Agir

Agir

The Réseau AGIR (English: ACT Network) was a World War II espionage group founded by French wartime resister Michel Hollard that provided human intelligence on V-1 flying bomb facilities.

Intelligence was collected every 3 weeks directly from volunteer informants who gathered information in their normal jobs (e.g., through the position as station masters, barkeepers, hotel managers, dock workers. To obtain travel permits, a few full-time AGIR agents were registered salesmen of Hollard's employer. Hollard paid the AGIR expenses and smuggled information to the British military attaché in Bern, Switzerland, from Occupied France making ninety-eight trips from 1941 through February 1944 when he was betrayed and arrested.

One member of the network, Olivier Giran, was taken and executed in 1943. On 5 February 1944, Michel Hollard and 4 other AGIR agents (including Henri Dujarier) were arrested during a cafe meeting on the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. Hollard received the "bath treatment" (torture) at the hands of the Milice and was imprisoned until the end of the war. Jules Mailly died at a Mauthausen camp 4 months after his arrest, and Joseph Legendre led AGIR after he and Robert Rubenach were released.