Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  Virginia was creatively using her experience with escaping Allied prisoners. She kept a mental map of couriers and subagents who did not know where newly arriving “bodies” came from, nor where they went. Each courier was sequestered in a public park until nightfall, when he or she was taken to a safehouse. Bodies did not need to know exactly where they were. Safehouses and contacts changed at frequent intervals. These escape lines became a foundation for coordinating SOE work. For example, while Jean Moulin was in France, he operated with one set of false papers in his pockets, with a courier following at a distance with another set of false ID for Moulin in case of emergency.

  The “Palestine Express” was Vera's name for a major escape route. One of her early recruits, French businessman Victor Gerson, had proposed that a permanent chain of “helpers” would simplify SOE exits and entrances. In May 1941 Gerson's wife, Giliana Balmaceda, volunteered to reconnoiter such a line. Chilean by birth, Giliana was a beautiful young actress of the Paris stage, whose SOE training sharpened her professional skill of slipping into the skin of another character. She proved unusually adept at distinguishing between those who volunteered to help escapees and those professing to rebel against the Germans while secretly informing their counterintelligence police. Giliana looked for sédentaires, often elderly people, who stayed in one place and were willing to use their sedentary habits to provide staging posts along the escape line. These staging posts, or safehouses, were often run by middle-aged ladies, who sheltered escapees in their unobtrusive houses in Paris. Giliana traveled widely, and returned to London along the same route, using her Chilean passport to move through Vichy France and Spain to Gibraltar. By mid-June, she was with Vera to deposit a large haul of intelligence and the names and addresses of those who were willing and could be trusted to help.

  Giliana's husband, Victor, took SOE training and met up with Virginia Hall on his second insertion into France by submarine with Peter Churchill. Victor's first arrival by parachute in September 1941 was almost his last. He was dropped into a Marseilles trap set by the Gestapo and barely escaped. Victor put together an escape line running from Amsterdam through Brussels, Paris, and Lyons to the Spanish frontier. All the young couriers, with the exception of the journalist Jacques Mitterrand, were Jewish and sent other Jewish customers on the “Palestine Express” to the Middle East. Their stopover in Lyons was arranged by Virginia Hall: a few hours of rest at a certain Madame Caravelle's modest little salon de coiffure.

  Jews rescued by the New York editor Varian Fry were prevented from entering Palestine. The Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion said the British barrier “strikes at the very heart of the Jewish national home.” The Haganah Jewish defense force made its own grenades and bombs, while still trying to work with the local British administration. In a battle for the British cause, a Haganah officer lost one eye: this was the future Israeli army chief and defense minister Moshe Dayan. Others in Haganah broke away to form groups to fight the British. The opportunity to make more trouble was seized by Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of implementing the Final Solution: he shipped more Jews in “coffin ships” down the Danube and across the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to Palestine. Anthony Eden, as secretary for foreign affairs, insisted that the exodus be stopped in order to calm the Arabs, whose goodwill was needed while Britain's only military victories were in North Africa. Eichmann, during a prewar fact-finding tour of the territory, had told Hitler that Jews could be ransomed for profit. Now he used them to force the British to choose between turning them away and fanning the flames of anti-British feeling in the Arab states.

  Routiers, the fiercely independent truck drivers of France, hurtled between transit points with escapees packed tight under tarpaulins. The drivers held German permits as employees of German factories or the Wehrmacht, and among their loads were growing numbers of downed Allied airmen and other servicemen. By the end of 1941, with the U.S. finally at war, Virginia Hall could call for professional American military help. She needed to bring discipline to the volunteers in her partisan armies. Although the early missions had gone well enough for Vera, from the winter of 1941 to the spring of 1942, disaster followed disaster.

  24

  The Flying Visit

  Although the end of U.S. neutrality made it easier to tighten and expand clandestine collaboration between SOE, the U.S. president, and Bill Donovan, there was a mystery that Vera had to clear up, because it caused American misgivings about Churchill's ability to continue waging war if appeasers were still trying to make peace deals with Hitler.

  Vera had already disclosed a great deal about operational techniques to Bill Donovan. One evening at Winchelsea, she quoted:

  The sea is calm to-night.

  The tide is full, the moon lies fair

  Upon the straits. On the French coast the light

  Gleams and is gone; The cliffs of England stand…

  The lines are from “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. Moonlight told Vera when operations were possible. At sea when the moon was invisible, in the air when the moon was full.

  “A spasm of moonstruck craftiness,” she called the moment when Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, landed by moonlight in Britain with a timing that was more calculated than either side admitted publicly.

  Ian Fleming's brother Peter had written a novel, The Flying Visit, a satire on what would happen if Hitler parachuted into England. Hess turned fantasy to near-truth on that moonlit night when he landed close to the Scottish estate of the Duke of Hamilton. Peter's book, far from being written with foreknowledge, poked fun at English politics. Hess's arrival, though, sparked speculation about a continuing appeasement party in London in this period before the U.S. joined in the war.

  Deputy Führer Hess had piloted a specially equipped Messer-schmidt 110 along a difficult and indirect route to the duke's home. Hess bailed out and fell into a field, where he gave his name to an open-mouthed farmworker as Alfred Horn, and asked to see the duke, who was a fighter pilot and wing commander in the RAF. Hess carried a list of royals thought to be friendly to Germany and still willing to negotiate.

  Vera took Charles Fraser-Smith, the designer of Q gadgets, to a secret location where a uniform was laid out on a trestle table. Fraser-Smith recalled later: “She said she'd given Hess something to ensure he didn't wake up until morning, then said, ‘This is his uniform. Make an exact copy. We must have it back to him in four hours.’ She didn't tell me Hess was in the Tower of London.”

  Fraser-Smith often got clandestine help from Courtaulds, the textile experts whose executives worked with Vera, and from Elder Wills, whose main “laboratory” was a carpenters’ shop at the Victoria and Albert Museum. His assistants included former wardrobe masters and makeup artists from his Elstree movie studios. Elder Wills also managed a secret factory in Margaret Street near Oxford Circus, employing teams of Jewish seamstresses and tailors who could imitate clothing from almost anywhere. They scouted London synagogues for cast-off refugee clothing from which foreign labels could be detached or foreign shoes fitted with sliding heels to hide microfilms and codes. Now a Courtaulds expert checked the uniform, and announced it was made from high-quality synthetic lightweight gabardine. Elder Wills found a likely substitute. Fraser-Smith compared it with the original. “I took Hess's tunic between forefinger and thumb with a most unaccountable feeling of excitement,” he said. “There was something surreal about handling the uniform of a man who helped lead the Germans against us in the bloodiest of all wars. I went through the pockets feeling for hidden compartments. Then I turned to a tailor-cutter from Elder Wills’ factory and asked for an exact copy.”

  Fraser-Smith, in the conscientious spirit of his voluntary work as a governor of the British and Foreign Bible Society, said, “I made it my business to stay on the right side of everyone, especially Vera. She drew a curtain of silence around Hess. And so must I.”1

  The deputy führer's dramatic arrival could not be kept out of front-page headlines in the British pres
s, but nothing was published about the list of prominent figures who had been regarded by Hitler as pro-German before the war. In Washington there was concern: had Hitler been encouraged to send a peace envoy while preparing to invade Russia, hoping to enlist the support of well-known anti-Bolshevik personalities? Churchill had to say again that there would be no time squandered on supposedly friendly Germans. He wrote carefully in his postwar memoirs that Hess “came to us of his own free will [with] something of the quality of an envoy.” Hess was the only Nazi war criminal kept in jail until his death many years later. He was never permitted to give his side of the story.2

  Vera wondered if the flying visit was a complicated deception plan. The Nazis were not as expert in this as was the London Control Directorate. LCD now seldom consulted Vera or SOE's sister services, and was later discovered to have been infiltrated by pro-Soviet propaganda specialists. Records were destroyed after the war. Broadcasts dictated by London Control named anti-Nazi Germans for reasons that seemed only to serve the purpose of assisting Soviet interests.

  The secrecy was described as “evil” by Air Commodore G. S. Oddie. The highly decorated RAF flier wrote of Hess as a man “guided by his own code of honor” in a foreword to a later anthology of heavily censored letters from Hess to his wife, Ilse. Oddie quoted some significant words from Rudolf Hess: “I had not realized that Churchill had become powerless to prevent the catastrophe enveloping us.” The catastrophe was Nazi Germany's invasion of Russia, immediately following the Hess mission.3

  There had been forewarnings. Krystyna Skarbek had provided eyewitness accounts of German troop movements through Poland to the east. Hitler had disclosed the schedule for invading Russia to the fifty-six-year-old Marshal Ion Antonescu of Romania, who had assumed dictatorial powers. Vera heard from Ambassador von der Schulenburg in Moscow that before the Hess flight, Stalin had put an arm around his shoulder. “We must stay friends,” Stalin told Schulenburg. “Do everything to that end.” The German ambassador had flown to Berlin, and on April 28 reassured the Führer that there was no possibility of Russia attacking Germany. Schulenburg returned to Moscow, seemingly the victim of a double deception, and sent a note to Vera innocently quoting Hitler's reassurance to Stalin: eight German heavy divisions were being “transferred away from eastern Europe.”

  On Saturday, June 21, 1941, Schulenburg was instructed to charge the Soviet Union with “sabotaging, terrorizing, and spying against Germany.” The next day, at 5:30 A.M., Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg delivered to the commissar known among Russia's elite as “Iron Arse” Molotov the fatal German declaration of war. “It is,” Schulenburg told Molotov, “madness.”4

  Vera could judge the reliability of agents by finding collateral intelligence. Her opponents were increasingly clever at planting false information. She was puzzled by conflicting evidence: Schulenburg had said no German troops were preparing to invade. Then he delivered a German declaration of war despite his many claims that he fervently prayed, like Bismarck, for the avoidance of a Russo-German war.

  At least it simplified the disputes between the French Communist Party and other underground networks. Communists were now fully at the disposal of the Free French in London and in Vera's F Section. There had always been a degree of guarded cooperation, which had more to do with the French character than with politics. The former metalworker colleague of Rolande Colas’ father and leader of the communist Francs-Tireurs (Snipers) et Partisans, Henri Tanguy, had already assisted de Gaulle's Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur, or FFI, as it began to be more widely known.

  Vera won the help of two special RAF squadrons. Though poorly equipped, they were assigned to deliver agents, arms, and supplies into France with more regularity. She disclosed SOE's changing requirements to the Scientific Research Department run by Professor Dudley Newitt of the Imperial College in Kensington. A chain of “laboratories” was improvised from odd corners of distant buildings to manufacture special equipment and documentation for agents and invent new devices on a grander scale. The greatest need was to improve communications now that the communist-run circuits were ready to work with de Gaulle's FFI. There were still tensions, but Vera was seeing more French escapees who wanted only to be trained to go back and fight, regardless of politics. She had to oversee the painstaking work of comparing stories, watching for double agents, and looking for contradictions or falsehoods in a flood of intelligence.

  By mid-1941, escapees like Diana Hope Rowden had been reaching England in growing numbers. Diana was a twenty-one-year-old tomboy who had lived with her mother in the south of France in the 1920s. When they returned to England, Diana attended the Manor House, a private school in Surrey. In 1932 as a shy teenager she won a scholarship to the Sorbonne. At the outbreak of war, she volunteered for the French Red Cross. After France fell, she stayed behind until mid-1941, when she escaped through Spain. Gubbins's deputy director, Harry Sporborg, saw her file. Multilingual, she became an assistant section officer for RAF Intelligence. Diana was later featured in a post-war Time magazine article that asked if she had been used by London Control as a decoy, leading to her execution. This was never given credibility by Squadron Leader Bill Simpson, who considered Diana to be “good material” after meeting her at the southern English resort of Torquay. He could see she was “healthy as a flea,” a free spirit, her recklessness under control, her skills honed in prewar days by crewing on yachts instead of going to classes. She knew Brittany and Normandy well. Simpson thought she deserved to spend the rest of her life sailing, which she adored. She went into action with equally ill-fated companions, Cecily Lefort and Noor Inayat Khan.

  Vera systematically gathered anecdotal information from sources like Diana, knowing that conditions changed and details needed to be updated. The girl had recalled that the daily baguette was gone. Bread rations were down to twelve ounces per person per day. Those who normally smoked cigarettes now puffed on “tobacco” made from nettle leaves, linden flowers, or Jerusalem artichokes. Taxis were wicker bath-chairs pulled by bicycles like the rickshaws of French Indochina. Paris had become a woman's city, where the whispered question was “Any news of him?” This was usually followed by a quick shake of the head. Men were hired by German factories, but it was clear they were slave workers.

  Out of wellsprings of information, Vera drew her own conclusions. Agents in the field should be supplied with huge quantities of French francs, real or counterfeit. She had growing lists of businessmen in France who might advance real money if repayment was guaranteed in BBC broadcasts, with a phrase proposed by the lender inserted upon receipt by Morse transmission from the borrower-agent. Tactics of counterintelligence were changed by the “Gestapo,” a term the French applied indiscriminately to all German security services. Admiral Canaris ran army intelligence, and his archrival Himmler ran the SS's Sicherheitsdienst. The army put its routine field police in uniform and its secret field police in civilian clothes. Himmler controlled the Sipo, security police units divided between the Kripo, which dealt with crime, and the true Gestapo, or secret state police. Vera's agents were taught to tell the difference. Their survival after capture might depend on which security branch held them. Vera updated lists of these organizations and the addresses of their headquarters and outstations, noting changes and gleaning what she could of the treatment received by captured agents. The German army sent those who claimed prisoner-of-war status to regular prison camps.

  She tracked ever-changing regulations on rationing, travel permits, curfews, and the sentiments of local people. She estimated that nine out of ten French citizens hated the Germans, and “made the best of a bad job” until provided with credible leadership as part of a coherent plan. Vera verified the accuracy of her own information by examining that of the Free French and felt at times as if she was putting flesh on the bones of characters in a spy novel. The conquerors, she wrote, “presently pay for purchases in overvalued German occupation marks. The French call the Germans doryphores, potato beetles
that devour the leaves so that the plants die. The Germans strip the shops of luxuries by using occupation marks set at an artificial rate, which in effect makes their pocket money worth five times its true value. It was only ten years prior that the four biggest banks in Germany were closed down by a depressed economy that hit rock bottom. Now a new generation of Germans regarded Hitler as a genius for making them feel rich.” The German Reichsbank was making huge profits by manipulating currency exchanges wherever Germany ruled. A million French prisoners of war worked in German factories and were joined by French “slave laborers.” The Germans were taking sweet revenge for French reparations after the 1914–18 war, but they were spreading hatred that might result in a single-minded resistance.

  Diana Hope Rowden was a mine of information. She said most of the ordinary German soldiers she'd seen were straight off the farm, looked a little lost, and “missed their Mums.” Some found solace in cheap brothels, but their euphoria at finding that their money went a long way soon wore off. In Paris it was beyond the average German soldier's means to go to Maxim's, which was run by a Berlin restaurateur, Herr Horcher, who licked the boots of top Nazis like Göring. Caviar overflowed at Petrossian's, if you could afford it. Coco Chanel was the expensive mistress of a senior German officer after she reopened her haute couture house on the advice of André Gide: “Come to terms with yesterday's enemy. That is not cowardice but wisdom.” The most exclusive brothel, One Two Two, serviced German officials, who ignored an official ban on whorehouses. Maurice Chevalier still sang. Picasso still painted. Jean Cocteau wrote as cynically as ever. Frenchmen who ran the black markets made bigger profits than they ever had as peacetime shopkeepers. But Frenchmen working the land were in the vast majority, and their rage against the oppressor infected the cities.