Diana repeated a lot of gossip, of course, but it was the significant gossip by which an observant young woman could read the people's mood. Her reports were easily checked against later arrivals coming by way of MI9, the escape-and-evasion agency that was causing unease at the top of the SIS. Nothing could stop MI9 as a new and expanding secret service from organizing and training the armed forces on how to break out of enemy prisons and return to England. Its own agents would eventually help some twelve thousand airmen escape captivity, many of whom flew again. By his conquests, Hitler had created horrendous policing problems, and it was impossible to block the dozens of smaller exits out of his Fortress Europe. His expansion of “German” frontiers left a vast population theoretically trapped within that “world of barbed wire” described by the Earl of Cardigan. The very size of the Greater German Reich left gaps and weaknesses. The old Viking sea routes went through the Orkney and Shetland Islands, whose inhabitants were British but Norse by origin. The Shetland Islands had been a Norse colony until the fifteenth century, and were now part of Scapa Flow's Home Fleet outer defenses. The string of flat islands dotted a vast emptiness of ocean across which sudden gales blew. In Kirkwall, the Orkney capital, Vera heard the old joke that one day the wind stopped and everyone fell over. But from here she could float agents in small boats that slipped unobserved past German coastal forts in Norway. Neutral Sweden was closer, too, and a discreet SOE transit point was maintained there by British military attaché Malcolm Munthe, son of the famous author of The Story of San Michele, Axel Munthe. Malcolm's services included regular RAF flights to England by Mosquito fighter-bombers that carried agents in their bomb bays and supplied weekly intelligence culled from European newspapers.
The flow of escapees out of France yielded the greatest dividends, and it was important that Vera become deft in dealing with the secret services of de Gaulle and his FFI, to whom many escapees came first. At the end of 1941, her own F Section acquired a nominal boss, Maurice Buckmaster, after internal and near-suicidal departmental bickering. He was an old Etonian and more acceptable to other government departments than SOE ragamuffins from government schools. His prewar job as Ford manager in Paris had earned him a place on the chilling Wanted List France, Sonderpfändungsliste Fr. It was lucky that the Gestapo in France called agents and circuits “Buckmasters.” It drew attention away from Vera.
Vera still had to argue against Whitehall mandarins, who said SOE put up “smoke screens.” They were blind to historical precedents. The SIS liked to claim its roots went back at least as far as Elizabeth I, who had employed “explorators” to subvert the Catholics plotting in France. SOE descended from the deceptively named Alien Office, which had kept the French Revolution from infecting England, directed the assassination of Tsar Paul of Russia in 1790, and funded French resistance to Napoleon. The Lord Halifax school of thought, “on-the-one-hand-this-but-on-the-other-hand-that,” was the absolute opposite of the Alien Office's philsophy of quick action.
After Russia became an ally, and with Halifax parked in Washington, the Foreign Office surprised Vera by sending SOE advisers to Moscow. Long after the war, after many attempts to hush up the facts, MI5 counterintelligence disclosed the extent of Soviet infiltration. Peter Wright, a retired assistant MI5 director, forced a constitutional crisis about the conduct and oversight of secret intelligence by defying a ban on his book Spycatcher, reporting details of English moles who were protected from prosecution after they confessed to spying for Moscow.5
After Pearl Harbor, SOE grew in stature. Donovan appointed officers of considerable standing to his London station, where his deputies, cheerfully accepting the jibe that OSS stood for Oh-So-Social, made very clear their support for Vera. Skirmishing parties, trained by SOE and operating under names like the Small Boat Squadron, picked away at the outer German battlements of France, using canoes and tools whose very simplicity made them easy to acquire. In countries like Hungary, it was said the Gestapo took off on Friday and resumed work on Monday. In France, they were over-stretched by resistance groups united under de Gaulle's man Jean Moulin. Many partisans were, in sentiment, anti-Gaullist. Vera discovered just how brilliantly Moulin could inspire them to overlook differences by his personal example. Resistance leaders saw, as did Vera, the scars on Moulin's throat, inflicted by a razor before he escaped his German jailers.
25
Shattering Laval's “Shield of France”
Vera joined a small Free French celebration in Duke Street into the early hours of New Year's Day 1942. Before the last hoarded bottles of champagne were emptied, Jean Moulin left to parachute back into France. At the age of forty, he had been the country's youngest prefect. He had stayed at his post in Chartres until dismissed by the Vichy government after he refused to sign a German-dictated declaration that French civilians had been burned alive and in other ways slaughtered by the French themselves. Rotting corpses littered the streets, victims of German atrocities. Prefect Moulin refused to arrange a municipal cleanup, insisting that the Germans finish their own dirty work. He was jailed, tried to slit his throat, and was rushed to hospital. “I survived but felt I was on borrowed time, and should give to the cause whatever remains of my life,” he told Vera. He had escaped German surveillance, acquired two fake identities, gathered details of anti-Nazi activities in the Rhone valley, and slipped over the border with the help of the U.S. consul in Marseilles. With a fake identity as Professor Jean Joseph Mercier of the International Institute in New York, he crossed overland to Lisbon. The British flew him to Poole, in Dorset, on October 19, 1941.
Moulin was questioned in the London district of Wandsworth by MI5 counterintelligence at a place previously known as the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum for Orphan Daughters of Soldiers and Sailors Killed in the Crimean War. He was not so much offended as intrigued, observing that he did not feel like an Orphan Daughter.
Vera salvaged him, curious to learn about his contact with a well-known Soviet agent in Paris, Henri Robinson, who had suggested the Hess mystery was really quite simple. Soviet agents in Berlin reported that the British would join Germany in a war against Russia. Hitler instructed Deputy Führer Hess to reinforce this impression while preparing to launch an invasion. None of this really mattered to Vera. The Russo-German war had brought her a reservoir of agents, previously hesitant about placing their well-organized networks at the disposal of the French underground. Moulin was a symbol of republicanism, to counter accusations that Gaullists planned to impose an authoritarian government once France was free again.
Vera escorted Moulin through an intensive course of training in SOE techniques. He was dropped into Provence on New Year's Day with a microfilmed message from de Gaulle hidden in a matchbox. This empowered Moulin to build conspiratorial cells of no more than seven men and women. Cell leaders would know only their immediate superiors in a chain of command reaching back to London. Moulin was called Rex by Vera. In France he was code-named Max. He was joined by Jean-Pierre Reinach, a young French army officer who had been captured in occupied France, escaped, reached England, and had fallen in love with Naomi, sister of Edmund de Rothschild. They married at the Great Synagogue in London before Reinach and Moulin parachuted back into France.
Jean-Pierre Reinach defended the Free French and FFI for being so obsessively secretive. “Closework is a blueprint for terrorism. It will be used against us by others rising up against white imperialism someday,” he said to Vera while being briefed on codes by Leo Marks. Leo had an unusual sensitivity to any pupil's chances of survival. Leo had no credible reason to stop this idealistic young man from dropping to his death.
Moulin's latest reports began to arrive in February 1942. By then, Vera was allied with Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, whose Combined Operations launched coastal raids with primitive equipment. Vera and Mountbatten saw eye to eye. The French industrial working class formed a sound basis for mass uprisings. But the Foreign Office and the SIS intervened to complain about the allegedly erratic procee
dings of SOE agents. Hugh Dalton was at the point of no return as SOE's parliamentary voice. He was seen as “Communistically inclined.” Vera found this laughable: when she was with Ambassador Schulenburg in Bucharest, he had identified Stalin's leading agents, who burrowed out of sight and kept silent. Dalton was anything but invisible or silent. He was loud-mouthed, and poked around the SIS looking for examples of bungling, a threat to the illusion of SIS infallibility. So he was made president of the Board of Trade, where he would cause less friction, since foreign trade was virtually nonexistent. Bletchley decrypts of the U-boat Enigma ciphers had suddenly dried up. Enemy signals were unreadable because the Germans had added a new rotor to their naval Enigma machines. Shipping losses soared in a theater of war Churchill regarded as the one in which Britain might suffer final defeat. In assigning resources, he had to give a lesser priority to swamping Nazified Europe in a wave of terror.
Dalton, while still at SOE, had been infuriated by “a most graceless clodhopping” memo from Cadogan, undersecretary for foreign affairs, alleging that SOE “employed its own jargon to lay down a dense smoke-screen.” Dalton was replaced by a supposedly more pliant Viscount Wolmer, the Earl of Selborne. “He's not very inspiring,” commented Cadogan. Yet it was Selborne who made the damning accusation later that “SIS would never hesitate to use us to advance their schemes even if that meant the sacrifice of some of our people.”
The SIS claimed that its hostility to SOE was justified because Moscow had instructed the French Communist Party to control internal resistance, and to work toward a national insurrection after the liberation of France. Yet Moulin, far from being a Soviet agent, was busy making sure that a French secret army would control the communists. He worked underground for fourteen crucial months, during which Pierre Laval, Vichy's prime minister, declared, “I hope for a German victory,” and projected an image of his Vichy regime as the Shield of France. Then he launched a program of “voluntary labor” that turned into mandatory labor. French youths were forced to work in German factories. Thousands took to the hills in what was openly spoken of as Resistance. Seventy or more clandestine newspapers were published regularly, carrying reports of “La France libre” and the Free French. All of the Laval regime's anti-Semitism, including the transportation of Jews to death camps, was advertised in the roundup. Jewish children were carefully separated and dispatched in separate wagons to avoid “scenes of emotion,” Moulin reported in helpless disgust and despair.
Moulin was flown back to England in a Westland Lysander. This nimble RAF spy plane was old by the standards of the time, but it had short, rough-field capabilities. It had been designed in the early 1930s, with a high wing behind the pilot, allowing for excellent all-around vision. American experts praised it as revolutionary, to the astonishment of RAF pilots, who were resigned to hearing their machines were obsolete. It had a cruising speed of 180 mph with a single Bristol Mercury engine, but it could reach 300 mph in a dive. All pilots were told to remember “what a tough job agents take on,” in guidance notes by Wing Commander H. S.Verity. “Try to get to know [the agents] and give them confidence in pick-up operations,” he wrote. “Don't let any [pilots] think they are sort of trick-cycling.” Pilots were cramming extra “bodies” into space for three passengers, and bringing home gifts of perfume and champagne from French closework fighters.
What Moulin brought back was a dossier on the Resistance and news that Naomi Rothschild's young husband, Jean-Pierre, had been killed.
Vera had to harden her heart against an emotional attachment to Moulin and distress over Jean-Pierre's death and its validation of Leo Marks's premonition. She was increasingly restrained in her personal feelings, and yet she knew her success came from “getting inside” others, which required a great deal of sympathetic understanding. She feared for Moulin, who returned again to France with Yeo-Thomas, the White Rabbit, to free one of their comrades from German captivity. By then, Moulin estimated, there were some 200,000 partisans ready for a massive uprising. Resistance leaders were heartened by the sight and sound of a middle-aged British officer. Often partisans were forced to share a single weapon among several men. The White Rabbit constantly battled to break down the reluctance of the regular British armed forces to spare a few crumbs for them. He was hampered by secrecy: few knew of his heroic work.
In June 1943, Moulin was captured after an informer told the Germans “a Gaullist is in the neighborhood.” He might have escaped, with so much experience in changing his appearance and identity, but he still carried the matchbox in which de Gaulle had inserted the microfilmed authorization for Moulin to speak for the general. The damning evidence was discovered. Fourteen resistance leaders, rounded up with him, were tortured and killed. Vera forced herself to read eyewitness accounts of how he was dismembered by the Gestapo until he died.
Three days before Moulin's horrific end, during the night of June 17–18, 1943, Pierre Raynaud, a French subaltern–sabotage instructor, had been dropped to join Francis Cammaerts, a graduate of the tough commando school at Arisaig in the Scottish Highlands. Raynaud became convinced that he was the victim of betrayal. At the same time, Noor Inayat Khan, often described as an Indian princess and a talented writer of children's stories, parachuted into France and began a long journey to a tragic end that would prompt speculation that she, too, was betrayed.
During the eighteen months since Moulin's New Year farewell party of 1941–42, Vera had seen physically tough young agents become paranoid when things went wrong for quite ordinary reasons. Raynaud believed his landing was observed by Germans who were waiting to follow him to Paris. He came to believe that SOE's F Section deliberately sent inadequately trained agents who, if caught, would break under interrogation and mislead the Germans with information given them by London. Such conspiracy theories were contradicted by one young female wireless operator, Yvonne Cormeau, who parachuted into France later that summer and found herself sitting in front of Francis Cammaerts, Raynaud's contact, on a train to Toulouse. “He looked straight through me,” she reported, “and we ignored each other.” There was no evidence of inadequate training. What sometimes did happen was that agents forgot safeguards after becoming comfortable in their hostile environment. A sudden encounter with an old friend from training school would lead to sharing a drink together, and then the Gestapo would pounce. Sometimes agents had to arrange a direct meeting to pass messages. Yvonne Cormeau had learned to write such messages on thin paper, tightly rolled and inserted by a needle into a cigarette, which could be partly smoked and then casually dropped. But even she, honored as a craftswoman who transmitted four hundred coded messages in a year, broke a rule that mandated that an agent should keep constantly on the move. She remained in one hideout for six months. The Germans were looking for an English wireless operator in the region, and her hideout was in a village with no running water, which seemed a good reason for not bothering to look there.
“Her reasoning was perfectly sensible,” commented Vera. “She could watch from her attic over long distances for any suspicious German movements.” Rules were meant to be broken, provided this was not done in a moment of sheer absentmindedness. This kind of reasoning did not satisfy Pierre Raynaud, who became obsessed with the idea that some agents—young, hurriedly trained girls—were given information they would reveal under interrogation and unwittingly deceive the enemy about Allied plans.
Gubbins reviewed SOE's training programs and its mobilization of highly skilled craftsmen, and agreed with Vera that anyone who believed agents were graduated before they were fully trained was suffering from paranoia. Some greenhorns, like Princess Noor and Diana Hope Rowden, although graded by instructors as unfit to go into the field, were sent anyway because their special skills were desperately needed, and they proved to be the toughest and most innovative in resisting interrogation under torture.
To make sure that SOE training was watertight, Vera revisited the rugged terrain at Loch Ailort, twenty-four miles west of Fort William on the c
oast of Scotland, where young men and women lived in a grim old house with cold granite walls, whipped constantly by high winds, that was hardly ever visible through the thick tall trees reaching higher than the roof. Mist and rain soaked the surrounding hills. The region was gloomy beyond belief, and the high fatality rate among aircrews at a nearby naval air station was almost entirely due to pilots flying into hilltops or losing their way in foul weather and running out of fuel far out to sea. Jack Wilson, formerly deputy police chief in Calcutta, oversaw instruction.
In September 1942 Vera concluded that the training grounds near Fort William were beyond subversion. “The Polish instructors had gone through hell in Soviet labor camps,” she recalled. In that Scottish wilderness around Loch Ailort, the Poles recognized that under Jack Wilson's air of toughness was the honest purpose of a benign schoolmaster, who wanted to hammer home the art of surviving even worse challenges than Siberia. He had introduced Kim's Game, based on the Rudyard Kipling tale of a boy required to train his memory in order to live. Wilson had taught boys the mental disciplines that now, at the age of fifty-two, he introduced into Special Training Schools. The STS mushroomed into seventy “schools for danger” around the globe. Wilson's first wartime assignment had been with Gubbins's Independent Companies in Norway. He regarded the experience as a practice run for proper guerrilla warfare and helped Vera plan the insertion of agents to kill one of Hitler's chief instruments in the slaughtering of Jews, General Reinhard Heydrich.
Spymistress Page 25
