Reich, and Emilio and Susanna were still working together to try to keep Edda and the remainder of the diaries safe from the Gestapo.
The introduction between Frances and Emilio Pucci took place sometime at the end of that summer, and it was her “great friend” Virginia Agnelli who arranged for them to meet in Morat, a little lakeside hamlet just north of Fribourg village, where Emilio was interned. The purpose of the introduction was specifically so Frances could meet Edda Ciano.
Was Frances de Chollet simply curious to meet the infamous daughter of Benito Mussolini? Did Virginia, who knew Edda from Rome, simply wish to make the introduction because she thought Frances—who considered police chief Werner Balsiger a friend—might be better positioned to help Edda arrange more sympathetic terms for internment? Or was it not a coincidence that Frances, the society hostess of the house of spies, was drawn into an emerging intelligence drama?
The case for Frances being an established, if casual, operative in Switzerland before August 1944 is circumstantial but fascinating. Allen Dulles arrived in Switzerland in late 1942 and during his time as spymaster in Bern routinely pulled into his intelligence network well-placed Americans, especially women. Was Frances one of those women from early on? Her daughter Jacqueline remembers being sent throughout the war on strange errands by her mother. On one occasion, Frances sent her as a small girl down to the train station to collect a gentleman who, she was told, would be carrying a particular briefcase. Refugees-in-hiding frequently resided in the de Chollet mansion.
Jacqueline also remembers clearly that her mother would bike each day to the train station with her beloved dachshund Badsy in the front basket, and travel to Bern and back on some unexplained business. Frances had acquired Badsy in 1937, when the family was living at the Ritz hotel in Paris, and they were inseparable. Once, when her mother could not take the dog, Badsy trotted down to the station alone and hopped the train to Bern, where it turned up expectantly at the fashionable Schweizerhof Hotel looking for its mistress. That the dog was immediately recognized in the lobby gives a hint as to at least one of Frances’s frequent destinations.
There in Bern at the luxury hotel, Frances was part of a group of American friends who enjoyed long lunches. That group included three men who were at the center of the US intelligence service: Allen Dulles, the head of the OSS, and his two colleagues, Donald Bigelow and Gerald Mayer. Frances knew Allen Dulles and his wife, Clover, from before the war, and it appears that it was another mutual American friend in Switzerland, Jane Cabot, who reconnected him and Frances in Bern not long after his arrival. Allen was an undeniably charismatic and attractive man who exuded sexual energy, and Frances at least felt there was chemistry. Clover, though, was a fellow Bostonian, and Frances considered her an old friend, which meant that any liaison herself with Allen Dulles was out of the question. Frances knew too well the pain and shame of a philandering spouse, and Allen’s extramarital affair with Mary Bancroft was anything but a state secret.
Gerald Mayer, Allen Dulles’s close associate and right-hand man with the War Office and at the OSS, regularly signed the guest book at the house of spies from at least spring of 1944 forward. Allen never signed the book. But he too joined the house parties.
Was Frances drawn into the matter of the Ciano Diaries by chance or by design? The question remains unanswered and perhaps unanswerable. Freedom of Information Act requests have turned up no OSS declassified files related to Frances or Louis de Chollet, a fact that is not, in and of itself, determinative. Personnel files are frequently sealed for sixty or more years after the death of the individual, which might mean researchers won’t have answers—if they exist—until sometime after 2050.
What is known is that Frances de Chollet met Emilio Pucci in Morat sometime in the latter part of August or, at the outside, in the first few days of September. And immediately following, the Le Guintzet guest book records on September 4, 1944, an extraordinary meeting that can only have been part of a coordinated plan to address the matter of Edda’s safety and the fate of the Ciano Diaries.
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On that evening, the guests at the home of Frances and Louis de Chollet included Emilio Pucci and representatives from the Italian and American delegations, from the US intelligence services, and from the Agnelli family. Allen Dulles’s lieutenant Gerald Mayer was present. Allen, with his reluctance to sign the ledger, may also have been an unrecorded attendant. On the Italian side was Giorgio Bombassei Frascani de Vettor, considered reliably anti-fascist by the Americans, and his wife, Eli. Phyllis Legge, the wife of the US military attaché in Switzerland, attended (and her husband is another likely unrecorded person present), as did Clara von Furstenberg, Susanna Agnelli’s sister and housemate in Lausanne. Clara was the wife of the German-born Prince Tassillo von Furstenberg, and his name appears in wartime OSS files as assisting the Allies.
It was a small, strategically select party, and each of them had either established connections to the OSS in Switzerland or established connections to Edda Ciano. Such a gathering cannot have been accidental. Emilio and the Agnelli women, Susanna especially, following Hilde’s pleading and dramatic visit to Lausanne earlier in the year, had been working, as yet fruitlessly, to arrange the transmission of the diaries to the Allies as part of a deal to improve Edda’s financial and domestic situation and to forestall a Gestapo kidnapping. After they’d been stonewalled by the British agent in Bern, nothing was more natural than that they might reach out next, using Virginia Agnelli’s American connections and her friendship with Frances, to the American intelligence service. There, they found a receptive audience. The Americans were actively working to establish personal contacts with friends of Edda by August, following the publication of the New York Times article. Emilio later said that when he first met Frances de Chollet that summer, the Americans already seemed to him very interested in the Ciano Diaries.
From that first meeting in early September at Le Guintzet, things progressed quickly. There were more meetings among Frances, the Agnelli women, the Americans, and now also the British representatives in Switzerland. On September 11, Frances passed the evening with Virginia Agnelli and another of her daughters, Susanna’s younger sister, Maria Sole. On September 26, Frances passed the evening with Catharine Cabot, the mother-in-law of her friend Jane Cabot Reid, who had connected Frances with Allen Dulles in Switzerland. With the party again that night were H. Norman Reed, with the British legation, and Phyllis and Barnwell Legge, with the US military.
And as always, there were those shadow guests who came and went from the house of spies unrecorded. Frances de Chollet was about to take charge, whether she was ready or not, of one of the Second World War’s most consequential covert recovery missions.