Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  Chuck used to help his father shoot gas wells with plastic explosives. So when the RAF dropped fifteen-hundred-pound canisters crammed with equipment including fuses and plastic explosives, he told the guerrilla commander, “I can help you fix this stuff.” The canisters included bundles of money, Sten guns and detachable silencers, .38 Llama pistols, ammunition, tire bursters, cans of abrasive carborundum powder to sabotage machinery, tree spigots for screwing into wood or brickwork in order to launch bomblets. Another drop disgorged transceivers with power packs to replace cumbersome forty-pound wireless sets in suitcases; these had Eureka position-indicators and S-phones by which Resistance leaders could talk directly to the SOE planes called “clockwork mice” because of their regular round trips. A pilot unable to find his customers could now be redirected by Eureka to a “depot ground” where a portable blacksmith's forge was pedaled to generate power for a transceiver. Clockwork mice also brought what looked like department-store catalogs. Chuck was reminded of sitting in the outhouse as a boy, with sales catalogs strung up for toilet paper, wishing he had the money to buy Christmas toys. Now toys were offered free. The most fanciful were MCRs, miniature communication receivers, to be fitted into everyday objects that came with the MCRs: German Bibles, antique clocks, brandy flasks–all fake. There were illustrations of door keys and finger rings and collar studs to hold microprints, and toiletries cunningly fashioned to hide screwed-up paper messages. Things could be ordered by number, transmitted by wireless. Each time there was a delivery, the huge canisters had to be buried and the contents hidden in horse wagons or stuffed into root cellars and haystacks.

  The customers were new to much of the technology. Chuck took charge of explosive-fuse devices and showed how to set them for different timings. He explained the Sten: inaccurate beyond a couple of meters, liable to fire if jolted, made from metal bicycle tubing, and good only for ambuscades.

  “I became a terrorist,” recalled Chuck. “I needed these guys, so I shared their lives. A German Fiesler Storch would sometimes skim over, able to drop into a cowpat if the pilot spotted us. My comrades said little, tight-knit but friendly. They knew these deep forests like I know the woods back home. We never stopped long in one place, and we hid by day and hit at night.”

  There were dozens of such groups in the forests and mountains. Their spies in marshaling yards and train depots reported on troop movements and targets. The White Rabbit's plea to Churchill was finally showering the landscape with phony rocks to balance wireless transmitters in rough country; bundles of faggots designed to fit local forestry flora but stuffed with explosives; “timber logs” resembling those used in artificial fireplaces and primed to blow up if plugged into a socket; fountain pens that squirted death; milk bottles with correct French markings that burst when the tops were unscrewed; plastic loaves of bread that blew up if broken open; packages of lethal “cigarettes.” Iron nuts and bolts were hollowed out so incendiaries could be inserted when left in railyards or factories. The instructions that went with these toys needed to be explained. Chuck had difficulty with tins of Zambuk. The ingredients were listed as eucalyptus oil, soft and hard paraffin, powdered pale resin, and chlorophyll. Then he recognized the concoction as ointment from his childhood, except that Zambuk was English and his American version included “a well-known Indian healing oil,” great for cleaning up weeping wounds. He relished his life as both terrorist and medicine man, but he still kept asking when he was going to be guided through the Pyrenees.

  One wet evening he was led to a truck. He scrambled into the back, a tarpaulin dropped down, and he was aware of other bodies as the truck corkscrewed through narrow twisting lanes. When the truck stopped, torchlight revealed a Frenchman crouching on the floor between two benches of men. He gave out hand-drawn maps. The Frenchman spoke precise English, “You'll head for a central ridge in the Pyrenees at a boundary line between France and Spain. We've sketched your best crossing. South is safer. Up north, the Spaniards will sell you for a few francs. It'll take you five days to cross if you don't hit blizzards. You're at the starting point. It's that shepherd's shed, a hundred yards from here. Stay until night—no fires, no talking.”

  There were thirty men crowded in the hut. None said a word.

  Hartley Watlington had been led on foot to the hut by “a Dutchman working with the British secret service who bound my feet and ankles with elastic bandages, a godsend in the ordeal ahead,” he told Vera. “I saw these other escapees come out, muffled up to the eyebrows against the awful cold.” There were two maquis, fifteen Americans, twelve Dutchmen, three Frenchmen, and a Belgian pilot who had escaped after more than three years in a prison camp. “We climbed through the night. The snow was thick and if the crust broke, we sank to our hips. We reached the top of one mountain just as the sun hit my eyes, blinding me. We went to the bottom of a valley to rest until nightfall, and skirted a small village to start the really big climb.”

  One by one, men dropped out from exhaustion. Others drifted apart in pairs, Chuck Yeager with a B-24 navigator he knew only as Pat. Late into the fourth day Chuck saw an empty cabin, where the two men collapsed into an exhausted sleep. Suddenly German troops were shooting through the cabin door. Chuck and Pat dived through a back window onto a log slide. “We went spinning ass over teakettle,” Chuck recalled. They slid a couple of miles and ended up in an ice-cold creek. Pat had been shot in the knee by a soft-nose bullet. Only a tendon attached his lower leg to the upper. Chuck sliced away the tendon and tied a tourniquet made from a torn shirt around the stump. Pat was unconscious, his face ghastly gray. Chuck resolved “to carry this bomber guy over the last mountain ridge and sledge him down to Spain.”

  Hartley, now far off, reached the point where “I was moving on hands and feet, and eating benzedrine go-pills like candy,” he said. “They were in my escape kit, with a printed warning: ‘Take every three to six hours but only in extremity.’ I figured this was extremity. We were at twelve thousand feet when, at 0630 on Tuesday the twenty-eighth of March, just as the sun came up, the guide said we were at the Spanish border. I sat down with the others and we all had a good cry.”

  Hartley and Chuck had to slide a long way down separate paths. Chuck skated Pat down a slope, then followed, crouching with a branch between his bent knees “just like I'd roller-skate downhill behind our house as a kid, with a broomstick as a brake.” Hartley “slid with a tree branch between my knees, and ripped the ex-minister's fur coat to tatters.”

  Chuck dragged Pat's body to a glazed snowfield. Pat looked as if he were dead. There was nothing to be done, other than leave him on the roadside, half a mile from where Hartley landed.

  Hartley had nursed through all his wanderings the escapee's pipe: the stem held a tiny compass, and the bowl contained a tightly wadded silk map. He figured he was above a tributary of the Garonne River. If he turned right, he would reach the Spanish village of Viella. Other escapees were moving in small groups. Hartley “elected to go by myself.” He came across Pat's abandoned body, and saw no signs of life. He kept walking and was picked up by a Spanish police car and taken in for questioning at the Viella police station.

  “A German Wehrmacht officer arrived and got into deep conversation with the Spanish chief of police,” said Hartley. “When they parted, they exchanged Nazi salutes. Spain was supposed to be neutral. I found it all very peculiar. Service personnel of a belligerent weren't supposed to enter neutral territory in service uniforms. The German and his driver carried sidearms. That's something you better remember about neutrals—you're never sure which side they'll take.”

  When he was questioned by the Spanish police, he said, “I made up the biggest pack of lies. Said I was captured by the Germans. I was classed an escaped war prisoner—not an invader, for which I'd be imprisoned for the rest of the war.”

  He got the police chief to retrieve Pat, who was not, after all, lifeless. Six weeks later, an American consul in Barcelona sent Pat home minus his leg. Chuck was picked up and put in
to a cell, but used a saw-blade from his escape kit. “It was made from good old American steel that zapped through the brass window bars like butter.” He holed up in a small Spanish pensión near the police station, and on March 30, 1944, the same U.S. consul arrived to arrange travel back to England for both Chuck and Hartley.

  Chuck was told: “No more combat.” He argued his way up the chain of command until he faced General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and pointed out that London newspapers were now reporting a Resistance fighting the Germans. “So the maquis are out in the open,” said Chuck. “I can't blow them to the Gestapo if I'm shot down again, General.” Eisenhower personally arranged for Chuck to fly again after the pilot's huge harvest of unique details had been poured into Vera's lap. Hartley kept a delayed date with her, his precise recollections opening an enormously wide window into a world otherwise glimpsed through narrow slits. The secret agency MI9 that dealt with escape-and-evasion, now joined by a new American MIS-X escape-and-evasion service, expanded the gathering of intelligence. Allied servicemen rescued from capture equaled three divisions, some 35,190 men, a pool of observers that Chuck later called “the college of life and death.” As a maquisard, his unscheduled training in closework gave authority to his argument for more Anglo-American-French officers to boost Resistance morale and provide badly needed instruction. Three-man “Jedburgh teams” went into action. Communications were compacted inside a “Jedburgh station”: a skullcap with low-impedance phones and a midget wireless set. American Jedburghs held at Milton Hall, a country house in the Fens seventy-five miles north of London, no longer had to wait. For use around D-day, BBC instructions were memorized: “Plan Vert” meant “attack railways”; “Plan Tortue,” attack German reinforcements coming by road; “Plan Violet,” dislocate telecommunications; “Plan Jaune,” attack munition dumps; “Plan Rouge,” attack fuel stores; “Plan Noir,” attack enemy HQs; “Plan Grenouille,” sabotage railway turntables.

  Hartley later described the reception given to Vera by some Jedburgh recruits when they first heard lectures on codes. Her use of escapees fascinated the future CIA chiefs Bill Colby and Bill Casey, then young Jedburghs. “Casey asked about difficult agents. Others gave Leo Marks a hard time when he mentioned FANYs. ‘Fannies!’ Leo said it stood for First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Its girls hoped they could claim to be prisoners of war instead of being executed if caught. That sobered up the Americans.”1

  De Gaulle's representative, Colonel Passy, had always insisted that “networks of envoys need only collect information and organize communications between small groups who would snowball into a vast Resistance.” The word “snowball” alerted Soviet agents in the SIS to a possible plan to put General de Gaulle into postwar power, and under this influence, opposition in Whitehall continued to thwart the quiet buildup. The escapees, though, portrayed Vera's “shitpile” as merely anti-Nazi groups whose lack of liaison permitted the burgeoning of mutual suspicion and misunderstanding. Seeing the situation through the eyes of objective, if unplanned, observers, she saw a place both for small and uncoordinated actions and for Passy's dream of the “gigantic guerrilla” conjured up by Churchill in the full flow of his 1940 rhetoric.

  Nobody had foreseen the accidental creation of spy networks whose accumulated observations bridged a gap between local guerrilla forces and experts in skullduggery sent out from England to perform specific tasks within separate provincial—and therefore parochial—regions. The policy of sealing off SOE activities was designed to maintain security, but it limited Vera's freedom to instruct and question agents on broader matters. The sufferings of escapees yielded the unexpected gain of a priceless, gigantic spyglass into the enemy's backyard. It was all the more effective because Vera had learned a dozen years before how to peer through her Bucharest spyglass into the tiny target of Berlin and integrate the scraps of professional observations passed along by the ambassador, Old Fritz.

  32

  Rolande

  “Park! Show our visitor the way to the Number Fifty-three bus stop.”

  “Yes, ma'am.” The commissionaire led the girl to a back staircase. She had come to Room Six by way of an ancient lift: a rope was yanked to make unseen pulleys raise or lower passengers. She left by the tradesman's entrance. A precaution, the girl thought wryly, against encountering some new recruit on the way to being terrorized by Miss Atkins. Park was studying her face. She felt she was being photographed through the lenses of his neutral eyes.1

  She was Rolande Colas, back in London amid talk of Europe's invasion on some unspecified D-day date, perhaps by late spring or early summer of 1944. She had been coolly dismissed by Vera to preserve the fiction that they had not met before. Rolande took it in stride. Her own life, after all, had dangled on thin threads of falsehood since their first meeting in Paris. Rolande had described petty officials in her sectors who wooed local voters as if the Revolution of 1789 and the Bastille were yesterday. Leaks to the enemy were a by-product of squabbles at provincial levels. German proconsuls often sought to boost the voter appeal of docile mayors by helping them with everyday matters of sewage and municipal drains, but in other départements, German officers fought with priests and parishioners. The complications were difficult to comprehend from a distance. The girl who had been an innocent seventeen-year-old student in 1940 was so seasoned in closework she could always command Vera's attention.

  Park's name and this address near Regent's Park were dropped into Gestapo interrogations, Rolande had already reported. Captured agents were told “cooperate, don't suffer torture, we know everything.” Vera was more familiar with enemy interrogation centers than her enemies were with these quarters. She continued to use the address for “housekeeping” to avoid tipping off the enemy that their deception was known. Rolande said the interrogators had somehow got information to speak of “Park, the butler” and drop the name “Orchard Court” to convey the Gestapo's omniscience. The address had a posh ring to it. Vera let her opponents imagine it as the heart of a richly financed enterprise. Actually, it was far enough from Whitehall for her to run loyal retainers as reverential as Park, who were far from being butlers. They included a captain in the Hussars who was clever at “winning” army stores and improvising imaginative ways of using them. When the inevitable Scarlet-Faced Senior Officer pounced on demure Miss Atkins, she would smile seraphically and say, “But it's too late now to undo things, isn't it?”

  She was on guard against agents “turned” by the enemy and sent back to England. She would ask counterintelligence bons viveurs to suck any such suspect into a drinking binge. Drunk by dawn, the suspect might let slip a damning disclosure. Booze was in short supply, but SOE was never short of Haig whiskey. She was certain of Rolande's loyalty. A Students Assessment Board had been wished upon Vera, made up of what she called dismissively “the trick cyclists”: the psychiatrists. She had to let the board screen Rolande. The chairman told her, “There's nothing wrong with you, except that nobody in their right mind would volunteer for your job.”

  Rolande's fieldwork had been limited to northern France. Vera echoed Hartley's warning: “In the Côte d'Azur and around Cannes, resisters bog off for a little pastis and get nailed by the Gestapo. The fleshpots tempt our own agents to swan around.”

  Vera took Rolande to a Special Air Service commando training estate. Targets popped up at all angles. “Faster, faster—two rounds into each man, another two rounds to be sure. Change mags until you can do it in your sleep,” commanded Vera, introducing the girl to the improved silencer, the weapon of the assassin. The SAS had perfected techniques in silent killing and found new uses for PE, the yellow plastic explosive of cyclonite mixed with a plasticizing medium.

  Down at The Shop, sixteen miles southeast of central London, production of new devices had reached great heights. The Shop was near the sheltered anchorage in the “green bay,” grene wic in Old English, that gave the name to Greenwich, in whose chapel Admiral Nelson's body lay after the Battle of Trafalgar. Vera wanted the girl to fe
el the weight of centuries of resistance since the Roman age. Under Tudor monarchs, the long association with the navy began here. It was from here that Queen Elizabeth had sent her fleet against the Spanish Armada. Remembering how long it took her to really understand England, Vera wanted the girl to get the feel of historical memory that rejected defeat. One of Rolande's future tasks was to convince waverers in France that the approaching day of liberation would end in Allied victory. Poles now operated in France, and the abandonment of Poland was common gossip.

  “One jump from a balloon and one drop from a Whitley bomber will do,” Vera said, sending the girl for a refresher course at Ringway, where a Canadian veteran of three hundred parachute jumps took her through the drill. He said, “When Miss Atkins says ‘You're late!’ she scares the daylights out of me.” Rolande jumped, but broke a tooth. Vera probed, and exclaimed, “Heavens! I should've known you'd had local fillings. Get them redone the French way. Go see this woman dentist on Maddox Street. Looks sadistic but I'll ask her not to hurt you. It'll still be hellish, but good practice for—well, whenever.”

  Rolande was to work with old equipment, a B Mark II transmitter and receiver weighing thirty pounds that fit into a two-foot-long suitcase. It required a seventy-foot aerial that had to be laced through trees. Frequency was set by removable crystals, one for day, one for night, with several spares. Vera had to use up old inventories, to justify the dispatch of the new gadgets for the underground armies that were forming spontaneously, though still little known outside. Rolande had learned to make the best of things. Batteries for the B Mark II ran down fast and were recharged with a hand-cranked “buzz-box.” She knew better than to run a wireless transmitter off the mains. Germans were now efficient in locating an operator by shutting down electricity in subdistricts, one after another. By a process of elimination, D/F direction-finding vans slowly closed in on “the pianist,” the wireless operator. Rolande had mastered the art of cutting down each transmission to less time than it took the D/F vans to figure her location. They could do this now even if batteries were used, but she preferred them anyway because they gave her greater flexibility. She never transmitted from the same place twice.