Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

by Lynne Olson

As it happened, many anti-German policemen and security officials joined resistance networks after the occupation.

Today, Darlan gives me Algiers and I cry ‘Vive Darlan!’ If Quisling gives me Oslo, I will cry ‘Vive Quisling!’ Let Laval give me Paris tomorrow, and I will cry ‘Vive Laval!’ ” In the view of many, such cynical pragmatism undermined the lofty moral position of the Allied cause.

On Christmas Eve 1942, a twenty-year-old French military trainee burst into Darlan’s headquarters in Algiers and shot him dead. There were suspicions that American and British secret services had arranged the murder, but nothing was ever proved.

Alliance had boasted about one hundred members. Now there were nearly a thousand.

By late 1942, dozens of Alliance agents and subagents had infiltrated all the ports and U-boat bases in the west of France, from Bordeaux and La Rochelle on the southwestern coast to Lorient, Saint-Nazaire,

A member of a prominent, wealthy Jewish family in Paris, Koenigswerther had escaped to Britain in a sailboat at the time of France’s occupation. His parents were also able to flee, spending the rest of the war in New York. In London, Koenigswerther joined the Free French and was recruited by BCRA,

In August 1943, after Gardes reported the departure of five subs from the base, the RAF sank all of them in the Bay of Biscay.

The resulting explosions caused heavy damage. In

Brittany, another young agent—twenty-four-year-old Lucien Poulard—had been praised by the British for his own stellar work and that of his operatives.

young seamstress, code-named Shrimp, who repaired the life vests of the submariners. They usually brought the vests to her as they were getting ready to leave on a patrol, and by listening carefully to their chatter, she often learned the times and dates of their subs’ sailing.

The group, called Sea Star, was headed by a twenty-eight-year-old former naval officer named Joël Lemoigne.

He brought with him a large amount of information about the Lorient base,

But the crown jewel was Lorient, a once quaint and peaceful fishing village on the Bay of Biscay that Dönitz had transformed into the largest submarine base in the world.

Submariners considered themselves the royalty of the German navy, and when they returned from successful patrols, their reception, especially at Lorient, was regal indeed. Dönitz himself was on hand to greet them, as was a brass band and a crowd of welcomers, including a number of attractive young German women who would bestow flowers and kisses on the victorious sub commanders. Medals would be awarded, speeches made, and triumphant anthems played.

While German security officials viewed every French citizen as a potential enemy of the Reich, they were uneasily aware that Bretons were more hostile than most of their compatriots. A craggy, starkly beautiful, wind-swept peninsula that extends into the stormy North Atlantic, Brittany seemed to many to be a land apart from the rest of France. Likewise, its people regarded themselves as a race quite different from the residents of other parts of the country.

descended from Celtic settlers who had populated the area in the sixth century.

Bretons never lost sight of the fact that Brittany was an independent kingdom until it was absorbed by France and became a province in 1532.

The Germans’ worst enemy in Lorient, however, was not one of the town’s natives. It was a Frenchman trusted by Dönitz and despised by the Bretons—the naval engineer Jacques Stosskopf.

In fact, the “traitor Stosskopf” turned out to be one of the most brilliant, audacious Allied spies of World War II. Since the fall of 1940, he had been providing a treasure trove of intelligence about German submarine operations at Lorient, first to high-ranking anti-German naval officers at Vichy and then to Fourcade’s network.

The Reich’s military defeats in 1943 coincided with a sharp increase in resistance activity in France, sparked primarily by Germany’s decision to draft hundreds of thousands of French citizens to work as forced labor in its industrial war effort. Initially, Pierre Laval had called on the French to volunteer, but when few responded, he issued an order requiring all Frenchmen between the ages of eighteen and fifty and all unmarried women between twenty-one and thirty-five to give two years of service to German war work.

Until the work draft, the lives of most of the French had not been deeply affected by German repression. STO, however, hit home in the most literal way: Virtually every family had a loved one in danger of being rounded up.

along with mountainous regions in the east and south of the country, became favorite hiding places; in those out-of-the way places, members of newly formed quasiguerrilla groups, called maquis, lived off the land and began to plot sabotage and subversion.

From mid-1942 to mid-1943, German security forces, along with French police, arrested some sixteen thousand resistance members, many of whom were tortured and put to death.

Also taking part in the purge was a brutal new French paramilitary force called the Milice, whose members, according to Vomécourt, were, “almost to a man, thugs on the make.”

The Germans began referring to the group as Noah’s Ark.

Few of them copied the tactics of French Communist resistance groups, which were organized into cells of a few men, with each cell having minimal contact with one another.

As much as Fourcade tried to combat it, she was well aware that indiscretion was endemic among members of Alliance, as it was among most of the resistance rank and file in France. She found it impossible to prevent her agents from getting together and telling each other about their discoveries.

As the French American historian Ted Morgan saw it, this type of secret work was not something that his French compatriots were very good at. Morgan wrote that the French “have a hard time taking security measures seriously because they interfere with their social habits and natural garrulousness.”

“Each one that you take on is an additional security risk, an additional person who can betray you all.”

belfry.

After the war, Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, honored Philippe for his efforts to save French

Lyon seemed more Swiss than French in its outlook. One observer described it as “a citadel of old money that was never flaunted.”

In 1793, for example, the people of Lyon revolted en masse against the radical government that had seized power after the French Revolution.

go ten meters without running into an underground comrade whom you had to pretend not to know,” one leader noted. Among them was Jean Moulin, the former French official who would become known as the greatest figure of France’s wartime resistance.

Moulin would be responsible for bringing together a wide array of fragmented movements and welding them into a relatively cohesive body.

Not surprisingly, Lyon also became a hotbed of Gestapo and Abwehr activity. The major figure of Nazi repression was Klaus Barbie, the local Gestapo chief, wh...

“In my network,” she said, “no woman ever faltered, even under the most extreme kinds of torture. I owe my freedom to many who were questioned until they lost consciousness, but never revealed my whereabouts, even when they knew exactly where I was.”

Once again, one of her female friends came to the rescue. Marguerite Berne-Churchill, a physician who was already involved in resistance work, invited her to share her apartment. Berne-Churchill’s teenage children volunteered as Alliance couriers.

Drenched with sweat, Vinzant collapsed in a chair after they had left. Marie entered the room. “Have they gone?” she asked. Then, with a grin, she lifted up her apron: “Your radio, it’s very heavy, Monsieur.”

Marie-Madeleine made arrangements to bring both children to Lyon and hand them over to Amitie Chretienne, a Lyon-based organization run by two Catholic priests that had helped save hundreds of Jewish children and others at risk by hiding them in private homes or Catholic institutions like convents and schools.

bungled

The day after Siegrist’s arrest, Jean Moulin, the movement’s most important and powerful figure, was captured by the Gestapo, along with six key resistance leaders with whom he was meeting at a safe house in a Lyon suburb.

heather

threadbare.

ferret”—had

The eminent historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was also at MI6

cunning.”

life. A thoroughgoing misogynist, he never let on to her how appalled he’d been when he first learned that the leader of MI6’s most successful French network was a beautiful young mother of two.

One of her first frustrations came when Major Keyser, her longtime MI6 liaison whom she considered a friend, was suddenly reassigned. His successor was an officer whom Fourcade identified only as Tom and who was a thorn in her side from the start. He ignored her questions and advice and kept from her much of the material sent by Alliance to MI6.

sods!’