Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  When she next saw the ambassador, he said that Stalin had no real military power.

  “Is that why Stalin is rearming Germany?” asked Vera.

  Stephenson recalled later that Vera began to jerk the ambassador out of his smug self-satisfaction. He called Vera his English June rose. She let him think her mother came from Sussex innkeepers. It was true that her mother had left Max, who was in very poor health, to live in Sussex. Schulenburg, assuming she was essentially English, argued that good order was needed in England, as in Germany, to curb Stalin. Bolsheviks wanted order without moderation; Bismarck had wanted an empire to impose order with moderation.

  “Was Bismarck's imperial order any different from Stalin's ambitions?”

  “Yes!” the ambassador replied. “Bismarck wished to impose a benign pan-German order upon the lesser breeds of Europe.”

  Impose order? Lesser breeds? The words set off alarm bells. Vera wondered if this orderly racism truly impressed this ambassador, who said he disagreed with Nazi racism. He was her window into Berlin today, just as Bucharest was his window into Moscow. Did he know this? Was he feeding her information, expecting that it would get back to others in England?

  Two years before Count von der Schulenburg was transferred to Moscow, she spoke of her misgivings to Gardyne de Chastelain, who was then considering how Romanian oil supplies to Germany might be sabotaged if war broke out again. He watched rivals jockeying for control over oilfields run by his British company, Phoenix Oil. It was early 1932. Ten years later, Gardyne and his wife Marion would be working for Stephenson's World War II intelligence network. Gardyne would parachute back into Romania, while Marion served in Stephenson's New York headquarters.

  Stephenson spoke to Vera of German funding of Romanian fascists to ensure future war supplies of oil. Germany had once been the biggest industrial power in Europe, because it had big reserves of coal to fuel steam engines. A new, illegal German arsenal of modern weapons needed oil. He had no doubt that “Romanian oil will reignite world war.”

  He spoke of Steiny, or Charles Proteus Steinmetz, a German-Jewish engineer who had helped with Bill Stephenson's early inventions. Steiny had met Max Rosenberg while doing research at the Romanian oil institute, which was secretly funded from Berlin. Steiny had heard that Max was “put away” in an isolated medical institution. Vera was not prepared to discuss her father. Anything she said might get back to Max's enemies, anti-Zionists who would kill him.

  Mary Stephenson, Bill's dainty wife, accompanied him on his Bucharest visits. She had a disconcerting way of reading the innermost thoughts of others, and knew a Zionist representative, Hélène Allatini, whom she introduced to Vera as a visitor from Paris. Hélène said the Nazis were making Jews flee through Romanian ports to join a secret army fighting the British who held the League of Nations mandate in Palestine. This gave a new dimension to the presence of such a high-ranking German ambassador to Bucharest. Hélène had come here to warn Max. But Vera had left Max on his deathbed. There was nothing that could be done to keep him alive, and those who shared his love for the Zionist cause were staying away to prevent the local fascists from guessing at Max's connections. He was now in a deep coma, with a severe respiratory infection, and had insisted that all visitors be kept away.

  Vera understood her father too well. He was a hard man underneath all his bonhomie: hard because there was no other way of survival. He advised her not to let her love for him distract her. She too must have privacy. Trysts with Schulenburg in central Bucharest would get her labeled a whore. Pregnant courtesans were still victims of “honor killings” to save the reputations of rich lovers. Vera's Jewish background made her even more vulnerable. Vera later recalled: “Couples motored into the countryside—it was permitted to fuck if it didn't frighten the horses.” Only the upper class had cars. Schulenburg drove an embassy car without a chauffeur, and told his staff he wished to avoid attention while inspecting the borders. He picked up Vera at places specified by penciled numbers to indicate time, date, and location. The codes were scribbled on scraps of paper hidden at the jockey club, where they were both members. The ambassador took Vera on long trips through narrow winding lanes while she continued to ask him about Nazi influence. He blamed rabble-rousers appealing to the despair of Germany's unemployed soldiers: they should enlist help from General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. He had been at school with the ambassador, and during World War I he ran a guerrilla war in German East Africa. He was a hero both in Germany and in Britain, where he would win genuine sympathy for German veterans trying to correct awful conditions: in Germany 20 percent of babies were born dead and 40 percent died within a month because requests for basic foods and medicines were denied by the victors. Lettow-Vorbeck was admired by Winston Churchill, who had firsthand experience of guerrilla warfare in Africa and knew Lettow-Vorbeck had actually won his war at the moment Germany surrendered in Europe. Now Hitler promised such veterans “a people's war.” Schulenburg quoted a famous memo by Churchill when he became secretary of state for war in 1919: “The wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings.”

  Vera discussed all this with Stephenson, who said Churchill, though holding no government office, wanted Lettow-Vorbeck to become ambassador in London to help avert another war. Stephenson wrote down a private London address to which Vera could post information. He said mail was a safe means of communication. The British legation sent routine reports by diplomatic bag chained to a King's Messenger. Sensitive information went by telegram to CX, for the Secret Intelligence Service chief, or to CXG for lesser SIS officers: the traffic was intercepted by the Berlin Cipher Office. Open code in chatty letters was the best way to convey sensitive information. Schulenburg could write like this if Vera moved to London, where Stephenson wanted her to work in his St. James's office.

  Bill Stephenson, born in 1896, was twelve years older than Vera. He and Mary had no children, and they treated her like a daughter. They judged her to be trustworthy: she knew that the fate of Jews depended upon preserving all humanity from the new dictatorships. In Berlin, diplomats, who met mostly at cocktail parties, seldom collected useful information. Schulenburg was an exceptional source. Vera should delay any permanent move to London. Bill, as Vera now called him, passed along a bit of gossip: “Britain's royal family sees Stalin as the devil, and thinks Hitler is the man to oppose him.”

  Vera repeated this the next time she was in the embassy car, and Schulenburg fell into a troubled silence. She sat motionless, a trick she never lost, while he appeared to mull over the story. Then he laughed. So many ironies! He had been troubled because he was being recalled to Berlin for a briefing on talks he might have to conduct with Stalin's men in Moscow.

  It was harvest time. There was an unusual poignancy in driving along the rough dirt roads between fields of ripening grain, past wooden cottages where fruit and vegetables hung from overhanging roofs, and Gypsies sold sparrows and Turkish carpets. The winter of 1932–33 approached. Vera remembered her father's private moments with her as a child at this season, and said impulsively that she used to think adults were mostly too old to govern wisely. The devilish energies of grown men should be poured into totally exhausting activities that left them with no time to fight wars.

  He stopped the car to savor the smell of fallen wet leaves in the sweet autumnal rain, and said sadly that he'd also had a boyish dream of stopping grown-ups from meddling with people's lives. He longed to return to the child he had been.

  “You'll always remain a child at heart,” she told him, laughing.

  “It will be the death of me,” he said.

  After a week in Berlin, he came back looking as if he already felt the hangman's noose around his neck. He had expected to discuss his Moscow assignment. First, though, he was questioned about a Jewess named Rosenberg by agents from an almost forgotten department, Referat Deutschland, originally set up to keep politicians informed about foreign policy. It was run by a junior officer, who initially refused a Nazi dem
and that he spy on colleagues. Thugs took the young man away, and he came back cured of any old-fashioned ideas about loyalty to friends. The Nazi enforcers occupied new quarters run by Joachim von Ribbentrop, a pretentious wine merchant who had added the honorific “von” to his name. He was not ready to challenge head-on the old aristocrats at the foreign office, but he plotted to become Hitler's foreign affairs adviser. He would do this by taking credit for the greatest of diplomatic coups, a Nazi-Soviet peace pact, to be engineered by Schulenburg.

  Vera was puzzled by the ambassador's apparent unhappiness. Wasn't peace with Russia what Schulenburg wanted? At which point, Schulenburg dropped a bombshell: Stalin, he said, was making weapons for Germany forbidden under the Treaty of Versailles. The Soviet Union's own military was far from ready for any large-scale war, but it was providing Germany with secret facilities: a tank school, a flying school, laboratories for chemical warfare, a dive-bomber factory, all to build a Nazi bastion against America and Britain. This was the kind of peace that foreshadowed war.

  Vera said there were men in London who would help Schulenburg and other true German patriots thwart this. The count knew she was right: he had his own London sources, including the German ambassador, Otto von Bismarck, the great man's grandson. The younger Bismarck had secretly spoken with Churchill about saving the post-1919 democratic parliament of the Weimar Republic. But Hitler denounced it as a Jewish republic, and Churchill no longer felt there was any worthwhile anti-Nazi opposition. Bismarck pleaded that Hitler was still only the leader of a mob. Churchill wearily responded with lines by Rudyard Kipling: “This is the sorrowful story / Told when the twilight fails / And the monkeys walk together / Holding their neighbours’ tails.”

  Schulenburg recalled for Vera the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, commenting presciently at the end of the 1919 Versailles peace talks: “I seem to hear a child weeping.” Twenty years later, in 1939, the child would be old enough to fight in another war.

  Vera asked, Why could good Germans not act on their own?

  The count said Berliners were asking, “Why does Britain take so long to help us?” German industrialists and bankers were scared of the Red working classes and financed Hitler's mobs to attack Willi Münzenberg, the Red Millionaire of Berlin, the flack for International Communism. Hadn't Vera told him the same fear of the Red Menace in Britain influenced royalty? Churchill had been booed in Parliament when he quoted from the Hebrew Bible: “Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand.”

  True Berliners, said the ambassador, admired English nobility, and wore monocles and white ties and tails while toasting the Kaiser in exile. The toast went like this: “To His Majesty—hurrah! Shush! Hurrah! No, softly—hurrah!” Caution muffled their voices after Edward, Prince of Wales and future king-emperor, said the Versailles peace treaty rearranged frontiers so that German settlements fell under the rule of “barbaric Slavs” and a Russian tyranny stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific.

  The ambassador encouraged Vera to move to England. She was the one person he could trust on the other side of the widening Anglo-German rift. Perhaps she could later visit Berlin, now that it had revived as an international center? He gave her the names and addresses of friends he trusted. Some were Russian nobles exiled from Moscow and working in obscure corners of Berlin's city government. She should talk with one of Schulenburg's colleagues who had looked into Hitler's postwar records. As a twenty-nine-year-old corporal in an army hospital, Hitler had screamed that the report of Germany's surrender was “the vicious gossip of sexually depraved Jewish youths in a clap hospital.” A military psychiatrist wrote in a confidential note that the cause of Hitler's blindness was hysteria, but to calm the corporal, he assured him that he was a superman and would see again. Hitler's sight returned. He took this as a sign that he was the great leader destined to fulfil the old Teutonic Knights’ dream of imposing order from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

  During one of their last motoring expeditions, Schulenburg said he wanted Vera's friends in London to understand why many like himself were loyal Germans. The victors in the last war had served their own interests. Britain's Balfour Declaration promised Jews a national home in Palestine to win Jewish backing in wartime, but with a proviso: “Nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Such trapdoors were everywhere. Hitler had shown a mad genius for identifying them. “Hitler,” said Schulenburg, “preaches a religion of pure Aryan hatred for subhumans. Germany needs outside help or this maniac will lead us all down into hell.”

  In January 1933, Hitler was nominated as Reich chancellor after much maneuvering. The German republic was handed over to the man determined to destroy it, although a foolish politician who turned opportunism into a fine art, Franz von Papen, had declared, “We have him [Hitler] framed in.” Hitler's mole in foreign affairs, Ribbentrop, prepared for Schulenburg's mission to Moscow by having him withdrawn from Bucharest.

  Through Schulenburg, Vera had learned to evaluate possible enemies, memorize details, and detach herself from personal feelings. Her voice never quivered when she later told Mary Stephenson: “The ambassador had hopes of saving whatever he could of the country he loved as a young man.”

  Embassy cars abroad were ordered to fly Nazi pennants. Before Vera's final frantic motoring trip with Schulenburg, she said she could never travel with such insignia.

  “When you ride with me, no swastikas fly!” replied Schulenburg.

  These seemed fated to be the last words he would ever speak to her, apart from endearments that she kept to herself. “At least, I thought they were the last words,” she said later. “How wrong I was!”

  Late in 1933, at the urging of Billy Stephenson, she moved to London. While inspecting German steel mills for his Pressed Steel Company, he was alarmed by what he saw as accelerating preparations for war, and he wanted Vera out of harm's way. She received a yellowing clip from London's New Statesman. In it, the novelist D. H. Lawrence had written from Germany in October 1924: “Influences come invisibly out of Germany's flow away from civilized Christian Europe, back to the savage polarity of Tartary…. At night you feel strange things stirring in the darkness.”

  2

  Mutual Friends vs. Guilty Men

  “Secret services fix reports to fit policy,” Max Rosenberg had warned Vera before he died. He knew the methods of intelligence agencies in every century, in every country. “Lies about you can fester in hidden files.”

  He had helped British agents with information on the fascist Iron Guard, but he distrusted the spy chiefs in Whitehall. There was no way to correct their files on a private citizen. He had advised Vera: “Become an English churchgoer and a Bright Young Thing.”

  In London, Romanian bankers expressed surprise at “the secretive disposal” of Max's ashes. Some said his wife had abandoned him to live in Sussex under her former name Hilda Atkins. Bill Stephenson advised Vera never to speak of her Rosenberg roots. In Romania, Iron Guard interrogators pretended to know everything about a prisoner, and to escape further torture, a prisoner might drop Vera's family name. The Iron Guard worked closely with the German compilers of dossiers on Jews.

  Stephenson was mentally prepared for the next round of warfare with Germany. Meanwhile, he fought a covert war against British policy makers anxious to appease Hitler. He called them Guilty Men. “This is their bastion,” he told Vera on a summer's day in 1934, walking her through that part of central London known as Whitehall.

  They strolled from Westminster Abbey to the Mall, from Buckingham Palace to Admiral Nelson's statue in Trafalgar Square, and past the duck ponds in St. James's Park. He showed her White's Club, the haunt of the intelligence community, “where Jews are never welcome.” He said, “As a woman, you may look at these clubs from outside. Only men are allowed in. Women are for pushing tea trolleys and tapping typewriters. This is the Establishment, the ruling class. King George V denied refuge
to his cousin, the Russian tsar, because it might bring the revolution here, and left the tsar to be executed by the Bolsheviks. Fear of Bolshies dominates the ruling class. The Prince of Wales sees a rearmed Germany as the barrier against Stalin, and Nazi racism akin to attitudes toward inferior breeds in British colonies.”

  Stephenson introduced her to “Our Mutual Friends.” Risking arrest under draconian secrecy laws, the Mutual Friends aired facts about the neglect of British defenses through Churchill, who was a political outcast but still made himself heard. Some of the Mutual Friends had known Vera in Bucharest.

  Max had invested what was left of his capital in “the City,” London's center of finance and global information. His money kept Vera's mother in comfort. None of the neighbors knew she was Jewish when Vera went to see her in Winchelsea. The coastal town's layout remained as in the days of the Norman conquerors. Memorials spoke of past centuries, when the Channel was crossed by waves of invaders from the Continent. The townsfolk, indifferent to events in Europe, said it would never happen again.

  But among Our Mutual Friends, Vera heard plenty of concern about Germany's one-party system. By 1934 Hitler had the power to open prison camps for the Gestapo to fill. In Hamburg, Red agents spoke on the phone with Hitler's Brownshirts to plan the next day's street fighting. Each side hoped to win power through the breakdown of civic order. Winchelsea was minutes by air from Hamburg on the North Sea, but remained blissfully unaware of these events. London newspapers cut most foreign news to a few lines in the back pages, and gave space to Japanese and British armed cooperation against Chinese trade unions and striking workers in Shanghai.

  In high society, Vera flattered young men with questions about themselves and smoothly turned aside their questions about her. She had been noted for her flaxen hair in childhood. Now it was black. “It stayed forever glossy black,” recalled the prominent London artist Elena Gaussen Marks, who later painted Vera's portrait. “Such a change is natural in some girls as they grow older. The transition from blonde to brunette was fortuitous as cover for her future work.”1