Sarah Helm

by Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins;the Missing Agents of WWII

  Since then, however, Suttill's normal ebullience had evaporated. Returning to London for briefings in mid-May, he seemed jaded and voiced fears of penetration of the circuit. Two of his best local agents, sisters who provided a “letterbox,” had been captured in April, and a somewhat desperate bid to negotiate with the Germans for their release in return for cash had backfired. Instead of the two sisters, two prostitutes had been produced.

  Suttill was parachuted back into France on May 20, but his most recent report home suggested that his mood had not improved. He named a colleague who was not to be trusted, encoding the name for fear his report might be intercepted. Most notable was Suttill's intense antagonism towards desk officers back at HQ.

  “Your conception of a letterbox,” he had complained, “appears to be a place where an agent usually covered in mud, carrying an obvious suitcase, can turn up at an unreasonable hour to be lodged and fed and laundered for anything up to three weeks.” He even complained about Déricourt, alias Gilbert, the new air movements officer. “There has been a good deal of confusion this month over the Lysander receptions owing to Gilbert's insufficient instructions. Henri, for instance, on arriving was given a bicycle and left to his own devices. As he cannot ride a bicycle, he had to walk and came to me.”

  The concern in Baker Street was that Suttill's network, made up of intellectuals, farmers, Communists, and aristocrats, was riddled with rivalry, which was spreading distrust. Perhaps the network was simply too big for one man to manage.

  Reading between the lines, it sounded to headquarters staff as if morale in Suttill's own immediate team might be flagging too. He had asked HQ for “a short personal letter” for his women couriers, Andrée Borrel and Yvonne Rudellat. Not that their morale needed bucking up, but they had been rather left out of it as far as personal messages were concerned, said Suttill.

  On top of Suttill's “show of nerves,” as HQ saw it, another member of Prosper, a wireless operator named Jack Agazarian, had flown home on leave with the June moon, bringing news of further arrests in the group.

  During periods of uncertainty like this, it was Vera's practice to spend as much time as possible in Room 52, the SOE signals room. In late June she was waiting every evening for the first messages of the departed agents to come in, and she was particularly anxious for a message from Nora.

  It was, in fact, not necessary for Vera to be physically in the signals room. Until early 1943 all SOE signals had been handled by MI6, but under a new, more secure system, messages for SOE were now received first by wireless telegraphy staff at an outstation known as Home Station, where they were decoded before being passed to Baker Street over a secure teleprinter link.

  The country section would be alerted by Room 52 over the scrambler that a message had come through, and that message would then be passed to a superintendent to classify according to a classification board—“top secret,” “most secret,” “secret,” and so on—before being marked in an “in and out” register and sent out for distribution. The messages would then be colour-coded according to where they were going and from where they had come: white for outgoing traffic, green for live traffic, and pink for service traffic.

  And there were five duplicating machines, so once a message had arrived in Baker Street, distribution clerks rolled off sufficient copies and messengers distributed the messages on a trolley every half-hour during the day and every two hours at night. Country sections saw only their own signals, but every message that came in went to Colin Gubbins, whose secretary would sort them by colour code and tie them all to treasury tags.

  On receipt of a “priority” message an operator at Home Station signalled the word “flash” to London HQ, whereupon extra paper and carbon was inserted at the London end and the “flash” copy was stripped off the teleprinter without correction. It was stamped “subject to confirmation” and immediately passed to the dispatch clerk, who sent it off by special messenger.

  Rather than wait for the messenger's trolley, however, Vera liked to be in the signals room in person. In her role as intelligence officer she insisted on seeing all telegrams in order to build up as accurate a picture as she could of all developments affecting every circuit in France. She knew nothing herself of signals operations and had never studied Morse code. But for staff officers in London, most of whom had never been in the field but at times felt that this was where they too should be, there was nothing to compare with the sound of the teleprinter's clacking. The messages created the illusion of instant communication with the agents, and with France, which by June 1943 had been entirely cut off from England for more than three years.

  Immediately on entering the signals room, which was blacked out and was approached via a cordoned-off outer area, Vera could look up at a large blackboard high on the wall to see the call signs of agents for whom a listening watch was being maintained.

  In the middle of June Vera was looking for the call-sign Nurse. Each wireless operator had a call sign, most often referring to an article of clothing but sometimes to an occupation, in addition to an alias and a street name, to go with a cover story. The call sign was part of the operator's “signal plan,” their particular set of frequencies, codes, and transmission times. Nora Inayat Khan's alias was Madeleine, but her call sign was Nurse.

  Vera knew precisely what Nora's “scheds,” or transmission times, were: on Sunday she would come on from 9:05 a.m., on Wednesday from 2:10 p.m., and on Friday from 5:10 p.m. But as there was always a chance she would transmit much later than her designated time, Vera would often wait late into the evening, eating perhaps in the SOE canteen.

  Four days after Nora's departure Vera was still watching for Nurse. Nora should by now have made contact with her subcircuit organiser, Emile Garry (Cinema), and should also have been in touch with Prosper's own people, based just outside Paris. The circuit's core group met at an agricultural research college, the Ecole Nationale d'Agriculture, at Grignon, near Versailles, and several of the college's staff worked for Prosper.

  Nora might have tried and then failed to make her signal heard, but Vera had checked with Home Station over the two-way microphone, and there had been nothing at all. She might have already been DF'd, or blocked by German direction-finders. (When the Germans isolated an enemy signal, they first sent a beam out from a radio station and jammed the frequency, which for both the operator and the receiver produced a high-pitched ringing noise.)

  Then, on June 20, instead of Nurse the call sign Butcher came up on the blackboard. This was the call sign of Gilbert Norman, alias Archam-baud, who was Suttill's principal wireless operator and the person most likely to have news of Nora.

  The message from Norman, transmitted fast and clear, said Nora had arrived safely. She had not transmitted because her wireless set was damaged on landing, and Norman requested a replacement radio for her “soonest.” He said he was giving her instruction in W/T from his own set, out at Grignon. Norman's message was copied round F Section and set minds at rest. Two days later, on June 22, Nurse came up on the board, and, using Norman's set, Nora sent a hesitant first message confirming her arrival. She could have had no better instructor in the field than Norman, whose own wireless training reports had been among the best F Section had ever had. Vera knew that Nora was now in good hands.

  But within a few days more worrying news had reached London, again from Francis Suttill.

  Wireless messages, though the most immediate, were not the only means of contact between the field and HQ. Agents could also send back longer, more detailed reports in SOE mailbags. These reports were written en clair—that is, not encoded—though any ultrasensitive details, such as names, places, or signals details, were supposed to be encoded. As well as arranging the pickup of agents on the landing fields, the air movements officer Henri Déricourt (Gilbert) was the “postman” who collected agents' mail from letterboxes and put it on the Lysanders.

  The report Suttill sent on the last flight of the June moon was his bleakest yet. Dat
ed June 19, it reached Baker Street five days later and said that Madeleine (Nora) had narrowly escaped arrest a few days previously. Suttill was blaming London for sending her to France with details of a “blown letterbox.” The letterbox was unsafe because the person who provided it had been in touch with another F Section circuit, known to have already been infiltrated by the Gestapo, as Suttill himself had warned London four months previously. “Had Madeleine gone there yesterday afternoon, she would have coincided with one of the Gestapo's periodical visits to the flat!” he wrote. In a fury with whoever was responsible, he accused London of breaking a cardinal rule by allowing one circuit to be contaminated by contact with another. He then demanded that HQ take disciplinary action immediately against everyone involved.

  In this case it at once becomes superabundantly clear that similar circumstances can arise at any time and that therefore the whole system of giving to any agent a letterbox of another circuit is an obvious invitation to disaster for that circuit.

  I hope I have made myself clear. I state, in parenthesis, that it is now 0100 hours 19 June and I have slept seven hours since 0500 hours 15 June

  Suttill went on to warn London that all his letterboxes and passwords now in force would be cancelled from midday June 19 until he received a message from London saying “The village postman has recovered,” which would mean his rule was taken on board.

  “If you are not prepared to accept my suggestion I will of, course, on your instruction, immediately reinstate the letterboxes unconditionally. In such case please file this report carefully for production on the inevitable eventual ‘post mortem' of the ‘feu' [‘late,' i.e., dead] Prosper organisation.”

  With this report Suttill had also sent a letter for his wife, Margaret, a GP near Plymouth, thanking London for allowing him to write home. Personal mail carried by Lysander was a privilege not all agents received. One of Vera's jobs was to pass on the mail, checking first for security breaches. “Dear Child” was how Francis Suttill always began letters to his wife. “It is nice to have the boys with me,” he wrote, referring to the fact that after his last home leave he had brought a photograph of his two baby boys with him back to France, which was against the rules.

  HQ had no chance to take action on Suttill's threat. The following day, June 25, a “flash” message came out of the teleprinter in the signals room. It was from an F Section local recruit in Paris. Extra carbon paper was placed in the teleprinters by FANY clerks, and the dispatch riders were put on standby.

  The message said that Suttill, along with his main radio man, Gilbert Norman (Archambaud), and his courier, Andrée Borrel (Denise), had “disappeared, believed arrested.”

  “To be confirmed” was stamped on the signal “flimsy,” which was duplicated and transported around the building in Baker Street, with copies going to F, F Ops, F Plans, F Recs, FV, and FN, and over the road to CD and his senior staff, who, already dealing with emergencies in Yugoslavia and the Middle East, had little time to intervene in F Section's crisis. An even greater catastrophe had hit the Free French. Jean Moulin, the leader of the Gaullist resistance, had been captured in France at almost exactly the same time.

  Although Vera knew nothing of signals telegraphy, her presence in the signals room was never irksome to the signals staff. On the contrary, she was valued because she had a particular flair for reading mutilated messages: those that were hard to understand because letters were garbled or words were missing as a result of enemy jamming or poor transmission.

  Each agent had a unique fist, rather like a fingerprint in Morse. Tapping on the key of their transmitter, some made a long “dah” and some short; some used long breaks between words and some clipped their “dits.”

  Vera also knew the different “signal plans”: the coding system, transmission times, and frequencies ascribed to each agent. For security, each agent was assigned their own exclusive frequencies—usually two— which could be located only by inserting a device called a crystal into the wireless set. If the agents wanted to change frequencies, new crystals were sent out by London, deliveries of which Vera might often arrange.

  Vera also made it her business to know an agent's coding system. Many agents encoded their messages using a favourite poem—typically one they learned at school or university—which they chose and memorised before leaving for the field. Others used a Playfair cipher, based on a square containing twenty-five letters and numbers. Nora had been given a simplified code as she had left in such a rush.

  Because Vera knew the coding systems and poems, she was well equipped to unscramble an “indecipherable.” This might occur simply because an agent had mistransposed a letter in their Playfair or misspelled a word in their poem, which Vera was often able to spot. Each agent had a characteristic set of mistakes. And although she was not qualified to identify the technical aspects of a fist, Vera certainly knew individuals' styles of communication as well as anyone. For example, some agents liked simply to sign off “Goodbye,” while others sent “Lots of Love” and one of Nora's hallmarks was “Tallyho.”

  Buckmaster, like Vera, had never trained in clandestine communications of any sort. But he did have a talent for crosswords and even claimed he finished the Times crossword every day on the bus to work. Not surprisingly, he liked to try his hand at transposing garbled messages. It was quite a common sight to see Vera, often with Buckmaster, bent over a piece of paper, transposing letters or debating whether an agent might have transliterated in error, using perhaps “mite” instead of “might” or “peace” instead of “piece” to “code up” a particular word. Both of them also enjoyed dreaming up BBC “action” messages, which were used not only to alert agents on the ground to a landing operation but to signal that a prearranged arms drop would now go ahead or that an act of sabotage should now take place. One of Vera's tasks was to deliver BBC messages to Bush House, ready for broadcast.

  For now, however, no messages of any sort could be sent to the Prosper network. All anybody could do was wait for more news. The silence—particularly from Gilbert Norman's radio—did not bode well. Butcher was simply not coming up on the board.

  If Suttill had been caught, his people all knew, he would try to hold out under torture for forty-eight hours without talking. In that time word would spread like lightning down the lines, and Prosper's followers—several hundred of them, counting all his subcircuits—would be running for cover, closing down letterboxes, abandoning safe houses, destroying messages, and burning their papers and codes. More information was bound to reach London soon. But at the moment nobody at HQ could be sure what was happening in France, because no messages were coming in.

  Then on July 7 the call sign they had so much hoped would come back up was chalked on the board. Butcher—Gilbert Norman—was trying to transmit. His message came through. Prosper “captured,” he confirmed.

  Coming from Norman himself, the dismal news was hard to question. Yet the consolation was significant: Norman, since he was transmitting, was evidently free. To that extent at least, the disaster was limited. The vital wireless link to London was still in place.

  And yet, as some in the signals room were swift to see, Norman's message was peculiar. It was mutilated, which might have been caused by atmospheric conditions, but his tapping was uncharacteristically clipped.

  Most surprising was that Norman had forgotten to include the secret security check, carried by each agent, which gave London absolute confirmation that a wireless operator was transmitting freely. Each agent was given a bluff check and a true check, which they had to insert into a message. These took the form of spelling mistakes or secret signals, agreed with London, that were inserted in the text to show the sender had not been caught. A bluff check was one that could, under torture, be yielded to the Germans. The one that mattered was the true check. If the true check was not present, it meant the agent was captured.

  A number of explanations were posited for the peculiar message. At first Vera considered that the message had perha
ps been transmitted by Nora, who had been practising on Norman's set. Another suggestion was that Norman was on the run and operating in difficult circumstances. Few, though, were prepared to countenance the possibility that he might be operating under German control.

  As F Section was aware, the Germans had sent messages back to London over the radios of captured operators before. As recently as April 1943 an F Section wireless operator named Marcus Bloom, alias Bishop, had been captured and peculiar messages had been sent over his radio, but this case was seen as a one-off.

  For the Germans to be operating Norman's radio, however, Norman himself must have passed over his codes and crystals. “He would rather have shot himself,” exclaimed Buckmaster when the possibility was proposed by Penelope Torr, the records officer.

  Norman, an accountant by profession and an earnest young man, had passed every test in training with flying colours, and security in particular had become “second nature,” said his instructors, whose only criticism of him was that he tended “to talk too much.”

  Miss Torr pointed out, however, that Home Station had examined Norman's back traffic and found that he had sent 149 near-perfect messages since going to the field and had never forgotten his security check before. Buckmaster was unmoved. There was only one explanation for Norman's mistake and that was carelessness. “You have forgotten your double security check,” he replied as soon as the operator's next sched came up. “Be more careful next time.”

  F's morning meetings were now dominated by Prosper as staff pored over the latest reports on who was captured and who was not. Among those reported safe was Nora, who was said to be lying low with France An-telme, another key Prosper man, who had escaped the roundup. But the clatter of messages now coming in was reporting mass arrests. The Gestapo were raiding all of Prosper's arms depots. Names of several traitors, among them key Prosper lieutenants, were already being mentioned in messages. Somebody was obviously talking. But none of the reports could be verified, and the position still remained anything but clear.