As far back as September, 1936, the _Surete Nationale_ knew that some leading French industrialists with the cooperation of the German and Italian Governments were building a military fascist organization within France. Nevertheless it quietly permitted fortresses to be built and stocked with munitions. The General Staff of the French Army, from reports of Intelligence men in Germany and Italy, knew that those countries were smuggling arms into France, but they permitted it to go on. The General Staff knew that some eight hundred concrete fortresses were being built under the supervision of M. Anceaux, a building contractor of Dieppe, and that skilled members of the Secret Committee for Revolutionary Action had been recruited for the building and sworn to secrecy under penalty of death. They knew that these fortresses were equipped with sending and receiving radios, knew that some were within the shadow of military centers, knew that the Cagoulards had a far-flung espionage system. But the French General Staff made no effort to stop it. The Popular Front Government was in power at the time, and heads of the Supreme War Council apparently preferred a fascist France to a democratic one. In fact, officers and reserve officers of the French Army cooperated with secret agents of their traditional enemy, Germany, to build up this formidable secret army. The investigating authorities, stunned by their discoveries and the high officials and individuals to whom their investigations led, either did not dare go further with it, or, if they did, suppressed the information. Some of it, however, came out. At the top of the Cagoulards is a Supreme War Council or General Staff whose members have not been disclosed. Working with them are several other organizations, all with innocent names, as for example the "Society of Studies for French Regeneration." The Cagoulards' activities are divided into broad general lines, each directed by an individual in complete command and embracing: Buying war materials within France and smuggling war materials into the country from Germany, Italy and Insurgent Spain, along with the simultaneous weaving of an espionage network under Nazi and fascist direction and leadership. Building concrete fortresses at strategic centers and storing smuggled arms in them. Military training of secretly organized troops. Getting the money to carry on these extensive activities. Extreme care was, and still is, taken to conceal the identities of the ordinary members and especially the leaders. For instance, one of the leaders known to his subordinates as "Fontaine" is in reality Georges Cachier, director of a large company in Paris and chief of the Cagoulards' "Third Bureau," which is in charge of military movements. Cachier is an Officer of the French Legion of Honor and a reserve Lieutenant-Colonel in the French Army.