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network was run by ‘Navarre’, a right-wing hero of the Great War and leading member of the veterans’ organisation Les Anciens Combattants. Using war veterans’ clubs and various charity enterprises as cover, by mid-1941 his organisation (‘Kul’) had spread into much of the unoccupied zone and, to a lesser extent, Brittany, parts of northern France and Paris, as well as having agents in French North Africa. ‘Most of these agents’, noted Cohen, were ‘what might be termed “enthusiastic volunteers” of the officer type, rather than trained spies’, and they were consequently sometimes ill prepared for the efficiency of the German security forces in France. Navarre himself was arrested in July 1941, but, thanks to the efforts of Marie-Madeleine Meric (later Fourcade), Kul continued to function. With Fourcade taking the code-name ‘Hérisson’ (Hedgehog), and later under the new name ‘Alliance’, it established its headquarters in Marseilles.16

By the end of 1941 A.5 had established particularly good coverage of the French Atlantic ports, where German U-boats and commerce raiders were based. But the growing size and consequent vulnerability of the networks resulted in a number of them, including the Confrérie de Notre-Dame, being penetrated by the Germans. Into 1942 there was a growing list of arrests, especially of wireless operators, but the Confrérie and Alliance nevertheless managed to provide a large volume of information from most parts of France. This was passed to the United Kingdom by wireless, by couriers through Spain, by sea operations to the Brittany coast and by aircraft pick-ups (of which by mid-1941 there was about one every month). Probably the most important intelligence was the very detailed coverage by a Confrérie cell of the German radar station and its defences at Saint-Bruneval, north of Le Havre on the French Channel coast. Along with air reconnaissance, this helped enable the successful British raid in February 1942 in which precious examples of the German equipment were captured. 17

During 1942 Fourcade’s Alliance organisation was threatened by the activities of ‘Bla’, a thirty-nine-year-old former farm manager in Normandy who had lived in France for about twenty years before the war. Escaping from the German advance, he had made his way to England in June 1940 and been recruited as an agent by SIS. He parachuted into southern France near Pau in August 1941, intending to operate a wireless set for Alliance and establish a network in Normandy. He began to report directly to London in February 1942, but inconsistencies in his identity checks, among other things, had begun to lead London to suspect that he might have been compromised. In May SIS received reliable information that Bla had been arrested by the Germans, who were using him for a deception operation. Hoping that he might still be loyal, Menzies decided in turn to play him as a double agent through the XX (or ‘Twenty’) Committee, an interdepartmental body set up in January 1941 which ran the tremendously successful British wartime Double-Cross System. He also wanted to give Bla the chance ‘to escape from the enemy’s clutches’ and return to Great Britain. A rendezvous was arranged in July, when Bla did not appear, but one of the leading Alliance agents narrowly evaded arrest by Abwehr officers lying in wait for him. The following month, with mounting concern, London instructed Bla to hide his set and get to Spain or Switzerland where he should report to the British authorities. By this stage the alarm bells were also ringing at SOE, who knew Bla as ‘Blanchet’. One of their agents had spotted him in Lyons, and Major Maurice Buckmaster, the head of SOE’s F (Independent French) Section, told SIS that he was signalling to France to warn them that Blanchet was a ‘most dangerous individual’ and they ‘should have no dealings with him whatsoever . . . If possible suggest to him that he makes for Spain,’ he continued. ‘If he persists in worrying you you are fully authorised to dispose of him as neatly as possible.’ In September 1942 there were various sightings