Spymistress

by William Stevenson

Vera shivered. These were not the words of a warmonger. They were those of a man who feared the insanity of war, and who would do all he could to prevent another. But the words seemed prescient. Churchill would never yield to an enemy who launched another conflict.9

  4

  Return to Berlin

  On November 5, 1935, street urchins pushed paper-stuffed dummies in old prams and cried, “Penny for the guy!” Guy Fawkes had tried to blow up Parliament some 330 years before. Taking a potshot at Hitler seemed less unsporting to Vera on this day of bonfires saluting Guy and his plan to roll barrels of gunpowder under politicians. A member of Parliament, Harold Nicolson, said, “The feeling is terribly pro-German.” Most parliamentarians agreed with King George V, who insisted “we can do business” with Hitler.1

  Vera ran into the reporter who had made notes from Stringbag's account of the expansion of Germany's secret navy.

  “I got fired,” the newsman told her. “The paper wouldn't publish the facts. A Blackshirt told my editor that he saw me with my source and I should go to prison for trying to air ‘false secrets.’ The British Union of Fascists has more clout than your navy friend.”

  Vera was on her way to the Marylebone Ladies’ Rifle Club to pay the annual fee of two pounds, one shilling, sixpence. The club in ritzy Devonshire Place gave her the opportunity to sharpen skills first honed while hunting in the Romanian timberlands. Meanwhile, Bill Stephenson had purchased from a gunsmith on St. James's Street a rifle that he told Vera was perfectly balanced and equipped for a sharpshooter, and inevitably her mind returned to the question of assassination. He had details of Hitler's routine. “The Führer will tighten security soon,” said Bill. “But right now, he loves his public appearances.” An assassin would have the choice of Hitler as a moving target, in his six-wheeled open Mercedes tourer, or a stationary Hitler waving his arms on a public platform.

  One bullet cost a penny at the Ladies’ Rifle Club. Hitler cost the lives of those he hated. The equation intrigued Vera. “She'd been moved by Churchill's fear of descending to Torture and Cannibalism,” recalled Mary Stephenson. “But he wrote this a year after the Great War ended in 1918, shell-shocked and sick of war. Now, only war would stop Hitler, unless he was assassinated. The only question was: would killing Hitler make him a martyr in Germany, or would it kill Nazism? Bill asked Vera to go to Berlin and judge the mood.”

  With Count von der Schulenburg hoping to see Vera in Berlin, the moment seemed opportune. Bill Stephenson conjured up papers identifying Vera as a representative of Johnny Walker Scotch Whisky. Its sole agent in Germany was Joachim von Ribbentrop, the representative for Henkell champagne.2

  German postal services were still swift. Within days, Schulenburg had arranged for her to stay at the Tiergartenstrasse mansion of his wealthy colleague Friedrich “Freddie” Horstmann, head of the British desk at the German foreign ministry and one of the older diplomats who opposed Hitler. The parents of Horstmann's wife Lali were Jewish. Her father, an honorary British consul, was one of the few foreigners to wear Britain's Order of the Garter. Lali arranged for Schulenburg to share a room with Vera in the Horstmann household, widely known for lavish hospitality and many guests. Vera's presence would not seem out of place. The ex-lovers’ reunion in December 1935 had been delayed more than two years and yet she felt the old “zootszoots,” her private term for sexual magic. But for most of the time they talked. There was so much to say. The ambassador was now fully aware of Ribbentrop's influence: Hitler considered him an expert on British nobility, and a future ambassador who would appeal to those in London who admired the Nazi program.

  Schulenburg said two million Nazi Party members could not tell seventy million Germans what to do. British diplomats listened to Nazi bigwigs at cocktail parties, instead of venturing into street bars where ordinary Germans asked openly when the British would help overthrow the Nazis. He was concerned that Vera might land on the new and secret “wanted” list, the Sonderpfändungsliste: persons to be arrested in countries to be occupied by Germany.

  He spent long hours at the foreign ministry and talked feverishly with her through the nights. He had appeared like a ghost from the past, reviving bittersweet memories, and now, two weeks later, he dissolved again. He had proposed a new way to communicate with Vera from Moscow. He kept the odd quality of gentlemanly innocence that first attracted her. She thought it made him the perfect cat's-paw in Hitler's game of placating Stalin until ready to attack the Soviet Union.

  As an Englishwoman who spoke good German, Vera saw the two Berlins that kept Count von der Schulenburg in a state of uncertainty. One was the Berlin of the Horstmanns, who clung to a rich cultural past. Freddy Horstmann remembered that after the first anti-Jewish boycott on April 1, 1933, von Ribbentrop invited Jewish friends to a “reassurance” lunch where he advised them not to take Hitler's anti-Semitic talk too seriously: it was aimed at eastern Jews, not German Jews. The lunch had come one day after storm troopers bludgeoned “white Aryans” who tried to shop in Berlin's Jewish stores. Now Ribbentrop inched his way into the self-deluded company of old-style German diplomats. Right across from the established German foreign ministry quarters at Wilhelmstrasse 74–76 was a fledgling bureau in the old Bismarck Palace where Ribbentrop, known as “Champagne Charlie,” aped the aristocratic English style and curried favor in foreign capitals. When he visited the French foreign ministry, its puzzled bureaucrats asked Berlin, Who is this parvenu? Hitler dictated a delicate reply: “He is an old party member traveling abroad to clarify the position of the German government.” Ribbentrop was getting what he wanted: recognition as foreign adviser to Hitler.3

  Vera learned of another pretender lurking in Berlin's southwest suburb of Zehlendorf, with a greater appetite for the slaughterhouse. Reinhard Heydrich listened to Mozart, was adored by the police chief, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, and directed the SD or Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi Party's intelligence service. On the same block was his potential opponent, Admiral Wilhelm Franz Canaris, who ran the Abwehr, the clandestine warfare section of the armed forces, where opposition to Hitler ran deep. Professional officers who first believed Hitler's “national revolution” meant a return to the old traditions now bitterly resented party thugs who lorded it over the soldiers.

  Vera heard Berliners in restaurants and bars voice fear of the party's usurpation of power. They asked questions like “When are the British coming?” Local British diplomats seemed deaf to such appeals. Joseph Goebbels, in charge of Public Enlightenment, sat opposite the British consulate where the Secret Intelligence Service representative, Frank Foley, was besieged by Jews seeking visas. The daily queue of Jews delighted Goebbels. Foley used the title Passport Officer as cover for the SIS. Paperwork swamped SIS officers using the same cover throughout Europe. They complained that Jewish visa applicants left them no time to pursue their real duties.

  Vera learned about the overworked SIS from Ralph Wigram, Churchill's loyal friend in Whitehall, when she returned home in early 1936. Wigram backed her opinion that British diplomats in Berlin were too busy entertaining English personages dazzled by “thrilling Nazi-land.” They raved about the blond blue-eyed young Nazis in “utterly smashing uniforms” who escorted them to Hitler's rallies. Vera said: “Great harm is done by visiting the Mayfair hostesses. These admirers of Hitler give an impression that pro-Nazi policy is fashioned in London drawing rooms, and discourage Berliners, afraid to act without British support.” Wigram was close to the permanent undersecretary at the British Foreign Office, Sir (later 1st Baron) Robert Vansittart, who was accused by his replacement, Sir Alexander Cadogan, of “dancing literary hornpipes” in assessing the fascist threat.4

  A colorful Texan engineer-diplomat, Sam Edison Woods, acted as U.S. commercial attaché in Prague. Woods regularly traveled to Berlin on the personal instructions of President Roosevelt to report on German technology under cover of trade talks. He confirmed Vera's observation that the Berlin Cipher Office had reengineered the commercial coding mach
ine first built in 1924 by Cipher Machines of Steglitzerstrasse 2, one of which Stephenson had purchased. Ralph Wigram's superiors refused to confirm Sam Woods's figures on German arms superiority. “Grave and terrible facts,” Wigram confided to Vera. He risked prosecution by disclosing these facts to Churchill.

  Then she heard that poor Horstmann, her generous Berlin host, the great diplomat and connoisseur of art, had been forced out of the foreign service and out of his mansion on Tiergartenstrasse. The price of integrity and of being Jewish was high, both in Berlin and in London.

  5

  Crown or Commoner: Where Lies the Treachery?

  Ribbentrop was appointed ambassador extraordinary of the German Reich, on special mission to the 1935 Silver Jubilee of King George V and Queen Mary. Forty stripe-trousered Germans in penguin suits stood in rows at the extraordinary ambassador's post on the Mall. As King George V came abreast, they gave the stiff-armed Hitler salute in perfect unison.

  On Tuesday, January 21, 1936, King George V officially died. He had actually died just before midnight on the day before, having requested a lethal injection of cocaine and morphine, timed to make the august pages of the voice of authority, the morning Times, not the trashy afternoon papers.

  His successor, Edward VIII, met that same Tuesday with the well-known Nazi, the Duke of Coburg. This was reported by the press spokesman in the German embassy, Iona von Ustinov, father of the future playwright and actor Peter Ustinov. Count von der Schulenburg's foreign office friends in Berlin had arranged for Vera to meet the quietly anti-Nazi Ustinov. Iona repeated to her a dispatch dictated to him by the Duke of Coburg after meeting the new king. “For the eyes only of the Führer and Party Member von Ribbentrop,” it reported that Edward VIII told the duke “a British-German alliance was an urgent necessity and a guiding principle for British foreign policy.” Edward approved of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess and hoped he might come to visit. The new king also thought the current German ambassador, the old fashioned Leopold von Hoesch, should be replaced by Ribbentrop.

  King Edward's subsequent phone call to Ambassador von Hoesch was recorded by Fritz Hesse, the secretly anti-Nazi reporter for the official German news agency, stationed at the embassy. In this call, the king said rumors of an alliance with Germany caused alarm in Parliament, adding: “I sent for the prime minister [by then Stanley Baldwin] and gave him a piece of my mind. I told the old so-and-so I would abdicate if he made war. There was a frightful scene. But you needn't worry. There won't be war.”

  Upon receiving a transcript, Hitler was reported to have shouted: “At last! The King of England will not intervene. He is keeping his promise. That means that it can all go well.”1

  Vera saw that the new English king's warm welcome for Hitler's henchmen would have a devastating impact on anti-Nazi Germans hoping for British backup. Without this, how many Germans, for the sake of a principle, would risk losing their wives and children or their jobs?

  King Carol II of Romania, in London for the state funeral for George V, was intimidated by Hitler in the same way. His hopes for British support had been dashed so far. “The Führer's boasts cowed the Romanian king,” wrote an astute Associated Press reporter, William Russell, who became a young U.S. diplomat in Berlin. Russell had been the first to tell Vera, “Go listen to what people in the streets of Germany really think about Nazism.” He was outspoken in his contempt for the diplomatic circuit in Berlin. Stanley Baldwin took absolutely no interest in foreign affairs and provided no guidelines to British diplomats in Berlin, who were thus happy to join in the Nazi-promoted merry-go-round of parties bountifully blessed with rich food and buckets of alcohol. Russell had, in common with other American correspondents, greater powers of independent observation. He later became an American-run agent, whose warm relationship with Vera worked to their mutual advantage. He persistently reminded American readers that Germans longed for outside help to overthrow Hitler.

  Hermann Göring was to represent Germany at King George V's funeral, until warned by the embassy in London that his safety could not be guaranteed “because of Jewish refugees.” Ustinov reported this to Vera, adding that Ambassador von Hoesch warned Göring about powerful Jewish families like the Rothschilds, who could damage the monarchy's financial affairs, so great was their influence.

  She asked Ustinov if this was true. He had a Jewish background. His post at the German embassy was a means to securing a home in England, which he had come to love. He laughed at the idea of rich Jews influencing the Crown. How many rich Jews were there? He himself had little money but stacks of books. His was one of the brilliant minds that once flourished in Berlin's brief cultural revival. Now he lived in a shabby part of London, his books balanced on broken furniture. “Defection is not a profitable pastime,” he said mournfully when she helped him move into slightly better quarters. He told her that Ambassador von Hoesch discouraged Göring from appearing at the state funeral in order to prove his loyalty, while he quietly opposed Hitler and worked with trusted English friends.

  There was an enormous English muddle at the funeral. The crowds showed violent hostility to Mosley's Blackshirts when they staged an anti-Jewish march. King Carol II was almost lost in the clutter of foreign dignitaries and representatives from the British Empire who came to pay homage. Vera was cheered by the chaos. It was the opposite of the mechanized society lampooned by London-born Charlie Chaplin in his movie Modern Times, although the press carried eccentricity too far in portraying King Carol's Romania as a Ruritanian fantasy.

  Vera felt a pang of pity for Carol. His flame-haired mistress, Magda Lupescu, was not in evidence at the funeral. Presuming upon old friendship, Vera left a note at his hotel, the Savoy. He received her there while having a massage. “Lying naked on his tummy,” she told Mary later, “the poor man worried about Russia, which had a plan of attack through Romania to invade Germany, and about Germany, which had a plan to attack Russia through Romania. If he lost his throne, he would need a nest egg somewhere. But where? I told him his best friends were British businessmen who had developed his kingdom's resources.” His fears had been inflated earlier, when he was one of many foreign potentates to visit Hitler's alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden. Most visitors meekly listened to Hitler's arguments, tailored to fit anyone he was receiving that day. He wooed Carol with a reasoned argument for securing Germany Lebensraum, or living space, in parts of Europe where the German people were in the majority. Hitler had seemed diffident and humble, but his cold eyes and queer voice scared Carol witless.

  After Vera's brief reunion with King Carol, an odd thing happened to His Highness. His masseur got lost in the funeral crowds around Westminster and he wound up in the Abbey with lesser mourners. His picture scattered among newspapers identified him as “King Carol of Transylvania.” In the late spring of 1936, a London cartoonist portrayed him as Count Dracula. One who noted the jibes and journalistic errors was an American businessman, Wallace B. Phillips, who lived in London but was linked to a group of influential businessmen in New York who met regularly in a small apartment at 34 East 62nd Street, dubbed The Room. Phillips met Vera at one of the Stephensons’ private dinners that summer. Forewarned of Vera's passionate anti-Nazi stance, Phillips told her that he and his American friends were as appalled as she was by Hitler's ability to con foreign statesmen. They had constituted themselves as an informal, self-appointed intelligence mission, in the disturbing absence of any central American secret service. Most Americans shared the British sense of fair play, he said, which made them easy marks when Hitler turned on the charm. The Room was a sort of secret society of elitists. It counted among its members Kermit, son of Theodore Roosevelt, and Vincent Astor, the wealthy property developer and publisher, who treasured his links with England and was close to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR was in a political straitjacket. He sensed the inevitability of war, needed all the information he could get on the Nazi threat, but knew that any overt measures he took might lose him another election.

 
Wally Phillips's like-minded friends included the American Red Cross representative in London, David Bruce, who would play a key role in a future U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Phillips's “secret society” reflected Vera's own ideas about closework. David Bruce commented later: “Vera could access people from hall porters to captains of industry.” He was among the very few American Mutual Friends who knew her travels in the late 1930s were for the purpose of gathering information. He wrote later: “There was an exciting whiff of danger about Miss Atkins.”2

  Bruce agreed with Vera that if the democracies continued to be deceived by Hitler's declarations of peaceful intent, and turned a blind eye to his actual moves during 1936—the occupation of the Rhineland, the proclamation of a Berlin-Rome axis, the German Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan—there would be nobody left to stand up to Germany when, not if, full-scale war broke out. Vera said the only cracks in Germany's armor would be in the factories. Spies could point out the weak spots to trained saboteurs, who could wreak more havoc, at less cost and with more precision, than aerial bombers. She paraphrased Sherlock Holmes: “Now in the building of tanks, I tell you what/There is always somewhere a weakest spot.”

  The finding of an enemy's weak spots occupied the fertile mind of a veteran of unconventional wars, Colin McVean “Gubby” Gubbins, who had been alarmed by a War Office financial secretary's report saying, “The more I study military affairs, the more I am impressed by the importance of cavalry in modern warfare.” In 1936, Gubby was a forty-year-old brigade major in Military Intelligence, stunned by the army's preoccupation with cavalry when Hitler had specific plans for blitzkrieg or “lightning war” tactics, using close coordination between airborne artillery and mechanized land units, radiophoning orders instead of using the slow dots and dashes of Morse code. Most countries had new methods of encryption and new ways of transmitting Morse. But spoken orders made for swift movement on a narrow battlefront.