Right from the start the Vichy intelligence services, including the Milice, had managed to infiltrate many of the réfractaires’ camps and build up a network of informers among the local French population. During the summer of 1943, the able young Resistance commander of Camp C2 near Villard-de-Lans, Pierre Faillant de Villemarest, was so concerned about infiltration that he suggested to the Vercors’ civil and military leaders that a proper intelligence and security service be established on the plateau. It was agreed that he and a girl called Charlotte Mayaud from Villard should undertake the task. The two quickly established an intelligence network among local doctors and set up a rudimentary surveillance service and a warning system to sound the alert in the event of an approaching threat. Villemarest very soon realized that the problem was much worse than he had thought, and concluded that the whole of the Organisation Vercors was deeply penetrated.
In September 1943, a man called Henri Weiss suddenly appeared and took over the running of a café in Villard. Surveillance quickly revealed that he was in contact with a Belgian named Lecuy who appeared to have no visible means of support but was staying in Villard’s most luxurious hotel, the Splendide. Further investigation uncovered a ‘spy ring’ which included two hotel owners and a groom called ‘Mistigri’, who was himself a member of one of the réfractaires’ camps. It was obvious to Villemarest that, between them, they had perfect oversight of everyone who arrived and left the town. Further surveillance established that the Belgian, Lecuy, held regular clandestine meetings with a German official in Grenoble who turned out to be none other than the infamous Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie. Villemarest gave a full report with supporting evidence to Chavant, but le Patron dismissed it all as ‘too imaginative’. Not long afterwards, the body of the Belgian, Lecuy, was found in a wood outside Villard. Local rumour said that he had been tempted to the spot by a Villard lady of relaxed virtue and that Villemarest had had something to do with the death.
Disgusted by Chavant’s naivety, Villemarest relinquished his job and left the plateau in February 1944. In the first half of 1944, however, Villemarest’s worst suspicions were confirmed when several Maquisards deserted from the camps. Some of these were suspected of being Milice infiltrators. One, Cémoi (we know only his alias), who had joined one of the camps in February, deserted to the Milice on 24 April. He was later captured and executed. It was not until June 1944 that a proper system of security was finally established on the plateau.
Although the plateau itself was riddled with insecurity, there were active and successful Resistance intelligence networks operating in the Grenoble area which were able to provide the Vercors leaders with reliable information on German intentions. These included many in the Vichy civil administration and the local police as well as the Gendarmerie. Post offices were also a fruitful source of information, as were local telephone-exchange operators who turned their well-known habit of listening to conversations into a patriotic duty. Others on whom the Organisation Vercors could normally rely included especially the local restaurateurs, who formed an extensive intelligence network of their own. This included establishing an organization for stealing side-arms from Germans dining at local restaurants and smuggling these to the Resistance in the forests.
Alongside the local intelligence organizations operating in the Vercors during this period there were also a number of French and Allied secret services doing the same thing. These included the French intelligence services based in London, SOE, SIS (also known as MI6), MI9 (Britain’s secret service dedicated to helping escaped PoWs and airmen), the intelligence service of the Polish government-in-exile and the American Office of Strategic Services, which ran, among other agents, Gaston Vincent, who was based in Saint-Agnan-en-Vercors until his death in June 1944.
On the other side, the German and Milice networks often made use of those involved in the black market and, it was said, brothel keepers, barbers and barmen. In his Union report, Thackthwaite added to this list waitresses in small-town and village restaurants, who were used as agents provocateurs. Apart from human sources, the Germans also put considerable effort into gathering signals intelligence and closing down secret radio stations. In one case a Milice agent who had been successfully infiltrated into one of the Vercors’ clandestine radio teams had to be got rid of because, ‘although he was assigned as a trustworthy person’, further enquiries were made and ‘It was discovered that his brother was a Milicien and his sister-in-law worked for the Gestapo.’
German intelligence even successfully took over some Resistance radio networks in their entirety. For example, a Greek called Guy Alexander Kyriazis was sent by the German secret service to work in a British-run SIS network called Alliance. Posted to Grenoble, he was paid 7,000 francs a month and appears to have operated until the end of the war, planting false messages and passing back codebooks to his masters. When subsequently interrogated by the Allies, he claimed that ‘the Germans … knew the details of the wireless procedure which was being used at Grenoble [and] were intercepting messages’.
The job of German intelligence was made much easier by that fact that the radio security of both the Resistance in the field and their Free French controllers in London was very lax and their codes extremely insecure. The British government became very concerned about this, especially now that planning had started on the greatest secret of the war, the date and location of D-Day. On 13 January 1944, the British War Cabinet took the decision that, because of the insecurity of the French codes, all signals or messages sent by the French in London and Algiers had to be transmitted through the British communication systems or use British or US codes. De Gaulle was predictably furious, calling it ‘an outrage and an insult’.
An SOE report on French radio security dated 29 January 1944, just a few days before the Malleval disaster, gives some indication of the scale of the problem: ‘[French] Security … is lamentable … Continual losses of [Resistance] chiefs, money, codes, archives, couriers, list of names which [were] unparalleled … we have continually pointed out over a year that [their] codes are fundamentally insecure and badly coded … We have finally been reduced to breaking them [the French codes] ourselves to prove [to the French] their insecurity … It must be assumed that every [French] message code can be read by the Germans as easily as by ourselves [emphasis in original].’
Closer to D-Day, the British went further, refusing to allow anyone of any nationality to leave Britain whom they believed knew anything, or thought they knew anything, about D-Day.
The approach of D-Day was beginning to concentrate German minds, too. As 1943 drew to a close without an invasion, it was clear to all that it must happen in the spring or summer of 1944. This time, however, the task for the Germans would not just be to disrupt the Resistance control networks, as in 1943, but to destroy the Maquis units themselves. And this would involve not individual arrests outside Métro stations or swoops on safe houses, but a series of bloody battles in which no quarter would be given to the ‘terrorists’.
On 3 February 1944, the German Deputy Supreme Commander West, Luftwaffe Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, set out the policy with chilling clarity in what has become known as the ‘Sperrle-Erlass’ order, prescribing the behaviour of German troops in the struggle ahead:
1. We are not in the occupied western territories to allow our troops to be shot at and abducted by saboteurs who go unpunished …
2. If troops are attacked … countermeasures [must be taken] immediately;
These include an … immediate return of fire. If innocent persons are hit this is regrettable but entirely the fault of the terrorists.
The surroundings of any such incident are to be sealed off … and all the civilians in the locality, regardless of rank and person, are to be taken into custody.
Houses from which shots have been fired are to be burnt down …
… A slack and indecisive troop commander deserves to be severely punished because he endangers the lives of the troops … and produces a lack of respect for the German armed forces.
Measures that are regarded subsequently as too severe cannot in view of the present situation, provide reason for punishment.
A week later, on 12 February, the German