Sarah Helm

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

  “Maurice read the telegram, and he just couldn't believe it. I remember he was very shocked. It was a Sunday morning, and only he and I were in the office. He was wandering around, very angry. He was a very emotional person, in a way that Vera was not. He could not believe the Germans would do anything so awful as that.”

  4.

  Traces

  In mid-September 1944 Vera was at her desk in Baker Street scrutinising documents, underlining a word from time to time with a black fountain pen or correcting a spelling. The building was almost deserted. The Ops room was still, and only the occasional clatter of a teleprinter could be heard in the signals room. At her side Vera had a row of flipflop card indexes, an inventory of names, addresses, and aliases of every F Section agent, each with a small photograph attached. Almost all the information here was already in her head, but even so she liked to keep the cards close to her. If she wanted to confirm a detail of an agent, she could run a fingernail along the top, and a mass of little faces would appear, flipping over on the roller.

  Vera was scanning the documents for names of missing agents. And if she made a note on a card, it meant she had found another “trace.” Occasionally a messenger would appear and pass to Vera another file from a trolley. Nobody else from F Section was here. Buckmaster was in France starting his victory tour of F Section circuits, code-named the Judex Mission, and with him was Bourne-Paterson. In early 1944 Bodington had been dispatched to lecture Allied forces on conditions in France and had not been seen since. Gerry Morel had been recruited to work with a new intelligence body that was planning for the liberation of Germany.

  Vera, however, had chosen to stay—or rather, she had insisted most forcefully on staying—on in Baker Street. To move office or accept a different assignment would be to desert the men and woman pictured on these cards. It was three months since the Normandy landings, yet of the four hundred F Section agents sent to the field, more than a hundred were still missing, sixteen of them women. Her responsibility, as she saw it, was to remain in place until every one of them was accounted for.

  In the turmoil after D-Day there had been little time to consider where everybody was, who was captured, and who was not. Gradually snippets of news began to come though, perhaps from those who had escaped or from Allied troops, who were by then pushing through the areas where SOE's circuits were active.

  In mid-June Violette Szabo—alias Corinne Le Roy, Seamstress, or Vicky Tailor—was reported to have been arrested on June 9, 10, or 11 and taken to the German part of Limoges. What had happened to Violette next, nobody knew; she had been moved to a “destination unknown.” Buckmaster wrote on her casualty report that she had fought off elements of an SS Panzer Division using a Sten gun before collapsing exhausted. A report had also arrived soon after D-Day giving news of Yvonne Baseden, stating that she was captured and last seen in prison in Dijon. She and her organiser had been cornered in a barn stacked high with cheeses. Yvonne's organiser had taken his suicide pill, and others had been arrested. The source of the news was a member of her circuit who had been able to avoid detection and escape to Switzerland. Another woman agent, Muriel Byck, died of meningitis after just six weeks of fearless work in the field.

  Many agents were known to have been captured well before the Allied invasion. Odette Sansom, one of the first women couriers to go into France, arrested in April 1943 in St. Jorioz, near Annecy, was reportedly then imprisoned at Fresnes, along with several others. At first it was thought possible that Allied prisoners held in these French jails might have been left behind when the Germans retreated. But as France was liberated, not a single prisoner was found. There were reports that Berlin had given orders for all Allied prisoners to be killed before the retreat. Others said that this was nonsense and that the Germans wanted all British agents alive because they might be useful as hostages.

  Vera herself had spent a short time in Paris immediately after the city was liberated in late August 1944. She, along with Buckmaster, had crossed the Channel by navy gunboat to assess priorities now that the war in France was nearly over. The initial task had been to set up a base where agents could make contact when they began to come in from the field. The Hôtel Cecil, in rue St. Didier, was hardly the “forward station” on the grand scale Buckmaster had envisaged for SOE back in February. De Gaulle himself had blocked all plans for SOE to have any more significant presence. So determined was the victorious de Gaulle to implant in the minds of his people that it was they alone who had liberated France, that immediately after D-Day he had set about scotching any traces of SOE's contribution.

  Nevertheless, the two bedrooms requisitioned by SOE served a purpose, and many familiar faces pushed through the hotel's revolving doors, to find Vera, or later Nancy Fraser-Campbell, upstairs ready to greet them. Pearl Witherington arrived to be showered with accolades after her magnificent command of a group of maquisards, and Francis Cammaerts, the former teacher from Beckenham and Penge County School, who had won a reputation as “un des grands” of the SOE circuits, also reported to the Cecil. The dashing George Millar, who set up the successful Chancellor circuit just before D-Day, had no sooner arrived at the hotel than he had whisked Nancy on a bicycle up to the bars of the Champs-Elysées.

  Some agents at first believed captured now returned safe, while others were scooped up by Vera in person. Lise de Baissac, working undercover as a poor widow in a Normandy village, had followed orders to stay put after the Allied landings and await instructions. In early September a black car turned into the village, and out stepped Vera, who handed Lise a brand-new FANY uniform and told her to put it on as she was taking her home.

  Soon, however, there was little more Vera could do in France. The revolving doors of the Cecil stopped turning, and the euphoria of the first homecomings passed. Paris was now awash with accusations of collaboration and treachery, and hard information about what had happened to individuals or how SOE's circuits had collapsed was difficult to come by. The French security police had taken control of the few German records that had been salvaged and were limiting any British access to French collaborators. Vera returned home; but her search for missing agents had only just begun.

  In September news of the missing might reach Baker Street from any quarter, and Vera was starting to file casualty reports. These carried the headings: “nature of casualty,” “when and where agent was last known to be free,” “source of report,” “estimated degree of accuracy,” “date and place of burial,” and “remarks.”

  Information on the courier Cicely Lefort, sent to Cammaerts's Jockey circuit, was unusually detailed. A French source had made contact saying they now had an address for her in Germany: “Kunz Lager, Ravensbrück, Fürstenberg, Mecklenburg.” This was the first Vera had heard of Ravensbrück, though she knew Mecklenburg was a vast area, studded with lakes, north of Berlin.

  Vera was now building up as much intelligence as she could on camps where Germans might be holding prisoners, but she could never learn enough. The Red Cross provided details on the network of more than two hundred POW camps, spread right across Germany, but Vera considered it more likely that agents would have been taken to civilian internment camps or possibly even concentration camps. Colleagues in SOE's Polish Section had access to the most up-to-date information on concentration camps, but Vera was now urgently seeking reliable data on the precise number of these camps and on the categories of prisoners held there. Weekly intelligence reports provided by SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) listed names of known concentration camps and gave a broad analysis of their organisation and function, but SHAEF admitted that its information was often “hearsay.” For good anecdotal evidence about the nature of these camps, Vera monitored the press, spoke to exile groups, and sifted data from the British General Post Office's Postal Censorship department. Mail reaching, in particular, the Jewish Agency had consistently told a story of concerted horrific atrocity. But nowhere had Vera seen mention of a camp named Ravensbrück.

&
nbsp; Information on most agents was not only limited but also usually very old; even so, it was all noted down. News of the arrest of Yolande Beekman of the Musician circuit, which had happened six months previously, had reached Vera in September by pure chance. A woman who worked in a pharmacy in St. Quentin (near Amiens), where Yolande had been based, had travelled to the British embassy in Paris to report that Yolande was arrested in the town on January 13, 1944. “She was brought back four days after her first arrest to the pharmacy. Her face was very swollen and she had obviously been badly treated. She was then taken away again to the local prison,” reported the woman, who added that she had tried to get food to Yolande, but she was being held in solitary confinement. The woman also heard that at the end of February Yolande had been taken to Paris by two members of the Gestapo.

  In rare cases, captured German agents had provided information. MI6 had passed to Vera a report from one captive who had talked of “three men and one woman dropped together with a supply of arms near Rambouil-let.” One of the men was described as “a tall English captain (a very tall muscular type).” The Germans had been waiting for the plane and knew the precise time it was due to land. The parachutists were rounded up by the Gestapo and taken directly to Gestapo HQ in Avenue Foch.

  This information clearly referred to France Antelme, Madeleine Damerment, and Lionel Lee. The mention of a fourth man appeared to be an error. Vera noted on the forms of the three agents “believed captured” in February 1944. The fact that they were dropped directly into waiting German hands had been clear to her for many weeks. She saw no reason, however, to note this extra detail on the files.

  Other reports were so vague that it was hardly worth filling out a casualty form. The form might just state “Missing believed captured” or often “Source unreliable.” Of Francis Suttill, for example, all that could be said was that he was “believed captured June 24th 1943 and last seen in Avenue Foch.”

  Of Gilbert Norman there was no confirmation of the date of capture even now, and the report simply said “Presumed arrested.” Under “When and where last known to be free” was written “Middle of July 1943 Paris.”

  And of Nora Inayat Khan there had as yet been no trace, not even a hint about when or where she had been captured, or where she might have been taken. Nobody seemed to have seen her at all. Of all the captured agents, Nora had most completely disappeared.

  Vera had requested colleagues in every service, including the Red Cross, to pass all possible traces of missing agents directly to her. Sometimes only the tiniest of clues about a missing agent, or their circuit, would appear in a report or an interrogation, and only Vera knew every alias, every cover story, and every detail of the agent's secret life well enough to pick out these clues. She feared, however, that others—particularly her own colleagues in SOE's security directorate—were deliberately keeping back information. John Senter, head of the security directorate, had requested that all F Section's files be sent to his Bayswater headquarters, but Vera was resisting. Senter had also dispatched his own officers to Paris to carry out investigations, quite separate from Vera's, into what had happened to SOE circuits.

  By mid-September one important report, which Vera had urgently requested from Senter's men in Paris, had at last arrived, and it was occupying all her attention. It was an interrogation of F Section wireless operator Marcel Rousset, alias Leopold. Rousset, one of F Section's Mauritian agents, was another unexpected figure to have walked into the Hô-tel Cecil. He was “reported captured” many weeks earlier when his call sign had come up in the signals room on D-Day with a “thank you” message from the Gestapo.

  Vera heard about Rousset s arrival at the hotel from Nancy Fraser-Campbell. A small man with red hair and a moustache, he had walked up to Nancy and said: “You are coming with me right away. I am going to show you the blood on the walls.” He had then led Nancy to 3a Place des Etats-Unis, a building that, until a few weeks earlier, had been used as a Gestapo prison. He showed Nancy into the torture room and forced her to look at the blood of SOE agents now dried brown on the walls. Rousset was a very bitter and angry man. He told Nancy how stupid everyone at HQ had been; how they had risked agents' lives. He said he had done everything to warn London that he was captured, but nobody had noticed. According to Nancy, he was damning about Buckmaster, Bourne-Paterson, Vera—everyone involved.

  Turning to the first page of Rousset's report, Vera read swiftly over the early headings: “Arrival in France and mission,” “Landing and subsequent events,” and “Organisation of circuit.” She noted that he had been in touch with Gilbert Norman and Francis Suttill soon after his arrival in France in March 1943. He was arrested on September 7, 1943, when twelve Gestapo men walked into the house in Paris where he was having lunch.

  Under “Interrogation of Source at Avenue Foch,” Rousset told his interrogator that as soon as he arrived at the Gestapo headquarters at Avenue Foch, he was informed that they knew his alias was Leopold, which he denied.

  He was then taken to a room on the third floor and confronted with some of his messages which had been decoded. In spite of this incriminating evidence he continued to deny he was Leopold. Next Rousset was confronted inside Avenue Foch with Gilbert Norman who told the Germans that Rousset was, indeed, Leopold. Norman told Rousset that the Gestapo had full information about SOE and that “in view of this knowledge he and Prosper had decided to admit everything, in order to save their lives.” Archambaud advised Rousset to do likewise.

  Vera underlined this paragraph. It was the first credible reference to Francis Suttill since his arrest in June 1943. It appeared to support gossip, which Vera had heard from French sources in Paris, that Suttill and Norman had together decided to make a pact with the Germans “to save lives.” “Archambaud then went on to say that they had been betrayed by somebody in London and named as the traitor Gilbert (Henri Déri-court).”

  The interrogator noted that “Rousset's personal opinion was that Gilbert was not a traitor. He had had contacts with Gilbert and if Gilbert had wanted to have them arrested before he could have done so.”

  As Vera knew, MI5's investigations into Henri Déricourt's case had only just been wound up, and at the beginning of September 1944 he had been told he was free to go.

  Rousset then told his interrogator how he was taken to another room on the third floor of Avenue Foch, where there was a large map of France. “On this plan was marked the organisation of the French Section with Colonel Buckmaster's name at the top and all the circuits underneath with names of organisers and radio operators.”

  Vera read on:

  Next source was shown his W/T set. This is divided into compartments and on one side of the lids source had put his extra “scheds,” his frequencies and his “Playfair” code, but not his poem. It is possible that the Gestapo discovered the poem messages under the carpet and were thus able to decode source's messages.

  When the Gestapo was sure of Rousset s identity, they asked him to work for them, but he refused. They asked him about the speed of his transmissions, and he replied that sometimes he transmitted at high speed and sometimes more slowly.

  The Germans then asked him to check messages sent by his organiser, Max, to see if they were in Max's style, “saying they knew all about the organisation and were going to have some ‘sport' with HQ.”

  Rousset agreed to do this, but states that he did everything possible to mislead the Germans, giving them a method of stating coordinates for a ground which he had been absolutely forbidden to use, saying that he put his security checks (which they must have found) after the date, when in fact he put them at the end of his message; [and] that he signed his messages with the words “Love and kisses” whereas he used “adiós” or “salut.” This went on for five or six days.

  As Vera knew, London had received a series of confusing messages from Rousset at about this time.

  She now read down a list of all other F Section agents whom Rousset had seen at Avenue Foch as well as at the
prison in Fresnes and the Gestapo prison in Place des Etats-Unis. Underlining names as she read, she also updated several cards on her card index. On his first stay at Avenue Foch, Rousset had seen the agent John Starr, alias Bob. Vera's casualty report for Starr stated: “reported arrested in June [1943],” and she now updated it to: “seen in Avenue Foch. October 1943. Source reliable.” Rousset had told his interrogators that Starr “seemed to be on good terms with the Gestapo and working for them.”

  In the prison at Fresnes, where he was taken next, Rousset saw Jack Agazarian. Vera had heard nothing of Agazarian since Bodington had returned from Paris in the summer of 1943 after the disastrous trip to investigate the collapse of Prosper. “Agazarian told Rousset that he had been arrested when going to a meeting with Archambaud, but Archam-baud had been arrested before this time, and a souricière [trap] had been placed. Agazarian told Rousset that Archambaud was double-crossing the Germans in order to save the lives of all the agents under arrest.”

  Rousset told his interrogator that on October 27, 1943, he was taken back to Avenue Foch and then to the Gestapo prison in Place des Etats-Unis. “There were sixteen prisoners in this prison,” he told his interrogator. “Source was in solitary confinement in a cell which had a view on to the staircase, and through a hole in the wall he was able to see various prisoners coming and going.” Rousset also “spoke” to prisoners in adjoining cells, tapping Morse code. Vera now underlined more names, correcting occasional misspellings, as they were mentioned one by one. All were F Section agents, all were on her list of the missing, and all were glimpsed at the Gestapo prison by Rousset through the hole in the wall of his cell.