Vera learned more about Passy during intensive predrop training. His real name was André Dewavrin. “My ignorance was total when I became the Free French intelligence chief,” he confessed. Even his taking the name Passy from a Paris metro station near home exposed a dangerous innocence. “Now I know pseudonyms should have letters matching your laundry marks. Never adopt a name remotely connected with your previous life.”
Passy had been fighting the Germans in Norway at the same time as Colin Gubbins, with a unit drawn from the Foreign Legion and the Chasseurs Alpins. He had been awarded Britain's Distinguished Service Order and Military Cross, and additional Norwegian and French decorations for bravery. After the 1940 defeat, French soldiers like himself had gone through the agony of choosing between repatriation and staying to fight with de Gaulle. On July 1, 1940, Passy had gone to de Gaulle's temporary office near Westminster Bridge at St. Stephen's House, where the general told him to organize Free France's Second and Third Intelligence Bureaus.
Passy scratched together a team of other young Frenchmen, simply because they happened to share a boardinghouse with him on the Cromwell Road. None had the foggiest notions about covert action. Passy learned espionage from someone he called “Uncle Claude,” finding it easier than Sir Claude Edward Marjoribanks Dansey. Passy soon divined that Uncle Claude's purpose was to rob SOE of a nascent French intelligence service and keep it for himself at the Secret Intelligence Service.
Vera saw Passy as a handsome man of thirty, not much younger than she. His dreamy manner covered an intensely orderly mind. He was tall, with thinning blond hair and the innocent face of a teenager. His blue eyes were apt to drift away and then suddenly return to drill the person he was addressing.
“He studied fortifications!” Vera once joked to Leo Marks. “That's why he's so good at stonewalling.” It was in the early days when Passy's Free French put up walls against shared information and distrusted an ally who had escaped after the French defeat. In August 1940, Passy's first tiny London base consisted of two wooden canteen tables, a chair, and two benches in a cramped three-room suite of Free French headquarters at 4 Carlton Gardens. Within a month, Jacques Mansion returned from a Passy-inspired mission. It showed Vera how fast Passy could work. His staff of amateurs had combed the camps and hospitals that held Frenchmen who had reached England, seeking men they imagined would make good agents. Jacques had landed on the Brittany coast from a small fishing boat and come back with news of German dispositions at Ouistreham, a fishing port adjoining Caen on the Normandy coast. Passy dispatched to the area a Lieutenant Maurice Duclos, trained for artillery, and Jacques Mansion. They were to send back information by carrier pigeon. Vera did not sneer. She had seen French pigeonniers rising one hundred feet or more, with spaces for pigeons in holes winding around the interior. The brick towers belonged to a crumbling age of medieval manors and were overlooked by the enemy.
Passy's RF Section subsequently “lived out” at No. 1 Dorset Square, dubbed “the circus of clowns” and previously occupied by the Bertram Mills Circus. Passy's working quarters advanced to a seven-room pavilion at 3 St. James's Square, then settled in at 10 Duke Street, near Selfridge's, with a luxurious substation behind Kensington Palace. His communications improved upon carrier pigeons after Duclos turned up on Christmas Day from Lisbon, followed two weeks later by Mansion, who had escaped through Spain. Both had been helped by Baron Rüdiger von Etzdorf.
To spot more Iberian exits, Passy had chosen a young filmmaker, Gilbert Renault, whose movie on Christopher Columbus made him friends in Spain. Renault made a swift reconnaissance, got back to England, and was given a crash course in new codes before being flown to Lisbon. Soon Passy was getting demands from his moviemaking agent for wireless equipment. Renault did not relish tying messages to the legs of pigeons.
Passy was afraid that a multiplicity of intelligence services in France could cause confusion. He asked Yeo-Thomas to help build a united front. Vera felt a brief stab of pain. Yeo-Thomas might not return, and he was becoming indispensable in confronting her domestic enemies. He was also the only Englishman she knew who could deal with the Free French without provoking a national temper tantrum, and get information in return. One early crisis arose because de Gaulle was told the Free French navy's admiral, Émile Muselier, was to be arrested. MI5 counterintelligence agents had unearthed what appeared to be letters suggesting Muselier sided with Vichy. But the letters were forgeries. MI5's espionage B Branch seemed determined to discredit the Free French. De Gaulle was losing trust in all intelligence services until Churchill apologized for MI5's interrogations of French escapees. It was an insult, said Passy, that the English should look for pro-Nazi Vichy agents when other secret services did their own vetting.
Yeo-Thomas was itching to get away from this wrangling. Vera would have gladly gone with him. She was, though, the one person able to regularly bridge the gaps. The British wanted to win the war; Vera wanted to keep up the pressure of covert action; the Free French wanted to win the peace and wanted to wait until resisters united behind de Gaulle as a peacetime leader.
Passy was quick to misinterpret incidents. A French recruit, Francis Basin, completed SOE courses in microphotography and invisible inks. He had to make his own way across England and memorize details of an airfield in the wilds of Wales. He passed the test, and was told to go to a clandestine meeting in the Dorchester Hotel's bar. He was cautiously drinking warm Irish beer, which he detested, when a stranger pushed through the noisy crowd and roared at the top of his voice: “Basin, you're a German! You're under arrest!” None of the drinkers showed any interest. The stranger whispered in Basin's ear. Then every head turned. “See,” said the stranger. “Behave like a conspirator and everyone suspects you.” It was meant to be a jovial SOE lesson in psychology. Passy thought it was another attempt by MI5 to fail his men.
Yeo-Thomas was one of the few who could persuade him to continue with the planned Operation Seahorse, which was to demonstrate Anglo-French mutual trust. Vera took the opportunity to put Passy through a crash SOE training course and took him to Wanborough Manor, the sixteenth-century “school” on the Hog's Back. He saw resources stretched thin to deal with large numbers of recruits, many of whom would never make the grade. He was told, like others, to forget all he had ever been told about firearms. “Get off two rounds quick as light,” said Vera. “The ideal murder weapon is the silencieux with luminous sights. There are more target points on the body than you'd think. Phosphorus grenades send Germans up in flame, but your body has less attention-grabbing weapons—use your feet, your nails to gouge out eyes, your fingers to choke off the carotid arteries or slash a throat.”
Passy asked if Americans were capable of such things—he had heard they had joined forces with “the thin red line of ’eroes.” Passy also knew Varian Fry, and learned a lot from the American. “The biggest danger is betrayal,” Fry had said. “Avoid arousing jealousy, so don't get involved with women. Greed grips even seemingly reliable contacts. Avoid any discussions, religious, political, whatever. Many agents have foreign origins, and they've got to be careful if they run into someone from their homeland. There are Ukrainians and Cossacks used as ancillaries to German counterintelligence. The advantage we have over Germans is their lack of flexibility. The Gestapo uses only black Citroëns, for example.”
A surprising number of Americans with extensive prewar business experience in Europe, as well as diplomats like William Russell, the former AP correspondent in Berlin, were gathered in London by Donovan. Gradually the silliness of departmental and national frictions was giving way to the handful of dedicated men and women from all parts of the world and all levels of society whose only aim was to operate behind enemy lines, an invisible and thin red line to undermine the enemy by rebelling against orthodoxy and worn-out rules.
Later, Passy recalled that his only contribution as a newcomer to the spy game had been his telling Vera to stop smoking like a chimney. He found it slowed the reactions.
/> “It gets me through the life I live,” she joked, confirming for him that the real lifeline was a quick sense of humor, even in the worst of times.
28
Fully Occupied
Vera turned Tommy Yeo-Thomas into François Yves Thierry, who carried forged papers showing him to be forty years old, formerly with the 34e Bataillon de l'Air, now back as a clerk in Paris, with a carte d'identité issued by the Paris Préfecture de Police on April 16, 1941, and a feuille de démobilisation from Marseilles dated September 2, 1940. He had a driver's license and a current ration card. Yeo-Thomas was to investigate with Passy the potential for resistance throughout France, discuss a future inter-Allied command with leaders of anti-Nazi movements, and bring back lists of supplies needed: Guns. Explosives. Comunications gear.
Vera told the BBC to send a message in its French service to a schoolteacher Tommy had known, Jose Dupuis. “Tommy à Jose: Nous reboirons bientôt du bon vin de Chignin.” He would drink Chignin wine with her again, soon. She would understand.
On the night of February 24, 1943, Vera drove Tommy and Passy to Tempsford, ten miles east of Bedford, not far from Woburn Abbey and a half hour's drive from Bletchley. On a camouflaged airfield, the RAF's 138 Special Duties [Moonlight] Squadron waited. Vera had disturbing news. The Polish Enigma team were at Château des Fouzes, between Montpellier and Avignon. On November 4, 1942, they had heard a prearranged BBC message: “The harvest is good.” It heralded the Allied invasion of North Africa four days later. This threatened the Mediterranean coast of France, and the Germans took full control of what had till then been the unoccupied zone. The code breakers quit the château three days before the Germans barged in. It was more important than ever to get them out of France before they tangled with French resisters whose loyalties might waver between political factions.
Operation Seahorse, the insertion of Passy and Yeo-Thomas, was timed to take best advantage of the moon, but it was a filthy night. Tommy said later, “I hadn't a clue where the moon might be, full or empty.” Passy concealed his L-for-Lethal pill inside his signet ring and Tommy less theatrically put his pill in his waistcoat pocket. The two agents put on rubber helmets and spine pads, pocketed revolvers and compasses and knives, struggled into their parachute straps, and waddled out to a waiting four-engine Handley-Page Halifax bomber. Vera had seen the availability of aircraft creep up from five in the summer of 1941 to roughly twenty aircraft, the numbers and type varying according to RAF priorities. The planes were scattered between New-market Racecourse and a small corner of a fighter base at Tangmere, near Chichester, as well as the Tempsford base. Vera clasped the men's hands, murmured her customary “Merde alors!” for good luck, and boosted them through the small hatch.
Before dawn the agents were back, cold, exhausted, and cross. The pilot had been unable to locate the reception committee's lights. Passy and Yeo-Thomas were confined to dispiritingly shabby rooms in South Kensington, unable even to pop round the corner to the nearest pub. On Friday, February 26, they were taken out again. Another cold winter's night but now a waning moon. Three hours later, cramped from sitting between ghostly great packages, ears hurting from the noise of engines and the lack of pressurization, they wanted very badly to jump when the dispatcher told them to hook up the static lines at 0300 hours. They sat on the edge of the hole and saw lights below. The dispatcher signaled and Passy dropped. Yeo-Thomas followed. There were always a few moments of euphoria after the chute opened. Then the ground came up with a rush.
“C'est vous, Shelley?” A man's large rough hand gripped Tommy, who had no idea who Shelley was. He agreed that he was indeed Shelley, to avoid needless chatter. The packages floated down on parachutes. Shadows escorted Tommy and Passy into a wood.
“Who is Shelley?” Passy asked.
“I thought you'd know,” Yeo-Thomas replied.
Back in London, Vera discovered that someone in Duke Street had informed the French reception committee that “Frances Yves Thierry” was code-named Shelley, but hadn't bothered to tell Yeo-Thomas, sitting in Vera's F Section office.
Foul-ups were common. A psychiatrist kept on tap by SOE repeated: “Stress is not something to cope with like some brave little Girl Guide, Vera. You're letting yourself get stretched too far.”
Gubbins was directing operations that now extended across Eastern Europe to the Far East. From India, aerial drops were made by Liberators that flew enormous distances into Japanese-held territories with agents of Force 136 of SOE in cavernous cargo holds, the pilots sometimes unable to find their jungle drop zones and forced to return from aborted missions, the agents battered by sixteen or more hours of nonstop flight. One young Force 136 agent came from Thailand's royal family. As a student in England, he had been branded an enemy alien when the Bangkok government, in the absence of their schoolboy king who was in Lausanne, sided with the Japanese. “I thought Vera Atkins should be locked up as an enemy alien until she told me how to get around the label,” Prince Bisadej told me in 1992. “She'd known both my cousins. One was murdered. The other became Ninth Rama.
“She told me to join the Pioneer Corps. Then I'd be a noncombatant. I said, ‘I don't want to be a noncombatant.’ I wanted to do what another Siamese prince was doing, flying with the RAF. ‘He was born here,’ she said. ‘If you join the Pioneer Corps we can shuffle the papers.’ That's how all Siamese got into Force 136. Instructors thought we were small little brown chaps with no muscle. But we'd been brought up on hard exercise, and after I knocked out a sergeant, I was taken more seriously. I was dropped into Burma and walked up into China to Kunming where we had an anti-Japanese representative from Bangkok. I was given tasks, and walked down into Laos and then northern Thailand. It was more fun than lifting potatoes. But it made me an enemy of my established government. Vera was the only person who seemed to understand. She'd had to make choices too.”1
Vera's priority was building up French networks. Code and teleprinter sections were set up in a mews off Baker Street. Leo Marks christened it “Danseyland,” after Uncle Claude of the SIS. “He was totally paranoid about SOE,” said Leo. “The army sergeant who first directed me into SOE said, ‘It's called SOD or something—some potty outfit for misfits.’”
Vera had to remain in London while Gubbins flew to SOE/Cairo, where Countess Krystyna Skarbek, now Christina Granville, lobbied for another assignment. She was told to break off contact with Polish organizations linked to SOE in the Balkans. One Polish faction had decided that another faction was infiltrated by either fascists or communists. SOE/Cairo seemed “a nest of vipers,” said Bickham Sweet-Escott of SOE later. “Nobody could possibly imagine the atmosphere of jealousy, suspicion and intrigue between secret and semi-secret departments. Christina Granville had the courage of a lion and was treated abominably by inferiors.”2
Lieutenant Colonel Tony Simmonds was in trouble for having brought out of Greece some sixty-five Jews in old caïques without telling anyone. Simmonds had been in Palestine with Orde Wingate, the expert in irregular soldiering. Simmonds's courage and initiative only prompted bureaucratic wails about agents acting on their own. Gubby had to tidy up what was becoming a scandal, and considered sending Krystyna to Hungary to revive her old routes into Poland. This brought protests from one Polish faction in London that she was a Gestapo agent. Krystyna was finally dispatched to France, where she became even more of a legend. But first she had to be freed from Cairo.
“SOE in Cairo is working across, if not against, the war effort,” reported Vera's friend the iron-willed Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly. She had gone independently to Cairo in the wake of her husband, Lord Ranfurly. She later reported what the butler said when His Lordship received orders from his yeomanry regiment, the Sherwood Foresters, to report for duty.
Lord Ranfurly asked his butler, Whitaker, “Are you coming too?”
“To the war, my lord?” asked the butler.
“Yes.”
“Very good, my lord,” said Whitaker.
His Lo
rdship was reported missing in the desert when the Countess of Ranfurly was expelled from Cairo by a vindictive one-eyed brigadier who was, she said, “making a cock-up of SOE finances.” She told Anthony Eden that “any amount of money is being wasted by this hush-hush organization which is in chaos.” She jumped ship at Cape Town. She was lucky: the ship was torpedoed after she left. She told the local Thomas Cook travel agent she was on a secret mission and got a rare seat on a commercial flight back to Cairo. There, helped by beauty and social connections, she dodged the one-eyed brigadier and infiltrated the higher levels. “It helped that you knew how to write an invitation properly, and how to arrange a bowl of flowers,” she remembered. She was said to know more secrets than anyone, and to have taught General George Patton to dance the Boomps-a-Daisy.3
From SOE/Cairo, saboteurs were within easier reach of countries like Romania in southeastern Europe, the source of half Germany's cereals and livestock, most of its tin, and a great deal of its aluminum ore, lead, and copper. But there were quarrels between those who said Tito's communist partisans were killing Germans and those who said he was killing right-wing guerrillas. Churchill's son Randolph parachuted into Yugoslavia. His Croatian secretary-translator, Mrdjn Lenka, told me years later that she fell in love with him when he arranged for the RAF to drop her an English/Serbo-Croat dictionary. His father, Winston, took to calling Tito “Marshal,” but when the countess met Tito herself, she briskly dismissed him as “short and stocky and dressed to kill.”4
Vera was improving relations with the SIS, which had an important Turkish station in Istanbul where her old mentor Gardyne de Chastelain ran special operations and employed Krystyna's husband, Jerzy, as a spy. De Chastelain knew Vera's difficulties in handling civilians who had to make decisions behind the lines but got into trouble for not going through the proper channels.
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