Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  Bad news followed. Pierre Brossolette, who remained in France with Jean Moulin to coordinate guerrilla operations, had been captured and was held in prison at Rennes, near the coast of Brittany. His telltale lock of white hair must eventually show through the dye. Moulin was already dead. Unification of the many different Resistance elements was again in doubt. Little Kay Moore, a French-speaking English girl who bridged the gap between SOE and the Free French, told Vera: “The White Rabbit feels he abandoned Brossolette and wants to save him before the dye wears off!”

  Vera gulped. She needed Tommy's unquenchable optimism, and the moral support of a man who, far from dismissing women, regarded them, when in the field, as superior in many respects. But she had to let go. His was the lone voice able to assure French resisters that they were not forgotten. Gubbins objected that Tommy knew too much; nobody could hold out indefinitely against skilled torturers. Tommy defied him: “If you can get through the first few minutes, you've got it made. The worst things come at the outset… small inconveniences, hair-pulling… tiny humiliations.”

  The White Rabbit went to see Squadron Leader Kenneth Dodkin, listed as an operational RAF pilot by the Germans, who seemed not to know that Dodkin could no longer fly. The White Rabbit spent hours at Dodkin's country home, absorbing his mannerisms and history. He had Dodkin's RAF serial number engraved on identity discs to be flourished if Tommy got arrested. He would then claim prisoner-of-war status as S/L Dodkin.

  Tommy was the first English agent to be sent on an operation for the Free French without one of their officers to watch him. He could talk frankly to both the French and SOE without compromising himself, which was why his new code name was Asymptote—a line that approaches but never meets a curve. Vera's Operational Orders betrayed no emotion: “We require for you to report back where action may be expected…. ‘Lousey’ is the code word indicating the target is prepared…. You will tell us your further financial needs after you take into the field the sum of five hundred thousand francs.”

  He sat one night with her in Leo Marks's untidy little Baker Street office to learn about “silks,” providing an agent with a way to encode messages from cribs imprinted on silk one-time pads. The White Rabbit proposed to use silks for long important messages, and an old-fashioned poem-code as backup. Leo fretted that SOE agents in Holland were under German control. The top brass rejected his circumstantial evidence. Tommy said he'd bang a few heads together—if he got back. Leo glanced at the White Rabbit's signet ring concealing the death pill, and spent the rest of the night composing the poem-code that his friend could use:

  They cannot know

  What makes you as you are

  Nor can they hear

  Those voices from afar

  Which whisper to you

  You are not alone…

  They cannot reach

  That inner core of you

  The long before of you

  The child inside

  Deep deep inside

  Which gives the man his pride…

  What you are

  They can never be

  And what they are

  Will soon be history.

  A day later Leo was grilled by Nick Nicholls, now SOE's director of signals. There was a rule against sending into the field any SOE officer with knowledge of other country sections, agents’ codes, security checks, and other conventions. Nick ordered Leo to write down “the whole bloody lot” of what he'd told Tommy. Leo came back with a sheet of paper, blank except for Yeo-Thomas's name. Nick roared: “There's a limit to the torture anyone can take. God knows how many agents we lose if Tommy breaks.”

  Leo was defiant. They were all in Tommy's debt for chewing out Churchill. Was it fair to stop him rescuing the Frenchman who had so many times saved him? Nick hesitated and then wrote a formal statement to SOE's executive: “Yeo-Thomas only knows stuff overtaken by events.”

  Twenty-three days after the session with Churchill, Tommy was on his way with Vera to the Tempsford base. He chose to parachute blind rather than wait for a moonlit night, landing at ClermontFerrand, some 250 miles south of Paris. There he would reconnect with agents likely to know if Brossolette had been moved, and then Tommy would set about rescuing him.

  In mid-March reports reached Vera that Brossolette had been transferred to Gestapo headquarters on avenue Foch in Paris. He had jumped through a window to his death rather than risk breaking under torture. On March 21, 1944, the White Rabbit was picked up by the Gestapo. Churchill asked to be kept informed.

  Vera did not rule out the White Rabbit's safe return. She had heard of stranger things from airmen who escaped after being shot down. They pioneered new ways to freedom by learning from local inhabitants how to poke holes in the Western Wall, built to confine millions within Fortress Europe. Allied servicemen who escaped brought back personal observations and insights that were impossible to replicate from a distance, no matter how diligently Vera might analyze reports from the field. Escapees were eyewitnesses of a special sort. They showed her how to achieve a seemingly impossible combination. She needed personal initiative in her agents, streetwise rebels who instinctively defied authority, while she also had to insist upon obedience to lifesaving rules. Agents were freelancers, not drilled to respond to the day-to-day authority of watchful officers in the regular armed forces. Vera had no control once an agent left her sight. The best escapees were downed airmen, schooled in self-preservation. They were natural rebels, highly individualistic, but their profession required them to be constanty alert, completely detached in observing the unexpected, with technical skills that sharpened their ability to assess whatever they saw and experienced after being shot down.

  But the White Rabbit was in a tight hole, and Vera worried about how he might escape.

  31

  An Unplanned and Gigantic Spyglass

  Hair tucked inside a naval officer's cap, scarf muffling her face, wearing a duffel coat and black uniform trousers tucked into flying boots, Vera saw the early dawn split by fierce blue flames from the racing engines of Hellcats parked near the end of a narrow street whose tumbledown terraced houses were separated from the naval air station by a wire trellis. Four of the U.S. Lend-Lease Hellcats shut down their engines. Two more moved from the verge of this Liverpool slum to a makeshift runway, pointing toward cargo ships for the next Atlantic convoy. But the two Hellcats were not shepherds. They were heading out over occupied Europe, packed with the latest spy cameras.

  Vera looked like any other service pilot. She had been brought here by John Godley, the future Lord Kilbracken, after a frank talk in a Covent Garden restaurant, in a discreet room once used long ago by King Edward VII to entertain his mistress Lillie Langtry. The London restaurant was patronized by old-school aristocrats who liked their main courses bloody and well hung. Godley was no longer a roast-beef man. He had the Twitch, the jerking of an arm, the twitch of an eyelid, after too many missions since he first flew antiquated Swordfish biplanes into battle.

  They had discussed Vera's need for natural rebels. Her agents were beyond supervision in territories where the Vichy French ran fif-teen security agencies and innumerable informers. By 1943 German army divisions in France had risen by 50 percent to thirty-eight because of Resistance activity, whereas a mere twelve divisions held down Norway and Denmark. Hitler had heard Stalin's demands that the West open a second front. And France was the obvious gateway. Inside, traps and traitors threatened agents night and day.

  “Stalin forbade communist networks to work with us,” said Vera. “Then Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Now we've a shitpile of networks that distrust one another while working more or less with the Free French. I haven't time to lay out all the updates and subtleties for agents, and those who report back operate within limited space and lack an overall view.”

  Godley always understood. He'd seen Vera bedeviled by service rivalries. The RAF feared being reduced to a supporting role, without a seat at the top table beside the army and navy brass.
The numbers game—the number of cities and civilians destroyed, the numbers of U-boats sunk—developed a dynamic of its own. Men in the War Office taunted SOE's male executives: “How many divisions do you have?” Vera had to make do with miserly resources, at most three thousand on her secret lists, including her French aides.

  Godley despised unimaginative stuffed shirts. “They've come up with an abortion of a new plane,” he railed, “to perform fifty-seven varieties of missions. Mostly it kills those who fly it.” When he attacked enemy ships in his antique biplane, he judged deflection by lightbulbs strung along its wings. Human ingenuity made up for idiocy at the top. He prompted her to make use of downed airmen, who covered the length and breadth of France, which was how she now came to be standing in rain puddles in the gloom while pilots timed each other's exits from the cockpits of the four silent Hellcats as if trapped upside-down under the sea. They endlessly repeated a tiresome routine: release links to the cockpit, kick off boots, loosen clothing, suck in air trapped in the canopy while the machine sinks into cold black terrors. No panic. Mind separated from body. She thought of her lost lover Stringbag. The loss of such men led to their successors drilling each other in this boring procedure. They lightened it by competing to beat each other's escape timings.

  “Downed aviators make good soldier-spies because of this repetitive self-training. They're disciplined to act with complete detachment,” Vera told Mary Stephenson, who recalled the self-discipline Billy used to escape in World War I with valuable information. Vera also wrote—though Mary never dared tell Bill—that she had adopted their “wham-bam-mornin’-ma'am” philosophy. “I can't indulge in long-term emotion,” she said. “I'd break down.”

  Vera had a strictly business date for Sunday, June 27, 1943, with John Hartley Watlington, one of two airmen whose operations into Europe she wanted to learn more about. The other was Chuck Yeager, an American proud of his West Virginia hillbilly origins.

  Hartley Watlington flew lone-ranger missions. His skills were inherited from a Bermuda ancestry of English swashbucklers. When he failed to show up for the Sunday date, she guessed he was gone.

  “I work by moonlight,” Hartley had told her. “I fly very low, follow the silver of a river, hop hedgerows between village churches.” He was piratical in the elegant fashion of the first Queen Elizabeth's buccaneers, licensed to roam the high seas and plunder ships of the monarch's enemies. He roamed the night skies to pounce on German “tip-and-run” raiders returning from hitting targets in England, when they were at their most vulnerable, descending and almost out of fuel. At 0220 hours on June 22 he circled an airfield near Amiens. He saw no flare paths. The raiders were not yet expected. He switched to his secondary role as a “train buster” and hovered above one train whose driver opened the firebox “to illuminate the target for me,” said Hartley later. “French railroadmen knew we only attacked troop trains.” He made a low pass to study the wagons when tracer bullets hosed his Mustang and plugged his radiator. He jettisoned his cockpit canopy to clear the blinding smoke, and repeated into his microphone a nonsense rhyme to give time for listening stations in England to fix his position:

  Little Willie in the best of sashes

  Fell in the fire and got burned to ashes.

  After a while, the room grew chilly.

  Nobody liked to poke poor Willie.

  The ground stations took cross-bearings and gave him a course to steer. The last words he heard were, “Watch yer arse, cobber!” from an Australian radio watch-keeper. Both knew the aircraft was too far away to reach home, or ditch in the Channel.

  If pilots jumped over the side, Mustangs often hit them with wing or rudder. Hartley automatically pulled his Mustang's nose up, jammed the stick forward, and catapulted out, free and clear. “Moonlight lit up great countryside. I studied it with intense interest from under my parachute canopy,” he wrote in a later report for Vera.

  He landed on top of a wooded hill and followed the drill, mind free from fearful speculation. He stripped insignia from his uniform, and sliced off the tops of his flying boots to look like walking shoes. He checked his escape kit: silk maps, local currencies and coupons, food tablets, pills to purify water, benzedrine, milk concentrate, chewing gum, and a rubber hot-water bottle. He buried the kit neatly in the summer grass “and went to sleep.”

  A French farmboy found him at dawn and took him home. Hartley told the family, “I am British airman.” The farmer, despite obvious poverty, gave him his Sunday suit to replace his uniform. “I thought it best not to get these good people into trouble by hanging around,” Hartley wrote. “So I headed for Gibraltar, a thousand miles away.” He reached the Dieppe-Paris railway line, and was surrounded by the local constabulary with guns drawn. “Je suis Anglais,” he said. Within seconds, the police were instructing him on how to reach Paris. “It is,” said their chief, “the best way to Spain, even if indirect,” and took Hartley to a small railway station. By midnight “Je suis Anglais” got him a room for the night in Paris with a friendly French couple. He spent the next day mingling with Germans, distinguishing between uniforms, as he'd been taught in groundschool. “I stopped at a bistro, thirsty and tired, and stupidly blurted out, ‘Bière, please.’ The proprietor whispered in English, ‘Three francs.’ He gave me a bed for the night, fed me, filled a bag with food for several days, and with his wife and kids took me to the railway station at Étampes as if on a family outing.”

  Hartley jumped from one train to walk along the river Cher. By Sunday, wistfully wishing he could keep his date with Vera, he limped along secondary roads and met a boy who was bartering homemade crystal sets for potatoes. He bartered for a piece of Hartley's gum. “The kid just assumed I was American,” Hartley said. “I gave him my hot-water bottle. The crystal set was the kind I'd made as a kid, wire around a toilet roll's tube. With this one, you stroked the crystal with a bit of wire until you heard the BBC. The kid took me into a village where a grocer passed me to an escape line.”

  Hartley kept mental note of the cast of characters along a chain of civilians: “Butchers or bakers or lawyers or dentists or laborers or schoolkids. New identity papers were forged when my old ones got dirty or torn. When I had to leave a safehouse, someone would park me somewhere else as the ‘body’ to be collected by a courier from another circuit, each unknown to the next, usually a girl on her bicycle, one link in the chain. I could decide who to trust at each stopover. It was like a pilgrim's progress.”

  Plans to cross into Spain went awry, so he returned to Paris. The crowded city offered better means of escaping attention. Germans mostly relied on informants, and looked uncomfortable in the hostile streets. A French circuit-master told him to head for the Brittany coast where a group of civilians were assembling. He was horrified by their lack of caution. A Breton fishing smack arrived. Hartley quailed. “The water came up to the gunnels before we were beyond the reefs. It foundered. I scrambled over rocks and headed inland, alone.” The others waded ashore in a tight bunch and were caught. He wandered around France, hoarding counterfeit currency from his escape kit, busily observing. He found “electric train services very reliable. German soldiers only boarded them while going on leave from barracks.” He preferred walking. “I saw French secret-service officers, Dutchmen heading for England, Norwegians, Scots, English wives of Frenchmen, but I wanted no company.” In Lyons, Virginia Hall was one stop on an escape line. She was also training French resistance forces. Hartley said her partisans needed more discipline. Anticipating his offer, she replied that he'd be executed as a spy if he was caught instructing them.

  “I often had to retrace my footsteps, and surprised those who thought I was safe in England. They scrounged clothes to replace my rags and a fur greatcoat left by a government minister who had joined the Free French.”

  Hartley spent ten months looking for ways out. “It's safest to be a loner. I never again made the mistake of that ‘Bière, please!’ Each attempt to break through borders demands care. You can't g
uard against an escape line collapsing. When an exit is blocked, you look for another.”

  Hartley was a resourceful artful dodger by 1944 when he crossed the path of Chuck Yeager. By then, the Germans were shooting escapees.

  Yeager's Mustang was shattered by a Focke-Wulf 190's 20-mm cannons on Sunday, March 5, 1944. Suddenly the twenty-one-year-old pilot tumbled into farm country. He unholstered his pistol. As a boy, he had sniped squirrels for the pot. He could trap and hunt. One thing bothered him: U.S. regulations would stop him flying more missions. The Germans kept tabs on Allied airmen. If he was shot down again, he'd be tortured for information about Resistance fighters. Bits of metal in his arms and legs began to hurt. He ate a chocolate bar, wrapped his parachute around himself, and slept.

  An elderly woodcutter found him at dawn. Chuck waved his pistol and said: “Me American. Need help. Find Resistance.” The Frenchman signaled Chuck to stay hidden, then left on the run. Chuck retreated into the trees, prepared for betrayal. An hour later he was pointing his .45 at two men. One whispered, “Listen, American. A friend is here.” The friend was a middle-aged woman in bed. “You're just a boy!” she cried in perfect English when Chuck was escorted into her small farmhouse. “Has America run out of men already?”

  She stored him in the hayloft. A local doctor patched him up and advised rest. Chuck got restless after several days, went outside to sit under a tree, and froze when heavily armed Germans marched past, close enough to spit on him. After this, he spent most of his time sleeping until a group of men in black berets and bandoliers arrived. They said it was too soon to cross into Spain. The mountain routes were blocked by persistent snow. He could stick around while they blew things up. “Then,” said the commander of this maquis, a peacetime lawyer, “we'll get you to Spain.”