Jeannie Rousseau, World War II Spy and a Leader of the French Resistance
When the Nazis occupied France in 1940, 21-year-old Jeannie Rousseau had just graduated at the top of her class from Paris’s most elite university. An expert at concealing her brilliance beneath a charmingly innocent exterior, Rousseau took advantage of the fact that most men, while appreciating her effervescent charm and pert good looks, failed to take her seriously.
Such was the case in 1943, when she became acquainted with a group of young German military officers in Paris while working as an interpreter for a syndicate of French industrialists. The officers began inviting the pretty young Parisienne, who spoke flawless German, to evening parties, where they talked indiscreetly about their work, including the testing of secret weapons on Germany’s Baltic coast. Playing the role of a wide-eyed coquette, Rousseau insisted that their stories of rockets and unpiloted jet aircraft couldn’t possibly be true. They showed her drawings, reports, and charts that proved otherwise.
After each evening, Rousseau, who was in fact a spy for the Alliance intelligence network, went to a safe house in Paris and wrote down, word for word, what she had learned. Within a few weeks, the voluminous amount of information she had acquired about the German terror weapons — the V1 and V2 — was dispatched to London. One of the greatest Allied intelligence coups of the war, her material enabled the British to delay the development of those weapons and blunt their impact once they were finally launched.
