Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  A brigade closework specialist, Chanan Greenwald, confirmed Vera's lifelong fear: “Every refugee needs a country of origin. Allied commanders say, ‘You don't appear on our books. You are not a nation.’”

  Vera recalled, “Balfour hoped Arabs would not ‘begrudge that small notch… being given to the people who for all these centuries have been separated from it.’ But Arabs did begrudge the small notch in Palestine. Old hatreds festered everywhere. Hitler's SS had 150,000 volunteers from non-German Europe helping run the death camps.” She wanted SOE to speak for Jews on an Allied armistice commission. In reply, she received copies of a memo by a Foreign Office official, A. J. Dew: “A disproportionate amount of the time of the Office is wasted on dealing with these wailing Jews.”5

  At Mannheim the Jewish Brigade sped “through an archway which still bore the repulsive legend Judenrein (Cleansed of Jews),” said Edmund de Rothschild, commanding 604 P battery of the 200 Field Regiment. Jewish soldiers reacted violently. Rothschild's own men were forced to dispatch Uzbek soldiers across a bridge with the Hammer and Sickle at the far end. Rothschild heard shots. All the Uzbeks were murdered. Hundreds of thousands of “displaced” soldiers under Allied command were handed over to certain death. When fifty thousand Cossacks resisted, British soldiers used bayonets to force weeping families into Red Army hands. The West was keeping its agreement with the Soviet Union to surrender everyone Stalin deemed to be Russian.

  To avoid ugly scenes, the War Office ordered the brigade to leave German soil. It moved to Belgium to guard military dumps. This proved a better base for closework. There were fifty-four nationalities represented on the brigade rolls, and those searching for their families could reach anywhere in Europe in a day's Jeep ride, weaving through Soviet controls. Rothschild sent his men off on forty-eight-hour “leaves to Paris.” They never saw Paris. When the British army conducted an inspection, Rothschild had his remaining soldiers wear forage caps on one side, and then reappear with forage caps tipped to the other side after nipping down the line, out of sight, giving an impression that the entire battery was all present and correct. An inspecting general said to Sergeant Heller, “I've seen you before, haven't I?” Heller replied with great presence of mind, “Sir, you saw my twin brother.”6

  Vera's ally David Bruce, now OSS chief for Europe, was always clashing with the British SIS. He dismissed misgivings about the ethics of such brigade actions: power dictated morality. After President Roosevelt's death in April 1945, Harry S. Truman as the 33rd U.S. president rejected on moral grounds Bill Donovan's plan to turn the OSS into America's first centralized intelligence agency. Then OSS agents began chronicling Stalin's ambitions. American envoy Arthur Schoenfeld cabled an account of communist dictatorship imposed on Hungary. U.S. proconsul Ellery Stone in Rome reported plans for a communist takeover of Italy. Donovan's plan to create the CIA was saved by Truman's decision to confront Stalin. “The Jews,” concluded Bruce, “will get moral support when they display power as a nation.”

  Vera got Lord Selborne to argue for SOE's survival in spite of clandestine cooperation with Jewish agencies. “It would be madness to allow SOE to be stifled,” Selborne wrote. “It is a highly specialized weapon.” But Churchill, its inspiration, met Truman and Stalin at Potsdam on July 25, 1945, and said he must leave early to fight an election. Stalin glanced at the mousey leader of the opposition, Clement Attlee, and growled, “Mr. Attlee does not look to me like a man who is hungry for power.” Next day Britain voted for the Labour Party and Attlee replaced Churchill.

  Gubby, as SOE's titular director of operations, wrote again to Lord Selborne: “British Security Coordination (BSC) comprises SIS, SOE, and security and secret-communications sections…. It should continue.” On October 16, 1945, Gubbins was told his services were no longer required. Stephenson defiantly continued BSC operations and arranged for Vera to be paid out of the Secret Fund. “BSC and SOE had tentacles that were impossible to disentangle,” noted William Mackenzie in his highly classified SOE history, kept secret for fifty-five years. With undercover Jewish help, Vera crossed into Russian zones, wearing a squadron leader's uniform, changing into civilian clothes when neccessary. She was helped by twenty-one-year-old Captain Yurka Galitzine, the English-born son of a Russian nobleman. She talked her way past the Russians at Auschwitz, and told the commandant, Rudolf Hoess, she would not leave his detention cell until he told her everything.

  She suggested that 1.5 million prisoners had been killed at Auschwitz.

  “No! No!” Hoess's professional pride was hurt. “It was 2,345,001.”7

  “Anything is in order that helps Jewish victims move from Y to Z,” said an enraged Jewish Brigade aide. “We call it ‘up-my-arse’ business…. TTG stands for the Hebrew version of up-my-arse. We write TTG on forms to shift army lorries around Europe to collect refugees. We ask British officers at checkpoints, ‘You mean you don't know what TTG means?’ and they say, ‘Why, yes, of course!’ and wave us on.” Jewish Brigade agents stole weapons from storage dumps, and filled out British army forms to cover the disappearance of blankets, milk, chocolate, even airplanes. Shaul Ramat, a Gordon Highlander attached to the brigade, showed Vera how “we make two sets of papers and license plates for each British army lorry.” In this way Yerucham Amitai, later deputy commander of the Israeli Air Force, escaped from Warsaw. “Thousands of us were picked up in thirty-four double-licensed trucks. Convoys delivered us to brigade camps and sped back to rescue more. I was shunted to Rome to join a ‘flying club.’”8

  After Churchill's downfall, Krystyna was stuck in Cairo. She was given “a special Middle East movement job” looking for rusting cargo ships whose owners would run the British naval blockade to deliver refugees to Palestine. From Poland, she received reports of Soviet Russian propaganda that Jews were again engaged in the ritual killing of Gentile children, inciting fresh atrocities. Clearly the war against the Jews continued. Forgers in the Jewish Brigade gave “official authorization” for refugees to get military training. Discarded aircraft were flown into Palestine by veteran airmen like Ezer Weizman, the RAF Spitfire pilot who became president of Israel. These actions could never be made public, and Vera, her Jewish background still hidden, stuck to her British vow of lifelong silence.

  But while Edmund de Rothschild was still fighting in Italy, he received a large buff envelope from London bearing the seal of the Secretary of State for War, marked “most immediate.” Inside was another sealed envelope marked “PRIME MINISTER.” At the time, Winston Churchill was still in office. Inside the innermost envelope, heavily sealed, was a note to be read on the battlefield. “Thank you,” wrote Churchill.

  40

  Unsolved Mysteries

  At Ravensbrück, fifty miles north of Berlin, once the weekend vacation spot for city dwellers, some 100,000 women prisoners had died since the start of the war. When the Red Army liberated the camp in 1945, there were only 12,000 women still alive. The SS camp overseer, Obersturmführer Johann Schwarzhuber, sat in a vacant cell under Vera's steely gaze. Yes, he said, it was in January 1945 that Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe, and Danielle Williams (Denise Bloch) were brought from the satellite camp at Königsberg to Ravensbrück. At the time, the mechanisms for mass murder were not running efficiently. Poison gas was in short supply, so each girl was shot in the back of the head by Corporal Schenk, then shoved into the ovens.

  “Corporal Schenk? What was his full name? What unit did he belong to?” Vera asked.

  The camp overseer scratched his chin. “We kept good records,” he said, and winced. The Russian barbarians had smashed into his office and burned all his papers. Illiterate, dirty scum!

  Vera heard another version. An English woman, Mary Lindell, who was also a prisoner, an escape-line organizer, survived. She said Violette and the other girls were hanged, and their stained clothes handed to the camp storekeepers to be laundered.

  In Berlin, Vera sought answers to one of the greatest mysteries: Why did the Cipher Office never discover
the ULTRA secret? The most significant spy of the era, Hans-Thilo Schmidt, made ULTRA possible by delivering German Enigma machines to the Allies. His brother Rudolf Schmidt, the panzer general, had been taken away by the Russians. Rodolphe Lemoine, who hired Hans-Thilo in 1931 for the French Secret Service, was never seen again after his arrest by the Germans. Did Admiral Canaris hide leaking the Enigma coding system to the Allies? His first wartime secretary, Inga Haag, was now in England, where David Bruce, OSS chief for all Europe, confirmed that she and Admiral Canaris had helped the Allies. Because of OSS skirmishes with Stewart Menzies, head of the SIS, Bruce had kept this information to himself. Menzies took credit for ULTRA, but his service was penetrated by Soviet agents. Bruce, the supreme diplomat, deemed it wise to say nothing of Inga Haag's part in protecting the secret. Lewis F. Powell, who “accepted” ULTRA intelligence for the U.S. Strategic Air Force, recalled after he became a U.S. Supreme Court justice that the Allies never shared ULTRA information with the Soviet Union—but the KGB had a dedicated communist at Bletchley who did.1

  After escaping from Romania in August 1944, a step ahead of the Russians, Inga Haag worked for David Bruce. Inga lived at 1 Upper Wimpole Street, an upscale London address. She said Canaris ran the November 6, 1937, investigation to cover up the leak of information on Enigma. Those around Canaris were “amateur spymasters,” World War I officers with no illusions about Hitler. “We had to have agents, but they were very inefficient, and the best spies worked for both sides,” she said. SOE agents who fell into the hands of Canaris's officers in Paris, when Inga served there, were treated “honorably” as prisoners-of-war.

  Missie Vassiltchikov escaped to Austria and married Peter Harnden of U.S. Army Intelligence in September 1945. Missie said Ambassador von der Schulenburg, her lover and Vera's, was condemned by the “hanging judge,” Roland Freisler of the People's Court, after being named by London Control as foreign minister in a future anti-Nazi German government. Also named was Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who plotted to kill Hitler. The judge, a showman who always tormented the accused with manic speeches about cleansing the world of Jews, forced the defendant to listen for hours to his ranting. Schlabrendorff was close to fainting when an Allied bomb hit the courthouse and killed the judge. The prisoner in the dock escaped.

  Hasso von Etzdorf, Vera's friend from her Berlin days, became consul general in Genoa ahead of the roundup of plotters. He was highly regarded in London and became the postwar German ambassador there. Vera no longer had any doubt that London Control's naming of such men as part of the 1944 plot was deliberate: a campaign to get rid of Germans who might have formed an anti-Nazi government against Russia. Stalin's intent, to wipe out all possible opposition to Soviet expansion, was reflected in the way he rebuffed an appeal from Churchill and Roosevelt on August 22, 1944, “to drop immediate supplies and munitions to the patriot Poles of Warsaw.” The exchange was recorded by Roosevelt's ULTRA briefing officer, Admiral Bill Mott, who told Vera of Stalin's negative response, condemning the Polish underground as “power-seeking criminals.” Stalin had promised that “the Red Army will stint no effort to crush the Germans at Warsaw.” He meant, of course, that the Red Army would henceforth control Poland.2

  Krystyna could never return to Poland. She applied to join the UN's British Section at Geneva but was told, “You are not British at all. You're a foreigner with a British passport.” She settled in London, taking any job she could: shop assistant at Harrod's, tearoom waitress, second-class stewardess on a down-at-heel cruise ship. There was no trace of her husband. She was thirty-seven when she was stabbed and killed at her shabby London lodgings one midsummer night in 1952. A spurned suitor, George Muldowney, was convicted of her murder.

  Pearl Witherington, who joined the Stationer circuit when she was twenty-five, joked about turning “into a matron” in her two years underground. She took the surrender of eighteen thousand Germans, after expanding her circuit from 20 to 3,500 resisters who, she said with all due modesty, “killed about a thousand Germans… their wounded were counted in thousands.” She married her second-in-command, Henri Cornioley, and settled in France after writing citations and recommending the highest awards for gallantry.

  SOE agents were not recognized until May 6, 1991, when the widow of King George VI, the Queen Mother, finally laid a wreath at Valençay, in the Loire valley, beneath a monument in the shape of an elongated Byzantine cross. Above it, a glowing white moon signified air drops timed by phases of the moon. The costs were shouldered by old partisans brought together by the Fédération Nationale de Libre Résistance. The sculptress was secretary of the RAF Escaping Society, Elizabeth Lucas Harrison. The names of unrecognized agents were finally disclosed. The London Daily Telegraph asked, “Why did their memorial take 40 years to build?”

  The delay had been longer. On December 5, 1946, Vera faced seven German women guards from Ravensbrück at a War Crimes Court in Hamburg. Odette Marie Sansom told how, while waiting to follow other women into the ovens, she was suddenly taken for a drive in a shiny new Mercedes-Benz by the camp commandant, Fritz Suhren, to meet an advance patrol of U.S. infantry. He was proud to announce safe delivery of “a relation to Winston Churchill, the prime minister of England.” He was later tried, convicted, and executed, as were some of the female guards.

  “L'affaire Odette” caused eventual unease. On February 12, 1959, L'Express reported that Baron Henri de Malaval, president of an association of those imprisoned at Fresnes, had been arrested after the Gestapo saw a note left by Peter Churchill, directing Odette and other SOE agents to the baron's villa. It cost the baron his freedom and the lives of others. Accusations were made public that agents were sacrificed to plant false information. Dame Irene Ward tabled a motion in the House of Commons on November 13, 1958, headed “Special Operations Executive and Official Secrets,” calling for an inquiry into charges of German penetration of SOE. The motion was never called, and there was no debate. Instead, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan promised that an official history would be published, but Lord John Hope of the Foreign Office warned, “We are bound to bear security in mind first and foremost.” There had been “an accidental fire.” The SOE Liquidation Section chief, Norman Mott, said records on women agents were destroyed, together with the contents of his own office, where he kept operational files. Briefs from SOE country sections relating to investigations into the blown réseaux or circuits were gone. The English-born chief of the Polish section of SOE, known as Colonel Harry Perkins and addressed by Krystyna as “Perks Kochay” or “Darling Perks,” said his essential records had been “destroyed by fire.”

  In 1995, in his last months in office, French president François Mitterrand appointed Vera Atkins commander of the Légion d'Honneur. “A particularly significant decoration,” editorialized the Times of London. It looked to her like a last-minute atonement. “The deathbed revelations of President François Mitterrand concerning his indifference toward Vichy's anti-Jewish policies during the war… shocked most French men and women,” wrote Walter Laqueur.3 Mitterrand had been a close friend of René Bousquet, head of Vichy French police affairs, a man congratulated by Hitler on joint French-German operations against the maquis.

  SS Brigadeführer Franz Six was “recuperated” by the U.S. Army's counterintelligence corps. Six, described by Adolf Eichmann at his Jerusalem trial in 1962 as a man who descended to the depravity of mass murder from his pedestal of “intellectual,” had been tried in a case against the Einsatzkommando mass murderers and sentenced to twenty years in prison. He was out within four years to join old colleagues in the postwar German intelligence service run by General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's intelligence expert on the Soviet Union.4

  The Polish code breakers in France met different fates. Those who escaped to England were not allowed to work at Bletchley. Their different paths remained secret until Hugh Sebag-Montefiore documented their stories in Enigma: The Battle for the Code, recalling the shabby treatment awarded them by British authorities. Th
e Poles received no public honors or praise. Henryk Zygalski, who had solved the code with Marian Rejewski, took a modest teaching post in an English Children's school. Marian returned to Poland, where the communist regime put him to work in a Soviet-style factory. Maksymilian Ciezki died in obscurity in England in 1951, his huge contribution to ULTRA unacknowledged because of the Official Secrets Act.

  Two years after the war ended, Vera estimated that 250,000 Jewish “displaced persons” were adrift in Germany. Shiploads of Jews trying to reach Palestine had been turned back by the British navy and redirected to the scene of the crimes against them. Aloisius Cardinal Muench, Vatican liaison with Germany from 1946 to 1959, recorded a return to anti-Semitism: Germans blamed Jews for delaying American reconstruction.

  Vera felt she had been lucky to learn in childhood the consequences of never being able to answer the question “What's your country of origin?” And so Vera Maria Rosenberg was forever buried. As Vera Atkins, she simply asked that, when she died, her body be cremated and her ashes scattered over the English Channel.

  41

  The American Connection

  “Moneypenny?”

  “Yes,” Vera said into the phone at her home in Winchelsea.

  “Is this a good connection?”

  “I hear you very well,” she replied.