Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  4. Quoted in E. H. Cookridge, Inside SOE: The First Full Story of Special Operations Executive in Western Europe 1940–45 (London: Arthur Baker, 1966).

  5. Among those who said Vera talked informally with Churchill and provided him with one-sheet reports on resistance in wartime Europe were the Stephensons; Bill Casey, who became CIA director; and news correspondents who later served as agents in occupied France.

  6. Ian Fleming, conversation with author, 1956.

  7. Geoffrey Cox, conversation with author, who worked with him at Independent Television News. Cox ran ITN in the 1960s and 1970s.

  CHAPTER 7: CONNECTIONS

  1. Nadya Letteney, interview by author. She later became a buyer at Macy's on Broadway after serving in Stephenson's wartime operations in New York.

  2. Irina von Meyendorff, conversations with author. On widespread suspicions about British “black propaganda” see Marie Vassiltchikov, Berlin Diaries: 1940–1945 (New York: Knopf, 1987).

  3. Goerdeler was not hanged until February 2 because Himmler hoped Goerdeler's contacts with the West might save Himmler's neck if things collapsed.

  4. Stanley A. Blumberg and Gwinn Owens, The Survival Factor: Israeli Intelligence from World War I to the Present (New York: Putnam, 1981).

  5. C. H. Ellis, The Transcaspian Episode: 1918–1919 (London: Hutchinson, 1963).

  CHAPTER 8: SPATTERING BRAINS WITH A KNOBKERRIE

  1. The full extent of his influence was finally laid out in Amanda Smith, ed., Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York: Viking, 2001).

  2. Weitz, Hitler's Diplomat.

  3. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960).

  4. Richard Hughes, interview by author. Hughes interviewed Burgess in 1957 in Moscow. See also Peter Wright, Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (New York: Viking, 1987).

  CHAPTER 9: POLAND BREAKS THE FIRST ENIGMA

  1. Malcolm MacDonald, interview by author; Yehuda Bauer, From Diplomacy to Resistance: A History of Jewish Palestine, 1939–45, trans. Alton M. Winters (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1970); minutes taken at the Weizmann-MacDonald conference. See also Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Cordell Hull, Memoirs of Cordell Hull (New York: Macmillan, 1948).

  2. Anthony Cavendish, interview by author. See also Inside Intelligence by Anthony Cavendish, first privately printed in 1987. The British government tried to silence him by claiming there was a lifelong duty of confidentiality that was understood by secret service officers. A more circumspect version was later published (London: Collins, 1990).

  3. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, O.M., 1938–1945, were censored even when published a quarter century later (New York: Putnam, 1972), although they were billed as “Secret Diaries Reveal Countless Hitherto Unknown Facts.”

  4. Colin Gubbins, interview by and letters to author.

  CHAPTER 10: BETRAYALS ALL AROUND

  1. Paul Paillole, Notre espion chez Hitler (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985).

  2. Gordon Welchman, interviews by and letters to author. For a thorough description, see the most authoritative work: Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, Enigma: The Battle for the Code (New York: John Wiley, 2000).

  3. Stalin's sources included the spy network Rote Kapelle, a cryptonym coined by the German central security office, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA. London acknowledged later that messages exchanged with the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, were intercepted by Germany and passed on to Moscow. See also The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan.

  CHAPTER 11: VERA'S FIRST MISSION IN AN OPEN WAR

  1. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan.

  2. See minutes of the British Foreign Office quoted in Blumberg and Owens, The Survival Factor, and Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe.

  3. Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, A Series of Lectures on Social Justice (Royal Oak, Mich.: Radio League of the Little Flower, 1935). Father Coughlin was notoriously pro-Nazi. Philip Johnson's record as a fascist ran from 1932 to 1940, between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-four. This was later overshadowed by his reputation in the architectural world after he joined the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He died in January 2005, and the New York Times obituary barely mentioned his “brief involvement in right-wing politics.” Other reports have also played down his involvement with the Nazi cause. Franz Schulze's authoritative biography, Philip Johnson: Life and Work (New York: Knopf, 1994), chronicles his period of dedication to the Nazi cause, his efforts to start an American fascist party, and his virulent antiSemitism. Johnson later publicly apologized for his “utter, unbelievable stupidity” after it was fully documented by William L. Shirer in Berlin Diary (New York: Knopf, 1941).

  4. Stanley Orlowski and Jan Zurakowski, interviews by author.

  5. Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries: 1939–1941, trans. and ed. Fred Taylor (New York: Putnam, 1983).

  6. Simon papers and Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

  7. Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years: Memoirs, 1931–1945 (London: Muller, 1957).

  CHAPTER 12: KBO: KEEP BUGGERING ON

  1. National Archives (London), Prem 3/22/44, July 10, 1941.

  2. War Cabinet Minutes 1939–45 (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1989), 22: September 21, 1939, 11 A.M.

  3. Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983).

  4. British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940–1945 (New York: Fromm International, 1999), first compiled for BSC in New York by William Stephenson in 1945; Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt's Secret War (New York: Random House, 2001); Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, 1939–1945 (London: Collins, 1967).

  5. Made public only many years later in The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan.

  CHAPTER 13: YOUR AFFECTIONATE OPPOSITION: THE GESTAPO

  1. Goebbels, Diaries.

  2. Schellenberg later appeared at the Nuremberg war crimes trials and denied knowledge of Nazi atrocities. Before Berlin fell, he was in Sweden, he said, “to negotiate an end to the war.” In January 1948 he faced an American military tribunal that sentenced him to six years in prison. He said he always helped prisoners in concentration camps. He didn't serve his full sentence, as the Allies used such “experts” to help fight communism.

  3. See U.S. intelligence analysis of captured Nazi records: Thomas Troy, CIA historian, and his account, “The Coordinator of Information and British Intelligence,” classified secret and circulated within the CIA, 1970, and published in Studies in Intelligence (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, 1974). See also Walter Schellenberg, The Labyrinth: Memoirs, trans. Louis Hagen (New York: Harper, 1956).

  4. Goebbels, Diaries.

  CHAPTER 14: THE PHONY WAR ENDS

  1. Noel Coward, interview by author, 1973.

  CHAPTER 15: “A GIGANTIC GUERRILLA”

  1. Dalton, Second World War Diary.

  2. Quoted in Hugh Cudlipp, Publish and Be Damned!: The Astonishing Story of the Daily Mirror (London: Andrew Dakers, 1953).

  3. John Colville, The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries, 1939–1955 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986); John Lukacs, Five Days in London: May 1940 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).

  4. From the account written by Nadya Letteney for the author.

  5. Richard J. Whalen, The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York: New American Library, 1964); Persico, Roosevelt's Secret War; Randolph Churchill, personal account to author and Vera in Cairo, 1956.

  6. War Cabinet Minutes 155: June 5, 1940, 12:30 P.M.

  CHAPTER 16: THE LIPS OF A STRANGE WOMAN

  1.Winston Churchill, The World Crisis (New York: Scribner, 1949); Ian Fleming's letter to Sir William Stephenson.

  2. Winston Churchill, Their Finest Ho
ur, vol. 2 of The Second World War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949).

  3. Quoted by Lukacs in Five Days in London; Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). In July 1938 Halifax received Wiedemann in London.

  CHAPTER 17: SABOTAGE ETCETERA ETCETERA

  1. It would be another sixty years before official records of Stephenson's wartime directorship of British Security Coordination, labeled “top secret” and from which these details originate, became available. BSC papers make clear why he became the first foreigner to receive the highest U.S. civilian decoration, the Presidential Medal for Merit, for “invaluable assistance… in the fields of intelligence and special operations.”

  2. Douglas Dodds-Parker, Setting Europe Ablaze: Some Accounts of Un-gentlemanly Warfare (Windlesham, Surrey: Springwood Books, 1983).

  3. Publicly acknowledged at the end of 2001 with the declassification of British government documents on the Political Warfare Executive.

  4. John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries, vol. 2, Years of Urgency, 1938–1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).

  5. History of the Second World War (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office).

  CHAPTER 18: A YEAR ALONE

  1. From Portal's memo, Secret and Personal, February 1, 1941: An Official Document (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1966).

  CHAPTER 19: A CIVIL WAR ENDS, A NIGHTMARE BEGINS

  1. House of Commons Hansard, November 12, 1940.

  2. National Archives, CAB 80/56.

  3. Just before Leo Marks died at the end of the century, he used the line as the title of a book that finally broke a British government ban, Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1998).

  CHAPTER 20: “SPECIALLY EMPLOYED AND NOT PAID FROM ARMY FUNDS”

  1. Ben Levy, interview by author.

  CHAPTER 21: “SHE COULD DO ANYTHING WITH DYNAMITE EXCEPT EAT IT”

  1. Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing: An Autobiography (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).

  CHAPTER 22: THE BLACK CHAMBER

  1. National Archives, UKRO HW 14/7, letter, October 21, 1940.

  CHAPTER 23: “SHE HAS TO BELIEVE IN WHAT SHE IS DOING OR GO MAD”

  1. His name was blackened in secret MI5 reports that smoldered until forcibly made public early in the twenty-first century. Bodington was portrayed in the MI5 reports as a traitor, but was never given the opportunity to clear his name. Once again secrecy falsified history. Vera lived in the same constant danger of unsupportable accusations that, being secret, could never be refuted.

  2. Daniel Cordier, Jean Moulin, 3 vols. (Paris: Lattès, 1989–93); Douglas Porch, The French Secret Services (London: Macmillan, 1996). Porch draws on numerous memoirs by French agents of World War II, and his objective survey is useful as an antidote to more exaggerated anecdotal histories.

  3. The poem “The Life That I Have” was destined to become one of Britain's most popular love poems after a ban was finally lifted by the British government in 1998 and Marks was able to publish his memoirs, which told how Violette saved the life of the White Rabbit and lost her own; see Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide.

  CHAPTER 24: THE FLYING VISIT

  1. Charles Fraser-Smith, interviews by and correspondence with author, 1981–83.

  2. Fraser-Smith and Hugh Thomas, interviews with author, 1981 (Thomas was the British Army surgeon who examined Hess in Spandau jail, Berlin); Hess's keepers at Spandau, interviews by author; research for William Stevenson, Eclipse (New York: Doubleday, 1986).

  3. Rudolf Hess and Ilse Hess, Prisoner of Peace (Torrance: Institute for Historical Review, 1954), in which Oddie writes: “Secrecy has never been and never will be a weapon of Good while more often than not it is the distinguishing mark of Evil.” See also Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3, The Grand Alliance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), in which he comments: “Reflecting upon the whole of this story, I am glad not to be responsible for the way in which Hess has been and is being treated.”

  4. Quoted in Vassiltchikov, Berlin Diaries; Missie's postwar conversations with Vera.

  5. Wright, Spycatcher. Wright was said to have spent twenty-five years inside the highest echelons of British intelligence. He accused the Crown of suppressing the truth about SIS traitors from the privileged upper class by misusing the Official Secrets Act. The British government suppressed the publication of the book and launched lawsuits throughout the world as Wright tried to find a country where he could publish his findings. Finally, in Australia in 1986–87, the Crown sent its most senior security adviser, Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert (later Lord) Armstrong, to seek an injunction in the Supreme Court of New South Wales. Armstrong was famously committed to ancient doctrines of official secrecy. Peter Wright's lawyer was an Australian who tore into the English guardian of secrecy with all the ferocity of the New World confronting the Old. Spycatcher was eventually published everywhere except in Britain. U.S. editions were smuggled into London. The establishment took revenge, using its well-worn tools for character assassination. MI5 director general Stella Rimington, after her retirement in 2000, still kept up the barrage of attacks on Wright, who by then was dead, and told the press, “He was self-important. He had an overdeveloped imagination and an obsessive personality which turned to paranoia.”

  CHAPTER 26: “WE ARE IN THE PRESENCE OF A CRIME WITHOUT A NAME”

  1. Jan Zurakowski, interview by author. “Zura” told me the entire story while testing a prototype long-range fighter, the Avro CF-100. He was demonstrating his new aerobatic, the first to be invented in years, when we had an emergency after pulling out of his “Zurabatic.” I was in the rear cockpit of the two-seater jet when he told me quietly that we'd have to bail out. Later, back on the ground, we had to spend the night in a form of quarantine because the CF-100 was still secret. World War II had ended some ten years earlier. He no longer needed to worry about that secrecy.

  2. Diane T. Putney, ed., ULTRA and the Army Air Forces in World War II: An Interview with Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1987); and Admiral William C. Mott, Intelligence Report (the newsletter for the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security), August 1988.

  3. Schellenberg, The Labyrinth.

  4. John Raymond Godley Baron Kilbracken, Bring Back My Stringbag: Swordfish Pilot at War, 1940–45 (London: Peter Davis, 1979); Lord Kilbracken, correspondence with author.

  5. Ezer Weizman, interview by author. Ezer Weizman dropped the final “n” from his name, not wishing to ride on Chaim's coattails.

  6. Bill Mott and CBS 60 Minutes producer Monika Jensen, interviews by author, 1983–85. Supreme Court Justice Powell said in parallel interviews that he kept his own role secret for another thirty years, even from his wife.

  CHAPTER 27: “THIN RED LINE”

  1. Baron Rüdiger von Etzdorf took British nationality at the war's end, dropped his titles, and died in London in May 1967 “unknown and unsung,” commented the Times. He had helped the escape of an untold number of Allied soldiers and airmen, and civilian refugees. His brother in 1967 was German ambassador to Britain.

  2. Colonel Passy, Deuxième Bureau Londres and 10 Duke Street, Londres (Monte Carlo: Raoul Solar, 1947) and Missions secrètes en France: novembre 1942–juin 1943 (Paris: Plon, 1951). A fourth volume was not published.

  CHAPTER 28: FULLY OCCUPIED

  1. Prince Bisadej, conversations with author, 1992. This former SOE Siam Section agent provided vivid accounts of hard training after King Bhumibol, the Ninth Rama, agreed there was no further need for secrecy. Bisadej is a phonetic rendering of the single name by which Thais are customarily known.

  2. Bickham Sweet-Escott, interviews by author, 1974; Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular (London: Methuen, 1965).

  3. Obituary of Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly, Daily Telegraph, February 13, 2001. She was eighty-seven.

  4. R
andolph Churchill, his Yugoslav translator in Zagreb and Cairo, Mrdjn Lenka, and Ted Howe, interviews by author. Ted Howe parachuted into Yugoslavia and floated down a German searchlight beam. He sideslipped into the darkness and spent what he called “hideous months trekking through mountains on horseback, gradually eating the horses as we ran out of food.”

  5. Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).

  6. Mackenzie, Secret History of SOE. Although 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.

  7. Benjamin Cowburn, No Cloak, No Dagger (London: Jarrolds, 1960).

  8. Jozef Cyrankiewicz, interview by author; reports in the London Daily Express, 1953; reports in the Toronto Daily Star, 1953.

  9. W. J. West, ed., Orwell: The War Commentaries (New York: Pantheon, 1985).

  10. Jan Nowak, interviews by author; Nowak, Courier from Warsaw (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982).

  CHAPTER 29: BLUFF AND COUNTERBLUFF

  1. Raymond Ruffin, La Résistance normande face à la Gestapo (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1977).

  2. From Carleton Coon's report to Sir William Stephenson, found among top secret papers for Intrepid's postwar official history.