The Foreign Service Journal, March 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2014 25 After the war, one of these people came into our embassy in Brussels and said, “Here’s the passport that was given to me by Miss Harvey. I’ve always remembered her.” The Belgians had a very good underground network. As a matter of fact, our office sometimes looked like a recruiting office, because when the Belgian radio, which broadcast from London to Belgium, began to urge young people who wanted to go out to join either the Belgian Army in the Congo or to come to London, they’d say, “Make for the American consulate in Lyon.”They would come in. Sometimes these people certainly looked rather “suspi- cious,” and were the ones that we could not get out with passports. They had to be taken out “black”—i.e., by special guides. People were divided about the Vichy government. We couldn’t help but see both kinds in a way, but people made little waves. They didn’t dare talk too openly, you see, because they never knew when the Gestapo would arrive and scoop you up. We had Gestapo coming into the office constantly. We were very careful not to find out too closely who came into that office. We didn’t ask too many questions. We found it better not to know always. Some of them, we knew pretty well, were members of the Gestapo, which was quartered right across the street frommy hotel, in the hotel where my consul general was lodged. One had to be very careful with whom one spoke, because they might be on one side or the other and go and tell what you said. So before you got into politics of any kind, you had to know the person really well with whom you were speaking. The French are apt to chatter a bit too much. I was traveling on a train from Vichy back to Lyon once, and happened to sit next to one of the rather famous French generals, General de la Laurencie, and he started to talk to me, you see, because he was very anti-Petain. I was terrified with what he was talking about. … I want to back up a bit and tell you a little bit more about the work I’d been doing regularly for our attaché in Bern, Gen. Legge. I went personally to Switzerland every once in a while, carrying documents to him and reports which we had from the occupied zone and from other places and, of course, from Belgium and so forth. Once, for instance, I arrived and we met in a field outside of Constance Ray Harvey, after receiving the Medal of Freedom in 1947 for meritorious service with the French Underground during World War II. At left is General Barnwell R. Legge, the U.S. military attaché in Switzerland with whom she worked. From Her Excellency by Ann Miller Morin (Twayne, 1995).