Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  Vera and Gubby were fated to escape from Poland together during Germany's first blitzkrieg at the start of World War II in August 1939. From the start, in 1936, their relationship was fraught with danger. Gubby could not hide details of his personal life, because army officers had few private secrets. She saw him as the last of the young adventurers who fought in the Great Game between Britain and Russia to gain dominance along the Himalayas. On the Northwest Frontier (today Afghanistan), Gubby had been with British military intelligence, eavesdropping on Russian wireless signals that linked Moscow with Far Eastern bases as far away as Shanghai. He joked about local tribal warfare as “Afghans bashing Russians, the British raj, and each other.”

  Gubby was descended from a captain of dragoons who campaigned for Oliver Cromwell in Ireland in the 1600s. His great-grandfather served in outposts of the British empire. His grandfather joined the Bengal Civil Service, and got into hot water for his outspoken criticism of the British raj. In 1863 he was sent back to England where, humiliated and jobless, he killed himself. Gubby's father served in Japan for thirty years under seven British secretaries of state. The son, from the age of seven, never saw his parents for years at a stretch. On the windswept Isle of Mull in the Western Hebrides, he ran wild in the heather or swam in the ice-cold sea.

  Vera was five years old when, in September 1913, Gentleman Cadet Gubbins entered the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, near the East End docklands. The following summer, aged eighteen, he was sent to Heidelberg University for German studies. A local widow rented a room to the boy, who looked like any other impoverished foreign student in patched clothing. On August 1, 1914, Gubby saw notices on lampposts announcing “Germany at war with Russia.” His kindly German landlady said he had better leave. She packed his trunk and promised to forward it to him, so he would not attract hostile attention on the train. At Cologne an unflappable Englishman pressed a gold sovereign into his hand, which paid for a third-class railway ticket to Brussels. German border guards inspected the papers of other travelers. Gubby was not even questioned because “I looked too boyish and underdeveloped to be of any use in war to anyone.” He reported to the academy on the day Britain declared war, at the same moment that Vera and her mother and two brothers abandoned their own journey to England and took refuge with Max Rosenberg's relatives in Cologne. Three of Gubby's fellow cadets in Germany were caught and spent the war in prison. His trunk arrived three months later with large white letters painted on the lid by his German landlady: american citizen's luggage. He never forgot the existence of “good” Germans.

  Second Lieutenant Gubbins fought on the Western Front until March 14, 1917, when he was sent to Buckingham Palace to receive from King George V the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry. The boy was back in France next day. Early in 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution broke out, and Russia made a separate peace with Germany. Three months after the Great War's end, Gubby was with the Archangel Expeditionary Force fighting the Bolsheviks, and discovering the caprices of guerrilla warfare. Some White Russians joined the Bolsheviks, and guerrilla forces fought sometimes together and sometimes against each other. Gubby became a red-capped staff officer with General Edmund (later Field Marshal Lord) Ironside, but detested the job and returned to sort out the complexities in the field.

  For three years Gubby had to outwit a different kind of guerrilla: the Irish nationalists. Their civilian army was free to choose time, place, and target. He was “shot at from behind hedges by gentlemen in trilby hats and mackintoshes.” In the legendary Northwest Frontier and Afghanistan, he analyzed Russian signals intercepted by Y, the most secret of British secret agencies. Later, while he was at the Soviet section of the Military Intelligence Directorate in London, the Russians adopted one-time coding pads. Each page had its own unique key, and was burned after use. Frustrated, he was reduced to examining Soviet publications that gave away nothing. His Afghan experience seemed wasted, and the cost of training an officer for conventional warfare was absurd if the officer was killed by a penny bullet from an Afghan tribesman's musket, the jezail. He spoke of this to Vera, who recognized Rudyard Kipling's “Arithmetic of the Frontier” and quoted:

  A scrimmage in a border station—

  A canter down some dark defile—

  Two thousand pounds of education

  Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.

  Gubby's regard for Vera was heightened by the pleasure he got from her appetite for learning and her memory. She had not forgotten the penny price of a bullet at the Ladies’ Rifle Club. If Hitler's assassination was out of question, homemade and cheaply produced weapons offered another way to derail Hitler's juggernaut. In Afghanistan, the way tribal ingenuity outdid massive conventional forces taught a lesson to Gubby and his comrades. These included Bill (John Hessell) Tiltman, master cryptographer, and Nick (Frederick William) Nicholls, who set up outstations around the globe to intercept the signals of potential enemies—signals analyzed by the Government Code and Cipher School in shabby quarters near St. James's Street tube station, the cradle of ULTRA code breakers. Nicholls would eventually connect with agents in the tribal rags of European civilians.

  Gubby wrote manuals like The Art of Guerrilla Warfare. His book Housewife's ABC of Home-Made Explosives described how to cook up big bangs for Germans who might invade English homes. The Partisan Leader's Handbook told how to deal with informers: “kill them quickly but only after squeezing them dry of information.” He said there was not a single book on irregular warfare to be found in Whitehall or anywhere else in the country.

  Gubby was a hard-faced Scot with a boisterous sense of humor. He questioned the wisdom of the top brass after he had seen Allied troops mangled in World War I. As a regular serving officer, his record qualified him for a knighthood and general's rank, but these would come later. He was now drawn to Bill Stephenson “like other professionals, by invisible threads, as if to the oracle at Delphi,” he said later. He met regularly with Vera, not lunching at swank restaurants but taking tea at a Lyons Corner house in Charing Cross. He asked how she knew so much about German military advances. She said Jewish scientists, escaping persecution, knew a great deal. He agreed that anti-Semitism in Britain stood in the way of training an underground Jewish army recruited from young refugees. Chaim Weizmann, himself a refugee, had perfected a new process for making acetone during a critical shortage of British explosives in World War I, contributing to the Allied victory. Now Hitler was driving out those who knew most about weaponry, a drain that would ultimately cost him dearly.

  Gubbins was not hampered by the narrow focus of the SIS and the diplomats in Moscow. With the advantage of his time in Russia and analyzing Soviet military books and signals, he was interested in Ambassador Schulenburg's task of laying the groundwork for a Nazi-Soviet peace pact. The count's letters were now going through a Swedish consular friend, and Vera's replies went via a Stockholm box number. Gubby cautioned her that Schulenburg might not always outwit the Nazis. Gubby remembered Germans who had saved him from prolonged incarceration in 1914, but he feared today's “good” Germans might be used to entrap Vera.

  “She doesn't need my warnings,” he told Stephenson. “She's got a deep understanding of Berlin. She's a beauty and a killer, you know.” A Scot with a touch of the second sight, and a soldier inclined to be biblical, he quoted from Proverbs: “For the lips of a strange woman drip as an honeycomb, and the mouth is smoother than oil. But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.”

  It was a strange, and prophetic, utterance. Gubby's blue eyes drilled into hers when he talked of such matters. Yet at regimental parties he donned his kilt and danced a reel on the table, his laughter booming above the drone of bagpipes.

  He had encouraged Orde Wingate to train Jews to fight Arabs in Palestine, even while Whitehall stopped the flow of Jewish settlers into the same territory. How did this contradiction come about? wondered Vera.

  Gubby said there
were political opportunists and there were those who followed their conscience. Policy was run by those who wavered between opportunism and morality, and these, if dumped in a cannibal's cooking pot, would see the cannibal's point of view. The Jews of Europe offered the biggest pool of talent: they had the incentive to become single-minded closework fighters. Vera said hostility and red tape was alienating many. Britain now would admit only refugees who proved they had permission to go on to the United States. “It's not our finest hour,” said Gubby.

  From London, the Central Fund for German Jewry in 1936 advised the Haganah's Jewish irregulars on Palestinian soil to practice havlagah (restraint) in the spirit of Gandhi's nonviolence. But this was taken as a sign of weakness by the Arabs and strengthened the tough breakaway group Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization), led by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, whose earlier warnings to Jews to leave Europe had failed.

  Orde Wingate had told his trainees, “We are building an Army of Zion.” He was asked if he had read anything about Zionism. “Yes, in the only important book on the subject: the Bible,” replied Wingate. He was by now regarded as slightly mad by the War Office top brass, but Mutual Friends protected him much the way they covered Section D, a shadowy group of three army intelligence officers whose files were plastered with secrecy labels to foil Whitehall snoopers.

  Gubby filled regular army posts. Too many, in fact. He told his wife, Norah, he was tired of military tasks “all over the place.” In one period of eight years, he'd had only five months of leave. His working days required him to keep rooms in London, and he visited Norah when he could in the countryside, which she much preferred to city life.

  One of the extra tasks loaded upon Gubby was training reservists in air defense. He found no equipment for antiaircraft regiments, despite Churchill's public warnings that the Germans would bomb London: “The heart of our Empire, and a target that cannot be moved.”

  The Air Ministry retorted that the RAF was fully prepared. Lord Trenchard, the former air marshal, had left the RAF short of planes and pilots. He was now commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police, and introduced an Incitement to Disaffection Act that allowed searches for “seditious literature.” If he decided Our Mutual Friends were guilty of sedition and conspiring against the government, it could prove awkward. The law was denounced by the National Council for Civil Liberties as copying “German Gestapo secret-police methods.” Trenchard created gentlemen-bobbies, an elitist version of the constables popularly known as “bobbies.” He said his gentlemen-bobbies had “superior qualifications.” At his new Metropolitan Police College, cadets wore dinner jackets and were waited upon by lowly ex-servicemen in white aprons. The pro-German Times lauded the upper-class policeman: “The ideals he cherishes will be those of the people from whose ranks he comes.”

  Vera's singular background exposed her to the risk of investigation. Luckily, the common sense of gentlemen-bobbies overrode Lord Trenchard's suspicion of Jews and foreigners. But “sedition” meant treason against the Crown, and behind Lord Trenchard were royals whose real influence was profound. Our Mutual Friends, to avoid accusations of secretly plotting against authority, spoke learnedly of the Fourth Dimension of Warfare, presented as an academic study, and proposed working-class uprisings as a means to confront any Nazi occupation. Hugh Dalton was called a traitor to his class for espousing these aims. The pro-Nazi Duke of Westminster said Dalton plotted communist uprisings. Churchill, as a political outcast, mentally earmarked Dalton to become a government minister who would parry questions about irregular operations once the pendulum swung in Churchill's favor.

  Vera's birth sign, Gemini, was characterized in Romania with these words, similar to those in England for Gubby's birth sign of Cancer: “Passionate sense of justice. Deep insight into the character of others. Integrity, courage, generosity and compassion are all-important.” Both she and Gubby possessed these qualities.

  High society giggled over the doggerel “All abide by one old-fashioned rule:/That gentlemen and ladies never tell/Of laughter and frivolity/And abandoned frocks and loosened curls.” Vera's friendship with Gubby might have given rise to speculation that they were among the gentlemen and ladies that never told. The Stephensons stopped any such notions by arranging dinner parties with Mutual Friends, where the two could talk as they also did in obscure tearooms. The pair simply held the same beliefs. He could let off steam, for example, about foolish Whitehall policies that allowed Germany to profit from Anglo-Arab tensions in Palestine. A crate labeled cement had fallen from a vessel unloading at Jaffa, scattering ammunition destined for Jewish defense forces. Germany's ally, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin, whipped up anti-British hatred by alleging that the cargo was secretly dispatched from London for a secret Jewish army. The vessel had departed, in fact, from a Romanian port, and was part of the Nazi scheme to send Jews to Palestine as one way to inflame Arabs against the British mandate there. An Arab Higher Committee announced a general strike until the British stopped all Jewish immigration to Palestine. The notorious Syrian guerrilla leader Fawzi el-Kaukji cut British rail, road, and telephone communications throughout the region. The crisis could have been avoided, said Gubby, if Whitehall were willing to take advice from well-informed Jews on the spot.

  Vera's Zionist friends might argue for a British-backed Jewish Brigade, but the only prominent champion was Churchill, and he was still ridiculed in London by those in power. A Jewish Brigade remained a dream. Gubby and Stephenson thought it would materialize in time. For now, the lack of forward thinking in the defense establishment was scrutinized in that tiny cell of military rebels called Section D. They called in Gubby, who later described how he was rescued from plodding through mind-numbing Soviet treatises at his War Office desk.

  A cold hand took me literally by the back of my neck and a voice said, “What are you doing for lunch today?” I whipped round—it was Jo Holland. I replied I was going to my regimental races…. I was told I was having lunch instead with Jo…. We adjourned to St. Ermin's Hotel where we met my real host, head of this definitely non-regimental Section D.3

  Section D for Destruction, as it became known among the few, was in a position to assess the ideas of Vera's like-minded civilian friends. These, at Marks & Spencer, had proposals for a future Jewish Brigade. Simon Marks's favorite historical character was King Alfred, who single-mindedly struggled for a national identity. “I'm proud to be British,” Simon told Vera, “but Nazi cowards destroyed the brave Jews who fought for Germany in their thousands during the Great War. We need a government to speak for us.” He arranged, through the Fund for German Jewry, to train young German-Jewish men at a camp in Kent. Edmund de Rothschild, a reserve officer in the Bucks Yeomanry, would prepare them for the only branch that recruited from “aliens” in the British armed forces, the Pioneer Corps.

  On March 12, 1938, German troops marched into Austria, greeted by civilians who were said to welcome Anschluss, the “reunification of the Germanic peoples.” Hitler drove into his childhood home of Linz to celebrate “completion of my mission to restore my dear homeland to the German Reich.” Vast and immensely useful industrial and natural resources were incorporated into his domain, along with nine million Austrians; their army became part of the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, and units were sent at once to Germany. Zionist headquarters in Vienna were attacked by Nazis. The persecution of Jews began. Austria was now a province in the New Order. Britain accepted the Anschluss as a done deal. The former Liberal prime minister, David Lloyd George, one of the most remarkable figures in twentieth-century politics, told Parliament that Hitler was “a great man.” One observer wrote, “Lloyd George may not actually tell a lie, but he will lead you to believe what he considers will induce you to do what he wants.” He used his persuasive Welsh charm to convince others, like Labour Party leader George Lansbury, that Hitler would do anything to avoid war. Hitler's interpreter, Paul Schmidt, later said that Lord Londonderry, the former air minister, was among many who wer
e emboldened by Lloyd George's oratory to trust the Führer's “wooing of the coy Britannia.” The German ambassador in Washington cabled Berlin, “It was striking that Congress took no stand on the German action.”4

  “Fear paralyzed the democracies,” Vera said later. “And more British serving officers rebelled against London's inaction,” she recalled. “Freddie Winterbotham had the title of ‘chief of air intelligence,’ but it was a one-man show. He had been a lumberjack in Stephenson's homeland of Canada. Acting alone, he joined the Paris-based Aeronautical Research and Sales Corporation in a joint venture with French intelligence rebels. Without authority, the French air force was photo-mapping German military installations. Winterbotham and an Australian businessman pilot, Sidney Cotton, made regular flights to Berlin to exploit the comradeship of pilots who had been enemies in the Great War, thus gathering information on the new Luftwaffe. Cotton had his own twin-engine Lockheed aircraft, with Leica cameras concealed in the wings to photograph German installations. Winterbotham pretended to be pro-Nazi to wangle private audiences with Hitler, who told him, ‘The only hope for an ordered world is that it should be ruled by three superpowers—the British Empire, the Greater Americas, and the new German Reich.’”

  When Winterbotham reported in London that Hitler believed his New Order was endorsed by England's royals, the pilot was told to remain silent. He had sworn the oath that empowers the Director of Public Prosecutions to proceed against those who break the Official Secrets Act. “I'm just a commoner, an ordinary bloke,” he said to Vera. “Between Crown and commoner, where lies the treachery?”

  6

  “England Cut Off”