Mathilde Carré

Mathilde Carré (30 June 1908 in Le Creusot, France – 30 May 2007),[1] née Mathilde Lucie Bélard and known as "La Chatte" ("The Cat"), was a French Resistance agent during World War II who betrayed the Franco-Polish resistance organization, Interallie, and, as a double agent, was responsible for the arrest of dozens of Interallié operatives by the German occupiers of France.

French Resistance leader Pierre de Vomécourt persuaded her to leave France with him and become an agent for the British.

After her marriage, she moved to Algeria with her husband, Maurice Carré, who was later killed in World War II, during the Italian campaign.

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 network, a Franco/Polish 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.

[3] In October 1941, the Interallié had come to the attention of the Germans and Abwehr's Sergeant Hugo Bleicher was tasked with infiltrating the network.

What neither SOE headquarters nor Vomécourt knew was that Interallié was "burned" and that Carré was working for the German intelligence agency, the Abwehr.

Two days later SOE responded and Carré told him a British agent would give him the money in Vichy.

At the trial, which started on 3 January 1949, the prosecution read from her diary: "What I wanted most was a good meal, a man, and, once more, Mozart's Requiem.