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Concept
Mathilde Carré
Summary
Mathilde Carré (30 June 1908 – 30 May 2007), née Mathilde Lucie Bélard and known as "La Chatte", was a French Resistance agent during World War II who betrayed and turned double agent.
Carré was born in Le Creusot, Saône-et-Loire. In the 1930s she attended Sorbonne University and became a teacher. After her marriage, she moved to Algeria with her husband, Maurice Carré, who was later killed in World War II, during the Italian campaign.
She returned to France, worked as a nurse and witnessed her country fall to the Germans. In 1940, she met Polish Air Force Captain Roman Czerniawski, whose cryptonym was "Walenty" to the Poles and "Armand" or "Victor" to the French. Carré, who had contacts with the Vichy Second Bureau, joined the headquarters section of his Franco-Polish Interallié espionage network, based in Paris under the cryptonym "Victoire" (as all of the headquarters section staff had "V" initial names in a network that named its agents and their sectors or areas of coverage for given names grouped by the letters of the alphabet), but she was nicknamed La Chatte, ("The She-cat") for her feline predatory and stealthy propensities.
On 17 November 1941, the Abwehr's Hugo Bleicher arrested Czerniawski, Carré and many other members of Interallié. They had been uncovered when an informant in Normandy had been exposed to the Gestapo. She was interrogated by him, threatened with death, offered a financial reward and agreed to become a double agent herself and to reveal all of the members of the network known to her. She began to work for Germans continuing to use the codename Victoire and may also have become Bleicher's mistress.
According to Pierre de Vomécourt, an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), he and a Resistance contact began to suspect her. When he confronted Carré, who had become his mistress, she confessed, and they together planned to outwit the Abwehr.
She claimed she convinced Bleicher and, through him, his superiors, to send her to London to infiltrate the SOE.
Official source
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