Spymistress
Spymistress
The True Story of the Greatest
Female Secret Agent of World War II
WILLIAM STEVENSON
Copyright © 2007, 2011 by William Stevenson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-231-0
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Terms and Abbreviations
1 Max's Daughter
2 Mutual Friends vs. Guilty Men
3 Kill Hitler?
4 Return to Berlin
5 Crown or Commoner: Where Lies the Treachery?
6 “England Cut Off”
7 Connections
8 Spattering Brains with a Knobkerrie
9 Poland Breaks the First Enigma
10 Betrayals All Around
11 Vera's First Mission in an Open War
12 KBO: Keep Buggering On
13 Your Affectionate Opposition: The Gestapo
14 The Phony War Ends
15 “A Gigantic Guerrilla”
16 The Lips of a Strange Woman
17 Sabotage Etcetera Etcetera
18 A Year Alone
19 A Civil War Ends, a Nightmare Begins
20 “Specially Employed and Not Paid from Army Funds”
21 “She Could Do Anything with Dynamite Except Eat It”
22 The Black Chamber
23 “She Has to Believe in What She Is Doing or Go Mad”
24 The Flying Visit
25 Shattering Laval's “Shield of France”
26 “We Are in the Presence of a Crime Without a Name”
27 “Thin Red Line”
28 Fully Occupied
29 Bluff and Counterbluff
30 The White Rabbit Hops into the “Governor's” Den
31 An Unplanned and Gigantic Spyglass
32 Rolande
33 Tangled Webs
34 Deadly Mind and Wireless Games
35 “The Life That I Have Is Yours”
36 “My Uncle Is Lord Vansittart”
37 “But If the Cause Be Not Good…”
38 “If These Do Not Die Well, It Will Be a Black Matter”
39 A Terrible Irony
40 Unsolved Mysteries
41 The American Connection
Notes
Index
Preface
Vera Atkins was the brilliant, highly effective leader of a select group who fought in secrecy against the Nazis in occupied Europe after the fall of France in 1940. These brave young men and women had volunteered for Special Operations Executive (SOE), improvised at this time of greatest peril by Winston Churchill, the last hope of a country whose leaders he had tried for years to awaken to the growing danger of Nazi Germany. Long out of office, he suddenly—“almost too late,” he remarked—became prime minister on May 10, 1940, at which point he had to confront those in Whitehall who sought to appease Hitler and make a separate peace. Even loyal staff officers in the War Office of Churchill's government resented the secrecy surrounding SOE and feared that its agents’ violent actions against the enemy were incompatible with democratic traditions, “offending international law and the concept of habeas corpus.” To these niceties, the utterly pragmatic Churchill responded by instructing the British chiefs of staff “to develop a reign of terror to make the lives of German occupiers an eternal torment.” That message also gave Vera Atkins's SOE a license to conduct her campaign in occupied France as her extraordinary mind and steely resolve dictated.
Churchill's hope after he became prime minister was that, sooner or later, America would join England in opposing the formidable Nazi war machine, for despite his indomitable public figure and ringing statements, he was far from sure England could win alone. His relations with President Roosevelt were good, but as the 1940 election neared, Roosevelt warned his friend that antiwar sentiment in the States was high, even overwhelming, which he could not ignore. In that election year Roosevelt—and the American people—were also far from convinced England would win the war. To get a better picture, FDR sent his trusted confidant William J. Donovan, the future head of OSS, to London to assess the situation. There Donovan was put in contact with Vera Atkins. She so impressed him that he reported back to the president his strong impression of her, and Britain's, courage and his conviction that the tide would be turned. Thus it is fair to say that, in addition to her accomplishments as Britain's Spymistress, she was also a key factor in convincing the Roosevelt administration of the Allies’ ultimate success.
SOE was Churchill's desperate attempt to demonstrate that there was life in the old lion yet and, indeed, to make life “an eternal torment” for the Nazis, who after their blitzkrieg attacks across continental Europe were preparing to carry out Hitler's Directive 16 and invade England. SOE's mandate from the start was to sabotage, burn, harass, and kill the enemy, “to set the continent ablaze.” Its numbers were strikingly few. Of 480 agents in the French Section, 130 were tortured, and many were executed in shocking circumstances. Despite their heavy losses, these men and women, over the four long years of German occupation, wreaked havoc on the Nazis throughout the country. With the growing help of the French Resistance, they cut phone lines to force the Germans to communicate by wireless (so Bletchley could intercept), blew up bridges and tunnels, and derailed military trains. As this book shows, at the time of the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944, they were so effective in harassing the German divisions rushing from the south of France and the Eastern Front to reinforce Normandy that they slowed down their arrival long enough, perhaps, to have turned the tide of the war.
In prewar Europe, Vera had already been working against this ruthless enemy. She was aided in this clandestine effort by William Stephenson (Intrepid), a Canadian businessman who, together with some other imported North Americans, had early sensed the dangers inherent in Hitler's rise to power, and formed in New York the British Security Coordination (BSC) office. Meeting Vera first in Bucharest and later in London, Stephenson was so impressed by her mind, her mastery of several languages, her dedication, and her fierce anti-Nazi stance that he sent her on fact-finding missions to several European countries, secretly reporting her findings to a few trusted souls in Britain. Together they supplied Churchill, then in his political wilderness, with facts about the growing Nazi threat and the sorry neglect of UK defenses. These facts were ignored by most members of Parliament before the outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939, when the first German blitz quickly subjugated Poland. A fierce Polish anti-Nazi resistance arose from the ashes to inspire similar resistance movements in other German-occupied countries. Vera immediately saw that France, just across the English Channel, would soon be fertile ground for her agents.
Despite her very British name and demeanor, Vera was actually Romanian Jewish, born Vera Maria Ro
senberg in Bucharest. In England, this put her at constant risk from the Alien Act of 1793 and the Official Secrets Act, which criminalizes the publication—even the republication—of certain kinds of information deemed to be a security risk. She took the name Vera Atkins, derived from her mother's maiden name, Etkin, to avoid detention as an enemy alien. Into her old age, she would dance and make merry with SOE survivors who knew her only as Miss Atkins, who honored her for superior qualities of intellect and loyalty, and who never talked of their wartime work until SOE came under attack by postwar critics.
Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, who had worked alongside Vera, was thunderstruck when in October 1958 a book entitled Double Webs was published. Its author, Jean Overton Fuller, claimed that SOE's air movements officer in France, Henri Dericourt, had actually been a double agent and that SOE agents were deliberately sacrificed “to draw the Gestapo away from still more secret operations.” On November 13, 1958, Dame Irene Ward, a member of Parliament, proposed to table a motion calling for an Official Secrecy Act Inquiry into these and other allegations of SOE incompetence. She was persuaded not to proceed by then prime minister Harold Macmillan, who said an official history would be commissioned. This appeared eight years later, in 1966, written by M. R. D. Foot, with details approved by the government and published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
Buckmaster released a public statement that said in part: “The events which took place more than twenty years ago have left their mark on many people who would be glad to have left the dead to sleep in peace (allowing the results of their bravery to speak for themselves). …We have been called amateurs. It is true that SOE was an ad hoc organization for which no blueprints existed before the war…. The most appalling accusation made against us is that we DELIBERATELY sent out agents into the hands of the Gestapo” to be tortured into disclosing misleading information. “I flatly deny such monstrous and intolerable accusations…. The French Resistance, in the words of General Eisenhower, ‘shortened the war by many months.’ The world owes to the men and women of the French Section [of SOE] a debt which can never be fully discharged.”
All her life, Vera had fought running battles with bureaucrats and military chiefs who disapproved of SOE “skullduggery.” She had scuffled continuously with the SIS, whose European networks had been compromised by the German kidnapping of SIS agents. Some SIS mandarins were actually dedicated to the destruction of SOE. After the war Vera held her tongue, even more conscious of her vulnerability in the Cold War hunt for Soviet-run agents with Jewish and foreign backgrounds.
During her lifetime Vera was publicly silent. She had bitter memories of the SIS effort from 1940 through 1945 to shut down SOE while her agents fought valiantly abroad. Immediately after World War II, SOE's domestic enemies finally succeeded in shutting it down. Then, early in 1946 a mysterious fire gutted the top floor of SOE's Baker Street headquarters, destroying most of its records. According to Angus Fyffe, a veteran of SOE and its record keeper, those records contained political time bombs waiting to explode. Vera and her colleagues had fought doggedly during the war to maintain their independence from the War Office and official bureaucracy. Once the war was over, Vera withdrew to her home in Winchelsea where she lived quietly—and silently—for the next half century.
Vera lived long enough to see Churchill's foresight vindicated yet again. It justified her silence. Why give away secrets to satisfy short-term public curiosity, secrets about underground operations and improvised explosives and weapons that a new enemy could adopt? She still had reservations about the potential power of secrecy laws, but she never believed, as many did when the Cold War ended, that we had reached the end of history. Churchill's book The River War, published in 1899—and her own needless difficulties in fighting domestic enemies—convinced her that secrecy laws could be held in reserve to deal with exceptional danger. She knew that parliamentary procedures could go hand in hand with secrecy, as her hitherto untold story here reveals.
Introduction
The police sergeant handed me a scrap of paper. “Here's the address. Some secret new ministry. Ask for Atkins. An air-raid warden. Or something.” He shifted uneasily. “Okay, on your bike, double-quick!”
The bombing of London was at its peak in the summer of 1940. I bicycled messages between East Ham police station and emergency posts if phone lines were cut. My Boy Scout uniform opened a way through cordoned streets where rescue workers dug for survivors. Hitler's war machine had destroyed France and was poised to cross the English Channel. I had seen from the sergeant's procommunist Daily Worker that the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Key Pittman, said Great Britain faced certain defeat and “must capitulate.” The sergeant never read the popular papers, insisting, “They're run by pro-Nazi press barons.”
The address was in London's West End. Piccadilly, Marble Arch, and Buckingham Palace had been hit in the night, as well as the Park Lane mansion of the Marquess of Londonderry, a former air minister who wanted an alliance with the Nazis. Of this, I knew little. I was a last-resort means of communication: a small, bare-headed, bare-kneed boy, bicycling past overturned electric trams and their drooping power cables still spitting blue sparks between mangled metal tracks. Drivers of red double-deck buses bravely tried to keep to their peacetime schedules, and some nosedived into pits that yawned suddenly when time bombs exploded. In one crater, the bus to Ladbroke Grove creaked and groaned like a dying dinosaur.
The ministry had taken over a venerable old building, sandbagged against bomb blasts, windows crisscrossed with strips of paper to limit the shattering of glass. The uniformed porter made me wait in the gallery of shadowed portraits, rows of richly cloaked gentry, rubicund faces plump with self-satisfaction. I imagined the police sergeant gloating, Those smiles'll be wiped off their faces by the bashing we're getting. The toffs had backed the wrong horse in Hitler, hoping his Nazis would build a barrier against Bolsheviks and Soviets. That's what most East Enders said, anyway.
“I'm Atkins.” The girlish voice startled me. I had not expected Atkins to be a pretty young woman. She took me to a man wearing a pinstriped suit. He had the accents of a toff. “You're a King's Scout?”
“Yes.”
“Then you can be trusted?”
“Yes.”
“Your father's safe. He'll be out of France soon. Tell your mum. But if she or you tell anyone else, he'll be dead.”
France? I thought my father was in America. Questions froze on my lips. The man had given me the obligatory lesson on the high price of breaking secrecy, and had turned to larger matters. The young woman steered me through dark corridors, up and down broad and barren stone steps, back to the street. She was trim-waisted and light-footed. She watched me swing a leg over my bicycle saddle and shift the gas mask at my back. I braced one foot against the curbstone and looked up. “Miss Atkins?”
She nodded. Smoky eyes pierced into me. She must be reading my mind, with its dirty little schoolboy secrets, its cowardice, its disrespect for silly rules. I was terrified.
Then she unbuttoned her tunic, as if escaping officialdom's stuffy rules. She had long legs that vanished high up into a short skirt. The stockings were silk, and the skirt was far from regulation length. I breathed easier. She was a rebel like me. She bent over the handlebars of my bike, and I became aware of her breasts pressing against a lavender silk shirt that hadn't been purchased with ration coupons.
“Where's your helmet?” she asked.
“My head's too small. And a Scout hat blows off.”
She laughed, a rich chuckle, not the tut-tut of disapproving adults. She said something about my brothers and sister. Our mother had decreed that none of us were to be evacuated to the countryside, making it sound like Outer Mongolia: “Father won't know where to look for us when he comes back.” Mother was French. It dawned on me that this might be why he was in France and not in Boston. That was where, long ago, he found Christian Science. Ever since then, Mother had read aloud at breakf
ast each day's lesson from Mary Baker Eddy and Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures. The ritual validated Father's absences abroad. I had the feeling that Miss Atkins knew about this. We watched each other in the failing light. Then the news sank in: Father was coming home!
How did the man upstairs know? Anticipating the question, she shook her head, as if to say, Don't ask, and offered a cigarette. It was nice to be treated like an adult, but I knew I would only choke on it. “No thanks, Miss!”
She lit her own. The flare of a match seemed like another act of defiance: German bomber pilots were reputed to have superhuman vision, and the wail of air-raid sirens had started up again. I saw, close up, the delicate bone structure of Greta Garbo's face in a movie about Emile Zola, a face promising nothing and offering all. She bent closer, and I sensed her warm body and smelled her bare skin. She said, “You're in the front lines, aren't you, running messages? Dangerous, isn't it, on a bike?”
“Only way to get through all the muck, Miss. And quickest.”
“Reliable, too.” She was turning things over in her mind. “You don't have wireless at your police stations?”
“Not where I live.”
She smiled. A sad sort of smile. Her hand lightly stroked my cheek. It was a surprisingly strong hand. She said something that ended with “all is love.” She sounded like Mary Baker Eddy.
“Tell your mother. She'll understand.” Miss Atkins tucked a cardboard token into my shirt pocket. “If things get rough, you can contact me. Some public phone boxes sometimes work.”
I repeated the words to my mother. She said, “That confirms your father is safe,” as if Mary Baker Eddy and Miss Atkins were clairvoyants delivering a coded message.
I asked the police sergeant the next day about the mysterious building. “Who's in charge?”
He countered, “What were you told?”
I said I was sworn to secrecy.
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