Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  Gubby was called a loose cannon by the hard-boiled General Bernard Montgomery, who was to become the leading British soldier of World War II. Having got his men out of France, Monty was trying to replace lost equipment while positioning his tattered 3rd Division to block the expected German invasion. Austere, crabby, and puritanical, he was outraged when an Auxiliary Unit, consisting of one elderly ex-poacher, broke into his headquarters. Monty had boasted to Churchill that the headquarters were impregnable. The old poacher penetrated the impregnable, worked his way around Monty's bedroom in a tumbledown farmhouse, and tossed a homemade Molotov cocktail—gasoline in a beer bottle—at the general's precious peach tree, incinerating it. The poacher vanished into the undergrowth. He could have been a German saboteur. Monty's coastal defenses had just been inspected by Churchill, who saw, despite Monty's claims of efficiency, a lack of troop transport but “large numbers of buses plying for pleasure traffic, up and down the seafront at Brighton.” Churchill ordered Monty to commandeer the buses, in the tone of a schoolmaster telling a lazy boy to pull up his socks.

  None of this endeared to Monty the concept of “dirty tricks.” His opposition could cause problems if, as Donovan hoped, an Anglo-American alliance was to confront Germany. Vera decided she had better tell Donovan all he needed to know. Later she was judged to be worth a score of formal briefing sessions. As U.S. supreme commander, General Dwight Eisenhower was so offended by Montgomery as a field marshal that Ike seriously wondered if he could tell any of his American generals to take orders from him.

  Vera frankly confirmed Donovan's impression that, behind the facade orchestrated for his benefit by Whitehall, there was confusion. The German air minister, Hermann Göring, had said publicly during the past summer, “I plan to have this enemy down on his knees so that an occupation of the island can proceed.” By Christmas, Göring was bombing open cities.

  Vera shared with Donovan the pragmatism of the grizzled old sergeants on the shooting ranges: “Shoot straight by instinct, out of your pocket or backwards between your legs and out of your arse. Unless you're in bed, put all your weight into your feet. If you are surprised in bed, don't waggle your pistol like a flabby cock. The pistol must always be your pointed finger.” She added that the instructions had been slightly amended when girls became shooters. She told Donovan how escapees brought home disconnected bits of intelligence that could be assembled to fit changing pictures of conditions behind enemy lines. A simple example was an escapee's story of how he had aroused suspicion because he did not know French workingmen wore hats or berets on their heads all the time. He was lucky that he learned this from friendly Frenchmen in a bistro who guessed he was an escaping British prisoner when he removed his cap at the bar.

  Vera drove Donovan to Biggin Hill, the air base near London. They talked with Jan Zurakowski and other Polish pilots who had escaped to join the RAF. Zura always spoke in a soft, almost high-pitched voice. In Warsaw he had told her how he mentally sat outside himself in dicey situations, observing his performance in the cockpit. Zura guessed her role when she said there was a need for pilots to fly solo missions behind enemy lines. He volunteered: “If I'm still alive.”

  In another intelligence failure, the RAF had been initially unprepared for new German tactics. Zura and his Polish comrades, in combat over England, taught lessons about an enemy who broke the old rules. Young RAF pilots, as university students and reservists, had been taught to fly in neat formations. This past autumn, enemy bombers protected by Messerschmitt 109s and 110s had attacked London as the “brain and nerve center of the British High Command.” For ten days, children basked under brilliant sunshine and watched air battles directly overhead. On September 15, Churchill followed one battle from RAF No. 11 Group headquarters at Uxbridge, and asked the group commander, Keith Park, “What other reserves have we?”

  “None,” was Park's reply.

  Every serviceable RAF fighter was airborne. The enemy had been led to believe that other aircraft must be held in reserve, since any sane defender would never commit all weapons to battle. The gamble succeeded. The tattered German air fleets retired. Only by such deceptions—in the air, on the ground, or at sea—could Britain stay afloat.

  The vicious Christmas bombings saw Germany expend more quality machines and men. By contrast, Gubbins's ground-defense preparations still resorted to cheap improvisations. Vera called them Gubby's Goon Squads. She showed Donovan their training base in the Vale of the White Horse, near Swindon, on a sprawling West Country property. The stables were converted into classrooms, haylofts became dormitories, and instructors lived in the servants’ quarters. “Secret sources provide small quantities of equipment,” she told Donovan. “Most secret sources are country squires who should have turned them over to the authorities.” Half a million old Springfield rifles from the United States were shared out among clandestine units. The squads became self-contained groups of three or four men, operating from independent underground bases, each with its own cache of arms and stores. “They cost nothing to run,” said Gubby, who had joined the two. He described a false alarm after favorable tides for invasion were predicted in the English Channel and the Eastern and Southern Command received the code word “Cromwell!” This was a precautionary warning, unbeknownst to the Vicar of St. Ives in Cornwall, who mistook a fishing fleet for the enemy and ordered his church bells to be rung. The bells set off a chain reaction, comparable to the lighting of beacons from Land's End to John o'Groats in 1588 to warn of the Spanish Armada's approach. Skies were scanned for German parachutists who, it was rumored, wore nuns’ habits. Eventually Dad's Army of elderly home guards was told to relax, a pair of innocent nuns was released, and the vicar went red-faced to bed.

  Some twenty-five hundred RAF pilots had prevented the invasion. Zura and his fellow Poles accounted for 5 percent of these, and were credited with inflicting 15 percent of German losses. These survivors who escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe proved the essential role of rebels against a German conquest. Near Bletchley, Station XII spent on explosive devices the equivalent of $23,000 in today's money, which seemed a fortune to the impoverished SOE. Secrets were kept by deliberately separating special units and by concocting meaningless titles. It was hard even for Vera to be sure who ran what. This confounded SOE's enemies at home. Malcolm Muggeridge, the writer and a wartime spy, observed that although SOE and the SIS were on the same side, they were more abhorrent to one another than they were to the German intelligence corps, the Abwehr.

  Donovan's American egalitarianism made him prefer SOE's use of people from all walks of life. London's Daily Mirror, the voice of the workingman, depicted the army as “overburdened by officers drawn from the privileged classes.” Gubby was a soldier after Donovan's own heart. When Gubby became Vera's director of operations, he moved into quarters provided by her good relations with the owners of Marks & Spencer. SOE became known as the Baker Street Irregulars, after the street urchins who spied for Sherlock Holmes. They were lodged on Baker Street, along with the headquarters of the large retail store chain whose chairman, Simon Marks, was SOE's undisclosed patron. Donovan had strong sympathies for the Jewish victims of Nazism and agreed with Vera that they should long ago have been supported in rebellion against Hitler. The Joint Palestine Appeal became the United Jewish Appeal, whose future deputy chairman, Sir Isidore “Jack” Lyons, came from a family long established in York. An ancestral Isidore Lyons and other Jews had been executed, their heads displayed on spikes along the city of York's encircling walls, after refusing to convert to Christianity. Donovan discussed with the current Lyons family the need to get so-called enemy exiles out of the detention camps. Their knowledge of Europe should be exploited. The help expatriate Jews gave SOE was never openly discussed. They were well aware of the anti-Semitism lurking under brass hats. Hugh Dalton told the chiefs of staff, “Covert action is too serious a matter to be left to soldiers. Whenever I try to destroy anything anywhere, I am caught in some diplomatic trip wire.”


  Vera could not be tripped up. Her authority was hidden. She relied greatly on personal connections. She had coaxed a sympathetic squadron leader to lend her an RAF rescue boat to plant Rolande Colas on her first mission. The girl had made her way from the coast to Paris to discuss the raising of resistance armies, and returned to rendezvous with the boat at a set time. The twelve-day operation netted hard and current facts that otherwise would have been difficult to glean. Vera later parachuted her back in, despite the objections raised by the chief of the air staff, Charles Portal, who thought there was “a vast difference in ethics” between dropping a spy from the air and “this entirely new scheme for dropping what one can only call assassins.”1

  Rolande's mission was an example of the importance of carrying out operations through personal contacts. The War Office preferred the old formula “firepower and overwhelming force.” Donovan saw the wisdom of officially keeping Vera at the modest level of a flying officer, free to change uniforms and modest rank or adopt the guise of Miss Waple when screening possible agents in a Wigmore Street apartment. She attracted none of the Whitehall enemy fire that was aimed at Dr. Dalton and architects of the upstart SOE. “The worst thing that can be said against SOE's skullduggery amateurs is that ‘they are not one of us,’” commented C. P. Snow, the writer and molecular physicist. He came from the unfashionable Midlands, was educated at an obscure government school, and was part of London's Jewish community. He selected scientific personnel in highly secret work. “Be thankful,” he told Vera, “you don't have to leave telltale squiggles on government requisition slips.”

  This freedom intensified the envy of departmental rivals, who were obliged to submit everything in triplicate. Informality was SOE's grim necessity. “Grim” was not a word Donovan would have used as an old hand at impulsive action, but he understood grim necessity during a visit with Churchill that Christmas. Grim necessity sent secretaries fluttering, scooping up papers. They scuttled to where Churchill was to settle in for a night's work. He had several choices: the old tube station at Down Street in Piccadilly, which Vera called The Burrow, or the former typists’ basement room at No. 10 Downing Street, which she called The Barn, or under a corner of the Board of Trade building facing St. James's Park at Storey's Gate in a subterranean War Cabinet room. Few knew beforehand Churchill's imminent whereabouts. He was a moving target. The House of Commons on the Thames was easily spotted by bombers, so Parliament sat in Church House, the Anglican Church headquarters facing Westminster Abbey. And so it seemed to Donovan that perhaps some of the ambiguities, the formlessness of SOE, the disorder and hodgepodge and anarchy surrounding Vera, were well justified.

  He left London on New Year's Day 1941. Vera delivered him to an RAF flying boat at Plymouth Sound that set course for Britain's first imperial coaling port and military bastion, Gibraltar. He carried a flask of hot turtle soup, a hamper of fresh lobster, cold pheasant, Stilton cheese, and three bottles of Moselle to celebrate his fifty-eighth birthday. There followed an official silence until Roosevelt received a cable in March 1941 from Churchill: “I must thank you for the magnificent work done by Donovan in his prolonged tour of the Balkans and Middle East. He has carried with him throughout an animating, heart-warming flame.”

  “America was still neutral with Donovan on our side,” Vera would say later. Once he was gone, she discovered, among other things, how to time secret operations by phases of the moon. “I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way.” One of the poem-codes used by agents to encrypt messages, that line was from a nineteenth-century poem called “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes, which reflected a popular view of masked men robbing the rich to give to the poor. Her agents often had that rogue quality. Their accomplices were captains of small boats, submarines, and aircraft. Pilots perfected techniques for landing agents. Fliers who had to land on small meadows operated the week before and after a full moon. The brighter the moonlight, the better the ability to navigate at low altitude by following railroads and rivers to steal through hostile territory. Insertions by sea were best made when there was no moonlight at all.

  19

  A Civil War Ends, a Nightmare Begins

  “Winston Churchill is trying to end the civil war at home,” said Mary Stephenson. Churchill spoke gently of his old enemy on Tuesday, November 12, 1940, when he told Parliament, “History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It fell to Neville Chamberlain, in one of the supreme crises of the world, to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart: the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril.”1

  “What a week!” Vera commented to Tony Samuel. He was twenty-three, nine years her junior, and consulted her about blowing up barges along a stretch of the Danube that she knew well. In that week, German bombs blew to smithereens the nearby Sloane Street tube station. U-boats sank a record number of cargo ships and threatened to isolate Britain. Germany attacked Greece, and the RAF had one squadron of outdated Gladiator biplanes to defend it. Roosevelt was told Britain could not pay for U.S. munitions. Lord Halifax said to American reporters, “Well, boys, Britain's broke. It's your money we want.”

  Tony Samuel met Vera for lunch at his family's banking firm, M. Samuel & Co. She told him that she didn't understand why Churchill was honoring an old enemy.

  “Chamberlain tried Churchill's soul,” Samuel replied, “but the world must see we preserve the continuities, the centrality of parliamentary and constitutional government. In 1910, Churchill's paper ‘The People's Rights’ led to pensions, prison reform, national insurance, job security, and the first welfare state. That made him a socialist in Chamberlain's eyes, a turncoat.”

  Samuel enthused about the spirit of fair play. His Jewish origins put him at risk when he gathered industrial intelligence abroad. He was the youngest son of Viscount Bearsted, and was on the Gestapo list of persons to be arrested after the occupation of Britain. His family business, Shell Petroleum, had a network of commercial agents, some of whom were also collecting information on the enemy. He said Churchill's tribute to Chamberlain would kill stories abroad about English appeasers who still put out peace feelers.

  “Do you believe appeasers can still hurt us?” Vera wondered.

  “Yes. Some Americans think we competed with them for German business because Chamberlain once said Britain could not survive as outcasts in Europe. Our investments were enormous. Halifax wanted control of European commerce. Winston's speech should end the acrimony. However much one citizen knows about a subject, there's always someone who knows more. He needs all of us to pull together.”

  Samuel mumbled. It was not what Mutual Friends called “the artful mumble of a spy.” He was growing deaf. He limited his operations to the acquisition of confidential files abroad. He was in Budapest when his safe house was raided. He flushed documents down the toilet. The plumbing recycled the papers into a toilet below, where the chief investigator was sitting with his trousers down. “The fool didn't like to pick the papers out of his pooh.”

  “I prefer our knaves to their fools,” said Vera.

  “No, no. Our side would never have knaves,” he joked. Then he asked her about Bill Stephenson. Mary had returned briefly to London, and she knew Samuel would be joining her husband's intelligence service. He was to be registered as G 202 while operating in Latin America.

  Vera walked alone that afternoon through the bombed streets of Aldgate, part of Worktown, a term used by Mass Observation, an organization founded in 1937 t
o record all aspects of everyday life. M-O's driving force was a controversial eccentric, Tom Harrisson. As a schoolboy, he organized the first national census of the great crested grebe. He studied the ways of cannibals in the Pacific, and founded M-O to help Whitehall measure the public pulse. Critics said M-O studied the masses as if they practiced alien cults. Its section on the Aspidistra Cult analyzed why potted aspidistras dotted lower-middle-class homes. Aspidistra happened to be the code name for the SOE project to control one of the most powerful transmitters in the world, for which the Radio Corporation of America, RCA, was being cautiously approached. M-O's report on an Aspidistra Cult caused hearts to miss a beat in counterintelligence, until the confusion was cleared up.

  Harrisson was to parachute into Japanese-held Borneo, where he led a guerrilla force of headhunters who had an age-old tradition of collecting the heads of strangers. Harrisson ordered them to limit their hobby to Japanese heads. After the Japanese surrender, he thought it only right that the headhunters should keep the heads. For following his own rules, he was banished from Borneo. He was later killed in the crash of a Bangkok tuk-tuk.

  In 1940–41, Vera combed through M-O lists for potential agents among streetfolk who scraped a living in imaginative ways. “Circus acrobats to burglars. I don't care how they made a living before the war, provided they're honest villains,” she told Harrisson. His rule was that M-O should be totally immersed in the culture under examination. She asked why his snoopers did not inspect the tribes of Whitehall. He replied that Whitehall was too dense a jungle, adding that “SOE is safe from my snoopers because it's impossible to find it has any culture at all.”

  In the November 1940 week of nightmares, when mighty German planes bombed London, British bombers retaliated by attacking Berlin, where the Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, was pressing Hitler for an answer to just exactly when German forces would invade the British Isles.