Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  “The danger was even greater for Vera. If her activities and origins were known, Ball would get her deported,” John Buchan recalled. Wigram arranged work for Vera as a part-time secretary in Whitehall, where she scouted for gifted young people. One of these was Nadya Letteney, who made lists for Vera of other talented linguists among Jewish refugees.

  “Wigram was shy and always courteous, clutching his papers, head painfully bent, hand gripping a cane to steady himself while he opened a door for me,” Nadya said later. “Hitler would have put him into his euthanasia program. Wigram died a natural death in 1937.”1

  Vera had consulted Wigram about another unlikely connection: Baroness Irene Isabella Margarete Paulina Caecilia von Meyendorff ex den Hause Uxkuell, called Irina, heiress to vast Baltic estates conferred by Catherine the Great. Irina's mother, forced by the revolution to flee Russia, made a fortune in Berlin by investing in highly profitable vending machines. At eighteen, Irina was a classic blond beauty when she was first hired by Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA), the largest German film studio. She took the lead in the 1936 movie Die Letzten Vier von Santa Cruz and became famous as Die Meyendorff. She was spotted by Vera during a visit to Berlin as one of a circle of anti-Nazis among highborn Russians in key positions. Die Meyendorff bravely refused to give a gloss to UFA's Nazi movie propaganda. Her husband, Dr. Heinz Zahler, was personal physician to her boss at UFA, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and supplied Goebbels with drugs to suppress his cocaine addiction. Irina suggested killing Goebbels with an overdose. Nobody would suspect foul play, she argued, but this went against Dr. Zahler's code of ethics. Later he set aside his scruples to join the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. The plotters were named in British “black” propaganda broadcasts, causing speculation among survivors that British intelligence deliberately exposed them. Dr. Zahler was believed to be among the hundreds hanged on Hitler's orders, many of them named in the British broadcasts.

  Questions about this were to be raised in postwar England both by Irina and by Marie “Missie” Vassiltchikov. The daughter of Russian prince Illarion and princess Lydia Vassiltchikov, who had been victims of the revolution, Missie was employed by the British Legation in Berlin, where there was a shortage of Russian linguists. In her diaries, she wrote that British authorities denied any knowledge of such broadcasts naming the plotters. A five-hundred-page government report of the Political Warfare Executive, which was responsible for the broadcasts, remained classified until the late 1990s. This official history made no mention of PWE's broadcasts that named those in Germany involved in the plot to overthrow Hitler and replace him with a pro-Allied government in which Count von der Schulenburg was to be foreign minister. Pro-Soviet members of PWE were later said to have inspired the betrayal of the plotters. Hints of their treachery emerged during the postwar exposure of Soviet agents, Englishmen who served in the British intelligence establishment and who feared that the overthrow of Hitler and the creation of a German government friendly to the Allies would endanger the Soviet Union. By war's end Irina, in self-imposed exile in Bavaria, was penniless after refusing to serve Nazi propaganda. In 1961 she was to meet James Robertson Justice, the Scottish actor, naturalist, musician, and poet. She lived with him in Scotland, where they flew falcons and built up a circle of friends including a Bolivian ballet dancer, an Icelandic lepidopterist, an Arab ruler, Gaelic scholars, the Duke of Edinburgh, and the Prince of Wales. Irina became a British citizen in 1967. Justice, after a second term as rector of Edinburgh University, suffered strokes that reduced them both to penury. He died in 1975. Keith Bromley, a naturalist and philanthropist, later married Irina.2

  As the descent to war quickened, Vera in London felt she was watching a Shakespearean drama, a clash between two fierce opponents: Churchill, still hoping for moral leadership from the Crown, and Chamberlain, the ex–Birmingham metallurgist, dull, ascetic, sniffing his disapproval of Churchill's “noisy, voluptuous, flamboyant style.” Chamberlain was afraid of tossing out the German ambassador, Ribbentrop, who had rented his house in Eaton Square while Chamberlain occupied the prime minister's official residence at No. 10 Downing Street. The prime minister also took his cue from ex-king Edward, now the Duke of Windsor, who had written to Hitler “as one ex-serviceman to another” to establish a friendly relationship. This note, found in Edward's correspondence, was extracted by Charles (Dick) Ellis, an Australian colonel who survived trench warfare in World War I and later became a British army intelligence officer in Russian Central Asia. His more recent cover included that of a newspaper correspondent in Europe. Ellis cultivated both White Russian and German contacts. He assured Vera that letters were still the best way to convey information. Tens of thousands of foreign citizens living in Germany brought out messages. Germany was not hermetically sealed. Embassies of many countries routinely forwarded mail. Sweden had fifty-three local consular offices in Germany that acted as mailboxes. A Jewish German-language teacher to the Royal Siam Embassy vanished, and the news reached the Central British Fund through Bangkok. The mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler, broke with the Nazis in 1936 because of anti-Semitism, and worked his way to England. On the advice of Count von der Schulenburg, he met with Vera and returned to Germany. (Goerdeler was to have been chancellor, with Schulenburg as foreign minister, in the new anti-Hitler regime. Both were caught and sentenced to be hanged by the Nazi People's Court on September 8, 1944.3)

  From childhood Vera knew how her father's people always discovered paths of entry and exit. Jews found ways to reach Palestine, where Wingate showed how an oppressor could be undermined with grit and imagination. A Jewish organization, small in numbers but of great complexity, was rescuing thousands of victims of Nazi persecution. Its name in the 1930s was kept secret, but it gave Vera news of fiercely anti-Nazi women working in Poland to bring out Jews and prepare for an expected German onslaught.4

  Colonel Ellis saw Poland as the target for a first Nazi-run military invasion and shared his notes with Vera. “The seizure of power in Russia by Bolsheviks in October 1917,” Ellis wrote, “opened the way for German penetration of the Caucasus and an advance to Persia and Central Asia.” He later expanded his notes for a book, The Transcaspian Episode, which was kept from publication by British intelligence mandarins until 1963. Bill Stephenson made Ellis his deputy in wartime covert action, and later denounced “attempts to punish Ellis for airing matters that a government obsessed with secrecy wants to conceal for ever. There are many ways to punish free spirited secret servants of the Crown.”5

  By the winter of 1938–39, Vera had made what John Buchan called “connections” with a variety of highly individualistic characters on either side of the great divide between pro- and anti-Nazis. Rudolf Schmidt was a German army officer swiftly promoted by Hitler. His brother Hans-Thilo Schmidt worked at the Berlin Cipher Office, and sold photographs of the Enigma coding machine to the French secret service. Vera knew about Hans-Thilo from Gustave Bertrand, the Paris coding expert, because Bertrand had shared with Ralph Wigram the frustration of dealing with lazy-minded military chiefs. Mutual Friends in the armed services formed one-man covert-warfare intelligence units with official-sounding titles to avoid scrutiny by the top brass. Military Intelligence (Research), MIR, for example, consisted of Gubbins, instructed by a shadow colleague: “Prepare for guerrilla warfare, establish contacts in future occupied countries, foment insurrections, and develop destructive devices.” Such planning “lacked coherence and clear purpose,” wrote the first government-approved recorder of these activities, William Mackenzie, in an overview kept secret until the twenty-first century. “The planning looked incoherent,” Vera recalled. “Units were unknown to one another for the sake of self-preservation.” Young rebels inside Whitehall taught her to pen instructions on borrowed stationery, sign a memo as coming from one department, and receive the same memo in the department to which it was addressed. With duly processed but fake authorization in hand, she could obtain facilities for Mutual Friends who enjoy
ed outwitting Chief of Staff General Sir Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd, that champion of “the well-bred horse” as the chief ally of the infantryman. He had written that “mechanization of the army at the expense of the cavalry is unnecessary and dangerous.”

  This Well-Bred Horse Brigade mentality was challenged by a new war minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha, a Jew, who demanded mobile mechanized divisions, not cavalry. He was derided as “notoriously Jewish” by upper-class fascists at Stonor Park, Oxfordshire, the family estate presided over by pillars of the Anglo-German federation. Five major-generals who supported Hore-Belisha's reforms were suddenly “without further employment.” One victim, General Sir Philip Chetwode, said “the problem in the War Office is complete brain slackness.”

  Vera expected “brain slackness” in the City, headquarters of global companies upon whose factories, mines, and markets the sun never set, which were stuffed with nephews and brothers and cousins of the privileged upper crust. She was invited to parties that began in a privately chartered train with one carriage for gambling and another for dancing while it sped to distant resorts for a weekend. The national character was masked by an apparent refusal to take anything seriously. But under the cloak of “toffee-nosed little darlings” and “gorgeous glamour boys” she detected a quality defined by the opponent of Count Lettow-Vorbeck in Africa, the notorious British intelligence officer Richard “Dirty Dick” Meinertzhagen, about whom Lawrence of Arabia said: “His hot immoral hatred of the enemy expressed itself in trickery as in violence. [He] took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy or his friend by some unscrupulous jest as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans with his African knobkerrie.”

  The little darlings might make adequate street fighters if they shed their “Smug Pratt” costumes. Meanwhile, their high society patrons finally got rid of Hore-Belisha after he proposed to promote non-commissioned officers. “The Officers’ Mess did not wish to be invaded by men who ate peas with their knives,” she heard General Chetwode complain publicly. “Few officers of the Army allow much play to their imagination. It would almost seem a crime to be one inch outside the sealed pattern of regulations.”

  The one-man operation known as Section D kept out of the sealed pattern by hiding in cobwebby quarters at 2 Caxton Street, Westminster. D's chief, Major Laurence Douglas Grand, made up the entire staff under a cover title: Statistical Research. His detractors said he stalked the streets wearing a black homburg and dark glasses, and flourishing a tapered cigarette holder and a swank swordstick from Swaine Adeney. His schemes for subverting the enemy, Gubby recalled, “were pretty wild.”

  Reckless innovators appealed to Churchill's own distaste for spit and polish. “Loyalty to the State must come before loyalty to the Service,” he advised one officer, Torr Anderson, who first confided his concerns to Vera. She sent him to Churchill's secretary, Violet Pearman, who met him in a tea shop. He asked what he should do with secret information about frightening weaknesses in the Royal Air Force. Mrs. Pearman said softly, “Go to Mister Churchill.” Regular meetings continued until the outbreak of war in 1939.

  Vera knew the risk of prosecution. It depended on how patriotism was interpreted. Y was the single letter used to cover an accepted secret organization that tapped into, and analyzed, foreign diplomatic, military, naval, and other radio traffic “of interest” to British intelligence. Y's chief was anonymous. Y's intercepts, proving the rapid growth of a German military machine, were dismissed, mislaid, or put in bottom drawers. Y's interception of high-speed Russian traffic was conducted from bases in remote parts of the world; Gubbins, for a while, had conducted intercepts of Shanghai-Moscow traffic from a vantage point in Afghanistan.

  Unfortunately, access to Y's reports was closely held by powerful men who shared Lord Halifax's wish to avoid nasty confrontations. Halifax voiced no criticism of Hitler's claim that “the German race represents the highest evolution of the human species. It is unthinkable that eighty-five million German Aryans should be compressed within tight borders dictated by others. The Third Reich must expand into more living space.”

  Halifax saw it as his patriotic duty to thwart Soviet Russian ambitions, with German help. His attempts to get rid of Y's chief, who was enraged by Halifax's efforts to appease Hitler, were challenged through secret parliamentary investigations monitored by Hugh Dalton, the Labour Party chairman of the Anti-Nazi Council. Dalton asked Vera to see a socialist comrade, Léon Blum, the French prime minister who had resigned in 1937 and now wanted to explain reasons for his distrust of British wisdom. For one thing, French intelligence had counted twelve planes in each German air force squadron. The British had wrongly counted only nine, underestimated German first-line air strength, and said “three hundred and thirty German military aircraft with crews are in training.” Blum said French intelligence reported that Germany had in service fifteen hundred operational planes of advanced design, some battle-trained in Spain's Civil War.

  “Facts,” said Vera to Ian Fleming, “are what officialdom wants them to be.”

  Fleming was one of the City stockbrokers she had first dismissed as “Smug Pratts.” Her mind was changed when Admiral John Godfrey transferred from his battleship Repulse early in 1939 to become director of Naval Intelligence. Ian Fleming's recruitment began when Admiral Godfrey was lunching at the Carlton Grill with the governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, who made a seemingly offhand remark: “Good chap, Fleming. Old Etonian. Stockbroker, but bored. Covered the Russian show trials of those British engineers for some newspaper.” And so Fleming took up position in Room 39 of NID. Fleming's father, Valentine, was a close friend of Churchill's who in the last war had been killed in action. This created a powerful bond, and Ian could convey to Churchill further troubling naval realities. Vera's friend, Stringbag, confirmed for Ian that the Royal Navy clung to certain old traditions that failed to confront modern realities. “A navy pilot is treated as a coxswain, his airplane just a version of the longboat. My navigator has command, and as the Observer. Commissioned observers cannot fly with noncommissioned pilots, who, as petty officers, also cannot sit in at flight briefings in the wardroom.”

  Vera saw Hugh Dalton as a voice in Parliament who did not submit to Labour Party tribalism. She spent an uproarious evening with him and Rex Leeper, head of the Foreign Office news service, who proposed to flood Europe with anti-Nazi propaganda. He had been a 1914–18 wartime spy, and said it was basically “boot-leather detective work.” They were joined by Terence Horsley, a journalist who would later work with actors Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson in covert use of the twenty-year-old Swordfish biplanes, the aerial equivalent of “the well-bred cavalry horse.”

  Vera finished off a pub meal of sausages and mashed potatoes, laced with liberal quantities of ale, and wove her way back to the Cheyne Walk apartment with Dalton, thinking light-headedly of how she might deflect the increasing curiosity of powerful profascists like Sir Joseph Ball. She extracted a bottle of Polish vodka from the larder. “I'm getting into the swing of Polish life,” Dalton remembered her saying as she spilled radishes on the kitchen counter. “You take a radish, scrape butter on a knife, slice the radish, leave a filling of butter, sprinkle salt, and knock back the vodka.”

  “What about the radish?” he asked.

  “I suppose,” she hiccuped, “you eat it. I haven't got that far in my studies yet. I want to get to Poland before it's too late.”

  8

  Spattering Brains with a Knobkerrie

  Hugh Dalton recalled that he would have liked to live inside Vera's head. He said later, “It would be a comforting place full of good things, tidy rooms with fresh flowers and home cooking and fine Scotch whiskey in cut-glass tumblers. And a cellar full of vodka and radishes with a sign on the door: Forget the sentimentality—Kill the bastards!” He understood her duality precisely.

  At her Winchelsea retreat, he saw what the sea winds did to sculpt her prominent cheekbones, high forehead, and glorious b
lack hair. He told Mary Stephenson: “Within sight of the French coast, she walked with the measured deliberation of a general, then curled up on a sofa like a kitten.”

  She scorned “champagne socialists” who pontificated about peaceful solutions, and how there are “no just wars.”

  Dalton assured her: “In my political constituency are northern coalminers who would never think twice about jabbing a broken bottle in the face of a German or kicking him in the groin.” Mary recalled warning Vera that “Dalton's enthusiasm for the unconventional offends many diehards.”

  Dalton loved it when Vera endorsed Meinertzhagen's philosophy of “spattering brains with a knobkerrie.” He never forgot her impassioned words: “We know very bad men plan very bad things. We must find out who they are and kill them. It's not your Christian approach. It's not your English fair play. It means forgetting the freedoms of Germans. They lost their freedom when they voted Hitler into power. Whitehall says we mustn't blow up German factories. Yet the RAF dropped bombs on Arabs when pious Lord Londonderry was air minister.”

  Vera's explosion followed a conference of thirty-two nations in July 1938 that dashed all hopes for the rescue of Jews. It assembled at the French resort of Évian-les-Bains near the Swiss border. The American Federation of Labor stipulated that entry to the United States be barred to Jews who might compete for jobs. Hitler rejoiced: “The world agrees that Jews are parasites.”