“Can you come over for dinner?”
“Where?”
“New York.” Bill Casey, then director of the CIA, mumbled a date. The Artful Mumble, she called it—“used by those who guard secrets.”
The name Moneypenny was a joke between them. Ian Fleming had tried out other names for the submissive secretary of James Bond—Miss Pettavel, Flissity Brown, and Dominique Domino—then borrowed Moneypenny from The Sett, an unfinished novel by his older brother Peter. These were in keeping with the use of cover names, real names, and code names. It seemed to Casey that this suited a woman with several identities. Her present identity fit her life on the Sussex coast. She was now seventy-five and well able to jet across the Atlantic for dinner at short notice.
Winchelsea folk also called her Miss Moneypenny for fun. They live with a history that is in many ways so French, and yet also so English. Their local government is the only one of its kind left in England: a jurat appointed by the mayor and parish church councillors after the fashion of medieval Norman France, which once ruled here.
Vera soaked herself in the town's history and the significance of events surrounding the Church of St. Thomas the Martyr. She was there in 1988 on the seven-hundredth anniversary of its foundation, when the Queen Mother planted a chestnut tree in the churchyard. Royalty's interest was more than ceremonial. Winchelsea was part of a confederation of the Cinque Ports, five towns formed to defend part of the east coast against foreign invaders.
Vera reached New York in good time for dinner with Casey on September 22, 1983. It was far more elaborate than she expected. CIA chiefs and veterans of the OSS welcomed her aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier Intrepid, berthed at Pier 86, at 46th Street and 12th Avenue. In the hangar deck, cleared of warplanes, a giant portrait of General William J. Donovan loomed over guests in evening gowns and dinner jackets. She heard U.S. president Ronald Reagan's tribute to Sir William Stephenson, recipient of the William J. Donovan Award. “As long as Americans value courage and freedom,” said President Reagan, “there will be a special place in our hearts, our minds, and our history books for the man called Intrepid.” Stephenson thought Vera Atkins deserved the Donovan Award, but London and Washington had agreed that neither would declassify secrets the other wished to keep. Margaret Thatcher was the previous recipient of the award as the British prime minister who received clandestine U.S. help in the Falklands War.
“Closework was a weapon forged in the Second World War,” Stephenson told Intrepid guests, “terrible as the atomic bomb. All the world knows about the bomb. Secrecy makes it hard to debate publicly how to handle this other weapon with integrity and prevent its use against us.”
After the dinner, Vera paraphrased Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko: “How sharply our children will be ashamed… remembering so strange a time when common integrity should look like courage.” With us was Beverley Woodner, the Jewish Hollywood set designer whose make-believe skills deceived the Nazis. She said, “If veterans of OSS publicly honored Miss Atkins, even now, we'd upset London. She always had to keep out of sight.” Beverley had been an intimate friend of the novelist Graham Greene, a wartime intelligence officer. “He said everyone was so secretive, nobody knew who did what.”
“Vera chose obscurity,” said a prominent New York businessman, John M. Shaheen. “Men didn't like the idea of a spymistress.” In 1943 Shaheen was chief of special projects, and Bill Casey was chief of the OSS Intelligence Service in General Dwight D. Eisenhower's command. Shaheen headed a team that penetrated the Italian Supreme Command, using motor torpedo boats and new signal systems to get through and kidnap an Italian admiral. With the admiral came samples of new Italian naval weapons.
Peter Sichel joined us. He had been a Jedburgh parachuted behind the lines. Now a leading wine merchant, he was with the CIA in Hong Kong, where I had known him. He joked about a small crisis on Intrepid. He had whispered in Stephenson's ear, “What wine do you prefer with dinner?” Stephenson replied, “Niersteiner,” as he welcomed aboard another colleague, Ernie Cuneo, a wartime adviser to Roosevelt. Peter dashed ashore with Vera. He had arranged the best wines for dinner—but not Niersteiner. They smuggled it aboard in brown paper bags. “It had to do with U.S. Navy and New York City liquor laws,” she said. “He used me for cover. An old lady with an English accent. That foxed the customs men.”
She had foxed many for longer than was realized outside the distinguished group on Intrepid. They included those whose careers in OSS extended into the CIA. They remembered how Chamberlain's spirit of appeasement almost let Hitler get away with taking over Europe, and how Roosevelt's yearning for peace led to appeasing Stalin. In December 1945 President Harry Truman's secretary of state James Byrnes, back from Moscow, reported that Stalin “is trying to do in a slick-dip way what Hitler tried to do.” The following March, Churchill delivered his famous Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Beyond that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe…”1
Vera was drawn into a postwar Anglo-American intelligence alliance. She was only in her late thirties, with unrivaled experience. Stephenson had written in a foreword to Top Secret, an account compiled in 1946 but not made public until fifty years later: “The only hope for democracy's survival is to be forewarned—and to be forewarned clearly necessitates a worldwide Intelligence Service of maximum effectiveness.”
A final chapter opened for Vera in the story she could never tell.
In a graduation address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in June 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, “This is another type of war, new in its intensity… war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of combat; by infiltration instead of aggression…”
In April 1987 Judge William H. Webster, the former FBI director, testifying before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee as the next CIA director, quoted Stephenson when he said, “Secrecy demands integrity. I can't put it better than that.”
From time to time, Vera would disappear on unexplained journeys abroad. She was said to be “awesome” and “austere” by those who saw her at the RAF Club in Piccadilly. She preferred it to what was first called the SOE Club to keep together experts in case of future need. It took in the SAS, and became the Special Forces Club. As she aged, she invited her Winchelsea neighbors in for evening drinks, ending at eight o'clock on the dot. The last of her successive homes, Chapel Plat, meaning Place of the Chapel, was the site of a Wesleyan chapel built in 1800. On her ninetieth birthday, the townsfolk presented her with a collage of a succession of modest Winchelsea homes she had occupied when dividing herself between the pressures of work and rural quietude. The town museum also honored a St. Thomas choirboy who had become one of her agents, Major Henri Peuleve. He was a BBC cameramen in the early days of television, and then volunteered to parachute into France in July 1942. He broke a leg, was hunted by the Gestapo, and escaped home through Spain. He was twenty-seven years old when he again parachuted into France and built one of the best SOE circuits, until he was captured in March 1944 and dispatched to Buchenwald. The memorial plaque says: “The rest of his network owed its survival to his fortitude.”
Behind Winchelsea's sleepy façade are clues to the duality of Miss Moneypenny-Atkins. There is a house called Moneysellers. It seems close to the name of Moneypenny, as Ian Fleming noted. Moneysellers is a reminder that in 1333 Winchelsea was one of only twenty towns in England where foreign money could be exchanged. Mulberry trees date from when Winchelsea provided these resources to the Third Battalion of the Cinque Ports Volunteers for the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Caen stone from France was used to build gothic arches and ribs for forty cellars where wines were stored, 120 hogsheads (6,300 gallons) to a cellar. The town attracted artists and writers: Turner, Thackeray, Conrad. Edward Lear, the author of nonsense rhymes, lived nearby. So did three members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. And here Beatrix Potter dedicated Peter Rabbit to her nephew. Ellen Terry, one of the greatest English actresses, lived in Tower Cottage “on the ivied wall of the ancient Town Gate” and drove visitors around the countryside in a nineteenth-century governess cart. Ford Madox Ford lived on Friar's Road. Winchelsea was the perfect setting for Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, and some who visited Vera thought she suited the part.
In its October 1998 issue, the parish magazine reported that Vera Atkins, at one of the Second Wednesday Society meetings, finally broke silence about her wartime work. Still, she disclosed very little. “Her wry sense of humor demonstrated how she was able to cope with a most demanding and harrowing task,” wrote Daphne B. Robertson. “She pointed out that she only agreed to talk because she'd been promised cucumber sandwiches for tea.”
This was the same person who had memorized the instruction “There is required… an element of legerdemain, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten.” SOE was to represent “tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent.” Ian Fleming had quoted Winston Churchill in creating James Bond as “a blunt instrument” outside the law. Vera had reminded Fleming that Bond and blunt instruments were the weapons of the weak. She said that Bond was popular because he was human; his devices were inspired by SOE “toys” that sprang from resources so limited that only paupers would bother to turn them into deadly weapons, which was why it was dangerous to talk about them.
In mid-2000, when Vera fell seriously ill, George Millar raced across half of England from Dorset, but arrived too late. “I spent so many years with her,” he told me. “When I proposed writing my first book, Maquis, she remonstrated, ‘How can you make money out of all this?’ But she forgave me, and I enjoyed expensive dinners in London she gave me, and her quick wit. Yet, until the day she died, I never knew she had a Jewish background.”
Vera died on June 24, 2000. Her obituary in the Times gave her name as Vera Maria Rosenberg, “intelligence agent.” A memorial service was held at the Church of St. Thomas the Martyr. “Grant unto her eternal rest,” intoned the preacher. “And let perpetual light shine upon her,” responded the congregation. They had long ago welcomed as one of them the girl born a Romanian Jew.
Notes
CHAPTER 1: MAX'S DAUGHTER
1. Kenneth Rose, Elusive Rothschild: The Life of Victor, Third Baron (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003), records efforts by Soviet agents in British intelligence services to smear Victor de Rothschild as a communist mole. The book's flap copy notes that Victor, a public-spirited patriot, endured much public humiliation before Margaret Thatcher cleared him of spying for Russia.
2. Vera's recollections, shared with Sir William Stephenson, Lady Mary Stephenson, and Sonia d'Artois, and in David K. E. Bruce, letters to author, 1975–76.
3. Formerly the Public Record Office, the National Archives recorded the existence of the Committee for Imperial Defence, but details were still treated as secret. National Archives documents are otherwise open for research. However, a loophole in the UK's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) of January 1, 2005, was noted by BBC History magazine in October 2004 under the headline, “Legal loophole ‘could spell doom for historic research.’” “There is nothing to stop records being destroyed prior to a request,” noted the Institute of Historical Research. Prior to enforcement of the act, information deemed to impinge on national security was destroyed or concealed. The UK's notorious obsession with secrecy had already obscured World War II SOE records. Katherine Gunderson of the Campaign for Freedom of Information was quoted in the same issue of BBC History: “We are concerned that information could be destroyed in anticipation of the act.” Richard Smith in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister disclosed that “initiatives are coming down to us to whittle away our records” before the FOIA was enforced. Scholars protested that secret wartime documents dating back sixty years and more were “weeded” during this period. The earlier thirty-year rule should have opened documents filed during SOE's operations between 1940 and 1945, but important SOE files were burned in 1945, and no official record of Vera Maria Rosenberg's early life is to be found in these archives.
4. BBC History, October 2004.
5. Vera entrusted these and the following details to Lady Stephenson, who shared them with the author.
6. Lady Stephenson's recollections to the author.
7. Identity not made public.
8. Vera's response to queries about her time in Germany from notes kept by Sir William Stephenson.
9. See Walter Laqueur, ed., The Holocaust Encyclopedia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).
10. Robert Mendelsohn, British author and publisher of Prion Books, is a widely traveled entrepreneur whose businesses range from gold mining in Central Europe to exporting Scotch whiskey to Japan. An amiable and acute observer of these times, Mendelsohn with his generosity in sharing research and firsthand knowledge greatly assisted the author.
11. Quoted in the author's A Man Called Intrepid (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).
12. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919 (New York: Random House, 2001).
13. Srinagarindra, Princess Mother of Thailand, interview by author; the author's The Revolutionary King (London: Constable, 1998).
CHAPTER 2: MUTUAL FRIENDS VS. GUILTY MEN
1. Elena Marks, interview by author.
2. Frank Whittle, interview by author.
3. Ian Kershaw, “Making Friends with Hitler,” BBC History, November 2004.
4. Vera was so impressed by this Churchillian statement that many years later she told the youngest female agent in SOE, Sonia d'Artois, that she had tried but failed to trace its origin. Sonia became a close companion to Vera in later years, and I am indebted to her for many anecdotes repeated here. Her husband, Guy d'Artois, immediately followed Sonia's insertion into France. Both are better honored in Canadian military records than British, although France recognized their gallantry and awarded Guy the Legion of Honor. Sonia's feats appeared in Sebastian Faulks's novel, Charlotte Gray, and in the 2005 movie of same.
CHAPTER 3: KILL HITLER?
1. MacMillan, Paris 1919.
2. From notes kept by Mary Stephenson, and her later observations to the author.
3. Menachem Begin, The Revolt: Story of the Irgun, trans. Samuel Katz (London: W. H. Allen, 1951); Begin, televised interview by author, 1977.
4. Begin, The Revolt.
5. Laqueur, The Holocaust Encyclopedia; also Walter Laqueur, A World of Secrets: The Uses and Limits of Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
6. Rose, Elusive Rothschild.
7. W. J. M. Mackenzie, The Secret History of SOE: Special Operations Executive, 1940–1945 (London: St. Ermin's Press, 2000). Though it was written immediately after the war at the suggestion of General Sir Colin Gubbins, executive head of SOE, publication was delayed until 2000, when an edited version became available in the Public Record Office.
8. Hugh Dalton, The Second World War Diary: 1940–1945 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986).
9. From notes of Vera's conversations with Mary Stephenson.
CHAPTER 4: RETURN TO BERLIN
1. Parliamentary Debates Hansard, November 1935.
2. John Weitz, Hitler's Diplomat (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992), an authoritative account of the social and political basis of Nazi Germany, and the first full-length biography of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's notorious foreign minister.
3. Charles Williams, The Last Great Frenchman (London: Little, Brown, 1993). This biography of Charles de Gaulle by a former British ambassador in Paris is an indispensable, objective record of French history of this period and how it shaped the determination of General de Gaulle as leader of the Free French.
4. John Costello, Mask of Treachery (New York: William Morrow, 1988). Costello shared his extensive research a
nd notes from the Cadogan diaries with Monika Jensen, then staff producer at CBS's 60 Minutes, who was preparing the segment “The Last Nazi.”
CHAPTER 5: CROWN OR COMMONER: WHERE LIES THE TREACHERY?
1. Fritz Hesse, Hitler and the English, trans. F. A. Voigt (London: Wingate, 1954).
2. David K. E. Bruce, conversations with and letters to author, 1975–76.
3. Colin Gubbins, interviews with and letters to author, 1970s, when the Official Secrets Act still applied.
4. Paul Schmidt, Hitler's Interpreter (New York: Macmillan, 1951), quoted by Ian Kershaw, one of the world's leading authorities on Hitler and a professor of modern history at the University of Sheffield, in “Making Friends with Hitler,” BBC History Magazine, November 2004.
CHAPTER 6: “ENGLAND CUT OFF”
1. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (New York: Harper and Row, 1983). Johnson had been editor of the left-wing New Statesman but became increasingly critical of Lloyd George's pacifist followers.
2. Winterbotham had to wait thirty-five years to disclose Poland's role in the ULTRA saga that was later considered a key to Britain's survival. Winterbotham's book The Ultra Secret (New York: Harper and Row, 1974) was published in defiance of British government attempts to suppress it. Until then, the story of brilliant academics working round the clock in dreary conditions to break the constantly changing Enigma codes had been such a closely guarded secret that even Bletchley townsfolk had never talked about it. The Daily Mirror quoted Winterbotham's account of how he was punished for breaking the silence: “I never ranked higher than a group captain.” Winterbotham was employed by the RAF and by the Secret Intelligence Service, but was left without a pension from either.
3. Chandos Brudenell-Bruce, Earl of Cardigan, I Walked Alone (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1950).
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