Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  Gardyne de Chastelain was planning to parachute into Romania for SOE to sabotage oil wells and river traffic. For the logistical and other support he would need, he looked to Vera and not to Cairo, scorned as “a nest of spies, all betraying each other.”

  The turmoil in Cairo worsened. Egypt's pro-German leaders wanted to get rid of the British, who had been campaigning here since Nelson's victory at the Nile in 1798. If Cairo fell, Churchill would have to resign. His successors would make peace with Germany. It had been on June 21, 1942, that Churchill, staying in the White House, received the devastating news that Tobruk had been surrendered by British troops to the Germans: “One of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war.”5

  Tobruk was a garrison of 35,000 British soldiers. The surrender undermined Churchill's efforts to convince the United States that the tide would turn in Europe, and not to devote attention to the Pacific. The Western Desert had provided the only British land victories in 32 months of war. American newspapers reported the fall of Tobruk as heralding the fall of Churchill. On June 28 a motion of “no confidence” was introduced in the House of Commons. Churchill survived. But this was one of many crises that demonstrated the fragility of democratic leadership, and the danger that another government might make peace, or dismantle SOE.

  Vera's friends in the Jewish Agency were realistic. Jews were no longer being smuggled into Palestine through Romania's ports to embarrass the British. Romania had lost Bessarabia and Bukovina to the Soviet Union, and Jews were blamed. Jewish soldiers of the Romanian army were massacred. A death train loaded with some 2,500 Jews had been guarded by Romanian and German troops; dehydration killed 1,400 prisoners in the cattle cars during a five-day journey to the camps. About 100,000 Jews out of three times that number who had been living in Bessarabia and Bukovina were taken by the Soviet authorities and never seen again. Where Vera had once driven in the German ambassador's limousine along wide boulevards, bodies of butchered Jews now hung from the branches of the wonderful old trees that formerly shaded the chic cafés of Bucharest.

  Vera faced overwhelming resistance to her making use of the chief victims of terror themselves, the Jews, and involving them in warfare. The chief rabbi of London was concerned that by the time a regular Jewish army brigade could be formed, its soldiers would be embittered by Britain's closure of Palestine's doors and its abandonment of promises implied by the Balfour Declaration. She had support from Lord Louis Mountbatten at Combined Operations for recruitment of those most bent upon revenge. He said the arithmetic overwhelmingly favored covert action. A packet of plastic explosive applied to a strategic point on one power transformer did more harm in an industrial area than costly Allied bombing raids. When the RAF launched a campaign against enemy transport systems, locomotives were singled out for low-level attacks to reduce the rolling stock and overload the repair sheds. Seventy locomotives a month were hit from the air during 1943. “To achieve this, seventy-eight railwaymen have been killed and three hundred seventy-eight wounded,” reported Vera's French agent, who was a senior rail engineer. “By contrast—sabotage damaged eight times as many locomotives, with no civilian losses.” Confirmation came from pilots on train-busting operations who were shot down and served with the Resistance.6

  Railway workers favored clandestine operations, as did workers in factories serving the German arms industry and armed forces, and all were asking for leadership and supplies from outside. This was confimed after Vera's team was electrified by a message. “The little white rabbit has returned to his hutch,” the BBC announced for French listeners on April 17, 1943.

  Tommy Yeo-Thomas shared a Lysander pickup plane with Passy, Commandant Pierre Brossolette, and an American flier named Jim Ryan whose Flying Fortress had been shot down. Tommy had walked openly around Paris among SS men in their black uniforms with skull and crossbones. He had found his friend Jose Dupuis, still teaching at the same girls’ school, and she had built him a network. Before his murder, Jean Moulin set the strength of a secret army at 50,000 with a reserve of 100,000. Yeo-Thomas had raised morale by being seen as a British secret-service officer, and he came back with new observations: “The gazogène, a wartime utility tractor, and the remorqueur, a towpath tractor, are good for transporting concealed weapons. There's a wartime digestif made from grape skins, it's white and called marc. Bean oil is now used to emulsify the hair. Be careful to tell the difference between anciens combattants and the French equivalent of the Hitler Youth, Les Compagnons de France, and watch out for Vichy propaganda that the world is run by the Old Lady of rue Threadneedle—which means the City of London, the Rothschilds, and Imperial Chemicals.”

  In Paris, Tommy had visited his father, who loudly greeted him in French as a stranger and then, once the apartment door was closed, asked, “What the bloody hell have you been doing for the last two years?” The older man had been carrying out small terrorist acts on his own account.

  Brossolette, who flew on the same Lysander, had a distinctive white lock in his thick black hair, which had to be dyed to avoid identification. The dye had almost worn off since he had dropped into France, in the same moon period as the White Rabbit and Passy. Vera knew Pierre Brossolette as a prewar broadcaster of foreign news commentaries, dismissed from his job when he spoke out against the Munich “surrender.” After Paris fell, he had run a small bookshop near the Lycée Janson de Sailly, whose pupils came to whisper of activities against the Germans rather than to buy books. He had escaped to England in April 1942 and had gone to Passy, who said Brossolette was “the man amongst all I met in life [who] made the greatest impression.”

  The White Rabbit's return provided Lord Selborne, SOE's political voice, with hard news to report to the chiefs of staff in his campaign for more generous SOE support: “Sabotage is widespread… support of a very effective kind can be given to regular military operations.” But Vera was afraid Selborne was exhausting himself fighting those who said SOE wasted weapons and supplies. Her best hope was that Donovan's high-level London staff would rubber-stamp an official directive that SOE was the single authority for coordinating covert action and the work of “patriot forces.” One agent, Major Ben Cowburn, returned with news of Virginia Hall. The New York Post girl had saved his bacon after he was dropped wide of the mark; he had lost contact with the reception committee, and she had to scurry around to find him a wireless operator. Vera decided Virginia should be recalled for training as a telegraphist and provided with one of the new radio transmitters. It was likely that she would become part of Donovan's new OSS. Vera was having to choose Americans over the SIS at home. Cowburn, an oil engineer in peacetime, had carried out four secret missions against oil targets, and later wrote scathingly of the legend “that the Secret Intelligence Service was omniscient.” Its members, he said, were “seen only at fashionable Mayfair parties wearing stupid expressions and talking only about horse-riding, grouse shooting, and memories of their days at Oxford or Cambridge.”7

  Donovan's American officers were eager to learn, and they shared with Vera a conviction that unconventional special forces were the way of the future. Cowburn and other Englishmen like him, who came from the real world of hard knocks, said SOE's enemies were staff officers who moved seamlessly into government service straight from the cloisters of the same old establishments—Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Oxford, Cambridge—and were never exposed to the hurlyburly of life on the streets.

  After the White Rabbit's reports gave SOE a stronger voice, Vera asked the Polish government-in-exile to appeal to all Poles to hide Jews. The Soviet Union had executed Polish army officers and occupied more than half of Poland. In Warsaw, the final German liquidation of the ghetto had started on April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover. The German attack had been anticipated by the central ghetto's 30,000 Jews, and when the liquidators broke in, they found people had burrowed underground. Gas was pumped into the tunnels in a German Grossaktion. Major General Jürgen Stroop broadcast a tally of “56,065 Jews seized, 7,000 perished. After
deportation, 6,929 were exterminated, which adds up to 13,929 Jews destroyed.”

  Jozef Cyrankiewicz, a future communist leader in Poland, ran the Socialist Party's underground at the time and later said: “After seeing cattle wagons loaded up for the death camps, I felt we must mobilize the surviving Jewish communities from the Baltic to the Balkans. I was in Auschwitz when we sent couriers to London. Prisoners asked the Allies to bomb Auschwitz so the Nazis might stop the enormous trans-Europe traffic to death camps.”8

  Vera talked with the Polish National Council in London about the appeals from Auschwitz. Samuel Zygielbojm, a member of the council and of the Jewish Bund, sent a cable to President Roosevelt that was not answered, failed to make his case in London, and finally committed suicide in despair. George Orwell, while making BBC war commentaries, noted that within the British Civil Service there were those who simply did not believe the reports of atrocities. A colonial officer, J. S. Bennett, wrote a memo: “What is disturbing is the apparent readiness of the new Colonial Secretary to take Jewish Agency ‘sob-stuff’ at face value. As a political maneuver, this will establish a good precedent which the [Jewish] Agency will no doubt exploit.”9 Orwell's misgivings led to his fictional Big Brother and the memory-holes down which unpalatable facts disappeared forever.

  Vera mapped routes that SOE agents could follow into Poland, using information from French “guest workers” in German factories. They were bribed to lend their passports, from which details could be copied by Polish agents. Thus Jan Karski got out of Poland with a message for SOE's Lord Selborne: “The unprecedented destruction of the entire Jewish population is not motivated by Germany's military requirements.” But Alexander Cadogan complained: “These people with odd initials and numbers puzzle me more than the enemy.” Jewish agencies had objectives that disturbed his Foreign Office boss, Anthony Eden. Where would the Jews go if given the means to liberate themselves?

  The Polish courier Jan Nowak worked his way to Stockholm and was flown by the RAF to Scotland to report to Churchill on Poles, including Jews, skilled in underground work but in need of airdropped supplies. Nowak had to go through Desmond Morton, whom he described as “the voice of anti-SOE elements.” Nowak claimed that Morton misrepresented the original report and forced him to wait three months before Churchill would see him in March 1944. The Polish courier proudly handed over a Home Army brochure inscribed to Churchill by a calligrapher in a secret Warsaw print shop. If it had fallen into the hands of the Gestapo along the way, Nowak wrote later, he would have been hanged. Churchill glanced at it and asked if Novak could write “all that you want to tell me on one page.”

  “I shall try,” Nowak mumbled.

  “If it is longer, my secretary will put it straight into the wastebasket,” Churchill told him.

  The courier's head was crammed with enough information to fill several hundred pages. Nowak revered Churchill but “the interview lasted only seven of a scheduled ten minutes,” he told Vera. He wrote in a bitter memoir later: “The whole effort of Underground Poland, achieved with enormous sacrifice, had been completely out of proportion to the place and importance it occupied in British and American strategic planning. The Allies seemed afraid to offend Stalin who forbade RAF planes to refuel on Soviet bases. Only six hundred tons of weapons were delivered to Poland compared with ten thousand tons to France during one period.” He praised Vera's organization, though, as “our most loyal and important ally. She and SOE always fought to give aid to our cause.”10

  Vera saw the treatment he received as disturbing confirmation that Whitehall was now under the thumb of those who put no value on well-armed young Polish and Jewish closework fighters, though they were the most highly motivated of tyranny's victims. The choice was being made: the war would be won by first “area bombing” German cities. It seemed a long time since Churchill wrote in the aftermath of the Great War: “Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian states had been able to deny themselves.”

  29

  Bluff and Counterbluff

  Resistance leaders despaired of getting adequate airborne supplies. Vera met Polish underground agents at their hideout, 18 Kensington Palace Gardens, one of the stately old Victorian mansions still standing among the bomb ruins. The Poles confirmed the blocking role played by Desmond Morton. They said that his intelligence work reached back to another era, that he was old and tired, and influenced by Vera's opponents, and that Churchill let Morton decide who and what should reach him from the secret armies.

  Vera had Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie airlifted out of France to go directly to Churchill, who knew Astier as a poet. He told the prime minister, “Two Germans are killed for one French resister.” Astier later wrote that Churchill's plea to give aid to “brave and desperate men” had been lost in his continuous battles with those who still wanted to throw him out as prime minister. He could not defend SOE in public when he was being accused of being “the warlord of organized terrorism.”1

  Vera was frustrated because, besides Admiral Canaris and several disaffected generals, there was widening detestation of Hitler in Berlin. If the Führer could be killed by agents masquerading as German resisters, the Nazi structure would collapse. Fake German radio stations, Kurzwellensender Atlantik and Soldatensender Calais, spread reports invented by the Political Warfare Executive of German anti-Nazi actions. Resources for this “black propaganda” increased when Bill Donovan sent Robert Sherwood, the dramatist and friend of President Roosevelt, to work on “market research” and provide powerful new U.S. radio transmitters with the secret help of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

  What was really known about Hitler as a man? Vera flew to Canada to question his former friend and foreign press chief “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, driven out of the Third Reich by the jealousy of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Putzi saw Vera at a Canadian army camp holding German POWs: some were being coaxed to switch sides by experts from nearby Camp X, SOE's STS 103. Americans with European backgrounds were trained there beside Lake Ontario between New York State and Canada. This made it easy for U.S. volunteers to avoid border authorities. At Oswego, New York, on the U.S. side, Donovan's OSS built a spy school. Secret transborder crossings were easy. Vera flew with Putzi from the adjacent Service Flying Training School (SFTS) at Kingston, Ontario, landing at Oswego, where Donovan escorted the pair to another protected area, Fort Belvoir, near the U.S. capital. There playwright Clare Boothe Luce, wife of the publisher of Time and Life magazines, shared information she had gathered on every aspect of Hitler's habits, and confirmed Putzi's view that Hitler had nervous breakdowns that ended when he presided over mass rallies or intimidated personages like Neville Chamberlain. On Vera's return to Camp X, she brought a leading American anthropologist, Carleton Coon, who stayed to gently interrogate Putzi further. With Coon went Aaron Bank, later honored as the Father of U.S. Special Forces. Bank, fluent in German and French, was a U.S. Army lieutenant who later drew up a plan to capture Hitler.

  Coon later said of Vera that he had never met a more extraordinary woman, “nor ever met a finer group than her SOE staff—a pleasure to go anywhere or take on any job with them. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the Secret Intelligence Service, which holds itself aloof from SOE. The question is whether the worst enemy of SOE is Germany or SIS.”

  Bank saw that the SOE-SIS conflict would foreshadow his struggle to launch the Green Berets. He wrote after the war: “We trod a tortuous path through army traditionalists, and the Central Intelligence Agency was fearful we'd tread on its charter.” He understood why Vera Atkins was never openly acknowledged in her commanding role. “There was deep distrust of women, fears of ‘feminine intuition’ intervening, and disbelief that women could fight and kill, or win male confidence enough to organize civilians for guerrilla warfare.”2

  Vera needed a dramatic success. It would require very much more time and research to kill Hitler—who, if he survived, would declare, as h
e had done before, that he was protected by divine providence. Putzi claimed that the Führer would fall apart if a chief lieutenant were killed, however. She selected SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, whose movements were far more predictable. The plan, code-named Anthropoid, was kept within a tight circle. It might be condemned as an act of terror by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, which was trying to curb Bill Donovan and his new OSS—to the extent that, when Donovan sent more officers to London, the U.S. Passport Office was planning to stamp their passports “OSS” until Donovan stepped in. “It was like stamping I AM A SPY on our backs!” said David Bruce, Donovan's man in London.3

  Operation Anthropoid was also kept secret from General George Veazey Strong, called “King George” for his autocratic grip on U.S. military intelligence. Strong was afraid that Donovan's OSS would eat into his own budget. Strong might “spill the beans to Lord Halifax, the ambassador in Washington,” Vera told Bill Stephenson, who had not forgotten Halifax's dreams of making peace with Hitler. It was agreed: the Holy Fox would again trumpet his moral objections to assassination.

  She found two Czech volunteers to drop into Czechoslovakia, where Heydrich was “Protector” and followed a well-known route through Prague to his office. The agents carried handguns, a submachine gun, Mills bombs, antitank grenades, explosives, fuses, detonators, a spigot mortar, and a lethal hypodermic syringe. Vera felt a personal need for revenge. At the notorious conference “regarding the biological destruction of the Jewish race,” Heydrich had uttered the words Hitler dared not speak. She had seen IG Farben's dividends double in the first year that its subsidiary sent Zyklon-B to gas death-camp inmates.