Vera had first gone to the Fort William area with Gubbins and Polish soldiers evacuated through Dunkirk with their commander, General Wl-adysl-aw Sikorski. Gubby had known since boyhood the forbidding hills and the deep lochs of freezing black water. He had first selected it as a redoubt if Germany occupied Britain. Sikorski told Vera that the dismal landscape suited his Polish soul. The viaducts and bridges were perfect for exercises in sabotage. The countryside was bleak and challenging, and offered a foretaste of what an agent might encounter anywhere in Europe.
Vera found quarters for the Polish government-in-exile in the office of Boy Scout Magazine editor F. Haydn Dimmock on Buckingham Palace Road. Their role in shattering Laval's Shield of France would prove heroic. Few among Whitehall's regular service officers, and only those with the need to know, had any inkling of what went on behind the inoffensive magazine's blacked-out windows.
26
“We Are in the Presence of a Crime Without a Name”
“Look!” Vera said, proudly waving a piece of soft toilet paper in front of Jan Zurakowski. “No more scraping your bottom in the loo.”
Zura was bug-eyed. Many public washrooms had only squares of newspaper hanging from a nail. Vera had emphasized secrecy for this rendezvous. The Polish fighter pilot wondered if she had called him here to boast of this wartime adaptation of gentlemen's disposable handkerchiefs, sold exclusively in Harrods before the war.
Vera had asked him to meet her at SOE's Small Scale Raiding Force (SSRF) canteen near Kensington Palace Gardens Terrace, parallel to Embassy Row, a posh neighborhood of London's most expensive properties, now mostly blitzed. The SSRF canteen was improvised from the remains of a bombed pub on Church Street, just off Kensington High Street. The canteen was open to all servicemen, but in a shabby back room Vera enjoyed total privacy. Zura waited to learn what she really wanted to talk about.
She spoke of new shipping losses in Arctic convoys carrying war supplies to northern Russia. Local Soviet radio lapses were causing horrendous losses among British ships loaded with Russia-bound cargo scraped together to satisfy Stalin, who put constant and heavy pressure on Roosevelt and Churchill to reinforce Russian forces on the Eastern Front. If Stalin lost faith in his Western allies, he might make a separate peace and renew his old alliance with Germany. Vera warned: War on two fronts promised victory over Hitler. War on a single western front meant certain defeat for the Allies. Zura didn't need to be told that Poland's only hope was to be liberated by the West. What he now learned was that in September 1943, PQ18, an Arctic convoy, had been endangered by Russian wireless traffic whose codes were broken by the Germans. The previous convoy, PQ17, had sailed from northern Scotland along the Arctic route to Murmansk and suffered the loss of twenty-two merchant ships with cargo totaling 3,350 tanks and military vehicles, 210 warplanes, and some 100,000 tons of food and ammunition.
Bletchley now knew that the Russians were discovering the dates of convoy departures from northern Scotland and transmitting details to Polyarny, near Murmansk, in ciphers already broken in Berlin. Was this deliberate sabotage, and if so, who was responsible?
Zura was one airman qualified to undertake a mission to confirm or dismiss Vera's suspicions. He was one of her oldest and most trusted allies, their relationship close to a love affair, although both lived by the decent values for which they were fighting. Neither would cross the line between mutual respect and physical intimacy. Vera had promised Zura that everything would be done to get his girlfriend, who was Jewish, out of Poland. The odds were against it, and now it hurt her to ask him to risk his life again after all he had already done.
First she disclosed to him the existence of the only fighting squad whose actions were granted complete immunity from all legal accountability, including the ancient statute imposing criminal penalties for unsanctioned secret operations. She had never provided such disclosure before. Potential agents were first studied from a distance for suitability, introduced gradually into the killing arts, and left to make their own deductions once they were deemed fit for action. The final bit of official business was swearing the secrecy oath. Nothing was said about the technical illegality of their work. SOE specialized in murder and mayhem. Vera had to spell it out for her friend in clipped sentences.
Zura saw an astonishing hardening in her. She wore a short pleated Harris tweed skirt and a simple ivory blouse in place of a uniform, and at first glance appeared demure. Her lush black hair curled just below the square shoulders, sexy but short, as if to remind male admirers that she was likely smarter. Her straight posture declared her authority: her chin lifted just a bit above the norm, not arrogant, but enough to make the elderly waiter rush to please her. It was clear to Zura that, however old and scruffy, the waiter had the highest level of security clearance. Under his apron, he packed a gun.
This new toughness in Vera's manner followed her recent discovery that while she was herself escaping from Poland into Romania, the German “ghettoization” of Polish Jews had been discussed in Warsaw by Adolf Eichmann, the grocery clerk who ran the Bureau for Jewish Affairs at the Reich Security Headquarters and was known to Vera as a signature on forms circulating through the SS, the Nazi elite. But on October 4, 1943, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler had told his highest-ranking leaders meeting at Poznan, “Most of you probably know what it is to see a hundred corpses, or to see five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through that and yet… to have preserved our decency—this is what has made us hard.”
Vera had gotten hold of the text of that speech. “She became harder than any SS executioner,” Zura was to tell me many years later. “She felt guilty for not knowing sooner that Eichmann had been in Warsaw while she was there, and why he'd been there. God help anyone who got in her way now. She was in a state of fury. She felt she'd let down my Jewish girlfriend. She sounded utterly pitiless when she outlined the SOE skullduggery she believed was the only way to sap the strength of an enemy whose purpose was not conquest but genocide, and to fight those who gave no priority to stopping the genocide.”
Other frightful details had now reached her. She knew how deadly facts were ignored in London when so much might have been done to disrupt the Europe-wide network of railroads serving the death camps. When Whitehall appeasers still sought to pacify Hitler, she worried about the machinery for killing millions. Zura said, “She forgot she hardly had time to sleep, preparing covert warfare before Churchill took power… I saw a report that even then she was ‘fearless but defies officialdom to get her own way.’ Now nothing stood in her way. It was not as if the terror was secret. Even before Churchill finally took charge, our Polish couriers were reporting ‘gassing machines’ run by engines taken from dismantled Russian-built submarines to kill Jews at Auschwitz.”
On January 20, 1942, fifteen top bureaucrats involved in the “natural diminution” of Jews met in a villa at 56 am-GrossenWannsee. SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler told this conference that “emigration” meant extermination. Before the war, Adolf Eichmann was already known to Whitehall, since in 1932 he had been intercepted at the border of Palestine by British Mandate authorities. He had arrived under the cover of a newsman for a well-respected Berlin newspaper and was later identified as “special deputy charged with preparation of the Final Solution.” Within weeks of the French surrender, the puppet regime at Vichy took instruction from a General Commission on the Jewish Question, directed by SS Captain Theodor Dannecker, head of the Gestapo's Jewish office in Paris. The first deportations from France to Auschwitz began within months of the French surrender: several thousand children between the ages of two and seventeen were never seen again. All this had been known in Whitehall.
Zura said Vera had rock-solid proof that the German program of “natural diminution” had already begun while he was trying to fly to England and she was trying to escape Romania. She remembered, too, how Czechoslovakia had been betrayed by Chamberlain, who had sneered in public that nobody in England knew or cared about such countries in East
ern Europe. “They cause only chaos and incomprehensible trouble for generations,” he was quoted as saying.
Actually, Churchill in a BBC “Broadcast to the World” on August 24, 1941, had attempted to publicize the Nazi terror, saying, “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” His words were printed in leaflets to be dropped by air throughout Europe in 1942, but Vera told Zura that the Air Ministry opposed the waste of warplanes for such pointless missions.
Zura and other Polish pilots were already familiar with the use of secrecy to conceal domestic embarrassments. Polish veterans of the aerial clashes over Warsaw had fought anonymously in RAF Squadron 303, otherwise know as the Kosciuszko Squadron, named after the eighteenth-century Polish hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko. The name was never acknowledged. Air Ministry officials had tried to prevent the use of Polish pilots in the Battle of Britain. Tributes to their skill and heroism came later from regular RAF pilots, who said the battle would have been lost without the intervention of the Poles, who were horrified by the RAF's use of outdated tactics against an enemy whose modern tactics clearly had never been studied.
Historians today record the vital role of the Poles in defeating the 1940 German aerial onslaught, but at the time their role was unknown to the public.1
In 1943, Vera told Zura, “You were fighting to liberate your own country when you saved England. When this war's won, Churchill and Roosevelt will let Stalin take Poland.” It was clear she had lost all illusions.
After her initial disclosure, Vera invited Zura to a weekend walking through the Sussex countryside around Winchelsea. There she outlined a mission involving dangers that even Zura had never faced. She needed a Polish-speaking pilot to fly solo in the Baltic area and record Russian wireless transmissions. These were not picked up in their entirety at Bletchley, and code breakers were not sure if transmissions originated in the Russian-occupied part of Poland. Zura flew a series of these spy missions, refueling at a secret base on the Finland-Sweden border. He was never told the results. He wrote me later: “The RAF's top brass resented Vera's ‘irresponsible, unauthorized efforts to influence policy’ and saw her as an interfering woman, uneducated in the traditions and disciplines of a fighting service.” But Zura saw Vera was right: Poland would be sacrificed to placate Stalin, and he wanted to take his girlfriend, if she escaped, as far from the Soviets as possible. Meanwhile, he advised Vera on escape lines for downed fliers.
Vera could have seen Zura behind closed doors at the Boy Scout magazine office sheltering the exiled Polish government, but she was wary of eavesdroppers when secrecy was so difficult to preserve among governments-in-exile. Some things must be kept secret; some secrets should be deliberately leaked. She had confided to Mary Stephenson some misgivings upon learning before the war that Eichmann had met several times with Haganah Zionist militants in Berlin. One meeting had been reported in Der Stuermer, the radical anti-Jewish periodical; other meetings took place between Zionist agents at the Hotel zur Traube, near the Berlin Zoo. Prewar Haganah representatives needed to test Eichmann's claim that he wanted only to resettle Jews in Palestine. He had gone there in the winter of 1937, traveling by train through Romania and boarding a ship at Constana for Palestine, carrying false credentials as a journalist for Berliner Tageblatt—a newspaper whose owner and editor in chief, both Jews, were replaced when it was “coordinated” into the Nazi Party. The Soviet Union put its best intelligence resources into finding out if Eichmann meant to use Jewish refugees to damage British relations with Arabs. One Soviet source was Kim Philby, later exposed as a mole in the British SIS. His father, Harry St. John “Jack” Philby, met with Zionist leaders including Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann in February 1939 and promised that substantial Jewish immigration to Palestine could be purchased by a Jewish “loan” to the House of Saud and Ibn Saud as “boss of bosses” in the Arab world.
After she found that facts had been twisted or ignored, Vera pushed harder than ever to win respect for these Jewish military organizations, still seen as enemies in Whitehall. Nothing had appeared in the British press in November 1940 when the illustrious U.S. correspondent in Berlin, William Shirer, reported that his “spies,” as he called informers, discovered why strange death notices appeared in German newspapers, using phrases like “after weeks of uncertainty” a beloved son or daughter had “unbelievably” died in an area around the castle of Grafeneck, which was said to be a “hospital.” Shirer found Grafeneck surrounded by “black-coated SS men”; trucks with tarpaulins thundered into the “hospital” all night. He concluded that the Nazis were murdering the mentally ill for “eugenic reasons.” An unanswerable form letter was mailed to relatives: the dead son or daughter had been “saved from a lifelong institutional sojourn” and death came as “a merciful release.” Euthanasia had been justified, but not a word had appeared in print in the three years since Shirer's first horrified conclusions. After the decision to go to war, the Chamberlain government and newspaper proprietors who toadied to the royal family had either suppressed the reports or dismissed them. Vera had waited three years to learn of the euphemism for genocide. It was clear that not only Jews were the intended victims of a dictatorship intent upon perfecting an Aryan race.
Vera was absolutely sure that the only hope for the Jewish people was to create their own state. Churchill seemed to yield to the American policy of shutting out Jewish immigrants on the theory, Go with the ally best able to serve your interests. Whitehall stepped up attacks on SOE as an out-of-control agency teaching terrorism against international law. Vera continued as fiercely as ever to argue that democratic control was her aim in uniting French guerrilla groups, but she could not talk openly of this without ministerial approval, which had to come from the antagonistic Foreign Office. Its SIS chiefs feared that uprisings fomented by SOE might help French agents recruited by the German Jewish communist who called himself Henri Robinson. He was said to have been instructed by Stalin to make France the Red front of the Soviet Great Patriotic War. In the bowels of the SIS, however, were British-born traitors reporting to Moscow and, because of pro-Soviet sympathies, eager to destroy SOE.
Zura discussed all this with Vera after his clandestine recordings of Russian broadcasts of escort arrangements for the Arctic convoys. Admiral Bill Mott, briefing officer on ULTRA for Roosevelt, would later report Stalin's refusal to agree to the West's airlift of supplies to anti-Nazi underground armies. Mott identified John Cairncross as a Soviet-run spy at Bletchley from 1942 to 1944, betraying ULTRA secrets to Moscow and then becoming a formal SIS officer. ULTRA information was not supposed to be disclosed to the Soviet Union, according to future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis W. Powell. As a wartime U.S. Air Force colonel, he was one of a tiny American group empowered to “accept” ULTRA intelligence from Bletchley to guide General Carl Spaatz's U.S. Strategic Air Force in bombing German industrial centers.2
It made no sense to Zura that the Russians would give their German enemy the details of convoys bringing urgently needed supplies. His mystification only deepened after the revelation by Hitler's spy chief that “Russian shortwave transmitters extended over all German-occupied territories, and neutral countries too, from Norway to the Pyrenees, from the Atlantic to the Oder, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean.” Walter Schellenberg made the claim when he became a postwar adviser to the Americans on Soviet espionage.3
For a long time Vera was to remain in the dark about the reasons for Russian broadcasts using codes already known to be broken by Berlin. She was working exhaustively on SOE operations while trying to understand SIS motives in betraying Zionist guerrillas, in synchronization with Russian propaganda that encouraged anti-British feeling in Arabia. On Friday, March 6, 1942, the London Daily Mirror ran a cartoon by the famous Zec. It showed a lone merchant seaman clinging to a life raft, his ship torpedoed, his agony starkly etched against the terrible isolation of an empty ocean. The caption came from an announcement in the House of Commons: THE PRICE OF PETROL HAS BEEN INCREASED BY ONE PENNY—OFF
ICIAL. Zec's message was that badly underpaid seamen suffered terrible losses to fill the pockets of war profiteers. The Daily Mirror was reminded that the Communist Party's Daily Worker had been closed down for such “vicious and malignant criticism.” Then the Mirror columnist William Connor, under his pen name of Cassandra, spoke out against a new British policy of stopping further Jewish immigration to Palestine. He was immediately drafted into military service.
The need to study masses of contradictory information became painfully obvious, but Vera suffered from a lack of qualified analysts. Her sources reported that, while shipping Jews to death camps, Eichmann also increased the flow of refugees to Palestine. She could only guess that the contradiction arose from Nazi calculations that if the British had to intercept the refugee ships, this tied up their warships. Yet if they let in the Jews, they would alienate the Arab world. Churchill did try for an Anglo-American denunciation of “elimination” that masqueraded as emigration. He squeezed a declaration out of ten Allied governments-in-exile on December 17, 1942, deploring Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people. Not one government, including the U.S. and U.K., would put its name to documents setting out the facts. The public was left in ignorance of what the declaration really meant. At this point, Churchill apparently gave up.
“But Vera went for the jugular,” said Zura. She got the Archbishop of Canterbury to speak out against the lack of action to save Jews. He said that polls in the United States reported a rise in anti-Semitic sentiment, and his warnings led Christian groups, labor unions, and humanitarian activists to demands measures to help surviving Jews. To curb public outcry, Whitehall called a conference on the day the Warsaw ghetto uprising broke out, April 19, 1943. The conference ended as the Warsaw Jews broadcast their final appeal: “The last 35,000 Jews in the ghetto are condemned to execution. Save us.”
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