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stranger, looking for suitable landing-grounds,’ he said that ‘he made a habit of visiting 2 or 3 farms to enquire for food.’ This could provide him with an alibi. Should the police ask him why he was in the district, ‘he could answer that he was looking for food’, and ‘indicate farms where he had called and where, should the police check up on his story, they would find it to be true’. Another observation was that when a stranger went to live in any locality for a length of time, it was ‘not safe for him to be there without receiving correspondence’. If, ‘in the normal way’, he did not receive letters, ‘he should write letters to himself. A person who does not receive any correspondence’, asserted Verrier, ‘is apt to be looked upon as a person in hiding.’

Despite Verrier’s somewhat dismissive remarks about the Gestapo, the Alliance organisation was very badly hit by enemy penetration and arrests during 1943. Its sheer size and centralisation, along with some lax security, proved fatal for many of its members. The German occupation of south-east France in late 1942, moreover, deprived Allied sympathisers of what had been a comparatively safe haven. Early in 1943 it was clear that the Germans had become aware of a clandestine organisation whose members took the names of animals as pseudonyms. In January and February a series of arrests disrupted the network in Toulouse, Marseilles, Nice and Lyons, where the Gestapo chief, Klaus Barbie, directed the torture of two young female Alliance members, ‘Hummingbird’ and ‘Mouse’. German pressure forced the network to move its headquarters from Lyons to Paris, but in the summer there was a further series of blows. In June, ‘Elephant’, one of the principal figures who had remained at Lyons, and the network’s chief supplier of forged documents, was arrested. The following month the head of the south-west region in Limoges narrowly evaded capture by the Gestapo, but some of his staff were captured. Further arrests followed in Toulon, the Alpes Maritimes and even Paris. With the whole organisation under extreme pressure, its leader, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, was brought out to London.

Only after the war did it become apparent that the disasters of 1943 were in part due to at least one traitor in the Alliance ranks. Elephant’s capture seems to have been down to an Alsatian, Jean-Paul Lien (‘Lanky’), who had penetrated the organisation for the Germans. Lien also engineered the arrest of Fourcade’s effective second-in-command, Léon Faye (‘Eagle’) on his return from a brief visit to London in September. Faye, whose party included ‘Magpie’, a British radio operator who had been sent to work with Alliance in October 1942, was picked up with incriminating documents, three million francs, arms and other equipment which they had brought over from England. Others awaiting Faye’s arrival in Paris managed to get away when the Gestapo began to search the block of flats where they were gathered. More arrests followed, and by the late autumn of 1943 most of the Alliance groups in north-west France and the Rhône valley had ceased to function. Many of the network’s members were shot by the Germans. Faye was executed at a camp in eastern Germany early in 1945. Magpie was more fortunate. In a rare wartime example of a spy-swap, the British, negotiating through the Swiss protecting power, managed to exchange him for a German officer and he arrived back in the United Kingdom in February 1945.12

The Davis and Alliance organisations came under Kenneth Cohen’s P.1 section at Broadway, which handled most of SIS’s French work. Numerous other intelligence networks developed under Cohen’s aegis, with and without Free French co-operation. One was ‘Sosie’, a large and extensive organisation working mainly in the north-east of the country, and the smaller networks included ‘Triboullet’ and ‘Jove’. Their primary means of communication was by radio, but some used courier lines through Spain, while others were provided with air and sea pick-ups. The growth of intelligence activities in France during 1943 produced a growing