PWE had originated in an unmarked corner of the Foreign Office in the prewar rebellion against appeasement, and was originally quartered in Electra House on Victoria Embankment under the cover of the Imperial Communications Committee. PWE then moved to the Duke of Bedford's sprawling estate at Woburn Abbey, where London Control came on weekends to work out deception schemes within bicycling distance of Bletchley. PWE was designed to work with SOE, but there were fierce battles between the armed forces, security boffins at the Home Office, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Foreign Office, the BBC, and the General Post Office. PWE's most controversial boss was Sir Bruce Lockhart, convicted as a British spy in Russia and exchanged for a prominent Soviet prisoner in 1918. Lockhart was an author, journalist, and diplomat, and had also been a rubber planter in Malaya, now Malaysia. He was too much a man of action to suffer fools in the secret agencies, where, he wrote later, “most of the energy which should be directed against the enemy is dissipated in interdepartmental strife and jealousies.”
The same wasted energy initially hindered Vera's efforts to cooperate with the Free French secret services, which were a law unto themselves. She needed to know more about her missing Polish code breakers, and she baited her hooks with snippets of information. One useful piece of bait was the Earl of Cardigan, who, as an escaped prisoner of war making an epic six-month overland journey through occupied France, had kept notes that would interest the Free French. The earl had stopped along his way to shelter at Virginia Hall's safehouse in Lyons. Seeing his impoverished state, she sent him to her friend the U.S. consul. There was a magical moment when the earl—in rags, and carrying on his shoulder a pioche, a fairly heavy farm-laborer's tool, something between a pickaxe and a hoe—stumbled into a consular cocktail party and confessed he was the Earl of Cardigan. The consul had a special fund for “distressed British subjects” and advanced the earl enough money to continue on his way, over the mountains into Spain.
Cardigan was happy to report that “the working poor in France are the most generous.” His observations might seem pedestrian in normal times, but the German occupation made it almost impossible to keep track of the smallest, ever-changing details of French life. “Traveling on bicycles and on foot is best,” he advised. “Be careful to fit into the local landscape. Don't tense up among Germans; don't catch their eye. I was in a deep sleep when the Germans came knocking on my door in one hideout. I said, ‘Come in!’ in English. Luckily, nobody noticed. Their regular soldiers are feeling just as lost as you, and this lot saw me as a poor old sod, down on my luck. If you ask for a café noir in a cafe, you get twigged right away. Black coffee disappeared long ago. It's the little things that betray you.”
Vera needed similar eyewitness reports from Jews that Varian Fry helped to escape. Those from Germany, on arrival in England, were labeled enemy aliens, the category she had very carefully avoided falling into, and were difficult to question in detention camps. Arthur Koestler escaped French detention only to be told in Lisbon that London refused to issue him a visa. The British consul general, Sir Henry King, slipped Koestler onto a KLM flight to Bristol. But there he was arrested and sent to Pentonville Prison. He was moved to discover that in England, putting a man to death was still treated as a solemn and exceptional event: guards walked on tiptoe and a mighty hush fell over Pentonville whenever a German spy was hanged. Koestler was finally released. He summarized English attitudes as “Be kind to the foreigner, the poor chap can't help it.” When he said this to the locals, they nodded in modest agreement. “So few saw the joke that I began to wonder whether it was a joke after all.”1
Back on another exploratory visit, Bill Donovan saw SOE's explosive devices put together in places like the Thatched Barn, an old coaching inn north of London. There was always someone somewhere who knew how to rig something deadly, using can openers and soldering irons. Vera introduced him to John Godley, later Lord Kilbracken, who hid experience behind an absentminded air. Known as “God-Save-Us” Godley, he piloted Swordfish biplanes catapulted from grain ships and oil tankers in the North Atlantic to look for U-boats. His future lordship, aged twenty-two, explained how he coped without toilet facilities: “I ask the chap in the back cockpit to pass me a dust-marker can. It's not a good idea to throw it over the side when it's full of piss, because the slipstream blows it back in your face. So I hold it between my knees, fly left-handed, warn the crew to hide behind a bulkhead, and then chuck it vertically upwards.” It was impossible to land the Swordfish back on the ship, which had rockets on rails to launch the aircraft but no deck for their return. Pilots ditched in the sea or bailed out, hoping the convoy would see them. Godley became the youngest commander of a navy squadron, covering convoys crossing near the Arctic Circle to supply the Soviet Union after Hitler invaded. He still flew Swordfish with cockpits open to icy blasts.
Vera Atkins during one of her few relaxed moments.
(Courtesy of Lieutenant General Eugene F. Tighe, Jr., U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency)
The ambassador Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg; here seen with Marie “Missie” Vassiltchikov, one of Vera's key agents in SOE. Vera met Schulenberg in Bucharest in 1931, where she quickly discovered his strong anti-Nazi sentiments.
(From the collection of Marie “Missie” Vassiltchikov)
William Stephenson, the man called Intrepid, director of British Security Coordination (BSC) in New York.
(Photograph courtesy of Sir William and Lady Mary Stephenson)
William “Wild Bill” Donovan, chief of the Office of Strategic Services, which later became the Central Intelligence Agency.
(Courtesy of BSC Papers)
Colin Gubbins.
(Courtesy of BSC Papers)
Polish countess Krystyna Skarbek (Christina Granville) in 1939.
(Courtesy of BSC Papers)
Indian princess Noor Inayat Khan.
(Courtesy of E-Spread Risk Management, Bermuda)
Peggy Knight after the war.
(From the archives of Squadron Leader William Simpson, courtesy of E-Spread and Bermuda National Archives)
Virginia Hall, “the Canadian,” correspondent for the New York Post.
(Courtesy of Veterans of the OSS)
Diana Rowden.
(Courtesy of Jacques Deleporte and French Special Branch)
Andrée Borrel, chief assistant to Major Suttill.
(Courtesy of Commission d'Enquête Parlementaire sur les Événements Survenus en France de 1933 à 1945)
Sonia and her husband, Guy d'Artois, both SOE agents. Sonia provided or corroborated much of the personal information on Vera, who was a close friend.
(From the collection of Sonia d'Artois)
Sonia Olschanezky before the war.
(Courtesy of Sonia d'Artois and Sydney Holland)
Marie “Missie” Vassiltchikov.
(Courtesy of the Earl of Cadogan)
Violette Szabo, who rescued the White Rabbit but was executed at Dachau on the eve of the Allied victory.
(Courtesy of Karen Newman)
Wing Commander Forest Frederick Edward Yeo-Thomas, the “White Rabbit.”
(Courtesy of Herbert Rowland, BSC Papers)
Peter Churchill, thought by the Germans to be Winston's son.
(Courtesy of E-Spread and BSC Papers)
Odette Sansom, later Peter Churchill's wife.
(Courtesy of E-Spread)
Tom Harrisson, founder of Mass Observation movement, who parachuted behind Japanese lines in Borneo.
(Courtesy of BSC Papers)
In Germany, by contrast, scientists were already building prototype jets and flying bombs and missiles designed to drop vertically in space. Polish agents smuggled out pieces of the new rockets. Yet Vera had difficulty explaining to the Ministry of Works why SOE needed cowsheds in a remote hamlet to make gadgets whose purpose could not be disclosed, or why a parachute jump tower was necessary.
Wanborough Manor was a sixteenth-century mansion, surrounded by parklan
d and ideal for intensive training. It stood on the Hog's Back in Surrey, an address that reinforced Bill Donovan's blurred impression of strange faces in odd places. Vera said, “If we throw out some trainees because they don't measure up, they already know too much, so they're put into other service units, and gagged by the Official Secrets Act.” Some recruits had experience in the Afghan hills, fighting warrior tribes. One instructor, old by any standard, maintained his sniper skills. He trained French sharpshooters, and demonstrated in dummy runs how to derail London-bound express trains by laying dynamite charges. He gave the usual crisp advice regarding informers: “Listen to what they have to say, then kill them.”
Moral objections to these “gangsterisms” were raised by the chief of air staff, Sir Charles Portal, who did not like “dropping men dressed in civilian clothes for the purpose of attempting to kill members of the opposing forces.” Vera had to maneuver around protests wrapped in ethical terms. There was absolute opposition to her proposal that Jews were more useful in SOE instead of in detention camps. When Arthur Koestler did get out, he was full of hard-won advice: “Without a carte d'identité,” he said, “any agent will be outside the law.” His own French identity card went to SOE's counterfeiters to be doctored and used by another agent. Koestler was one of many Jews with the scientific expertise to help modernize Britain's ramshackle defenses. In 1931, as a science editor in Germany, he had looked into the future by contemplating splitting the atom. He had speculated about the chain reactions. German scientists ridiculed him because they had discovered the hydrogen isotope 2H, deuterium, and its oxygen compound, called heavy water. This meant, Koestler predicted accurately when he finally got anyone in London to listen, that German atomic bomb research was heading in the wrong direction.
Germans suspected of being spies went to Camp 020, the former military psychiatric hospital at Ham on the southwest outskirts of London. Lieutenant Colonel Robert “Tin Eye” Stephens was its monocled administrator. Information that was potentially useful to SOE was wrung out of Nazi-run agents. That is, if Vera got to them before they were hanged. Two, Josef Waldberg and Karl Meier, landed by dinghy on the Kent coast and were caught and strung up. Others were persuaded to return to Germany as double agents, but were not told their parachutes were never going to open. Dead on arrival, their corpses carried false information to fool the enemy. SS Officer Alfred Naujocks disclosed the German deception preceding the invasion of Poland, under questioning by Tin Eye, who told Vera, “Naujocks said he preserved bodies in Polish uniforms, and riddled them with bullets to trump up the charge of Polish aggression across Germany's sacred borders. He was a Nazi murderer and fixer.” By the winter of 1940–41, Tin Eye had hanged fourteen prisoners. He said of an English turncoat spy, “Hanging's too good for him,” but hanged him anyway. He was the multilingual keeper of counterintelligence files that eventually grew to the hundred-thousand-card index that enabled the XX (Double Cross) Committee of PWE to manipulate agents who first worked for the Nazis and, in one way or another, could be turned, and sent back with misinformation.
22
The Black Chamber
Vera avoided card files. She kept in cardboard boxes the bare essentials, and memorized the rest in what she had called her Black Chamber ever since Mary Stephenson got her a bootleg copy of The American Black Chamber by Herbert O. Yardley. The book upheld Bruce Lockhart's argument that energy that should be directed against an enemy was dissipated in interdepartmental strife and jealousies. Yardley's memoir was published in 1931 and was hastily banned. Before the outbreak of the 1914–18 war he was a young telegraph operator and, through his own brilliance, rose to become chief of the code room, which he named the Black Chamber, in the White House. In 1929 Henry Stimson, as secretary of state, saw deciphered Japanese messages and said, “Gentlemen do not read each other's mail!” He stopped the decoding of foreign embassy cables. “Thousands of documents were destroyed for domestic political reasons to do with internal rivalries,” wrote Yardley.
Vera recognized his description of diplomats arguing so loudly about policy in the code room that it was impossible to get any work done. “Jolly, good-natured, smartly dressed pigmies,” he called them. One jeered at a warning that codes in use were not safe. Yardley showed how the codes were easily stolen from the vault. Its combination numbers were taken from the phone book on a daily rotation that any fool could work out. He said cipher brains and originality were all that was needed. He demonstrated how America was cheated of “the most tremendous victory in the annals of warfare” through blind trust in old ciphers used in the great offensive of September 12, 1918. Plans were telegraphed across the Atlantic by cable. The contents were recovered through induction by German submarines using wire laid alongside a stretch of the oceanbed cables. The Germans were prepared and broke the offensive. The Black Chamber had relied on a code easily broken by the submariners.
Vera's Black Chamber, being mostly in her mind or in shoe boxes, reduced the risk of burglary. Yardley's book was delivered by Bill Donovan. Now that he ran the first U.S. foreign intelligence agency, she told him how Harry Hinsley's reliance on memory and distrust of paperwork took him, the son of an unemployed laborer, into Churchill's committee on submarine warfare. Hinsley's mother cleaned other people's houses. Her son did not impress the equivalent “pigmies” in Britain's upper-middle-class network, who had deep roots in the regular armed forces, administration, colonial service, and public life. But he did please nonconformists like Stephenson and Donovan. Both men were relieved to hear that Vera's irregulars were being joined by more and more dissenters, who submerged their personal idiosyncrasies to suffer the tough training required. Most were as capable of independent self-discipline as Churchill, who wanted an end to the carelessness that was causing naval losses, like the one that had cut short the life of Vera's lover.
Hinsley, long-haired and scruffily dressed, marched into the Admiralty Operational Intelligence Center to demand that spit-and-polish officers listen to him. Four years earlier he had made boldness his friend. At eighteen, curious about Germany, he lived there during the last summer of peace. He won a scholarship to study medieval history at Cambridge, where he learned to wrest deductions out of old documents in a way that later would enable him to discern links when analyzing German wireless traffic. He taught himself to spot indications of future enemy activity. He penned a formal letter complaining that the navy's OIC officers worked “in so aimless and inefficient a manner that all their time is taken up in groping at the truth and putting as much of it as is obvious to all on card indexes.”1
Hinsley improved at making accurate conclusions from fragmented enemy signals. If the navy required the source of some prediction of enemy movements, one answer now sufficed: “Hinsley.” He sat at Battle of the Atlantic emergency meetings chaired by Churchill. On the first occasion, Churchill asked, “Who is that boy?” Desmond Morton whispered that Churchill himself had asked for Hinsley's presence at these tense moments. The prime minister muttered, “Yes, yes,” and returned to paying close attention to what Hinsley had to say, not to his working-class accent or to his habits of dress.
Moral courage led Vera, too, to shrink from reliance on card indexes. She told Donovan: “Incompetent intelligence analysts feel safer surrounded by fat meaningless files, like babies sucking security blankets.” She did not underrate the Camp 020 index system, because it served a different purpose. For her agents, it took courage to fight alone, without the backup of written instructions and performance records. So much depended upon the honesty of colleagues. Vera discussed courage many times with Donovan. There were few others in whom she could confide.
The American's visits to measure SOE's progress gave her an opportunity to relax and amuse him with gossip. She told him the story of Douglas “Tin Legs” Bader, who had lost both legs but was allowed to continue fighting in air battles over England and “collected a gong” from King George VI. The king, who had a stutter, recalled that the German raiders used Fokk
er aircraft. As he pinned on the medal, he asked, “How many have you shot down of the F-F-Fokkers?” Bader dutifully replied: “Well, sir, five Messerschmitts, two Heinkels, and a Junker, sir.”
Donovan liked Vera's story of the Netherlands’ Prince Bernhard, in London to represent Dutch resistance. A bomb exploded in the entrance to an apartment block where he had been a dinner guest. Clambering down through the rubble, he murmured, “So kind. Most delightful evening.”
In recounting such stories, Vera reflected the surface cheerfulness of the people around her. After the terror bombing of London for seventy-six consecutive nights in 1940–41, her anger was deeply personal. She received reports from Paris of gleeful Germans scooping up champagne, expensive perfumes, and other luxuries. Ernst Udet, director of air armament, had gone on a drunken spree, shouting his contempt for Hermann Göring, who dressed extravagantly in a purple silk blouse with puffy sleeves, high hunting boots, and a long hunting knife shaped like a Germanic sword in his belt, planning what he called the Great Battle to grind down Britain's air defenses before a seaborne invasion.
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