The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [310]
The Davis network was highly regarded in Broadway. A March 1944 minute noted that over the previous six months it had been the most productive ‘of any of our organisations’. In June it was added that Davis had ‘frequently received bouquets from the Air Ministry and War Office, who also often express astonishment at the volume of Davis’ output’. The Admiralty considered Davis to be in the ‘top drawer’ and the Ministry of Economic Warfare also commented favourably on the value and number of economic reports produced by the organisation. London believed that this success was due to Chavagnac’s ‘administrative ability and common sense’, combined with ‘a complete disregard for his own safety’. Early in 1944, however, ‘two minor members of the organisation divulged their knowledge of it to the Germans’. After failed attempts ‘firstly to evacuate them by a pickup operation and secondly to execute them’, and fearing that the network had been seriously compromised, Chavagnac was brought out and the organisation split into thirteen independent groups, which all continued to supply ‘valuable intelligence’.
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was described by SIS’s Kenneth Cohen as the ‘copybook “beautiful spy”’. Top left shows how British forgers could change her appearance for false identity papers.
An annotated breakdown of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade’s Alliance organisation drawn up in August 1942 demonstrates the reach of one of the largest and most important SIS French networks. One hundred and forty-five individuals are listed, organised into ten different groups. The largest of these, led by ‘Panthère’, had thirty agents, among whom were an electrical engineer and wireless operator who ‘has some serious sources in the Beauvais region’; an ‘industrialist, Paris and Nord’; a Paris-based female friend of Panthère, ‘a very cultured woman and enterprising’ with ‘contacts in medical circles’; a businessman able to travel between the two zones of France and to Germany; a police commissaire ‘in charge of the surveillance of the coast in Brittany’; an engineer who divided his time between Lille and Grenoble; and a port employee in Brest who ‘possesses information on movements of all German boats which he can pass on to us’. At its peak in the spring of 1943 Alliance was reckoned to have over two thousand agents, couriers and contacts right across France. Organised into three main geographical regions, each of which was divided into a number of sectors, it was run along military lines and concentrated broadly on military intelligence, including information on U-boat bases in western France and, from 1943, V-weapons.
A snapshot of life for an Alliance agent on the ground is provided by ‘Pierre Verrier’ (‘Seagull’), a civil airline pilot before the war, who, among other things, helped make arrangements for landing operations. Debriefed on his return to England in April 1943, he reported that he had had ‘very little trouble’ with the French police, and that ‘the most patriotic and the easiest ones to get on with were those belonging to the pre-war regime’. He claimed that the Gestapo, who ‘combined excessive politeness and the utmost brutality in the accomplishment of their duties’, were ‘overwhelmed with work’. Sometimes they were ‘remarkably stupid’, as when they had come to arrest two brothers. At the house they ‘asked one of the men if his brother was at home’. He replied that he would go and see, and both men managed to escape while the Germans waited patiently for him to return. ‘Whilst they were in the house,’ moreover, ‘a young local boy came in, went upstairs to the attic, dismantled and packed the W/T set and walked out without being molested.’ More ominously, however, Verrier added that ‘in every small town and village’ the Gestapo had ‘at least 2 or 3 denouncers’. Verrier, too, had good advice for other agents. ‘When in lonely country districts where he was a