Krystyna Skarbek, flitting through this frustrating Paris episode, told Vera of the astonishing ingenuity of Poles in escaping to places like British-run Gibraltar. Churchill broadcast a tribute to them: “The soul of Poland is indestructible.” Germany and Russia had held it “in bondage for a hundred and fifty years, unable to quench its spirit.” The words were regarded as Churchill's promise of help for the Poles if he gained power. To shake off the myth of a phony war, he said Germany still meant to plant itself on the shores of the Black Sea, overrun the Baltic States, and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of southeastern Europe.
Krystyna began work as an agent in the Balkans. She was a self-starter like Vera, and normally would not have taken orders from another woman. Krystyna loved men, and under her spell they would do anything for her. She was very much like Vera, keeping eyes fixed on dangerous objectives. She trekked over mountains through deep snow with messages, arms, and supplies for Poland. She based herself in Budapest. In Prague, Czech underground fighters were already organized. They had lived under Nazi rule, and had no reason to trust British promises. They were smuggling in weapons and equipment on their own.
Paris was full of plotters. The real closework fighters feared the lazy reliance on the Maginot Line. “Our generals and politicians won't heave themselves out of the beds of their mistresses,” she was told by Henri Tanguy, a communist introduced by seventeen-year-old medical student Rolande Colas soon after Vera spotted her as a future agent.
Vera was using Paris contacts to pursue inquiries into the carelessness of the SIS. Prime Minister Chamberlain disclosed to the War Cabinet that British intelligence agents had been negotiating with German generals. Churchill's fury can best be gauged from Cadogan's entry in his securely locked diary.5 “Cabinet told of our contact with Generals.” Lord Halifax “mustn't listen too much to Winston on the subject of beating Germany.”
Lord Halifax had been first to respond to the overtures made by bogus German generals and had set in motion prewar and wartime meetings with the two luckless British agents. Churchill invented yet another independent resource for waging domestic guerrilla warfare: a Statistical Department run by Hugh Dalton. From this, Vera sourced the raw material for her investigation into the SIS disaster. It turned out that SIS's acting chief, Menzies, had been forced by the fiasco to shut down stations and circuits and to overhaul the organization in London on the assumption that all SIS networks were blown.
13
Your Affectionate Opposition: The Gestapo
Vera reported to Hugh Dalton that the French refused to release the Polish code breakers. Some plan had to be worked out to get them to safety in England. “We can't leave it to the old intelligence queens,” he said, and fluttered his hands and rolled his eyes in a manner that was a familiar warning. He settled his large bulk more comfortably in the settee of her Winchelsea home. “I let loose independent scholars to spot how the SIS reports were doctored.” He let his head fall back and stared at the ceiling. “Now I need your experience to tell me what really happened. Because those two SIS agents were captured on Hitler's personal orders after he made an approach to Lord Halifax and other appeasers here.”
The two British agents had been in secret contact with alleged opposition groups in Germany long before the bomb that almost took Hitler's life on November 9, 1939, in Munich during a commemoration of the beer-hall putsch attempt in 1923. The British agents were kidnapped within hours of the bomb's explosion. Before this, Hitler had silently studied reports on “secret” talks between the SIS agents and Hauptmann Schemmel of the Army Transport Department, whose identity was borrowed by Walter Schellenberg, the ambitious deputy chief of the RSHA foreign intelligence section.
Earlier on the same day of the bomb, Unity Mitford, the English-woman rumored to be Hitler's mistress, was comforted by him after she fired a pistol at her head, supposing that a London-Berlin alliance was out of reach. Hitler arranged for her return to her father, Lord Redesdale, to show goodwill, and was encouraged by reports that Neville Chamberlain's principal private secretary, Sir Arthur Rucker, said communism was a greater danger than Nazi Germany.
After surviving the bomb blast, Hitler ordered Walter Schellenberg to lure the British agents, Captain Sigismund Payne Best and Major Richard Stevens, to the German-Dutch border at Venlo, snatch them, and arrange a show trial to discredit the British secret service. Major Stevens was a former Malay police cadet, an ex-lieutenant of the Rajput Rifles, and a translator of Russian wireless signals intercepted on the Northwest Frontier. Captain Best had been selected to take up residence at the Hague by Claude Marjoribanks Dansey, running an agency called Z whose operations in Europe paralleled the SIS. Officers of the two organizations supposedly knew nothing about each other. Best and Stevens discovered each other's existence only when London agreed to the secret negotiations. Dalton was troubled by the actions of Stewart Menzies, still not confirmed in the post of C, the SIS chief. Vera was to review the Best-Stevens negotiations. The agents appeared to act without central coordination.
Vera learned that Hitler had attended a state funeral on Sunday, November 12, for eight people killed by the bomb. Goebbels announced that if the beer-hall celebration had stuck to its announced agenda, the bomb would have killed Hitler, who had started to speak half an hour before schedule and left early. “A miracle,” Goebbels said publicly, seizing his propaganda opportunity. “The Führer stands under the protection of the Almighty.”
Vera traced Captain Best's connections to heirs of an ancient German dynasty, Princes Philipp and Christopher of Hesse-Kassel, whose grandmother was a daughter of Queen Victoria. The brother princes had joined Nazi organizations in the early 1930s, and were attracted to Nazi elitism and anticommunism. Their names were dropped by Walter Schellenberg in falsely presenting a portrait of pro-British elements. Admiral Canaris and Hans Oster, deputy head of Canaris's intelligence organization and administrative director of the army, were anti-Hitler. Both had supported early appeals for British help in getting rid of Hitler. Best had been in touch with General Ludwig Beck, who resigned as chief of the German general staff after Hitler overrode his warnings against war with Britain. Hitler was reported as saying, “The only general I fear is Beck.” Beck's successor, General Franz Halder, wanted to marginalize Hitler, or put him under control of the military chiefs.
The two agents had acted in good faith when Dutch intelligence was asked by the Germans for an introduction to Major Stevens on September 5, 1939. Menzies, while Admiral Sinclair was still SIS chief but already dying, had instructed the BBC to broadcast in its German service the introductory “Hier ist London” twice over to signal that British agents would attend a clandestine meeting on the Dutch-German frontier on October 17. Hitler put off invading the Netherlands after being told that the Chamberlain government wished for German participation in a European League of States against Bolshevism.
Schellenberg had used an English transceiver supplied by Major Stevens, call sign ON 4, to arrange meetings with “the English Secret Service Station.” In the Hague, a Dutch company known as NV Handelsdienst voor het Continent was regularly visited by Schellenberg, who knew it was SIS cover, at Nieuwe Uitleg 15. It had a secret phone number, 55 63 31, for use in emergencies. A German secret agent, F. 479, had been in Holland for years and, under orders authorized by Hitler, initiated the talks with Schellenberg or, as he called himself, Hauptmann Schemmel.
When he first met the British agents, Schellenberg wore a monocle in the style of Schemmel, and was taken aback when he saw that Best also wore a monocle. The German spymaster blushed when Best asked: “I say, old boy, why'd you wear a monocle like me?” Schellenberg mumbled that he was shortsighted in one eye. In fact, the monocle was a device for signaling Professor Max de Crinis, director of the psychiatric department of the famous Charity Hospital in Berlin, who came to the secret talks in the role of a key voice of “German opposition.” He took cues from Schellenberg, who removed the monocle with his left hand if de C
rinis was to stop talking, and removed it with his right hand if he needed de Crinis's support. It all seemed like comic opera to Vera: a top psychiatrist guessing what Hitler's spymaster meant when he fiddled with his monocle in a Dutch restaurant while conning British agents.
On October 30, 1939, Dutch intelligence sent a trusted officer, Dirk Klop, to drive the psychiatrist and the spy chief to Captain Best's Amsterdam office, where it was agreed that peace negotiations would begin upon Hitler's arrest. A protocol was sent to Menzies and solemnly passed along on October 31 to Alexander Cadogan at the Foreign Office, who noted laconically in his diary: “Something is going on in Germany.”
Three days later, Admiral Sinclair died. Menzies became temporary SIS chief. Vera now fully understood Churchill's opposition to this becoming a permanent appointment. He suspected the secret negotiations were being run by Menzies for Lord Halifax in his search for peace.
The day before the bomb explosion, the British agents had been in the Dutch town of Venlo, where they asked Schellenberg, in his guise of Schemmel, to produce one of the anti-Nazi generals next day to negotiate terms for peace. The German agreed. But after the attempt on his life in Munich, Hitler ordered that Best and Stevens be seized from the neutral Netherlands. Schellenberg waited in Venlo for a teatime rendezvous at the Café Bacchus on Thursday, November 9. The two British agents and their Dutch intelligence colleague, Lieutenant Klop, arrived in a large American Buick, crossed the street, and were ambushed by armed SS men in civilian clothes. There was a shootout. Klop was hit. With Best and Stevens, he was bundled into a car and whipped smartly across the border to Düsseldorf, where he died.
Goebbels broadcast the boast, “Our SS nabbed the European head of the [British] Secret Service. Our boys made themselves out to be enemies of the state and so lured this piece of garbage to the border.”1
Sir Alexander Cadogan, unaware of the coup, wrote in his diary that same day: “Saw Menzies. General did NOT come into Holland today.” The general was the German requested by the British agents as proof of the alleged anti-Nazi plot. Next day, Cadogan's diary coldly noted: “Our men who met, or were to have met, Gen[eral] yesterday bumped off.” Four days later, Cadogan endorsed a proposal by Lord Halifax and a senior Foreign Office man, Sir Orme Sargent, for an “anti-Comintern pact” that would ally Britain and Germany with Italy, Japan, and Spain against the Communist International.
Later Berlin announced the capture at the Swiss border of “a Dutch bomb maker” named Georg Elser, said to have confessed to working for British intelligence. Best and Stevens were interrogated daily by the Gestapo, and the reports were sent each evening to Hitler. The long interrogation reports were rewritten in three times the normal print size for Hitler, whose eyes were “very weak,” according to Schellenberg's memoirs. Best and Stevens survived, and SIS reports on their activities were embargoed until 2005.2
Vera believed Best and Stevens gave the addresses in London of intelligence organizations, and of SIS locations in Europe, plus cover names of commercial enterprises used for espionage, and methods of coding and communication. Intercepted telegrams and analysis of German newspapers flown from Stockholm by a special RAF weekly flight to England yielded German counterintelligence references to “a new sabotage department” preparing for a Special Operations Executive.3
On Wednesday, November 22, 1939, Goebbels declared “the English swine” were to be publicly tried for attempted murder and “the British secret service's time-honored method of assassination.” Goebbels listed as other typical victims Tsar Nicholas II, King Alexander of Yugoslavia, and Lawrence of Arabia.4
The names of British, French, Belgian, and Dutch intelligence officers were announced by Berlin radio. Churchill, infuriated, wrote another powerful plea to have his man, Admiral Godfrey, put in charge of the SIS. Cadogan called it “a tiresome letter” in his diary and expressed the appeasers’ widely held opinion that “Churchill ought to have enough to do without butting into other people's business.” The confirmation of Stewart Menzies as C was supported by Lord Halifax. The Holy Fox was exploring another “peace channel” through the Italian dictator Mussolini. Opposition to Churchill was orchestrated by that éminence grise of Imperial Defence, Sir Maurice Hankey. Menzies won the day.
A message was sent from Berlin at the end of 1939 over the SIS wireless set given by Major Stevens to Walter Schellenberg for the very purpose of communicating with London. Schellenberg used the free service to boast that there were really no British secrets left. He twisted the dying old lion's tail with a final signal: “Negotiations… with silly and conceited people are tedious. A hearty farewell [from] your affectionate German Opposition. The Gestapo.”
14
The Phony War Ends
During the ominously grim winter of 1939–40 the only real violence was wind and rain. Vera had won her spurs but felt lost in the confusion of London politics. She escaped into “utter irresponsibility,” and a sense of removing a heavy load from her shoulders at her Winchelsea retreat. She was not to learn until many years later that her visits to the Netherlands had been logged by the internal security service MI5 as “suspect.” Informers claimed she had paid a large sum of money to German intelligence to secure protection for a relative. The accusation had to be seen in the light of the SIS fiasco in the Venlo affair, but it lingered.
In high places, similar doubts about Colin Gubbins festered in the secret alleyways of Whitehall. Gubby in Paris tried to help Czech and Polish underground armies. He was ordered not to talk to the Czech intelligence chief, František Moravec, who was exclusively under the wing of the SIS.
Churchill tried to shake off the phony war paralysis. Britain and France had the power to revive the life of the Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks, he declared in a broadcast on November 12, 1939, warning “blatant, panoplied, clattering Nazi Germany” not to underestimate a country that might seem hobbled by its adherence to democratic procedures. Parliamentary countries “had to bear with these difficulties.” But there must come an end to shilly-shallying, to nursing vain hopes of avoiding “the fearful storm about to fall upon the business-like calm of the masses of our wage-earning folk.”
Vera was told by a political opponent of Churchill, Josiah Wedgwood, that the speech moved him immensely. Wedgwood was a Labour member of Parliament who had fought gallantly in the 1914–18 war and now recognized, as did increasing numbers of wage earners, that Churchill spoke for a constituency that crossed party lines. But Chamberlain took the speech “very badly,” according to his staunch supporter at the foreign office, R. A. Butler, who condemned Churchill's words as “vulgar.”
Vera came out of hibernation and was seen regularly in both Paris and London. She met Stringbag at Simpson's on the Strand, where they had a lunch of rare roast beef, prefaced with a Pimm's and accompanied by a decent bottle of what Stringbag called “plonk.” Good wines could still be found. She asked him to join her again on the coast, for a belated Christmas celebration.
There had been black frosts and snow, gale-force winds and lashing rain on the English Channel. They spent days in bed, sipping the champagne she always brought over from Paris and reading the heroic adventures of Captain Horatio Hornblower, the dashing hero of C. S. Forester's naval sagas. “I felt snug as a bug in a rug,” she later told Mary Stephenson. “Life was normal.”
There came one of those sudden breaks in the weather that make English winters bearable. A watery sun broke through the clouds. Huddled in duffel coats, they tramped around Winchelsea. The port town had been continuously attacked by French raiders for decades. King Edward I in 1288 left his other domain in Aquitaine to design Winchelsea on the gridiron principle of the French bastides. Vera clung tight to Stringbag as they walked along Dead Man's Lane through which, 570 years before, French marauders poured to butcher and rape worshippers at the adjoining church. Winchelsea men had retaliated with barbarous attacks against French coastal ports. The old stories of invasions in both directions had made a deep impression on h
er, perhaps more than someone English-born, for she had learned the town's history as an adult, whereas children took it all for granted. Stringbag saw the narrow English Channel between his island home and continental Europe as an airman: “Just a hop, skip, and jump from Normandy,” he said. “The English and French are better qualified to cross it than Germans.” He was laughing. “God, we're so smug in England, aren't we? We live in the past, glorifying our defeats.” He added, “Take me, for instance. Promoted from a snotty to an acting temporary sub-lieutenant (Air) in the Royal Navy Reserve. What a title!”
“What's a snotty?” She giggled.
“A midshipman, not old enough to wear a gold stripe round my sleeve. I had brass buttons so I couldn't wipe snot from my nose. In Hornblower's day, midshipmen were snotty-nosed little devils. Too many admirals still live in that other age.”
Under the jocularity there were flashes of bitterness. A midshipman friend had been lost aboard the aircraft carrier Courageous, sunk by a U-boat in the Bristol Channel. “He was eighteen,” said Stringbag. “Whenever he was on leave, if he stayed at London hotels, he'd be mistaken for a boy working the lift. He got fed up and told one snobbish old dowager the lift was out of order. She had to walk up the stairs.” Stringbag had been at Scapa Flow, the prime naval anchorage off the northern tip of Scotland, when Churchill had inspected the defenses. Scapa was closer to Norway, a potential hideout for German warships, than it was to London. Churchill had called for an urgent update of antisubmarine nets. Before dawn on October 12, 1939, a German submarine penetrated the Scapa Flow defenses and sank the battleship Royal Oak. “She went straight down with an admiral and eight hundred men,” said Stringbag. “Bodies are still pinned to the sea bottom by a lash-up of netting so corpses won't wash up and demoralize us.” He gave her a straight look, and added, “I'm not supposed to know what you're up to, but get your outfit to pull their fingers out.”
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