The conference took place between British cabinet members and a small U.S. delegation in Bermuda. The British territory's “censorettes” intercepted communications between the Western Hemisphere and Europe. Buried in such secrecy, the island was ideal for a conference that was never meant to produce action. The U.S. government issued permits for only five wire-service reporters, who had to rely on handouts. “It was a mutual anticonscience pact,” Vera said later. “Americans did not want to compromise their tight immigration policy.” The Archbishop of Canterbury condemned the whole affair as disgraceful. Discussions were kept secret on the pretext that Allied security was at stake. A one-page bulletin said concrete recommendations were made but must remain confidential because of “military considerations.” Vera knew what this meant, from the report of parliamentary undersecretary Richard Law, later Baron Coleraine: “The feeling in England is widespread against the Jews [but] American public opinion is subjected to extreme pressure from an alliance of Jewish organizations.” The conference was pious humbug.
Vera spoke with Chaim Weizmann about this fresh proof that a Jewish Brigade must be formed. Again she saw secrecy used to hide intentions and mistakes. Chaim's son Michael was killed piloting a war-plane in a botched operation to stop the German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau slipping through the English Channel after being bottled up in the French Atlantic port of Brest for months. On the night of February 11–12, 1942, they escaped. A naval board of inquiry suppressed details of what Lord Kilbracken, a navy Swordfish pilot, later called “perhaps the sorriest debacle of the war.” Six old Swordfish biplanes were launched against the battlewagons. The RAF's modern aircraft “waited in their hundreds,” as Kilbracken put it, on the ground. The German warships, accompanied by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and destroyers, left Brest during 198 minutes of darkness and sailed for three hundred miles undetected until they reached the Straits of Dover, while telephone arguments raged between naval and RAF commanders over which service should take responsibility. Thirteen of eighteen Swordfish crewmen were killed. Their commander, Eugene Esmonde, was awarded the highest decoration, the Victoria Cross, but he was dead, too.4
Chaim said bitterly, “My son fell in a cause for which the Zionist flag has not yet been unfurled.” Another son, Ezer, flew RAF Spitfires and later became chief of the Israeli air force and then the president of Israel.5
SOE had no political or racial agenda. Since there was not yet a Jewish Brigade, Vera prepared, with combat training, agents like the Jewish ex-boxer Alec Rabinovich, a wisecracking wireless operator in Peter Churchill's French network. “Wireless operators are SOE's most valuable links in our chain of operations,” Vera told the cryptologist Leo Marks. By this time, Operation Lavatory had inspired Elder Wills to design wireless aerials to look like the pull chain above French toilets.
Vera won the fight with SIS for control over SOE communications and now had a signals directorate under Leo Marks with a “harem” to handle coded traffic. The girls’ reports were intercepted by the SIS deputy chief, Claude Dansey, by tapping the teleprinter lines to Baker Street. De Gaulle's Free French insisted on using their own secret codes to outwit Dansey. Messages from their agents in the field were passed through their offices in Duke Street.
“So the Free French had one code we knew and another we didn't,” Vera told Bill Stephenson. “De Gaulle said his code was locked in a safe. Then one of his agents sent an indecipherable, mutilated by atmospherics or careless coding, and Leo was asked to help.” Leo was always trying to prevent “repeats.” Each time an agent made a mistake in coding, he produced an “indecipherable” and London had to ask for a repeat. Thus German detection vans were given more time to close in on the agent's location. Leo wanted to reach a stage where original messages would always be broken. Sometimes it took 750,000 attempts to break an indecipherable. Leo was slowly building up teams of bright girls who swore there would never again be such a thing as an indecipherable after they heard Leo's graphic account of what happened to agents who were caught while repeating a message.
Leo locked himself in the Free French lavatory to unscramble an indecipherable. Meanwhile, the agent in France blew out his brains when the Germans burst in while he repeated his transmission. “He was afraid they would torture the information out of him,” Vera recalled. The agent should never have been asked for a repeat, because Leo was already solving the puzzle while sitting in the Duke Street toilet. After this, he called it Puke Street. “The message was sent in the French code,” he said later. “In the loo, I discovered this supersecret French code was the same as ours.” De Gaulle's Free French added their own prefixes while working the British code, and the British were not supposed to know. Leo broke the dead agent's indecipherable and sent it to de Gaulle without comment.
Leo Marks was always fearful of losing agents because their messages got unintentionally scrambled. He became alarmed whenever he caught someone like Violette Szabo repeatedly making mistakes that seemed so tiny but could endanger an entire network. He made new agents understand how they might accidentally produce these “indecipherables” while encoding under deadly pressure: cold, hungry, and lonely, trying to recall preselected words from “recognition poems,” injecting safety checks, tapping out Morse while enemy radio-locator vans searched for them. The Germans honed their detection skills to shut down power stations in sequence until a sudden suspension of ditdit-dahs betrayed the agent's location. To counter this, batteries were used for a new batch of wireless sets, and crude ways were devised to crank them up. Independent signaling apparatus had been neglected in the beginning. Yet the Bank of England always had secret telegraphic codes. One SOE executive who knew about these was Geoffrey Courtauld of the international textile merchants. The Courtauld company used codes in its cables abroad, and Vera shamelessly drew on these private business experts for advice.
“She learned it was a good idea to do the Times crossword puzzle, to know the Oxford Dictionary of English Verse, popular slang, and English music hall songs,” Admiral Mott said later.6 “These were sources for encoding messages and also enabled her to deal with memorized poem-codes that became garbled in transmission. She'd solve an indecipherable by a kind of lightning intuition.” The question asked of each bright young female interviewed to handle coded traffic was “Are you good at crossword puzzles?” To answer “Not really” could be decisive. Did she love music? A negative was just as bad. “Terrible at arithmetic?” A despairing and reluctant “Yes” was greeted with a smile that astonished the candidate. Vera knew any damage done by a math teacher at school was easily repaired, but if the puzzled woman had a tin ear and disliked crossword puzzles, she was shunted into some other service.
Leo Marks was in awe of the way Vera found time to help with communications. He was himself capable of immense bouts of intense mental activity. “I supposed it was because we were both Jewish,” he said later. “We watched helplessly while the Allies ignored pleas to bomb the death camps or the intricate network bringing from all over Europe the slaves who would be worked until they were no longer useful, then sent to the ovens, and we wanted to end the nightmare despite the Whitehall skeptics who dismissed guerrilla warfare as a means to quickly collapse the enemy infrastructure. We knew what awaited agents caught by the Gestapo.”
27
“Thin Red Line”
“I was lucky that secret American support for SOE pre-dated U.S. entry into the war,” Vera said later. “Bill Donovan's missions throughout Europe confirmed that ‘no country of origin’ meant doors were closed against Jews who still got out of Europe.”
“It's a vast concentration camp,” reported an anti-Nazi German aristocrat, Baron Rüdiger von Etzdorf, working for SOE. “Millions may be sent to places like Russia when the Third Reich collapses.”
“Nobody in Whitehall spoke of this,” Donovan David Bruce, told his London-based representative of the Office of Coordinator of Information. Bill Stephenson was expanding secret training camps alo
ng the unguarded U.S.-Canada border. From Montreal, U.S. collaborators could now fly unobserved to Scotland in modified RAF bombers, avoiding scrutiny of the Pan-Am Clipper routes.
Donovan had his own sources in the Iberian peninsula who reported seeing a German baron with an “English gentleman.” Vera reassured Donovan: Baron von Etzdorf was a friend introduced in prewar Berlin by her ex-lover, the ambassador Count von der Schulenburg. Etzdorf had told her that after meeting Hitler, he found “everything about the little Nazi unpleasant.” Etzdorf now organized escape routes that led to Lisbon: “The last open gate in the vast European concentration camp.”
A brother, Dr. Hasso von Etzdorf, worked in Berlin with the chief of the general staff, Colonel-General Franz Halder, also anti-Nazi, who knew Marie “Missie” Vassiltchikov, the Russian princess. Missie had warned Vera that these influential anti-Nazis would “have trouble forming a united front if Britain doesn't help.” Baron von Etzdorf had wangled a diplomatic posting to Madrid, from where he could communicate with Vera. There he met Sir Samuel Hoare, sent to Spain as ambassador because his appeasement reputation might help keep local fascists neutral. Vera viewed Hoare as one of the Old Cronies’ Club: aristos who levered each other into top jobs and had pro-Nazi leanings. His pals had advanced him from secretary for India in 1931 to foreign secretary in 1935. He encouraged the then French prime minister Pierre Laval, executed in 1945 for Nazi collaboration, to believe Mussolini should keep his Italian military conquests in Africa. Hoare became secretary for air in early 1940, a serious setback for the RAF until Churchill took power and sent him to Spain so that Hoare's fascist contacts might be discouraged from letting Germany use Spanish coastal bases, the more easily to attack Atlantic convoys. Virtuously citing his ability to keep Spain neutral, Hoare torpedoed SOE's plans for guerrilla warfare there. The advice Vera gave the baron was “squeeze what you can out of the old Hoare by playing on his invincible faith in his moral superiority.”1
The German baron had helped Jews to escape the surrender-on-demand agreement between Vichy and Germany by working with Varian Fry. Fry was free to work with Vera on his unique connections, for he was now part of Donovan's clandestine office in London's Grosvenor Square. The secret cooperation was described by Desmond Morton, Churchill's old intelligence adviser: “U.S. Security is being run for them at the President's request by the British. A British officer [Stephenson] sits in Washington with Mr. Edgar Hoover and General Bill Donovan for this purpose.” Donovan picked Fry's brains to make better use of young Jewish escapees, helping them defeat “enemy alien” rules. Fry, the Harvard-educated classicist who had risked his life inside the enemy camp for fourteen months, knew precisely Vichy's program against 330,000 Jews in France: 168 different decrees forced them, among other things, to shop between 3 and 4 P.M. and banned them from most professions. Many had fled to France to escape German persecution, but were now put into work camps. Fry knew how to exploit divisions within the Vichy-run police, how to locate French anti-Nazi resisters, and how to avoid Gestapo entrapment. Most important, he was sure, by promoting a common aim among quarreling factions, anti-German resistance could be achieved first in France to inspire wider uprisings. An ardent champion of this view was “Tommy” Yeo-Thomas, the White Rabbit.
The Yeo-Thomas family had lived in France since 1855. Tommy was thirty-eight when Britain declared war, and he left his office on rue Royale in Paris to offer his services. The local British military attaché said he wasn't needed. The French Foreign Legion said he was too old. So he gave his car to the British air attaché and was grudgingly accepted into the RAF at the lowest rank, unpaid, to interpret for RAF Bomber Liaison in France until all lines of communication were broken on June 11, 1940, by the German conquest. He got on a cargo boat evacuating some of the last British troops to England.
He shared Vera's graveyard humor. “We're outcasts,” he told her, “until the buggers need us to do their dirty work. Me Tommy, you Vera—we're Tommy Vera.” He paraphrased Rudyard Kipling: “O it's Tommy this and Vera that, an’ both you go away / But it's ‘Thin red line of ’eroes’ when the drums begin to roll…. For it's Tommy this Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck ’im out, the brute!’ / But it's ‘Saviour of ’is country’ when the guns begin to shoot.”
Tommy glimpsed her grim wit when she left him a note: “Since we're fated to be Tommy-Vera, you should know we're fiction. ‘Tommy’ was used 128 years ago in a War Office guide for a soldier to apply for ‘marching money’ at two and a half pence per mile to cover himself, wife, and child. The Duke of Wellington in 1794 found a Grenadier with a bayonet thrust in the chest, a sabre cut across the head and a bullet in his lungs who gasped, ‘It's all in a day's work, sir.’ His name was Thomas Vera.”
Vera noted: “The Grenadier combined loyalty with ‘proud insubordination.’” Yeo-Thomas used this to describe his own refusal to obey imbecilic rules imposed from on high by a swelling bureaucracy that forbade members of different SOE country sections to exchange information. He planted a question in the House of Commons: Why wasn't better use made of civilians with firsthand experience of living among the enemy—like himself?
He joined Vera's F Section in February 1942 and in Baker Street “saw the ghost of Sherlock Holmes passing by in a hansom cab. I'll honor the great detective by applying Holmes's methods in France.”
He later said: “Vera terrified me at first. Those cold eyes… She's scholarly-smart. She knew all the books used by agents for coding and quoted Alice in Wonderland, who said you can make a word mean different things. ‘Not so,’ said Humpty-Dumpty. ‘The question is, which is to be master.’ She made herself the master. She won against old SIS codemakers who clung to dangerous old ways of making words mean different things.”
Tommy knew how Hitler used his Vichy puppets to exploit the traditional loyalty of police and civil servants to French governments. “Spread word that Vichy is not the legitimate government,” she told Tommy when he joined her. “General de Gaulle governs Free France.”
The frictions caused when Marshal Philippe Pétain first set up his Vichy government in the so-called free zone typified squabbles within the intelligence comunity in London, which included often mutually hostile foreign elements. Vera needed to override all differences to reach the common goal of defeating Germany. She whipped up anger against Pierre Laval, the Vichy prime minister, by publicizing Laval's words: “The Resistance is financed by Jews so others can do the fighting for them.” Any French citizen could see Jews were now being sent by the wagonload to the camps along with French “slaves.” Some opportunists seized Jewish businesses at knockdown prices. She planned a day of retribution. It meant overcoming the fact that de Gaulle was not the elected leader of an elected French government.
Vera proposed strategies for SOE's Western Europe Directorate. She had to work with two French sections: F, run by Buckmaster, and RF, working with de Gaulle. RF's chief was known by the code name Colonel Passy, and Whitehall treated him with caution as a de Gaulle “subversive” in an unelected group that could not be registered as a government-in-exile. Passy had no experience in intelligence, and simply believed that de Gaulle as head of a postwar state would wipe out the memory of the corrupt prewar government that let France collapse into moral decrepitude.
Passy had inserted the first Gaullist agent, and later explained that until he understood the departmental war between the SIS and SOE, he saw Vera's people as pursuing activities multiple, secret, and complicated. Tentacles reached into every corner of Whitehall. When he knew more about Vera's motives, Passy backed her department intrigues and drew up a list of closework actions that civilians could take to help the final liberators of France on D-day. He had a personal stake in not wishing to see his own people burned alive in village churches for isolated acts of defiance.2
“Passy left wife and children behind,” Vera told Yeo-Thomas. “He's cut off from his own utterly different culture. He wants a maximum of informers to tell him precisely what they see, what they know,
but to sit tight. He wants agents as envoys to collect this information, put it in context so he can plan the final insurrection. He's afraid of small, premature actions that will push the Germans into organizing frightful techniques of counterterrorism.”
Passy proposed that he parachute into France, together with Yeo-Thomas. Vera told Yeo-Thomas of lessons learned from the early insertion of a Free French paratroop battalion to ambush German pilots known to travel by bus from their quarters to their airfield near Vannes in Brittany: it had seemed sensible to kill the pilots on the ground before they could carry out their bomber target-marking missions over England. By December 1940 the Free French had readied Operation Savanna. But the RAF first said Savanna was a despicable act, involving the “assassination of fellow combatants.” De Gaulle asked sarcastically if bombing innocent civilians was less despicable. There was a long silence. The fatal consequences of delay were soon to be demonstrated. On the night of March 15, 1941, the RAF released one old bomber and Vera drove out to a secret airfield where Scotland Yard men searched the paratroopers to make sure they carried no incriminating evidence. “I know nothing the Gestapo would find useful,” said one parachutist, refusing the offer of a suicide pill if he needed to cheat the torturers. The five were dropped “blind,” and nothing more was heard. Three turned up a month later, after being picked up by submarine. Two found their own way out through Spain. The mission failed because the German bomber crews had changed their routine during the RAF's long delay.
Operation Josephine B, which followed soon after, blew up a power station near Bordeaux. Both operations taught that closework must have up-to-date target information. Vera expanded resources for gathering such intelligence. The survivors of these early missions, who had to grope their way back to England, alerted Vera to more espionage possibilities using downed airmen, and to the usefulness of escape routes.
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