Part 8

As far back as September, 1936, the Surete Nationale knew that some leading French industrialists with the cooperation of the German and Italian Governments were building a military fascist organization within France. Nevertheless it quietly permitted fortresses to be built and stocked with munitions. The General Staff of the French Army, from reports of Intelligence men in Germany and Italy, knew that those countries were smuggling arms into France, but they permitted it to go on. The General Staff knew that some eight hundred concrete fortresses were being built under the supervision of M. Anceaux, a building contractor of Dieppe, and that skilled members of the Secret Committee for Revolutionary Action had been recruited for the building and sworn to secrecy under penalty of death. They knew that these fortresses were equipped with sending and receiving radios, knew that some were within the shadow of military centers, knew that the Cagoulards had a far-flung espionage system. But the French General Staff made no effort to stop it.

The Popular Front Government was in power at the time, and heads of the Supreme War Council apparently preferred a fascist France to a democratic one. In fact, officers and reserve officers of the French Army cooperated with secret agents of their traditional enemy, Germany, to build up this formidable secret army.

The investigating authorities, stunned by their discoveries and the high officials and individuals to whom their investigations led, either did not dare go further with it, or, if they did, suppressed the information. Some of it, however, came out.

At the top of the Cagoulards is a Supreme War Council or General Staff whose members have not been disclosed. Working with them are several other organizations, all with innocent names, as for example the "Society of Studies for French Regeneration." The Cagoulards' activities are divided into broad general lines, each directed by an individual in complete command and embracing:

Buying war materials within France and smuggling war materials into the country from Germany, Italy and Insurgent Spain, along with the simultaneous weaving of an espionage network under Nazi and fascist direction and leadership.

Building concrete fortresses at strategic centers and storing smuggled arms in them.

Military training of secretly organized troops.

Getting the money to carry on these extensive activities.

Extreme care was, and still is, taken to conceal the identities of the ordinary members and especially the leaders. For instance, one of the leaders known to his subordinates as "Fontaine" is in reality Georges Cachier, director of a large company in Paris and chief of the Cagoulards' "Third Bureau," which is in charge of military movements. Cachier is an Officer of the French Legion of Honor and a reserve Lieutenant-Colonel in the French Army.

The Cagoulards are still very active. Members are being recruited with leaders pointing out to the fearful ones that there is nothing to worry about--almost all of those arrested in the early days of the investigation are free, out on bail or kept in a "gentleman's confinement" where they can do virtually as they please. "Our power is great," new members are told.

As is customary in secret terrorist societies, the members are sworn to silence with death as the penalty for indiscretion. The penalty when it is employed is usually administered in American gangster fashion. Each member is allotted to a "cell," the basic unit of the military organization, and assigned to a secretly fortified post for training. One of these posts discovered by the Surete Nationale was in an old boarding house run by two ancient spinsters with equally ancient guests who spent their time in rockers, knitting and reading and not dreaming that underneath the porch on which they sat so tranquilly was a fortress with enough explosives to blow the whole street to smithereens. Into this particular fortification, the cell members would steal one by one after the old maids had retired, entering by a concealed door three feet thick and electrically operated.

There are two different kinds of cells in the Cagoulards, "heavy" and "light" ones. They differ in the number of men and the quantity of armaments assigned to them. The "light" cell has eight men equipped with army rifles, automatics, hand grenades, and one sub-machine gun; the "heavy" one has twelve men similarly armed but with a machine gun instead of a sub-machine gun. Three cells form a unit, three units a battalion, three battalions a regiment, two regiments a brigade and two brigades a division of two thousand men. The battalions (one hundred and fifty men) are subdivided into squads of fifty to sixty men with ten to twelve cars at their disposal for quick movement throughout the city. These automobile squads are given intensive training.

Members are not required to pay dues, for enough money comes in from industrialists and the German and Italian Governments to eliminate the need of collecting money from members for operating expenses. Every effort is made to function without written communications. No membership cards are issued. Notices of meetings, drill and rifle practice are issued verbally, and so far as the mass membership is concerned, nothing in writing is placed in their hands.

A twenty-page handbook with instructions on street fighting was issued to group commanders and, lest a copy fall into wrong hands and betray the organization, it was boldly entitled: Secret Rules of the Communist Party. The instructions are specific and are based upon the insurrectionary tactics issued to the Nazi Storm Troopers. They fall into six sections: General Remarks; Group Fighting; Section Fighting; Choice of Terrain; Commissariat; and Policing Groups.

One or two excerpts from these instructions for street fighting follow:

"The particular force for street fighting is infantry, provided with automatic weapons and hand grenades. Members of the detachments should be instructed that automatic weapons must always be used in preference. Essential arms are: sub-machine guns, rifles including hunting rifles, hand grenades, revolvers, petards." (Petards are small bombs used for blowing in doors.)

With regard to "mopping up" in houses, the instructions state:

"If the door is barricaded, it must be opened with tools or explosives. If it is a heavy door, break it in by driving a lorry at it. Clean up basements and cellars by throwing bombs down through the air holes or other openings after your men have got into the house. Only after these have exploded should the cellar doors be forced. Then, when ascending the stairs, keep close to the walls while one of your men keeps firing straight up the shaft. Mop up as you go down floor by floor. If necessary, pierce holes in the ceilings and mop up by throwing down hand grenades."

The chief of the Cagoulards' espionage system is Dr. Jean Marie Martin, a bushy-haired stocky man with dark, somber eyes. Dr. Martin usually travels with several false passports and with the utmost secrecy. At the moment he is in Genoa where he went to meet Commendatore Boccalaro, Mussolini's personal representative in charge of smuggling arms into foreign countries.

The preparations by the Rome-Berlin axis point to plans for a fight to a finish between fascist and non-fascist countries. A feeble or disrupted democracy will obviously strengthen the fascist powers in any coming struggle with anti-fascist powers. Germany and Italy, faced on their own borders with a democratic France allied with the Soviet Union in a military defense pact, would face a powerful enemy in the event of war. But if France were torn by a bloody civil war, she would be virtually unable even to defend her borders. Consequently, it is essential for Germany and Italy to weaken and if possible destroy France's democracy.

France and Germany have been traditional enemies in their struggle for land containing raw materials needed by their industries to compete in the world markets. But the growth of the French labor movement and the power of the Popular Front which threatened the control and the profits of French industrialists and financiers, made them find more in common with fascist and Nazi industrialists than with French workers who menaced their economic and political control. The result was that leading French industrialists were willing to cooperate with Nazi and fascist agents to destroy the Popular Front and establish fascism in France. About half of the 200,000,000 francs, which it is estimated the fortresses and arms cost, was contributed by French industrialists. The other half came from the German and Italian Governments.

Germany and Italy sent swarms of secret agents into France to supervise the building of the underground military machine and to carry on intensive espionage with the assistance of the French Army and Government officials who were members of the Hooded Ones. The espionage service was organized by Baron de Potters, an old international spy who travels with two or more passports under the names of Farmer and Meihert. De Potters gets his funds from the Nazis' strongly guarded "Bureau III B," established in Berne, Switzerland at 21 Gewerbestrasse. "Bureau III B" is the official name of this branch of the Gestapo. At the head of it is Boris Toedli whose activities include not only espionage but underground diplomatic intrigue and propaganda. He works directly under Drs. Rosenberg and Goebbels. Toedli supplies not only the Baron but other espionage directors with money and there is plenty of it at his disposal for quick emergency uses. The money is deposited in the Societe des Banques Suisses, account No. 60941.

The head of the Italian espionage system directing the work in France and cooperating closely with the Nazis is Commendatore Boccalaro, head of the Italian Government's Arsenal in Genoa. One of his specialties is the smuggling of arms into foreign countries.

Boccalaro's history shows that the not so fine Italian hand is interfering in the internal affairs of foreign governments. As far back as 1928, he secretly supplied carloads of arms from the Genoa Arsenal to Hungary, and in 1936 he supplied Yugoslavian terrorists with war materials in efforts to get those countries under Mussolini's sphere of influence. Boccalaro, too, seems to have had reasons to suppress information in at least one case where the death penalty was inflicted upon a member of the Cagoulards.

Among the Hooded Ones who have been found with bullets or knives in them was an arms runner named Adolphe-Augustin Juif, who tried to charge the secret organization a little more than he should for smuggling guns and munitions into France. When the organization threatened him, he advised it not to resort to threats because he knew a little too much.

On February 8, 1937, his bullet-riddled body was found in San Remo, Italy. When Juif's wife, not hearing from him, sought information about his whereabouts, she wrote to Boccalaro, since she knew he was working with the Genoa director. The Italian papers had announced the finding of his body; nevertheless, on March 3, Boccalaro wrote to the murdered man's widow:

"Your husband, my dear friend, is carrying on a special and delicate mission (perhaps in Spain or Germany) and has special reasons of a delicate nature not to inform even his own family where he is at the present moment."

Among the men whom Juif met before he was murdered was Eugene Deloncle, director of the Maritime and River Transport Mortgage Company and one of the most important industrialists in France. Deloncle, a high official in the Cagoulards, used the name of "Grosset" in his conspiratorial activities. The other man whom the murdered Juif met is General Edouard Arthur Du-seigneur, former Air Force chief and Military Adviser to the French Air Ministry. The General is one of the military heads of the Cagoulards and frequently met with Baron de Potters.