Mathilde Carré
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Mathilde Carré (1910-1970) was a French Resistance agent during World War II who turned a double agent.
Mathilde Carré was born in France. In the 1930s she attended Sorbonne University and became a teacher. After her marriage, she moved to Algeria with her husband.
Carré's husband was killed in the early stages of the World War II. She returned to France, became a nurse and witnessed the fall of France. In 1940 she met a Polish Air Force Captain named Roman Czerniawski cryptonymed 'Walenty' to the Poles and 'Armand' or 'Victor' to the French. Carré, who had contacts with the Vichy 2nd Bureau joined the headquarters section of his Franco-Polish Interallié espionage network based in Paris under the cryptonym 'Victoire' (as all the headquarters section staff had 'V' initial names, in a network which named its agents and their sectors or areas of coverage for Christian names grouped by the letters of the alphabet) although nicknamed La Chatte, the Cat for her feline predatory and stealthy propensities.
On November 17, 1941, the Abwehr's Hugo Bleicher arrested Carré and many other members of Interallié; they had been betrayed by a double agent. She was interrogated by him, agreed to become a double agent herself and revealed all of the members of the network known to her. She began to work for Germans continuing to use the code name Victoire. She may also have become Bleicher's mistress.
Pierre de Vomécourt, an agent of SOE and a Resistance contact began to suspect her. When he confronted Carré, who had become his mistress, she confessed and together they planned to outwit the Abwehr.
She claimed she convinced Bleicher, and through him, his superiors, to send her to London to infiltrate the Special Operations Executive. In February 1942 she was exfiltrated to London with de Vomécourt. MI 5 interrogated her about Abwehr techniques and played back her radio link for a period until her usefulness was exhausted, whereupon she was arrested and taken first to Holloway prison and then a female detention centre near Aylesbury housing other Section 18, DORA detainees, for the rest of the war, where she also acted as an informant against them as well, much to MI 5's amusement and disgust.
After the war Carré was deported to France. Despite of the fact that a wartime commander of hers Paul Archard defended her, she was sentenced to death. After a couple of months the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
Mathilde Carré was released September 1954. She published an account of her life in "J'ai été la Chatte(I was the she-cat)" but soon fell out of public view. She died in 1970.