Sarah Helm

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

  The first of the sixteen to be mentioned was a man named Jacques Michel, an explosives expert whom Vera knew had been sent out to work with Pickersgill and Macalister's Archdeacon circuit in September 1943 and had vanished. Rousset saw Michel in the Gestapo prison the following month. “He told Rousset he had been tortured and that he had done everything possible to avoid giving information to the Germans and had finally tried to hang himself.”

  When Michel was taken away “to an unknown destination,” Vera read, he was replaced in the cell by Pickersgill himself. “Pickersgill told Rousset he had been dropped in France in June 1943, and both he and John Macalister were arrested three days after their arrival, in a village which was surrounded by SS troops. Pickersgill had tried to escape from a cell by jumping from a second-floor window but fell and broke his elbow and received two bullet wounds. He was recaptured and taken to hospital. Here he was operated on, and during his operation he was given an injection and has no recollection of what he may have said after that.” Vera's casualty reports for Pickersgill and Macalister simply said “believed arrested” but gave no date or place. Nobody had imagined the two Canadians had been arrested as early as June 1943. This meant Germans had been operating the Archdeacon circuit in the Ardennes for precisely one year.

  She read on: “Rousset was told by Pickersgill (who was in the cell next to him) that in the cell on his other side was an agent called Cinema.” Cinema was the first alias for Emile Garry before it was changed to Phono. He was Nora's organiser. Pickersgill described Cinema as “very dark; aged 30–35 and wore spectacles.”

  And then Rousset told his interrogator: “Cinema's Wireless Operator was called Madeleine, who, Pickersgill supposed, was at Avenue Foch. The Germans were using her wireless set.”

  Vera had read only halfway through the report, yet already it had produced the most devastating news. Now at the bottom of page six, just tucked away in the middle of another long list of missing agents seen or heard by Rousset, was the name Madeleine.

  Rousset clearly didn't know who Madeleine was, but he had been told by Pickersgill that she was Cinema's W/T op, which was enough to make Vera quite sure that this was Nora Inayat Khan. It was the first trace Vera had found of Nora. And yet it was hardly even a trace. It was really just a rumour, a tapping on stone from one agent to another through a cell wall. Pickersgill “supposed” Madeleine was at Avenue Foch.

  And here now was France Antelme, arrested on landing at Rambouil-let, coming into Avenue Foch. “Through a hole in the wall of his cell Rousset saw the arrival of Antelme, alias Antoine.” Rousset saw nothing more of Antelme, who was not mentioned again.

  But an agent named Guy Schellens, alias Goat, was reported on at length by Rousset. Schellens was with the Belgian Section, not the French Section, but Rousset had known him at an SOE training school. Around the end of November or beginning of December 1943 Schellens attempted to escape, by attacking a guard. The guard (an SS man) shouted, and three other SS guards arrived on the scene. Schellens received a bullet and died a minute later. Thereupon all the prisoners were driven out of their cells with blows and shown Schellens s body. They were told that this was the fate they could expect if they tried to escape. Afterward the treatment received by the prisoners was much more strict and severe.

  On the following pages Rousset s graphic reporting took Vera further and further inside the Gestapo's cells, revealing more and more traces of other F Section agents: each new sighting, each new confirmation of capture, produced another scribble on another card or a note on a casualty report.

  After the death of Schellens two new agents were put into Rousset s cell, and Vera was able to fill in more details on their cards.

  Then suddenly, as Vera reached the final pages, the agents Rousset had seen or spoken to started to leave for “unknown destinations.” Under “Transfer to Germany” she read: “Rousset remained at the prison in Place des Etats-Unis until 18 April 1944. On that day he and several other agents were summoned for transfer to Germany.” Among the agents listed in the group were Frank Pickersgill (Bertrand), John Macalister (Valentine), and Gilbert Norman (Archambaud).

  “Archambaud,” Rousset told his interrogator, “had arrived at Place des Etats-Unis the previous evening in a lamentable condition. He was limping terribly, and he later said that he had tried to escape and then had been wounded by three bullets from a ‘mitraillette' [submachine gun]. The agents were taken to a bus in which there were other agents which they recognised.” There were nineteen all together, reported Rousset. The group were driven to the outer suburbs of Paris. Here the bus stopped, and still more agents joined it. The bus started up again, and they arrived at the railway station at Vaire-sur-Marne “in company with a group of women from Fresnes.” Vera underlined this reference and read on. “They travelled for four days to Germany via Maastricht, Düsseldorf, Leipzig and Dresden to Breslau. Before arriving at Breslau the women left the train.”

  Vera knew something of Breslau, if only as the name of a station. It was somewhere on the River Oder in western Silesia. Suddenly the group Rousset had been imprisoned with had been taken many hundreds of miles across Europe. “From Breslau,” said Rousset, “the men travelled on to the penitentiary at Ravitsch.” Vera had never heard of Ravitsch. It made little sense that prisoners should have been transferred so far to the east. In the spring of 1944 the Red Army was already crossing the Carpathian Mountains, advancing westwards.

  And what had become of the women who “left the train at Breslau”?

  As the interrogation drew to a close, Rousset described his escape. He had been imprisoned at Ravitsch, in Silesia, with the others until May 19, 1944, and then, for reasons he was not told about, was awakened at one a.m. that day. “He immediately thought he was going to be shot.” Instead he was put in a car with four others, among them Pickersgill and Macalister, and driven to Berlin. From there they were all flown back to Paris for reinterrogation, though they did not know why. They were placed again in the prison at Place des Etats-Unis. “Pickersgill later informed Rousset that he and Macalister had been reinterrogated and during that interrogation had been rendered drunk.” Rousset was given a cell that looked out onto the garden at the back, facing a convent. “He had a job now sweeping the stairs and corridors. He befriended two of the guards who were Georgians. One day he noticed that there was a door leading out into the back garden, and on the morning of 8 June 1944 he perceived that this gate was not locked. He immediately knocked out the SS guard, escaped through the garden, jumped over the side wall (which was supposed to be electrified) and reached the street through the adjoining house.”

  Rousset went into hiding in Paris. He tried to arrange the escape of the others, still imprisoned in Place des Etats-Unis, and made contact again with the Georgian guards, but it was too late. “He was informed that all the agents had been removed from the prison.” Rousset remained in hiding until the arrival of the Allies in Paris, when he was able to give this report—the most dramatic evidence so far that prisoners had been systematically transferred to Germany.

  Vera now asked the Foreign Office and War Office for information on POW camps at Ravitsch and Breslau. She then sent out instructions for a series of new “good news” letters to be sent to families of the missing. Although in many cases the news was very bad, reports were still contradictory and, in Vera's view, too vague to be passed on to relatives. In any case the continuing need for secrecy about SOE operations meant that even the families of those known for sure to have been captured were not to be told the truth.

  “Dear Mrs Baker Inayat,” wrote a junior official to Nora's mother on September 29, 1944, “I am glad to be able to tell you that we have good news of your daughter.”

  Christian Rowden, the mother of Diana Rowden, received an identical letter. “Dear Mrs Rowden,” wrote the same official on the same day, “I am glad to be able to tell you that we have again had good news of your daughter Miss D. Rowden.” Diana's mother always replied straight away t
o letters about her daughter. Writing from her flat in Cornwall Mews West, Kensington, on October 3, she said: “Thank you for your letter of 29 September which I was so glad to receive yesterday. It always seems such a long time between letters and when they are a week or two late it seems like a lifetime. Actually it is 16 months only since I saw my daughter and it seems much longer owing to being unable to send letters to and from her.”

  A month later the news was even worse. No more agents had come forward in Paris. There had been several more disturbing confirmations that the agents were captured, including another report from the Gestapo headquarters at Avenue Foch.

  In October British officials were finally given access to Avenue Foch. Dated October 9, a report of what was found reached Vera's desk soon afterwards. “I visited the torture chamber at Avenue Foch where inter alia Kieffer had an office,” reported an intelligence officer, referring to Hans Josef Kieffer, the senior German counterintelligence officer in Paris. “I found a moving inscription from men and women who knew they had lost everything, except their honour. Names underneath are those present in the cells. Their ultimate fate is unknown to me, but I was informed during the last few days before the departure of the Germans that several people had been taken downstairs into the courtyard, placed against the wall, and shot.”

  The officer then gave a list of names he had found, which included “S/O D. H. Rowden. 4193 WAAF OFF. 22.11.43. 5.12.43” and “A/S/O Nora Baker.” He added: “The dates are, I understand, those of the arrival and departure of the various people at Avenue Foch.”

  Vera was quick to identify her two women agents. S/O D. H. Rowden was obviously Section Officer Diana Hope Rowden, and the dates given against her name were, as Vera could see, consistent with the date when she was believed arrested. Although there were no dates against her name, there was little doubt that A/S/O Nora Baker was Assistant Section Officer Nora Inayat Khan. Nora Baker was her main alias. While the report provided corroboration that Nora—and now Diana too—had been held at Avenue Foch, Vera did not accept the rumour that they may have been shot. These were not the first reports that agents had been shot before the German retreat, but Vera took the view that the shootings probably did not involve her people. From French sources she had now heard that all the captured British agents were taken to Germany, where they could be used as hostages or in prisoner exchanges.

  Nevertheless, it was now time to change the tone of the family letters from “good news” to bad. On October 15 a letter went to Nora's mother at the family's home in Taviton Street, Bloomsbury.

  Dear Mrs Baker Inayat,

  I am extremely sorry to have to inform you that we have recently been out of touch with your daughter. Due to the confused state of affairs in France we were not unduly worried, but I am afraid now your daughter must be considered as missing although there is every reason to believe that she will eventually be notified as a prisoner of war … I would impress upon you in the interests of your daughter's safety that you make no enquiries with regard to her except through me.

  On the same date a letter went to Mrs. Rowden, in almost exactly the same terms, stating similarly that there was “every reason to believe” that Diana would be notified as a prisoner of war. Mrs. Rowden was not so sure. “Thank you for your letter of 15 October with its very bad news. It certainly is, as Diana would have put it, a very bad show. I do hope she may have gone into hiding and will turn up again soon. In fact I have been expecting her home daily lately. However, you believe she is a prisoner of war and will eventually be all right. I hope this will prove so.”

  5.

  “Need to Know”

  In the early months of 1945 Vera was often to be found lunching at the Causerie in Claridge's, or maybe at Fortnum's. Her guests—perhaps a young airman, a personal assistant to an air vice marshal, or else an influential secretary with channels to the Air Ministry—were flattered to be invited out in such generous style. And by the time the meal was over, the guest would also have been impressed by Vera's argument that she must immediately have a commission, preferably as a squadron officer in the WAAF.

  As Allied forces closed in on Germany, Vera's mission to follow the trails of her agents was fixed so firmly in her mind that anyone who encountered her at this time saw she could not possibly be deterred. There was, as she pointed out, nobody else to do the job.

  Nevertheless, it was unclear exactly how, as a lone woman with no military status and as yet no passport, Vera was to proceed. By January 1945 her personal position had once again become precarious. Her naturalisation had come through a year before, but she still had no passport, owing to a regulation time delay. Within SOE her status was unquestioned, but F Section was now reduced to a rump, and there was already talk of closing SOE down at the end of the war, so she could soon be out of a job. Official indifference about SOE was such that nobody would be kept on to care for the affairs of the missing agents, whose files would simply be stamped “missing presumed dead” and closed.

  Vera was therefore pulling every string she could to secure a commission, in order to bolster her authority to continue her search. As she also pointed out to those she lobbied, her lack of status was already badly hampering her ability to operate. Early in January she had been on an abortive trip to France. On the invitation of the French Sécurité Mili-taire, which was investigating treachery against members of the resistance, she travelled with another SOE officer to discuss French investigations into penetration of SOE circuits. It was a gruelling trip that involved taking another gunboat—this time across a rough winter sea—followed by several hours in the back of an army lorry to reach Paris. Vera had hoped to hear what the French were finding out, particularly about the Prosper case and about Henri Déricourt. She was disappointed. No sooner had she and her colleague arrived than the French police made it clear that they had nothing to say to the British after all. General de Gaulle himself had apparently heard of their arrival and declared the SOE personnel “persona non grata in France.” Vera returned home angered by the snub but determined that next time she went to Paris she would go with more authority.

  Her main frustrations, though, were much closer to home. Even as the first POW and concentration camps were being liberated in the east by Russian forces, one of Vera's own SOE colleagues was trying to put a stop to her search. In a lengthy memorandum Vera had argued that, given the speed of the Allied advance, it was now essential that the names of missing agents be distributed widely. She suggested that the names be supplied to other branches of the military, to the International Committee of the Red Cross, to the Russians and other Allies, and to any forces or bodies likely to be crossing German frontiers or contacting prisoners held in camps. On sight of Vera's memo, John Senter, head of SOE's security directorate, commissioned as a commander in the Royal Navy Voluteer Reserve, immediately pulled rank, saying her search should, in effect, be stopped.

  “Top Secret and Confidential. Strictly Addressee only,” wrote Senter in a memorandum on Vera's proposals. “I think the set-up suggested in Vera Atkins's note, and the annotations, is frankly unworkable,” he stated, adding that she should confine herself to “welfare work.”

  A barrister, noted for his gleaming white hair, Senter had begun his working life as legal adviser to the Scottish Boot and Shoe Company and was a stickler for the rules. He had always disliked Vera—or “Rosenberg,” as he called her—precisely because she broke his rules.

  Senter wanted total control of investigations into missing SOE agents. As security director, his interest in their personal fate was slight: rather, he wanted to know who had survived in order to be first to interrogate them and to find out how the Germans had penetrated so many circuits. Given the sensitivity of the investigation, in which both MI6 and signals intelligence would take an interest, only personnel with the highest security clearance could be involved. Vera had no such special clearance and no need to know.

  Not only was Senter angered by Vera's attempt to take over his interroga
tions, he was also opposed on principle to her methods of tracing the missing. To circulate names of agents, he argued, broke all the rules of a secret service by alerting others—possibly the enemy—to the fact that secret missions had taken place. Vera, however, argued that rules had been broken to get agents out there, particularly in the case of the women. Now rules had to be broken to get them back.

  The anomalous status of the female secret agents was becoming Vera's prime concern. It was not clear, for example, which department of government would maintain contact with them or their dependents after the war, or who would “carry” them if disability benefits were ever necessary or in the case of future welfare payments. Now Vera was also having to grapple with how the women's limbo status could affect their very chances of survival.

  Male agents either carried commissions or honorary commissions in the regular services, so they could correctly tell their captors they were officers, albeit not in uniform. This gave them at least a slim chance of claiming prisoner-of-war status, which was automatically denied to civilians or irregular combatants.

  But even this feeble hope of decent treatment did not apply to the women who were commissioned in the voluntary FANY corps, a civilian organisation. Those women who had been in the WAAF before joining SOE, or who more recently had been accepted as honorary WAAFs, carried some possible claim to treatment as POWs, but those who were mere “cap badge” FANYs were the most vulnerable secret agents of all.

  Vera's anxiety, however, also had a more immediate cause. The reality was, whatever Mrs. Rowden and other next of kin had been told, that SOE agents were, by any legal definition, spies. Once identified as such, they were liable to be shot rather than treated as POWs.

  The only way agents were likely to survive German captivity would be by disguising their true role in some way, perhaps by claiming to be ordinary French resistance members, or by escaping, or by sheer luck. The question was: how could those agents who survived be identified in the chaotic aftermath? By early 1945 no name—neither male nor female—of any missing SOE agent had been passed to a single organisation outside Baker Street. No SOE name, real or alias, had been placed on any military casualty list or any missing lists designated “secret” or otherwise. The idea, in particular, that women's names should be circulated was anathema to the authorities, as this would be to admit that women had been deployed. SOE names had certainly not been passed to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the British Red Cross, or the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. No organisation that might be responsible for looking for the missing, whether it was liberating camps or repatriating prisoners, had a single SOE name on its lists.