Vera, now in her midtwenties, was drawn by Mary Stephenson into West End society. Debutantes partied wildly while waiting to be presented at court, oblivious to the burning in Germany of books written by Jews and non-Nazis, and of later atrocities. “This indifference shocked Vera,” recalled Mary. “Ze'ev Jabotinsky was urging Jews to evacuate Europe. England was seen as the one viable base for an underground resistance to tyranny. But the necessary public outrage was missing.”
The London Season for a small and privileged class lasted from early May until the end of July. The partying was endless: a dance four times during the week; another dance on Friday night. Young men and eighteen-year-old debutantes tore off at weekends to country houses. Stockings were silk in London and lisle in the country. Dresses came from Molyneux in Paris, hats from Madame Rita in Berkeley Square, and elbow-length white kid gloves from Bond Street. Inclusion on the top invitation lists was the highest goal for many of these bright young things.
Mary watched with the curiosity of an American taught to value hard work. The family fortune came from the tobacco fields of Tennessee. She met Bill Stephenson on a transatlantic liner, and soon after, on August 31, 1924, the Sunday edition of the New York Times ran the couple's photograph with the caption american girls weds canadian scientist. A decade later the Stephensons were lending Vera one of their London flats, to which letters from Berlin were sent by Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, cautiously signing himself “Old Fritz.” The envelopes were addressed to Miss French Simmons, Mary's unmarried name. One letter told of Hitler prancing on the stage of the Potsdam Garrison Church, symbol of the Prussian officer corps. Hitler was seeking favor with the army, the only organized segment of society still resisting Nazification. Senior staff officers who opposed Hitler still looked to Britain for support. Some were seduced by offers of quick promotion. A wartime flying ace, Hermann Göring, as Prussian prime minister, sold his loyalty for a share of the huge royalties from Hitler's New Order writings.
Schulenburg was appointed German ambassador to the Soviet Union late in 1934, with instructions to convince Stalin that there was nothing personal about Nazi propaganda labeling the German opposition as communist: it was merely local party politics. Vera decided the Big Lie was already a weapon in foreign affairs, but suited Schulenburg's need to avoid a Russo-German war. His letters from Moscow were forwarded to No. 5 Kensington Palace Gardens Terrace, now given as Vera's latest residence, a cover. The ambassador wrote in open code. Vera's replies revealed little. Her old lover might be under the control of German intelligence.
She became a secretary-translator in Stephenson's company Pressed Steel, which made nine out of ten bodies for British automobiles. This gave Stephenson his excuse for inspecting German steel mills. He controlled twenty other companies throughout Europe, allowing him to dig out intelligence useful to Churchill. He was known in Germany for an aircraft made in one of his factories, which won the King's Cup air race in 1934. Berlin's curiosity showed itself in the friendliness of German aviators. Stephenson found this ironic, since the British air ministry displayed no interest at all. He had experimented with wireless telegraphy, and as early as 1924, he invented a device to transmit pictures by wireless at the same time Germany put on the market a commercial coding machine that later became the Berlin Cipher Office's top-secret Enigma, taxing the best brains among British ULTRA code breakers. Frank Whittle, a Royal Air Force officer, getting no RAF backing for his invention of the jet engine, turned to Stephenson. “He knew how to hook things up to make them work in unexpected ways,” said Whittle. “He'd give a leg up to chaps whose working-class accent stopped them getting past the snobs of Whitehall.”2
Vera met those who believed in the right of hereditary grandees to rule. If Hitler ruled the Continent, they argued, Britain would be free in the Mideast and Asia to guard its colonies against communism. Lord Londonderry held this view. Appointed Britain's air minister in 1933, at the same time Hitler became Reich chancellor, Londonderry also saw commercial advantages to close relations with Nazi leaders. He put Vera in mind of the German financiers who flew Hitler to party rallies in a plane trailing a banner, hitler over germany. Vera thought Londonderry would gladly fly another banner, hitler over britain.3 The British press had ignored Hitler's assumption of total power on January 30, 1933, with one exception. The Daily Express ran a banner headline that got the news horribly wrong: hitler baulked of power. Editors didn't seem to care, one way or the other.
Vera learned a rule she would later instill in agents: “You may prepare for surprises in another country, but you'll still be taken by surprise when you get there.” At the British legation in Bucharest, she had scanned well-informed situation reports that never prepared her for the London newspaper proprietors, who ignored their own Berlin correspondents’ stories of the legalized murder of less-than-perfect babies, the tests for purebred white Aryans, and the labeling of the rest as “subhuman.” The growth of concentration camps was not worth a mention.
Stephenson explained: “Newspaper proprietors lust for seats in the House of Lords and oblige a government that wants to read nothing nasty about the Nazis.” She still had a lot to learn, but he was impressed by her phenomenal memory, her grasp of many languages, her gift for making others talk. Best of all, she saw the need for unconventional action.
He sent her to explore an England that seemed afraid of another war, and afraid to prevent it. “The leaders sit in the path of the monster and twiddle their thumbs,” he said, “like rabbits frozen in the headlights of a truck, flapping their ears instead of running.” There was nowhere to run for the poor in London's East End, who got their news through the migrant grapevines. Survivors of pogroms against Russian Jews speculated about the bombers assembled in Russia for the German air force that would later target the East End docklands: “the docks” handled overseas cargoes, without which Britain would starve. Underpaid East Enders were less easily deceived than City merchants. Handicapped veterans of the last war begged for food, their medals already sold. Trade unions were under scrutiny by the internal security service, MI5, on suspicion of communist sympathies. The Daily Worker called Soviet Russia the one ray of hope for workers living in East End squalor.
East Enders, on the whole, sensed a coming resumption of what they called the Great War of 1914–18, the War to End All Wars. But many fiercely opposed warmongering. Vera related this antiwar feeling to that of German workers, tricked into believing law and order would end the dreadful poverty that followed the last conflict. The Workers’ Education Association in its East End evening classes taught how imperial lunacies led to conflict. One textbook began: “Austria declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914. Four days later, Germany declared war on Russia, and an Eastern Front stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. On August 4, Germany declared war on France and Britain. The Western Front became a stalemate of muddy trenches from the North Sea to the Alps. Nine and a half million men became battle casualties.” Vera came away admiring these tough East Enders. Some were burglars who took pride in using inventiveness rather than brutality. Others were humble inspectors of insurance claims, and knew the weak points in factories whose owners set fires to stave off bankruptcy. Many East Enders spoke Continental languages. Their communities were woven into the fabric of street life. They would make a reservoir of talent for any anti-Nazi resistance operations. They were natural street fighters, schooled in a world of the lower class.
The West End was utterly upper class. Vera heard of its delayed reaction to the massacre in August 1929 of twenty-three Jews in Palestine by Arabs armed with axes. “I can't think why the Jews make such a fuss over a few dozen of their people,” Beatrice, the wife of the British colonial secretary, Sidney Webb, Lord Passfield, was quoted as saying by Chaim Weizmann, future first president of Israel. Living in England, he protested against “its insensitivity, its indifference and hostility.”
Vera found young men who were not insensitive, though they turned up at posh pa
rties. One was a flier in the Royal Navy whose nickname was Stringbag, also the nickname for the Fairey Swordfish, an antiquated torpedo-bomber with four wings that folded back for stowage on carriers. He said it was held together by string, like a house-wife's shopping bag. “Hence,” he told Vera, “the name Stringbag.”
They met at a West End dinner party in 1935. Her dress was in the latest neo-Victorian fashion: leg-of-mutton sleeves and yards of seams, gores, and flares. The complicated-looking toilette could be swiftly removed thanks to new-fangled zip fasteners and decorative buttons that covered press-studs. Her hair was cut short and brushed forward in a swirl, plastered to her forehead and cheeks in ragged edges, in imitation of the popular Paris-style windswept coiffure.
Mary Stephenson wangled the invitation for Vera because the dinner, at Lady Mountbatten's Brook House in Park Lane, would include Mutual Friends. Edwina Mountbatten was half Jewish. She had not invited her anti-Semitic father, Wilfred Ashley (Baron Mount Temple of Lee), who applauded the Nazi Party for imposing order. “In the next war,” he declared in public, “we must fight shoulder to shoulder with Germany.”
His distortions of history were so outrageous as to seem comical. Vera asked why the press printed them. Were columnists paid to invent comic scandals? Edwina looked up with a myopic stare. She had just been the target of a gossip columnist: society shaken by terrible scandal. Her husband, young Louis Mountbatten, was serving on a warship at sea. A columnist reported that she was “caught in compromising circumstances with a colored man.” This was Paul Robeson, the actor-singer who left America to escape anti-Negro prejudice. The libel was trumpeted by the People, a popular Sunday paper, and was later retracted.
“Columnists writing comedy as history?” echoed Edwina. “Winston Churchill writes about things far from comic, and he's ridiculed for it. But admirers print his columns.”
Desmond Morton, who still carried a German bullet in his heart from World War I, added that Churchill had fought Boer farmers in Africa and seen them beat the mighty British imperial armies by irregular methods. “He'll train irregulars if war is forced on us before we get modern arms.” Morton was director of the Industrial Intelligence Centre of the Committee of Imperial Defence (IICCID), dismissed by the current government as a warmonger's tool. Senior civil servants sent reports on British defense failings to Morton, knowing his only customer was Churchill.
Stringbag walked Vera home. An early dawn streaked the sky. The streets were silent, the air divine. “He was a bit drunk and lyrical,” she told Mary later. “He said he was lucky to be able to fly above a filthy world. I was smitten, perhaps by him, perhaps by his airplanes.”
She asked about Morton's remarks about Boers and irregular warfare. Stringbag replied: “The world's most powerful empire in the 1880s was beaten by the Boers without modern weapons. Nothing looked more formidable than our armored trains. Nothing was more vulnerable. Our juggernauts were derailed by blowing up bridges with a couple of sticks of dynamite. We'll have to use Boer methods against Hitler.”
Stringbag was fed up with staff generals who refused to modernize. General Sir Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd, chief of the Imperial General Staff, updated a cavalry training manual with a brief addendum on the use of armored cars that he called “mechanized cavalry.” His manual's addendum was called “Cavalry (mechanized) and the well-bred horse.” Stringbag said the Well-Bred Horse Brigade could only be led by someone with a name like Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd.
On his next leave, the pilot took Vera to Simpson's on the Strand. Before lunch he ordered Pimm's Number One, confessing it was regarded in the navy as the quickest way to seduce a girl. “I drank him pretty much under the table,” she told Stephenson, who recalled, “She made Stringbag an exception to her rule against close entanglements. He was spilling the goods on antisubmarine defenses at Scapa Flow, so neglected that the anchorage was vulnerable to U-boats that Germany was secretly building.”
Stringbag had a graveyard sense of humor. He sang a lugubrious wardroom song: “They say in the air force/A landing's okay/If the pilot gets out and then walks away./But in the fleet air arm/The prospects are grim/If the landing is bad and the pilot can't swim.” This dim outlook for young pilots, he said, was the fault of admirals who did not believe in aircraft carriers. Naval intelligence had gone to sleep. The Secret Intelligence Service, under the Foreign Office, had a Secret Fund for private citizens who did not seek personal gain when collecting information abroad but who might need money to pursue an investigation. The fund was subject to a secret committee vote to maintain the facade of correct parliamentary procedure. There were no benefits for a volunteer agent with Non-Official Cover. Any NOC agent who got caught was disowned.
How did Stringbag know this? His father was an executive in the Marconi Company. Its radio officers were available in wartime to the Naval Intelligence Directorate. NID seemed unmoved by Germany's production of warships and submarines. He added, “Americans are just as blind. They launched their first carrier, the Ranger, and now Washington lawmakers want to scrap it because it costs too much to run.”
He recalled the Greek physician Hippocrates: “‘A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.’ These are desperate times. The remedy is dangerous. Right now, it means fighting the Guilty Men.”
And he quoted Churchill: “These appeasers feed the crocodile in the hope of being the last to get eaten.”4
3
Kill Hitler?
Would the assassination of Hitler solve anything? Vera thought it would certainly save some of the 600,000 Jews now terrorized by Hitler.
Stringbag said nobody within the ruling class in Britain cared much about Jews. Whitehall mandarins were impressed by Germany's new orderliness, and they would be outraged by any hint of an assassination attempt, because Germany would be thrown back into chaos. Hitler was a welcome phenomenon, according to the influential cabinet secretary Sir Maurice Hankey. He had asked as early as October 1933: “Are we still dealing with the Hitler of Mein Kampf? Or is it a new Hitler who has discovered the burden of responsible office?” This was at the time of the Einzelaktion order to launch the systematic persecution of all Jews.
Two years later Ramsey MacDonald, then Britain's prime minister, claimed the Royal Air Force was far ahead of Germany, only to be dramatically contradicted by Sir John Simon, the British foreign secretary, who returned from “a goodwill visit” to Berlin to report that Hitler told him the German air force was as powerful as the RAF. Simon the Impeccable, as he was dubbed by critics, said publicly, “Germany is doing splendidly in building its defenses against Soviet Russian expansionism.”
Hitler aimed his boast at those in Simon's circle who wanted Germany to build strong defenses against Stalin. On June 18, 1935, in violation of the Versailles peace treaty, Britain signed a naval agreement with Germany providing that Germany would have a fleet equal to 35 percent of Britain's surface craft and 45 percent of its submarines. The move signaled to other Versailles treaty signatories that London approved of German rearmament.1
“We'll end up dead or speaking German,” Vera told Stringbag. She had thought some more about this question of assassinating Hitler, and concluded, “High-level assassinations in Europe always lead to massive and unpredictable upheavals.” Bill Stephenson, part of the speculation, recalled that “the possibility of assassination was left hanging.” But disposing of Hitler by any democratic process was impossible.
Frustrated, Stringbag said to Vera, “Let's get above all this shit!”
He drove her to his aero-club and, under the name Tom Benson, booked a Gypsy Moth biplane, whose fabric wings were held together by wooden struts and wires. She sat in an open front cockpit. He took control in the rear cockpit. She heard his muffled voice through rubber Gosford tubes as he climbed through the muck of chimney smoke and layers of black cloud and broke into dazzling blue skies. “You've got her!” he shouted.
In the mirror above, Vera saw him lift up both his gloved hands
. She grabbed the control column and put her feet on the rudder pedals. The aircraft was flying smoothly, straight and level. She followed his instructions: left hand on throttle, right hand on the stick, feet on the rudder pedals. She tried a turn, keeping the nose on the horizon. “Loop the loop!” he yelled, and she sensed his light touch on the controls while he talked her into the dive, and pulled out into a steep climb. When the plane was upside down, they headed down again. “Try another!” he shouted above the roar of the slipstream and the banging of the single engine. She did. He took her through spins. His disembodied voice and the sense of an unseen guardianship was a bond, a promise of unqualified support.
“I really flew it,” she told Stephenson later.
“The Moth is as fragile as the torpedo-bombers your friend will fly in battle,” he remarked soberly. She suddenly saw the Moth, like its namesake, fluttering on currents of air, vulnerable, easily crushed. That would be Stringbag, in the war she knew must come.
He was based at a stone frigate, a naval air station near Portsmouth. He got away most weekends to give her more flying lessons.
“Better than sex!” she laughed after an afternoon of spins and rolls and inverted loops.
“We'll see about that,” he responded. They stopped for a drink in the public bar of a roadhouse. He took a room overlooking a motorway clogged with traffic. He rightly took her comment as a challenge. Their lovemaking had the essential ingredient of danger she relished with Count von der Schulenburg, but in aerobatics she felt a more intensively shared danger, and concealment added to the excitement. She'd return from an afternoon above the clouds, change, and bump into him again at some cocktail party. Poker-faced, he'd be in the company of men with the closed look of civil servants. He explained later. “Mutual Friends don't talk more than they have to.”2
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