Vera ventured through Europe into regions where the common man might rise up against oppression. It was obvious that Hitler needed to launch his new army-support warplanes against Poland before the poorly equipped Polish air force took delivery of RAF Hawker Hurricane fighters. Delivery by sea was to be delayed for months while the British Exchequer argued about whether it or the Poles should pay the shipping costs. Stringbag flew mock mine-laying operations in the Baltic, anticipating the use by German warships of Polish ports if war broke out. Vera had to decide where to concentrate guerrillas, using local resources, since tightfisted Whitehall suffered from what the journalist-historian Paul Johnson bluntly called “simple, old-fashioned fear; a dash of cowardice, indeed.”1
Freddie Winterbotham reported that Poland had a military version of a German “secret writing mechanism.” Gubby knew an Englishman resident in Poland, General Adrian Carton de Wiart, who had lost an arm and an eye in the Great War and had won the highest military award for gallantry, the Victoria Cross. Gubby considered a secret mission to join the one-eyed general. Vera knew how to cross the border from Romania, a route least likely to draw German attention. The mission would discuss stay-behind resistance groups, and look for a specimen of the “secret writing machine” that would become the Enigma challenging ULTRA wartime code breakers.2
Gubby avoided the SIS. He could not risk being identified with the mythology crafted into a Nazi book for general circulation, Secret Service: England's Darkest Power. This claimed to disclose “business secrets of the London murder center.” The book's purpose was to spread mutual suspicion among civilians, further encouraging them to report on each other to the Gestapo.
Poland had incorporated the first of Hitler's “lost lands” after the 1919 Versailles peace talks. Hitler said the losses would not have been in vain if Jews were forced to submit to poison gas.
Vera could never talk about such concerns to the Mayfair set, which was in general cynical and cruelly witty, dripping acid on Jews and kings alike. There were those who held this behavior in contempt. One was the Earl of Cardigan, whose ancestor led the cavalry in the tragic Charge of the Light Brigade and reputedly groaned, “Ah, well, here goes the last of the Cardigans,” when he saw disaster ahead. “He was wrong, of course,” the present earl told Vera. “For here I am.” He deplored snobbery and said, “The British Empire is winding down, but too many colonial administrators still equate Burke's Colonial Gentry with Burke's Peerage and Landed Gentry.” He regarded as a metaphor for the country's insularity the headline frequently scrawled on newspaper vendors’ billboards: fog in channel—continent cut off. “It never crosses our minds that it's England that is cut off,” said Cardigan, meaning a political fog that hid European events. He was interested in improvising an anti-Nazi resistance and reminded Vera that, in other wars, escapees had often brought back useful intelligence about their former captors. Cardigan was to become an escapee himself. He understood the definition of closework as meaning to get close enough to the enemy to use improvised weapons. He kept notes as a prisoner of the Germans, published after the war as I Walked Alone.3
Major General Alan Brooke, later Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke, would help get badly needed “silent-killer” weapons for closework. Gubby, who had been his personal staff officer, told Vera that “Brookie” haunted an antique bookstore, later made famous by Helene Hanff of New York in her book 84, Charing Cross Road. Brookie was a dedicated bird-watcher and searched for secondhand books on the subject. Vera caught him between bookshelves. An unassuming man, he was intrigued by her familiarity with the esoteric details of birdlife in Transylvania. They later met at nearby tea shops, where he quizzed her about Romania. He wanted Churchill in power, but he was also blunt and so outspoken that, when his wish came true, he would blast Churchill as a warlord who was pigheadedly proposing some impossible action. Churchill later moaned, “Brookie must hate me.” The general commented, “I don't hate him, I love him; but when the day comes that I tell him he is right when I believe him to be wrong, it will be time for him to get rid of me.”
By a most extraordinary coincidence, the Charing Cross Road bookshop was owned by one Benjamin Marks, who had invented a simple code that he penciled on the flyleaf to give assistants the lowest acceptable price in bargaining with buyers. His son Leo broke his dad's code at the age of ten, and would become the boyish chief cryptographer devoted to Vera in special operations. He was a baby-faced genius, first rejected as a Jew at the supersecret Bletchley center of ULTRA code breakers.
Gubby knew Vera's acquaintance Edmund de Rothschild in his role as a reserve officer in the Bucks Yeomanry. One of Gubby's duties was to train part-time soldiers of the East Anglia Artillery. East Anglia had no artillery, and he treated the job as a practice run for crudely improvised home defense tactics against German invaders. It gave him a chance to talk to Edmund de Rothschild about a future Jewish Brigade.
For the sake of appearances at the anti-Semitic War Office, Gubby kept an arm's-length relationship with the Fund for German Jewry. One of the fund's five joint presidents was the Marquess of Reading, son of a former viceroy of India. Another was Nahum Sokolow, president of the World Zionist Organization. Zionism alarmed monarchs, who used Jewish financial advisers but dropped them if they did anything to cause a public scandal. At the N. M. Rothschild bank a Fixing Room displayed portraits of the many monarchs it had subsidized. One unlikely borrower was the king of Prussia. Another portrait, of the Empress of All the Russias, hung there because the tsar refused to have his own exhibited in a Jewish bank.
Vera continued reading in London newspaper libraries about earlier years. England was still, in many respects, a mystery. She found, in its recent chronicles, reasons for the initial hesitation among Jews here to see the dangers brewing in Germany. Back in 1935, even Churchill had once seemed to waver. King George V still reigned, and expressed no concern. There were then six major dailies and two evening newspapers, whose proprietors took their cue from the Crown. Churchill wrote in the Daily Express: “History is replete with examples of men who have risen to power by employing stern, grim, and even frightful methods, but who, nevertheless, when their life is revealed as a whole, have been regarded as great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind. So may it be with Hitler.”4
Three years later, Vera questioned the young diplomat Ralph Wigram, who was now risking so much to inform Churchill of such views governing the Foreign Office. Why, Vera asked, had Churchill portrayed Hitler in such a way? Wigram said Churchill profoundly regretted it. He had tried to see Hitler as many Germans saw him: a leader who ended their humiliation. In 1935, it had angered some young civil servants enough that they sided with the fiercely anti-German permanent secretary in the Foreign Office, Robert Vansittart. For a time, Vansittart had considered Churchill to be as unbalanced and unpredictable as King George said he was.
“The external persecution to which the Germans have been subjected since the war” was offered as an excuse for Hitler's rise to power by Lord Lothian, one of the architects of the punitive Treaty of Versailles and an opponent of rearmament. He said the murder of Jews was simply “a reaction to this external persecution.”
Vera saw Lord Lothian's dismissal of the fate of Jews as pandering to royalty and to those in Whitehall who found it easier to remain blind to the approach of another world war. Churchill in 1935 wanted to broaden his appeal to the center-left of politics by representing himself as a reasonable man, defying Lothian's portrayal of him as a “whiskey-besotted warmonger.” Churchill abandoned his brief pretence. Vera was advised to avoid any overt contacts with Churchill that might expose her to the curiosity of internal security officers. She never mentioned in her lifetime the occasions noted by others when she was later consulted by him.5
By the late 1930s, Our Mutual Friends had formed an anti-Nazi secret service loosely linked to Section D and working with patriotic businessmen like Stephenson, who assigned Vera to intelligence missions. These info
rmal agents were known as NOCs: Non-Official Cover. She cultivated Ward Price, a senior Daily Mail foreign correspondent who had interviewed Hitler and his fellow dictator Mussolini, and wrote approvingly of both. He changed his views later, and became an NOC. Another of her journalist friends, Sefton Delmer, was born and educated in Germany and had been chief of the Daily Express bureau in Berlin until 1933. By the age of twenty-six he had walked and talked with Hitler and was now covering the Spanish Civil War, but he returned frequently to London. He arranged for Vera to become “an assistant, a sort of junior reporter.” This gave her further accreditation on foreign travels. Delmer's genius later shone in the Orwellian wartime London Deception Center.
In the Fleet Street press world, correspondents gathered in the local pubs during a break from foreign postings. Vera formed a long-lasting friendship with George Millar, who found newspaper work satisfied only part of his addiction to danger. Geoffrey Cox (later knighted), a Paris correspondent for the Daily Express, was a tough New Zealander. “The trouble is,” he told her one evening, “most Englishmen agree with King George: Abroad is bloody awful!”
She would eventually make use of all this talent. They were savvy men of the world, as Ian Fleming later called them. “They learned the rough edges because they were not tied to desks.”6
Cox and Vera would talk until closing time in the Wig and Pen, he recalled, “and then she'd follow a well-established route, Number 11 bus along the Strand, down sleeping Whitehall, past Victoria, Sloane Square and the King's Road to a basement apartment on Cheyne Walk, rented to establish her credentials as a young woman trying to make her own living.”7
Cox felt that France, if occupied by Germany, was the most promising field for behind-the-lines operations. It was close to England, where coastal residents heard the sound of German guns that first told them of the outbreak of the 1914–18 war. Cox deplored France's reluctance to believe Hitler was a serious threat, but said it was a result of the trauma suffered after the country's emasculation in that war: a tenth of the entire male population killed; almost as many Frenchmen permanently disabled; 673,000 peasants slaughtered and another half million injured. France was eclipsed by the solid German block, producing far more than twice her number of military males each year, towering up grim and grisly. It was the vengeful women of France who would have to fill gaps in any resistance armies.
Paris was where the British SIS kept its largest contingent abroad. Through Mutual Friends, Vera met officers in the French intelligence services, the Deuxième Bureau and the Service de Renseignements, who said nothing was being done to contain Nazi Germany. France was under pressure from London to cut its army by half because large armies would provoke Hitler to retaliate! The absurdity caused one Frenchman to choke on his aperitif. He had an informant in the Berlin Cipher Office who said the only thing to stop Hitler would be the certainty that large armies would oppose him.
By 1938 Vera knew that the French secret services had obtained photographs of the Berlin Cipher Office's coding machine. The French quoted the SIS station chief in Paris, “Biffy” Dunderdale, as saying British cryptographers thought it a waste of time to try and solve the puzzle.
Returning to London from Paris in October 1938, Vera felt she had a fresh perspective on English-French historical differences. The French Revolution's guillotines disposed of royals. An Instrument of Abdication had disposed of King Edward VIII on December 10, 1936: “I Edward the Eighth of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the seas, King, Emperor of India, do hereby declare my irrevocable decision to renounce the Throne.” Instead of losing his head to those who disapproved, he had signed away crown and empire to continue living with his American mistress, Mrs. Wallis Simpson.
Iona von Ustinov told Vera of apprehension in the German embassy because the ex-king took the title Duke of Windsor. The House of Windsor was once the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which changed its German name to avoid public animosity in the 1914–18 war. How long would it take the duke's former subjects to worry about the German connection? Lady Emerald Cunard, an American, who had served up Ribbentrop at her dinner parties as a real live Nazi, had introduced Wallis Simpson to Edward. When Mrs. Simpson learned she would never be Her Royal Highness, she moved to France with her ex-king. Did Wallis Simpson see Hitler as her husband's route back to kingship? She had made a public display of being impressed whenever she was with Hitler. The Duke of Windsor had made no secret, while king, of his approval of the Führer. He had written compromising letters to Hitler that, after World War II, were spirited out of the American zone of Germany by two British agents. The royal family feared that the letters, hidden and so far undiscovered by American occupation forces, might eventually fall into the hands of U.S. publishers. The agents were rewarded with knighthoods. One, Sir Anthony Blunt, got the post of Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures until it became impossible to hide his long history of spying for Moscow. A traitor had prevented the exposure in Britain of an ex-king's dealings with the Nazis, but had leaked the facts to Stalin.
Blunt's betrayal was unnecessary. Ambassador von der Schulenburg wrote Vera from Moscow at the end of 1938 that Stalin knew about British royalty's warm feelings for the Nazis. The count wrote that the Soviet Union's armed forces were in disarray, their leadership purged, and Jews expelled from public service. In Berlin, Ribbentrop achieved his ambition to become foreign minister. Over the years, Ribbentrop had courted friends of influence like Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail. A chummy letter to the press baron from Hitler did not surface until the rival Daily Express on May 10, 2001, published it with a report attacking Rothermere under the headline HE BELIEVED HITLER HAD THE RIGHT POLICIES FOR BRITAIN. The Daily Express reprinted the letter to discredit its competitor in the ferocious circulation wars of the twenty-first century.
During these months before Germany's invasion of Poland marked the beginning of World War II, Ribbentrop and his acolytes had been busy buying the services of British journalists. One, an otherwise obscure newsman and would-be author, James Murphy, translated Mein Kampf into English and was rewarded with a job in the Nazi propaganda ministry in Berlin. A well-known writer, Gordon Bolitho, dismissed reports of German Jews being deprived of all rights. “The reason we hear the Jews first is that they wail more loudly,” he wrote. The historian Nesta Webster declared that Bolshevism was the creation of Jews. The Aeroplane, the gospel within the aviation industry, avidly read by service airmen, published a theory that was eccentrically outside its normal professional concerns, claiming Jews exercised a communist influence on Welsh miners! The Imperialist Fascist League's Arnold Leese, a British army war veteran and surgeon, advocated gas chambers as the most efficient solution to the Jewish problem. All this was emanating not from Nazi Germany but from England itself!
These attacks strengthened the view among Jewish underground fighters in Palestine that England was their enemy. The English were befogged and cut off from reality in more troubling ways than headlines. These strident and eccentric anti-Semitic voices did not speak for the majority, but Vera had been warned that an internal security chief was already associating Jews with communist plots against England. She was firmly entrenched as Vera Atkins in most minds, but it was time to make sure she was thoroughly rid of any trace of Jewish roots. It placed upon her a heavy emotional burden, but it would free her to serve both the causes in which she believed: her Jewish heritage, and this funny old country whose people were ultimately to die for freedom of belief.
7
Connections
“Successful spy thrillers use a simple formula,” Vera told an American guest of the Stephensons in London. “You take three things a long way apart: An old blind woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in Norway, a little curiosity shop in London kept by a Jew with a beard. Not much connection between the three? You make a connection.” She was paraphrasing John Buchan (Lord Tweedsmuir) in his novel The Three Hostages.
Her many connections were poles apar
t in their views on Hitler. The American architect Philip Johnson was a friend of London's social diarist Sir Henry “Chips” Channon. Both adored the male eroticism of Nazi rallies.
“All those dear blond boys in black leather,” Johnson exclaimed. Vera and Mary Stephenson exchanged covert smiles.
John Buchan wrote spy thrillers while engaged in high diplomacy. He suggested that Vera should be wary of local pro-Nazis like an adviser to Prime Minister Chamberlain, Sir Joseph Ball, who had an internal security MI5 background and was the Conservative Party's research director and a moving force behind profascists of the Anglo-American Fellowship. “Jews are the demons who created Stalin,” Ball had said publicly. What if he were to discover Vera was not quite the purebred English gentlewoman she seemed?
Her travels made unusual connections that might have aroused curiosity if London society were not so indifferent. A neighbor, the expatriate American journalist Martha Gellhorn, wife of Ernest Hemingway, described it: “I can go away, spend six months in the jungle, come back and walk into a room, and people won't ask a single question about where I've been or what I've been doing. They'll just say, ‘Lovely to see you. Have a drink.’ It is the privacy of absolute indifference.”
Ralph Wigram had come home to this same indifference from a posting at the British embassy in Paris. “A bright and steady flame burning in a broken lamp,” Churchill called him, knowing that Wigram must die soon from infantile paralysis. “He guided us towards safety and honor.” Wigram wrote to his wife, Ava, that he had not been able to make people in Whitehall understand the Nazi threat. “Winston has always, always understood.”
To Vera, Wigram was a hero for obeying his conscience in defiance of his pro-German superior, Sir John Simon, who oversaw SIS matters. Wigram withdrew documents from Whitehall, diplomatic reports on the substantial evidence of Hitler's war preparations that Sir John chose to ignore. Wigram passed such papers to Churchill's close scientific adviser, Professor Frederick Lindemann (later Viscount Cherwell), who would drive along winding country roads to Oxford University to photograph them, then motor back through the night to return the originals the next day with nobody else the wiser. Linde-mann was born in Germany, and reputedly answered any scientific question from Churchill with such brevity and accuracy that he became known as Prof. Neither Prof nor Wigram could claim immunity from the Official Secrets Act.
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