Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  One was Otto John, who worked for the German airline Lufthansa. He flew to Madrid a few days later with lists of anti-Nazis and a warning that Vera saw: the names must never be used in propaganda.7 Nonetheless, London Control broadcast the lists. There followed the execution of 4,980 German officers and civilians. Admiral Canaris was publicly strangled. Count von der Schulenburg, named as a future foreign minister in a post-Hitler government, was filmed, on Hitler's orders, hanging with a wire noose around his neck.

  The ambassador's horrible end hit Vera hard. Since their times together, Old Fritz had tried to steer Germany back to sanity. She felt the awful indifference of the SIS after it infiltrated Ronald Thornley into her administration. Ten days after Stauffenberg's attempt on Hitler's life, Thornley memoed: “I have no doubt von T will be pleasantly arrested and fed on bacon and eggs for a month or two in order to improve his position.” The “von T” stood for Adam von Trott zu Solz, the anti-Nazi named in Control's broadcasts. Bill Donovan urged a more “subtle psychological approach” to win over such anti-Nazi German officers, but Roosevelt refused to soften the demand for unconditional surrender. Thornley, appointed to run SOE's German section, opposed covert action that might install an anti-Nazi German government to join the Allies against Stalin.8

  Vera had known Stauffenberg was in touch with German generals who had been captured by the Russians and were persuaded that Stalin was ready to make a separate peace without disarming German armed forces. This offer was communicated through a “Seydlitz Committee” named after General Walter von Seydlitz, who was taken prisoner at Stalingrad. Since the first Control broadcasts, the Nazis had published claims that 7,000 Germans had been arrested, 5,764 executed, and another 5,684 later killed. The dead included twenty-one generals, thirty-three colonels, two ambassadors, seven senior diplomats, a minister of state, three secretaries of state, the chief of the Criminal Police, provincial governors, leading police chiefs, and high officials. It seemed that Thornley, whose communist loyalties were known, rejoiced that if Stalin could not command Hitler-free German armies against the West in his plan to rule Europe, the West at least was prevented from using anti-Nazi troops against Stalin.9

  Thornley was replaced by Gerald Templer, later chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Lord Templer. As the new chief of SOE/Germany, he approved Periwig, an operation to give Germans the impression of a domestic revolt backed by the Allies. Superimposed on the Allied-controlled Soldatensender music programs were Morse signals sent by German volunteers recruited from prisoner-ofwar camps. In March 1945, Otto Heinrich and Franz Langmere were dropped west of the Chiemsee with paraphernalia suggesting they were to meet anti-Nazi Germans in Bavaria. Shortly after, Hans Bienecke and Josef Kick were parachuted into the Bremen area with similar “evidence.” Their SOE instructors had not been told that the Germans would carry fake “proof” of a vast resistance movement, designed to fall into Gestapo hands. The appearance of growing public resistance to Hitler might make the lies come true.

  Vera thought more about the mystery of Schulenburg's exposure by London Control. She was haunted by the specter of that amusing and intelligent man strung up by Hitler's hangmen. Camp 020 had persuaded another German army prisoner, recorded only as “Schmidt,” to become a double agent. He was dropped into Germany with a parachute that would never open. Coded messages were wirelessed to his nonexistent network, using codes the enemy would find on his body, as if London were unaware of his death and kept in contact with his anti-Nazi network and German resisters. To reinforce such illusions, a German briefcase with incriminating documents was dropped by a low-flying Mosquito, and carrier pigeons were released with messages that indicated links between anti-Nazis and Allied intelligence. The Frankfurt radio wavelength was commandeered and bogus orders were issued, as if from officials in German cities telling the populace to leave threatened areas. Reports that Hitler had bolt-holes for Nazi leaders in Argentina were planted in Latin American newspapers. This ran counter to Anglo-American propaganda that Hitler would let the Third Reich crash down upon him, and the German people should dump him at once. Vera said later, “There was a danger we'd confuse only ourselves.” SOE/Germany's Periwig went against common sense and was abandoned.

  Aaron Bank was to lead an OSS mission to capture Hitler if he retreated to his Alpine hideout as Nazi Germany collapsed. Bank, the future initiator of U.S. Special Forces, was offered the thick file compiled by the British that by now contained details of Hitler's movements to the last detail. The offer was never taken up, because Bill Donovan withdrew his OSS/Germany liaison officer with SOE. The move was intended to demonstrate that OSS was not a tool of the British secret services, a suspicion held by Cordell Hull at the U.S. State Department, whose foremost foreign policy aim was to end British imperial financial power. Gubbins hoped for the postwar continuation of special operations that would defend British imperial interests against the OSS, one of whose senior officers had said, “If OSS believes its own propaganda, it should declare war on the British, for they have set themselves up as the master race in India.”

  Gubby wrote indignantly to Lord Selborne that “the OSS embraces so many facets of secret work that it can be likened to the NKVD, the Russian secret service.” The OSS was “used by the American government as an instrument of policy” to dismantle British economic interests.

  SOE owed an enormous debt to Donovan. Now, to save the OSS, he seemed to cater to Roosevelt's urge to dismantle the British Empire. One of Churchill's staff, Sir Ronald Wingate, wrote irritably, “We had been at war with Germany longer than any other power, we had suffered more, we had sacrificed more, and in the end we would lose more than any other power. Yet here were these God-awful American OSS academics rushing about, talking about the four freedoms and the Atlantic Charter.”

  SOE successes were out of proportion to its few agents. No more than nine thousand, they counted for nothing among vast armies whose career-minded generals played to the gallery. Montgomery's 21st Army Group finally held Caen and Falaise, and provided the secure hub around which U.S. troops under General Omar Bradley could rotate to advance. Now Montgomery and Bradley tried to up-stage each other. Was this the end of Anglo-American cooperation? Clement Attlee, the socialist leader preparing to take Churchill's place, planned to discontinue SOE, about which he knew nothing, calling it “a British Comintern” (Communist International). The curtain of silence on covert operations also endangered British Security Coordination, and Bill Stephenson flew from New York to discuss strategies. “Yes,” he told Vera and Gubby, “Donovan's politically obliged to separate himself from us. But we need to cooperate against the Soviets. People don't want to think of another conflict. They only see Russia winning against Hitler.”

  Gubby agreed to overlook differences to save hard-won Anglo-American experience in closework. He wrote to Lord Selborne defending SOE and operations run by Stephenson “in view of his unique relationship with the Americans and in particular General Donovan.”10

  Meanwhile, Nazi Germany was fighting back ferociously and resorting to greater atrocities. Vera needed more closework successes, though hampered by secrecy, to ensure SOE's survival. The White Rabbit, on a death-camp train, was saved by Violette Szabo, the former London shop assistant. She had crawled through crowded prisoner wagons, hands and feet manacled, to bring water to Yeo-Thomas, whose prewar Paris fashion house had sold her “my first and only decent dress.” Violette was caught and executed. The White Rabbit would later escape to report the girl's heroism. Vera regained one of her best agents but lost the other.

  In Leo Marks's den at Norgeby House, she read what he had finally composed for Violette in place of Three Blind Mice as a poem-code. He had first written his poignantly personal poem for a girl he loved, Ruth, the half-Jewish goddaughter of SOE's onetime executive council chief Sir Charles Hambro. Ruth had been killed when her plane crashed. Leo had decided that the dead girl would not mind if he assigned the poem to Violette and pulled a copy from the “d
itty box” in which he kept coding materials. He told Vera: “When I gave her these lines, Violette asked me who wrote it. I told her she'd find out when she came back. She never did. I shall carry the sadness with me for the rest of my life.”

  The life that I have

  Is all that I have

  And the life that I have is yours.

  The love that I have

  Of the life that I have

  Is yours and yours and yours.

  A sleep I shall have,

  A rest I shall have,

  Yet death will be but a pause.

  For the peace of my years

  In the long green grass

  Will be yours and yours and yours.

  36

  “My Uncle Is Lord Vansittart”

  The train carrying Violette had left Paris for the Buchenwald concentration camp, with forty agents classified as “Nacht und Nebel, Rückkehr Ungewünscht” (night and fog, return not required).

  Bits of folded paper with handwritten messages were first thrown into the streets around Fresnes Prison, some scribbled by sixty-five-year-old General Charles Delestraint, chief of the Armée Secrète, destined to be hanged by the Germans. He named imprisoned agents: one was Squadron Leader Dodkin, the cover name for Yeo-Thomas, who had learned from Delestraint of the death of Commandant Pierre Brossolette, the French Resistance hero that Tommy had come to save. Despite his assumed RAF rank and POW status, the White Rabbit had been labeled “a terrorist to be exterminated.”1

  The “terrorists” had begun their final journey in German trucks to the Gare de l'Est in central Paris. Amond them was Diana Hope Rowden, transferred on December 5, 1943, to Fresnes, from where she was taken for regular Gestapo interrogation at the rue des Saussaies. Others who were trucked back and forth between jail and the Gestapo included Peter Churchill and Odette Sansom, captured in the HauteSavoie in April 1943. They had fallen in love. Diana knew the story. She bravely put herself between indifferent French guards and Peter and Odette, to allow them to talk before boarding the death-train. Peter glanced quickly at Diana and asked who this refined creature was. Odette said softly, “One of us.”

  The Buchenwald shipment also included Maurice Southgate, whose maquisards were now commanded by Pearl Witherington. Rolande Colas counted some thirty-seven agents tossing notes into the streets. One message began Chez Amis, mentioned “Barbara” three times in forty words, promised “Je reviendrai bientôt,” and had been dropped by Yeo-Thomas. His promise to return was picked up in time for the next Moonlight flight to London, and miraculously reached his wife within days. Barbara confided it only to Vera.

  Vera's Mossad spies reported that the prisoners were on a train for Verdun, delayed at Châlons-sur-Marne for questioning by another Gestapo group competing against SS Captain Theodor Dannecker, head of “Jewish matters” in Paris. The Mossad had tracked thousands of Jews piled into deportation wagons since February 1941. In July 1944, a month before Free French troops liberated Paris, more Jewish prisoners were delayed at Châlons-sur-Marne, piled into huts, and incinerated by flamethrowers.

  The Mossad passed on pleas from Jews in Auschwitz for the Allies to bomb the camp. Even if the inmates were killed, at least the facilities would be destroyed. The Mossad was told Auschwitz was beyond range, yet U.S. bombers attacked IG Farben installations adjacent to it. “Allied warlords wanted to lay waste cities,” André Malraux wrote later. “We were unheard at daily conferences on the massive movement of huge armies and fleets of bombers.”

  Vera badgered those who trusted her. She knew from Chuck Yeager about new young pilots who freelanced, “hitting fast and getting the hell out.” He had just flown what he called “a hush-hush mission for the Brits,” extracting an agent who sat on Chuck's knees in his single-seat Mustang fighter. Chuck had an admirer and ally in David Bruce of OSS, who backed Vera's request for train busters to “free-lance” against the delayed prison train. By now Vera knew its exact location.

  On August 8, ten days before the last deportation of Jews from Paris and seventeen days before de Gaulle arrived, the White Rabbit heard the roar of fighter-bombers and the chatter of 20 mm airborne cannon. Guards locked carriage doors. Prisoners were tossed into a heap from wagons. Vera had calculated that sabotaging the train would give the prisoners a chance to escape, but German guards were frightened of the punishment they would suffer for losing even one prisoner. Rolande reported later, “They manacled us in pairs. I had my identification as a Red Cross ambulance driver. Violette could not claim POW status. We were trucked into Verdun and slept in horse stables. Armed guards stopped us from crossing a rope separating the sexes. We whispered across the rope. Escape is possible if you stick to a bloody-minded resolve. If I should escape, I was to let Vera know Violette was alive by quoting, ‘The life that I have is yours…’”

  Early next day, loaded onto trucks, the prisoners dropped more notes as their convoy passed through sunlit villages, where people boldly gave the V-for-Victory sign. Yeo-Thomas escaped during a transfer of prisoners amid the chaos of a brief Allied air-to-ground attack. He was the only prisoner to escape unseen. By the time he began to look for Violette, he was caught again. The convoy rattled into Germany, and, at the camp, Rolande had to walk between les souris, who made the chained and handcuffed women defecate naked under the leering gaze of male guards. Rolande reckoned later that there were certainly forty SOE prisoners. Only she and three others were destined to come out alive.

  Vera had to piece together an increasingly chaotic picture of events, the reports often out of sequence, so that the chronology had to sort itself out later. Her old ally Gardyne de Chastelain had parachuted back into Romania on Christmas Day. The following August 1944, King Michael deposed the dictator, Marshal Antonescu. Gar-dyne was arrested as a spy, then treated as an unofficial envoy, then rearrested, and finally consulted as “His Majesty's representative from Great Britain.” An official SOE historian, William Mackenzie, confessed: “It is unfortunate that this cannot be made fully intelligible without a detailed study of Romanian politics.” His voluminous study was published only in 2000, with chunks of detail missing. Gardyne's account for Vera disclosed that King Michael wanted to escape the Russian advance but had no wish to become Germany's slave. He had lost confidence in British promises and flew out of Bucharest on a German transport plane, hoping Berlin would preserve the monarchy.2 Russia intended to install a Soviet government. Gardyne's proposals for preventing this were based on SOE plans that Whitehall refused to sanction. The Moscow conference of Allies in October 1944 gave the Soviet Union a “ratio of interest of 80 percent” in Romania, virtually the West's surrender to Stalin's aims.

  Gardyne returned to his SOE/Cairo base to find that Krystyna was in France. On the night of July 7, 1944, Krystyna parachuted into the Vercors, the maquis mountain fortress southwest of Grenoble. The Battle of Vercors stopped German reinforcements from helping to stem the D-day tide of Allied forces in Normandy. By August the Allies had broken out to sweep inland. But the enemy still held the Vercors region.

  Krystyna replaced an aide to twenty-eight-year-old Francis Cammaerts, son of the poet Émile Cammaerts, who had taken over an SOE circuit from Peter Churchill. Returning from a briefing in England in February 1944, Cammaerts's Lysander had caught fire. He parachuted from a high altitude and survived. He told Krystyna that he had been a convinced pacifist until his brother, who was in the RAF, had been killed. The beautiful Polish countess and the sensitive veteran of closework became battlefield lovers. “We are tied by the stupidity of others,” he told her. “Allied commanders ignore us, and Miss Atkins is without the proper English background to make a lot of noise. It is better that way! She is more effective, fighting as we do, making the best of hidden resources.”

  Krystyna herself had been injured when she landed that night. The French commando who had jumped ahead of her fractured his skull. Her pilot had continued circling, worried about the high winds, until Krystyna lost patience and dropped also from
too great a height. She was blown far from the reception committee. It was likely her hip was dislocated. “It's only bruised,” she told her OSS wireless operator, André Paray. They were part of an inter-Allied enterprise with Polish forces and a maquis of five hundred armed men, another five hundred partisans drawn from villages and farms on the plateau, and two thousand ordinary French people, mostly housewives, who provided the backbone of Resistance by continuing a normal life, while in the hills and mountains assembled the better-trained maquisards.

  “After an attack on a German convoy on Route Nationale 75, killing up to sixty of the enemy, the Germans bombed and strafed communities along the edges of the Vercors to stop supplies being sent into the forest hideouts,” Krystyna wirelessed Vera. “A French boy caught after the attack on an enemy convoy was paraded in the village of Lalley. The locals were told they would all suffer his fate as a terrorist. He claimed POW status because he was with an American commando unit, but his tongue and eyes were torn out in front of villagers, who were forced to watch him finally being bayonetted to death.”

  On Bastille Day 1944, U.S. Air Force Flying Fortresses flew to the Vercors from Algeria, where Donovan had established his OSS headquarters to escape the cramping effect of Whitehall. Eighty-five bombers dropped gay Fourth-of-July celebration colors attached to parachutes, but the containers lacked what was really needed: mortars and heavy machine guns. The mission chiefs in the Vercors asked for the appropriate arms. They were answered by fatuous radio warnings about nonexistent German troop movements, ending “Love to P.” P was Pauline, the code name for Krystyna.