Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  Later she recalled his words precisely because she had been angry with herself for blaming the illusion of a phony war on Britain's indifference to tragedies unfolding in Europe. It was easy to forget the deadly war at sea.

  She asked Stringbag if the gap in their ages made a difference. He said no. She was looking ahead: maybe she might want his children after this bloody war was finished. But maybe, by then, she'd be past childbearing age. Then she thought: Well, he can't see further than tomorrow. Before he left, he confided that he was to rejoin his squadron on the carrier Glorious. “We might be flying Gloster Gladiators.” That sounds rather posh, she thought, until he added: “They're biplanes like the Swordfish. Don't worry, they don't sink.”

  She returned to Paris. There Gubby, now a lieutenant colonel, was briefing an aide about to return to Romania. She stifled a wish to go back, just once, without feeling hagridden with responsibilities. Instead she studied the French countryside as a battleground for secret operations. She was back in Paris at a Russian nightclub when Gubbins gave a Scots Highlander's version of Stanka razin and Ochi chyornye, delighting his Czech and Polish companions. They were less amused by Gubby's inability to meet their military needs. Poles were getting a thousand kilos a month of supplies through their own clandestine courier service across the Romanian border. Czechs used courier services from Austria through Yugoslavia. Krystyna Skarbek was in Budapest with Andrzej Kowerski, preparing escape lines for both Poles and Czechs seeking training and arms to fight the Nazi occupiers. Kowerski had won the highest Polish military award, for bravery in resisting the German invaders in Poland's only motorized brigade, before he signed up for covert warfare.

  French secret service needs had to be correlated with the British. Vera met with Gustave Bertrand of the French Deuxième Bureau, the buyer of Hans-Thilo Schmidt's Enigma manuals. That was almost nine years ago now! Bertrand wanted to keep the Polish code breakers, whose old chiefs, Gwido Langer and Maksymilian Ciezki, had at last rejoined them. Bertrand finally agreed to let what he called “his Poles” cooperate with English experts, provided these came to France, which was awkward.

  Enigma messages began to be broken at Bletchley on January 17, 1940, and this could not be disclosed. Alan Turing, Bletchley's code-breaking genius, had to come to Paris. He had built his own electromagnetic improvement on the Polish bombe, which was limited to recognizing the fingerprint of the German sender of an enciphered message. Turing had a pretty good idea of the extreme danger to Britain if Polish code breakers fell into German hands.

  The French distrusted Gubbins's efforts to work with representatives of secret armies in Paris. Peter Wilkinson, a twenty-six-year-old Royal Fusilier and a member of MM-4, returned to Central and Eastern Europe and now came back with confirmation that it would be risky to build up resistance forces so long as communications had to go through the SIS. He took charge of a fresh bunch of military aides attached to British embassies, to avoid using communications with London that were under the thumb of the SIS. It was only half a solution.

  Gubby returned to London, expecting a lightning German attack that would seize some unsuspecting neutral—probably Norway, because Churchill had used his naval authority to bottle up the Skagerrak as a passage from the Baltic Sea for German warships and to lay mines around Norway. Berlin denounced this as a provocation.

  French citizens, not nervous politicians but workers descended from those who had waged the Revolution, with close links to other trade unions in Europe, reported that the monster of the German military was coming out of its winter sleep. Vera again met the young Catholic medical student Rolande Colas. She reminded Vera of her younger self when they talked quietly at a sidewalk café on rue de Varennes, near the Musée Rodin. Rolande said her working-class contacts spoke of “a fool's paradise” among the elite, and of communist-led trade unionists who took the realistic view that France was not equipped, morally or militarily, to withstand the German invasion that their German comrades said was imminent. At the final rendezvous, Vera wrote for Rolande a London address, a small apartment at 5 Rutland Gate in Knightsbridge. “If you ever get to London…” said Vera. The look in Rolande's wide blue eyes made further words unnecessary.

  Another rebel against French complacency was a student and an acknowledged genius, Wolfgang Döblin. A German Jew, he reminded Vera of her own double life, for he now served in the French army as Private Vincent Doblin, abandoning his name of Wolfgang. He was the youngest doctor of mathematics in the history of the Sorbonne. The Deuxième Bureau's Gustave Bertrand wanted this twenty-three-year-old genius to concentrate on codes instead of serving on the Maginot Line. Bertrand asked Vera to persuade the young man to leave the army; his release was already arranged. Doblin said he must remain at his post, but he agreed to continue his original research into “predicting the outcome of events that are subject to random disturbances.” This later became known as probability theory. He was way ahead of his time. He would have been invaluable to Bletchley. Vera felt he would have moved to England to meet “a challenge of highest importance,” but French authorities simply refused to part with him.

  Vera complained to Gubby that holding back Doblin was criminal misuse of his patriotism. Gubby said: “Same everywhere. Stupidity at the top!” U.S. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy had just proclaimed that “top people” like the English House of Lords still wanted to deal with Germany.

  In Paris there was another House of Lords, self-styled, made up of amateurs whose inanities inflamed Noel Coward. He told Vera: “I'm here because I asked Churchill to get me into intelligence. He misheard. He said if you want to use your intelligence, join this outfit. My plan was to use my silly-ass reputation as cover, to gather intelligence during my foreign tours. Instead, I'm stuck among upper-class twits above Schiaparelli's shop, larking about with daft ideas about bombarding Berlin with postage stamps. They carry Himmler's profile to suggest he's getting ready to replace Hitler, and they have sticky bottoms to stick to the pavements, provided it rains!” Noel Coward extracted himself from this Paris House of Lords. It dropped dead carrier pigeons with messages attached to their legs from RAF planes, hoping German counterintelligence would conclude there was a widespread anti-Nazi resistance movement. Several hundred live carrier pigeons were also dropped, but only five flew home, with rude messages from the Germans. Noel Coward said shameful departmental warfare was fed by such wild schemes: “More effort goes into confusing each other than outwitting the enemy,” he said. He was later put to work in the improvised intelligence agency run by Bill Stephenson.1

  By March 1940 Vera truly felt that idiocy ruled. The French wanted to bomb Russia's Baku oilfields to deny supplies to the Germans, but they refused to bomb German installations for fear of stirring up trouble on their western front. On March 23 Gubby was told to prepare for what Churchill called Independent Companies before changing his mind. Not wanting to be accused of interfering in military matters, he redefined the units as amphibious Strike Forces, which put them under his naval authority. The units were hastily thrown together to resist any German invasion of Norway. Veterans of mountain warfare were hastily assembled. Churchill went to his favorite corner of the Admiralty, naval intelligence, from where Commander Ian Fleming got a submarine, Truant, to insert the first Strikers into Norway.

  The German assault came on April 9, 1940. An enemy air umbrella spread far out to sea, and when Truant surfaced near the Norwegian coast, it was hit by German bombers. Peter Fleming, Ian's brother, was dropped into Norway with two Strike Force sergeants “to blow things up.” Peter was an adventurer who had walked with his Russian girlfriend across Tibet.

  Hitler had a precise timetable for conquering Western Europe. The secret was hardly a secret. He had laid it out at conferences, and details leaked but were treated as part of a war of nerves by the disdainful leaders of untouched democracies. Vera and Mutual Friends, however, saw his Norwegian campaign as the opener, and tried to plan for insurrections. If the Nazis occupied France, a spiri
t of resistance could be lit. The vast majority of French workers were tillers of the soil. They would take readily to closework. She returned to France, whose leadership was unmoved by the Norway disaster, and motored into unexplored corners, forming plans. Her notes were in shorthand, to be transcribed later. “Doodles,” she called them, like: “Domfront. Medieval town on hilltop. Perfect base for operations in Suisse-Normande: original family home of Oliver Cromwell. Locals say: Town of misfortune. Arrive at noon. Hang by one o'clock. May the Hun be the first modern victim.”

  She foresaw underground roles for Paris friends, some of them young women, some of them newspaper correspondents and businessmen impatient of paperwork, self-reliant, and independent-minded. German occupiers would find it impossible to cover every stretch of the long and open coasts along the English Channel, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. Nor could they seal France's two mountainous frontiers with neutral Switzerland and Spain. For secret agents who already knew France, penetration ought to be easy from England. She was to return there one more time before the Germans arrived in June of 1940—too late, however, to move to England the Polish code breakers still held in France.

  She was in time, though, to see the German victories in Western Europe that would sweep Churchill into office as prime minister.

  15

  “A Gigantic Guerrilla”

  Vera wore a London air-raid warden's arm-band, in anticipation of German bombing, when she listened to defeatist talk in Parliament's debate on the loss of Norway. The debate on Wednesday, May 8, 1940, seemed to her to consist of ditherers in the House of Commons until Leo Amery pointed at Prime Minister Chamberlain and echoed Oliver Cromwell's despairing cry in this same place in the seventeenth century: “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

  Chamberlain went. But Winston Churchill became prime minister amid such hostility that Vera prayed he might last long enough to convince President Roosevelt of Britain's will to resist. Hugh Dalton persuaded the Labour Party to agree to a coalition government at a weekend by the sea in Bournemouth that resembled a beer-guzzling Whitsun holiday until Lloyd George declared, “Britain's prospects are hopeless,” and swung opinion against Dalton.

  In Parliament on Whitmonday, a tremendous ovation greeted ex–prime minister Neville Chamberlain. Bill Stephenson later groaned to Vera, “Hitler will hear about this through the BBC and figure we're packing it in.”

  The defeatist undersecretary to Lord Halifax at the Foreign Office, R. A. Butler, proposed “a little publicity committee” to fill the press with letters calling for peace. The BBC scarcely mentioned the news of Churchill's premiership. A week earlier, Colin Gubbins had joined a special group hurriedly put together to fight by any means in Norway. With him was Kermit Roosevelt, a son of President Theodore Roosevelt. Kermit was a long-standing member of The Room at 34 East 62nd Street in New York and its first observer of closework in action. His impressions were tremendously important if Britain was to win support from President Roosevelt.

  Vera's informants reported, accurately as it turned out, that King George VI wanted Halifax as prime minister, not Churchill. Wasting no time, Churchill flew back and forth across the Channel in an effort to keep France in the war. “I was appalled to see him arrive at Le Bourget in an unarmed little two-motor Avro Anson,” said Vera's French secret service link, Louis Rivet. “The airfield was without defenses.”

  Churchill's bodyguard, Detective Inspector W. H. Thompson, remembered saying that the task ahead was enormous. “I hope it is not too late,” replied Churchill. “I am very much afraid it is.” Not knowing how long his premiership would last, he quickly made Hugh Dalton the “minister of economic warfare” to cover for a supersecret Special Operations Executive. Dalton could now unofficially appoint Vera as its spymistress. Both positions were fragile. Vera's role was known to a trusted few. Dalton was excluded from the next War Cabinet meeting when the service chiefs said they had highly secret papers to discuss. Dalton got his hands on the “secret papers.” The secrecy consisted of General Henry Pownall's attack on Churchill for acting like a “Super Commander-in-Chief.”1

  Churchill's refusal to behave like a supremo reminded Vera that there was no value in fighting tyranny at the cost of your own values. When the Daily Mirror pleaded for the exclusion of appeasers, Churchill replied that appeasers were everywhere. To knock them out would be “a task impossible in the disastrous state in which we find ourselves.” He needed to convert them: defeatists, appeasers, pro-Germans, and all.2

  He kept his temper when called a dictator by Sir Samuel Hoare, First Viscount Templewood, Lord Privy Seal and for the moment secretary for air. On May 25, 1940, the chiefs of staff considered “a certain eventuality,” meaning the fall of France. Churchill was quoted as crying out, “God save us!” and he promptly moved Hoare to Spain as ambassador.

  Churchill slowly united what he termed his “quarrelsome family” by evoking historical memories of when the country fought with its back to the wall. A precious young man sneered at Churchill's government coalition with socialists and later said, “I spent the day in a bright blue suit from the Fifty-Shilling Tailors, cheap and sensational-looking, appropriate to the new government.” John “Jock” Colville had once toasted “the king over the water,” the Duke of Windsor in France, still dealing with Hitler. Winston made Colville a secretary, and overnight a Churchillian.3

  Churchill warned Roosevelt, “You may have a completely subjugated Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear.” Such messages went through the U.S. embassy and were leaking to Berlin. On May 17, 1940, a Mutual Friend, Major Jack Dermot O'Reilly, trapped an American code clerk, Tyler Gatewood Kent. He had been passing copies of the secret exchanges to Captain A. H. M. Ramsey, who was distantly related to the royal family. Ramsey confided the material to Anna Wolkoff, a White Russian who blamed the Jews for her family's exile in London. She gave copies to the Italian embassy, which radioed everything to Rome where it was passed through the German ambassador, Hans von Mackensen, to Berlin. “The messages went direct daily to Hitler—priceless information that he read word for word,” testified the German spy chief Walter Schellenberg at his postwar trial.

  Early one morning, O'Reilly's men burst into a flat at 47 Gloucester Place in central London, arrested Tyler Kent, and retrieved 1,929 U.S. embassy documents from a cabinet plastered with this is a jew's war.

  O'Reilly had been helping Vera prepare for covert action. He knew her contact Nadya Letteney, who now worked alongside Anna Wolkoff's Jewish aunt and examined intercepted foreign radio traffic in a secure section of His Majesty's Prison, Wormwood Scrubs. “The most secret of secret places,” Nadya said later. She had charge of translators toiling in cells from which convicts had been expelled. Anna Wolkoff's aunt specialized in sub-Carpathian Ukrainian. She had gone to Finland “for her son's wedding.” Finland was invaded by Russia. The aunt escaped to Norway, where she asked the British legation for a British warship to pick her up because of her top-secret work. She was politely told, “The Germans are invading.” So she crossed into Sweden and was put on the RAF courier flight to London. Vera was asked to speak with this fast-moving woman. She had been helping Jews escape from Poland through Lithuania to Palestine. She was cleared of all suspicion. Nadya Letteney had sensed the leaks came from the U.S. embassy.4

  Vera saw the resolve to follow democratic procedures in wartime as a weapon, not a weakness. The mole, Tyler Kent, was the twenty-nine-year old son of an American diplomat. A clerk in the U.S. embassy code room, he felt FDR and Churchill were betraying Americans. At the time, only 3 percent of Americans wanted to enter the war, according to polls. In January 1940 Anna Wolkoff, whose father had been an admiral in the Russian czarist navy, told Kent that Jews had deposed their family. The mischief began. “A terrible blow!” Breckinridge Long, a U.S. assistant secretary of state, wrote in his diary: “
Our every diplomatic maneuver exposed.” Ambassador Kennedy prudently phoned President Roosevelt to say that, if the United States had been at war, Kent would have been shot. For once, FDR did not disagree with Kennedy.5 If the intercepted FDR-Churchill exchanges had been publicized in the United States, they could have destroyed Roosevelt. Laws enacted by Congress were designed to keep America out of European disputes. Churchill needed him to win an unprecedented third term in the 1940 presidential elections. Ambassador Kennedy “came under electronic surveillance,” noted Winston's son Randolph Churchill. “We had reached the point of bugging potential traitors and enemies.” Randolph later parachuted into Yugoslavia to join Tito's clandestine armies.

  Kent was later tried at the Old Bailey in October 1940. A jury took twenty-five minutes to find him guilty, and he was sentenced to seven years. All was done in secrecy. “Catch a spy but never talk about it,” Vera learned from counterespionage experts.