Returning to England after the war he had become a man-about-town with a succession of pretty society women on his arm. He was also rumored to be the son of his mother’s affair with King Edward VII. She had been a lady-in-waiting to the Royal Family. His connection in the political world grew and included Churchill, who recommended that Menzies should be recruited by MI6. Its founder—Mansfield Smith-Cumming, a plump, balding figure with a gold-rimmed monocle—wrote all his orders in green ink and signed them with C, for Chief.
Menzies had always hoped to one day continue the tradition by becoming chief himself, as he steadily worked his way up through the MI6 departments in Broadway. From time to time he was sent on missions to various stations in the empire; India, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand were included in his sea voyages. In 1935, an experienced officer, he became the head of Section Two, responsible for all overseas stations. By the end of the year he was promoted to be the deputy director of the SIS. It was a time when its chief, Hugh Sinclair, also used his green ink to battle against the peacetime budget cuts by the Treasury. Only Berlin and Paris stations were kept at full strength.
Early in 1936, Sinclair told Menzies that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Menzies had developed a liking for his chief and urged Sinclair to consult the best cancer specialist in London. While Sinclair was in the hospital for tests, Menzies took over the SIS, sitting in Sinclair’s office, reading well into the evening what crossed his desk, and signing reports to Lord Halifax, the foreign minister, in green ink with a bold C. They mostly concerned the growing threat Hitler posed.
In the spring of that year Sinclair appeared in the office, a wan-faced figure. He asked Menzies to remain in charge while he convalesced and to arrange for the SIS codebreakers to be moved to the country mansion that had been purchased before he had been hospitalized. As Menzies supervised the move to Bletchley Park, Sinclair collapsed and was again hospitalized. In 1938, while still acting head of the SIS, Menzies found himself plunged into the Sudeten crisis over Hitler’s threats to Czechoslovakia, and he accompanied Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to Munich to meet Hitler and try, in Chamberlain’s words, to bring “peace in our time to Europe.”
On November 4, 1939, Sinclair died. By then war had broken out and Menzies had been already confirmed as the third chief of the SIS.
Over dinner on that July evening in 1941, Donovan’s lawyerly questions drew out Menzies’s background. Donovan suspected that his host was happy to share with him so that he could tell Roosevelt. As the evening passed the conversation became more concerned with the war. Menzies admitted that while the possibility of an invasion had once been a major concern, Britain’s coastal defenses had been prepared. He then turned to the SOE. Its creation had led to a different concept of how the war would be fought. Sabotage and subversion would have an increasing role to support the bombing raids on Germany. The SOE would use a range of esoteric actions to create mayhem and confusion in Europe. Menzies was frank: some of those actions would be outside the work of both MI6 and MI5.
Donovan would recall how Menzies had paused before he said: “Churchill not only wants SOE to infiltrate occupied Europe with its specially trained agents, but he also wants to get women trained as agents. We have never done that before.”
That night in his hotel suite, Donovan made notes about the meeting with Menzies. Under the function of the SOE, he wrote “women” and circled the word. It was his way of reminding himself to further explore their role.
Next morning Gubbins collected Donovan from the Savoy. In their uniforms, both cut imposing figures. As the staff car drove away from the hotel, Gubbins said they were off to see “Churchill’s wizards.”
Their first stop was a guarded warehouse in a bombed street in London’s East End. Gubbins explained the people working there were forgers, creating a range of faked currencies of the occupied countries, as well as the German Reichsmark.
The operation was supervised by the Treasury and included printers from Waterlow, the company that produced Britain’s banknotes. A number of the forgers had been released from prison on parole with the permission of the Home Office to carry on their counterfeiting skills as part of the war effort. There were refugees from Europe. Some were Germans, or Jews who had fled from Austria, bringing with them the printing plates they had used to forge money.
As Gubbins led Donovan around the various work areas, they paused to watch the process that produced the fake currency notes. The paper, provided by Waterlow, was briefly dipped in a solution of very weak tea, then placed under blotting paper and passed under huge hot irons, which dried it in seconds. The paper was then trimmed to size, rubbed with a rag cloth, and placed on one of the plates to forge the note. Hundreds of different currencies were continuously produced and checked before the fake notes were placed on a conveyor belt and sent to the packing area, where bundles of various notes were boxed up. Porters wheeled them to a storeroom where they would be kept until they were dropped by the RAF for the Resistance to destabilize the Reichsmark. Donovan and Gubbins were each given a fake banknote as a memento before they left.
Their next stop was a laboratory near Tower Bridge. Its chemists had produced a superstrength itching powder that would be smuggled into a clothing factory supplying underwear for U-boat crews. Resistance workers would sprinkle the powder on the garments before they were sent to the submarines. Within days at sea, crews would be scratching themselves nonstop.
The powder had also been introduced into German-controlled brothels in occupied Europe. The whorehouses were supplied with contraceptives by the German army. The brothel keepers opened the packets and dusted the condoms with powder.
During the afternoon Gubbins brought Donovan to workshops in various parts of the city. One produced invisible ink and fake documents. Another factory that made test tubes for hospitals had been converted to make explosive devices. One was called limpet. Named after the mollusks, which fasten themselves on rocks, the device had been designed to attach to the hull of a German ship. A team of engineers had developed what they called the “time delay pencil,” a copper tube containing a glass ampoule of explosive liquid connected to a spring-loaded firing pen. Small and reliable, the “pencils” were color-coded to indicate different timing intervals. For assassinations the pens were fitted with silencers and fired special bullets.
In the basement of the Natural History Museum in Kensington, Donovan and Gubbins watched medical students stamping foreign manufacturers’ names on flashlights, batteries, wire cutters, compasses, and magnets before packing them in containers.
By that evening Gubbins had taken Donovan to more than twenty places where a wide range of supplies and weapons were being prepared and packed for the Resistance. They had then driven to an RAF station on the outskirts of London to meet on-call pilots waiting in their crew room for the signal to scrabble to intercept Luftwaffe bombers heading from France across the Channel toward London. The visit had ended when Donovan was taken to the main air defense center for the city. On a plotting table and wall maps, WAAFs—members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force—continuously recorded information from airfields and observers along the coast.
The nightly blackout started when Gubbins brought Donovan to the guarded, sandbagged entrance to the Cabinet War Rooms in Westminster. A soldier saluted, checked their names on his clipboard, and motioned for them to enter. In a small waiting area, a FANY, her belt shining in the overhead light, greeted them with a salute, opened a reinforced door, and led them down a corridor. Its walls were shored up with heavy timbers. Gubbins told Donovan the ceiling was reinforced by four-foot-thick concrete.
Their escort led them past a portrait of the king, George VI, and a lithograph of London Bridge. At the end of the corridor, a WAAF waited outside a closed door. She opened it and stood aside, and Gubbins led Donovan into a conference room. At the far end of a polished table sat Winston Churchill in a leather armchair. He rose and greeted his guests warmly and motioned for th
em to sit on either side of him at the table, which was set for dinner.
On the wall were several maps of Europe, and Donovan realized this was the room Menzies had told him about, where Churchill and his key aides planned strategies to defeat Hitler. The prime minister poured them each a measure of whiskey and handed one to Donovan with an impish smile, noting that it was an Irish vintage, not the usual Scotch he drank. Donovan suspected it was Churchill’s way of saying an Irish American was welcome, even if Ireland remained neutral. He made a mental note to ask Roosevelt to send Churchill a gift of the finest American liquor.
Churchill led the conversation as the meal was served. Had Donovan been impressed by what he had seen so far? He replied he was very impressed. Churchill’s smile showed it was exactly what he had hoped. Showing his own hold on history, he said that the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes had said, “Force and fraud in war are the two cardinal virtues.” The prime minister added Britain would use both.
Donovan saw an opening to develop his reason for being in England: it was time for both Churchill and Roosevelt to join forces and “come up with a game plan to defeat Hitler.”
For more than an hour, with support from Gubbins, a steady agreement developed. From what Donovan would later say had started from “minus zero,” he increasingly saw that Churchill not only would be an ideal partner for Roosevelt but could support his own idea of America having its own intelligence service and also provide it with the experience of both MI6 and MI5.
It was in the early hours when Donovan returned to the Savoy. As they said good night Gubbins said, “You played a blinder, Bill.”
Donovan spent the rest of the night writing a report of the dinner and his day tour of the workplaces of “Churchill’s Wizards.”
Next morning Menzies joined Donovan for breakfast at the Savoy and handed him a pouch of documents explaining that Churchill wanted Donovan to be “taken into our confidence to fully brief President Roosevelt.” The pouch contained secret war planning documents and a copy of the memo Gubbins had sent to Churchill about the role women could play in the SOE.
Later that afternoon, sitting in his favorite seat in the seaplane for the flight home, Donovan speed-read the documents, a technique he had mastered before making a closing speech to a jury. Somewhere over the Atlantic he memorized what he would tell FDR.
Could what he had seen and learned during his visit be adopted into the intelligence service he envisaged for America? He knew that, since his youth, FDR had enjoyed reading spy stories. Stephenson had called him “a real cloak-and-dagger boy.” Gubbins had said as much about Churchill. In his notebook, Donovan began to describe the kind of intelligence service America needed. He began with a definition. “Strategy without information upon which it can rely, is useless. Likewise, information is useless unless it is directed to a strategic purpose.”
He wrote what Menzies had told him about interservice collaboration between MI6 and MI5 with the SOE, and noted that the existing arrangements between the US Army, US Navy, State Department, and the FBI would benefit from such mutual collaboration.
Before coming to London, Donovan had read the history of intelligence in war. How Hannibal, the Carthaginian military genius, had used his spies to rule the Mediterranean after beating the Romans; how Julius Caesar had sent spies to scout the land; how the codebreakers in Renaissance Venice had solved the dispatches of foreign diplomats; how through the centuries feudal rulers had used their spies as military strategists; how Helmuth Count von Moltke had created Germany’s first Intelligence Bureau to get information he lacked about its enemies, and how it became the forerunner of the Abwehr, the German secret service Hitler had now claimed as his own.
Donovan had read about Mata Hari, the dancer who became an eponym for the spy, and as the plane headed for New York, he read Gubbins’s memo on how the SOE would deploy women. Could they be incorporated into the intelligence service he envisaged? Could he expect them to do what the SOE was going to ask of its women?
In August 1941 a tall, distinguished-looking lady in her thirties, with shining red hair and a limp, arrived in the town of Vichy in France and headed to the police station to formally register her presence. In a Maryland accent she told the police her real name—there was no attempt at subterfuge—and explained she would be working in the area for the New York Post. Over the coming weeks she would quickly ingratiate herself with businessmen, police officers, and doctors, as well as black marketers and brothel owners. Her name was Virginia Hall.
Born in Baltimore on April 6, 1906, the youngest child of a wealthy family, Hall had graduated from schools and colleges in America as well as the Sorbonne in Paris. Her ambition was to become a career officer in America’s Foreign Service. To kick-start her dream she had accepted a job in the mail room in the State Department Consulate in Warsaw. Hoping for promotion, she next accepted a higher-grade position in the Consulate in Turkey. Her duties were similar, her social life better: garden parties and snipe hunting in the mountains on weekends.
On a hunt she suffered a shooting accident when a gun went off and wounded her left leg, which then had to be amputated below the knee at the American Hospital in Istanbul to save her life. She was flown back to Baltimore to have an artificial leg fitted, together with a wooden foot with a rubber sole that would smooth out her gait as she walked. She named her false limb Cuthbert. Within a month she could walk again.
Hall wrote to the State Department asking to be once more posted to an embassy or consulate. “Any post in Spain is my choice. I want to learn Spanish. My second choice is Estonia or Peru.” She was told there were no vacancies in any of her wish-list locations. But a “note has been made of your preference.” Hall decided she would go to Paris.
Before leaving she had called a contact on the New York Post and offered to provide stories on the situation in Europe. She had hoped that the life of a reporter might replace her dream of being a Foreign Service officer.
In Paris, with France and Germany by now at war, she joined the French ambulance service. When the French signed an armistice with the Germans she escaped to Spain and then England, where in late 1940 she met Nicolas Bodington, a former Reuter’s news agency journalist who was now second-in-command at F Section. Her linguistic skills and resourcefulness immediately attracted her to Bodington, and they discussed ways in which she could help.
In London, on a summer evening he had invited her to a cocktail party. The hostess was Vera Atkins. Andrew Park, the butler–turned–SOE recruit, served the drinks. The guests were a cross section of actors, journalists, and officers in the army and air force. At some point in the evening Atkins took Hall aside and asked her to tell her what Paris was now like. Hall had long given up being circumspect and said she would like nothing more than to go back and see the “filthy Jerries driven out.” Atkins did not comment.
That night when the guests had left, Atkins sat at her desk, wrote a memo, and filed it in a folder marked PROSPECTS. It read: “Miss VH, an American, talked at my party last night of wanting to go back to France via Barcelona or Lisbon. She would join the Quaker organization as a cover. She also had an accreditation as a Foreign Correspondent for the New York Post as another cover.”
On that August morning in 1941, the memo was the reason Hall had gone to the Vichy police station and registered her nationality and her journalist profession.
Hall had been given a crash course in weapons, communications, and security. She flew to Barcelona via Lisbon, and then continued by train to Vichy. She carried out an intelligence survey of the spa town which, because she had no wireless operator, was brought back to England by a fellow agent, Jacques de Guélis. Hall then moved into the Grand Nouvel Hotel in Lyon, establishing herself as the key liaison officer for the SOE’s early activities in France. She found the first safe houses and recruited new resisters, helped an evasion line for shot-down airmen, met arriving agents—including Peter Churchill—and continued to cultivate her contacts in the Vichy regime. She
was a key spy for the SOE before she became the OSS’s greatest female spy in France.
Radio operator Brian Stonehouse had had the most unfortunate arrival in France. He had parachuted into the Loire Valley only to find his radio had been caught up a tree. He spent five nights in the woods trying to get it down, then found that it did not work properly. He would recall, “I was told not to go near Virginia unless it was a matter of life and death because she was being watched by French police and, I presume, the Germans as well. But things got so complicated in Lyon that my courier and I went to see her and she was very helpful in getting us started and organized.”
Hall helped him find shelter. He was soon joined by another female agent, Valentine “Blanche” Charlet, and together they went to work. Hall had built up a substantial network, and Charlet now took over much of it to allow the American to lay low.
Born in Belgium, Charlet was forty-six and running an art gallery in Brussels when the country was occupied. Among her clients had been English buyers, and she had fled to London, where she found a job as a receptionist in a West End hotel frequented by Buckmaster. He had already recruited two other women from the staff, Yvonne Rudellat and Andrée Borrel. Charlet’s fluent French had made her his third to join F Section.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 5
