Sarah Helm

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

  Searching for more of Vera in Coulson's letters, I noticed that her name suddenly vanished. But flicking through Hilda's pocket diaries, I saw that the moment Vera disappeared from his world, he started appearing in hers. In his letters home Coulson was now disguising Vera's presence in his life, but the initials J.C. appeared frequently in Hilda's diaries: “Vera to dinner J.C.;” “Vera to club with J.C.” Hilda noted down her own appointments with sad monotony: “Morning massage; tea Gladys; evening film.” If she did anything of interest, it was with Vera: “Vera to supper. Very nice.” Occasionally others, including Siegfried and Arthur, popped into Hilda's life, and Hilda reported: “Wilfred [Guy] leaves Oxford” and “Ralph leaves for Istanbul via Sophia.” But more regularly came entries such as: “Vera for drive with J.C.” and “Vera to concert with J.C.”

  If I wanted more detail of Vera's outings, I could check by referring to Coulson's letters to his parents. For example, after the concert he had written to them to say that he had enjoyed a performance by the director of the Berlin Opera. Hilda wrote on another day, “Vera to ball at Athenée Palace,” and Coulson told his parents, without mentioning Vera's name, that “there were five hundred for dinner and we danced till four in the morning.” He added that there had been 15 to 20 degrees of frost as the Crivat wind was blowing down from the Russian steppes.

  When Vera went away, Hilda's life was empty. “Supper alone,” “film alone,” she wrote. Then for days on end it could be: “Vera away.” Where was she? For Hilda it was “Morning massage. Afternoon film alone, Scarlet Pimpernel. Tea at Samuellis.” Then “V returned with J.C.”

  In counterpoint, Coulson's letters and Hilda's diaries provided some of the texture of Vera's life. They also contained names of all the many friends and contacts who now peopled Vera's busy world. Reading on, I became familiar with those names—Kendrick, Boxshall, Gibson, Humphreys, Chidson—and began to recognise individuals from Vera's later papers and even from official files. They were businessmen, diplomats, or journalists, and many of them were also spies. My material showed that Vera met them all at dinners, at dances, or on skiing trips. A regular contact was the commercial attaché in Bucharest and also an MI6 man, Leslie Humphreys. Humphreys was referred to by Coulson as “the Hump” and “a bit grim.” One of his colleagues described him as “A funny chap. A homosexual. You wouldn't recognise him from one day to another. No extrovert character at all.”

  “The Hump” seemed an unlikely companion for Vera, but she was evidently at ease with such shadowy figures, and they enjoyed her charms. Montague “Monty” Chidson, another MI6 man in Bucharest, was another fervent admirer of Vera's, and in later years he related how he had once proposed to her in a Bucharest bar in the small hours.

  The “spy gents,” as they were known, certainly enjoyed the revelry of Bucharest as much as anyone, as was evident from several photographs, including one that showed Leslie Humphreys, his sister Dot, Montague Chidson, John Coulson, Vera, and other revellers on a stage at the Targul Mosilor, a market in Bucharest, with a famous puppet theatre.

  But there was good reason to suppose that Vera's contacts with the intelligence world were already more than social, and they may even have been the most important reason she chose to stay on in Romania in the 1930s. In 1934, now aged twenty-six, she acquired a more responsible job, as a “foreign correspondent” with the Pallas Oil Company, which involved working as an interpreter and intermediary dealing with foreign clients. The job gave Vera access to useful information about the oil industry and required her to travel widely, so that she was now in a good position to pass on titbits to a man like Humphreys. At the time Humphreys s task was to provide the Department of Trade in London with intelligence reports on German economic policy throughout the region, and of paramount interest was Germany's policy towards Romania's large oil reserves. Vera's access to the German embassy of Count Schulen-burg certainly would not have gone unnoticed by the British intelligence community in Bucharest or anyone else who had interests in the region.

  And providing intelligence to the British was already a Rosenberg and Atkins family tradition: names listed among Vera's referees on her Home Office naturalisation papers revealed as much. She had four referees, all contacts she had made in Romania. The first two names were familiar: Arthur Coverley-Price had been a diplomat in the legation in Bucharest in the early 1930s, and George Swire de Moleyns Rogers was Bill Rogers. The third and fourth referees were at first more difficult to place. There was a Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Joseph Kendrick, who said on his testimonial that he had known Vera and both her parents (until her father's death) for fifteen years, but he gave no indication of how or where.

  The fourth was a Major Reginald George Pearson, who stated he had known Vera for twenty-two years. “I have known Miss Vera Atkins since she was a little girl and have no hesitation in stating that she is in every way suitable for naturalisation. She is British to the core as are and were also her parents and grandparents—all of whom I knew well for many years in South Africa and here.”

  Both Kendrick and Pearson turned out to have been spies. Reginald Pearson had indeed known Vera's grandparents in South Africa in the early years of the century, and it seemed highly likely that this contact came about through intelligence circles. From the earliest days of the Boer War, British intelligence officers were building up wide networks of informers in South Africa, and even the famous Claude Dansey, later deputy head of MI6, cut his teeth as a spy in Africa in the early part of the century. Henry Atkins, a staunch British patriot, onetime owner of the Lace Diamond Mine and a powerful figure in the Cape, would have been a useful person for any British intelligence officer to know.

  Perhaps Vera's father also made himself useful to British intelligence during his period in South Africa. Max Rosenberg was certainly a source for British spies once he established himself in Romania in the 1920s, where, coincidentally, Claude Dansey was operating, particularly in the Danube ports. Max was by then a German businessman of international standing and came to the attention of Thomas Kendrick, the second spy on Vera's list of referees. It was Kendrick who forged the strongest links with Max and his family.

  Kendrick was MI6 station chief in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. Vera kept several cuttings about him in her papers, as well as photographs of him as a youngish man. In Vienna, Kendrick was in a pivotal position for gathering intelligence on the Nazis, who, during the time he was there, were developing the defunct Austrian secret service into a major branch of the Abwehr. Max Rosenberg had highly placed Austrian and German contacts, travelled widely, often taking Vera with him as interpreter, and so was exactly the kind of contact Kendrick needed. Furthermore Vera's elder brother, Ralph, was, by the late 1920s, based in Smyrna and then in Istanbul, where he was a manager for Steaua Ro-mana. Ralph was also “loosely connected”—code for an intelligence source—to the consulates in these two cities.

  In her later years, if ever pressed about her father's occupation in Romania, Vera liked to give the impression that he was involved in some sort of diplomatic work, and she sometimes said he was a member of the International Commission of the Danube, a powerful body that regulated shipping on the river. I could find no trace of Max Rosenberg's name on any Danube Commission lists, but any association he had with this body would have brought him to the attention of the spies. German policy towards the waterway was always carefully monitored, and such was the Danube's strategic value that in 1940 the British sent saboteurs on an abortive mission to blow up the Iron Gates, a narrow channel through which all river traffic passed.

  In fact the Rosenbergs and their wide European networks offered British intelligence a fund of information between the wars. Vera's relatives the Mendls effectively ran the shipping on the Danube and themselves had long-standing intelligence ties. Sir Charles Mendl was knighted in the First World War for services to British intelligence and throughout the 1920s and 1930s was press attaché at the British embassy in Paris, another MI6 cover. Sir Charles had
links to many other networks. He and his wife, the American decorator Elsie de Wolfe, were famous for throwing lavish parties at their villa near Versailles, where Vera often dined when in Paris. Here Sir Charles gathered many a famous British spy around him—and quite a few infamous ones too. He briefed all young war correspondents who came to Paris and certainly knew Kim Philby. Vera's uncle also knew a young Reuters correspondent named Nicholas Bodington, who would later join SOE and work closely with Vera in F Section. Curiously, it was Sir Charles Mendl, in his role as press attaché, who in April 1940 had to negotiate the withdrawal of Boding-ton's accreditation as a war correspondent in France. The French considered the Reuters man to have “un mauvais esprit” and refused to work with him.

  Whatever Vera's connections to these broader intelligence networks before the war, she was probably on MI6's books only as a “local recruit” or “stringer,” and London may never have known her name. Nevertheless, providing freelance intelligence would have given Vera a useful extra income. “Vera was the kind of person who knew about money, and she liked money and would not have passed up the chance of getting some more,” said Annie Samuelli, who also considered Vera ideally suited to a clandestine life. “You knew if you told Vera something and said it was a secret, it would be secret. It was always like that with Vera. And she was extremely resourceful—always. She knew how to fix things. I don't know how she knew, but she did. She knew the right people. I think you are just born that way—you have a knowledge that you are right and what you are going to do is right. You know things before other people do.”

  Sometime in 1937 Vera knew—probably before he did—that John Coulson was not going to marry her. That summer he wrote to his parents: “It has been the most heavenly week you can possibly imagine. The temperature has been 70 almost every day, and hearts are fairly sizzling with joy.” According to Ann Eagle, it was about this time that Coulson asked her father, Bill Rogers, whether he should marry Vera. “Daddy thought that if Coulson was asking him the question he was obviously in two minds. Anyway it would have been quite impossible for a diplomat like Coulson at that time to have married a local Jew. I think there were rules about it.”

  Annie Samuelli said: “It may not have been like that. She may have rejected him—pre-empted him in a way. She may have feared that if she got too close, she would have to admit to being a Jew. And then he would recoil. This might have been her greatest fear: that she would repel the person and that would spoil everything.”

  It may not have been like that either. Mavis Coulson, John Coulson's widow, recalled her husband talking of Romania but understood that he and Vera were simply good friends. “He certainly had a marvellous time there. It was his private world, and I was not allowed into it, but I don't believe there was a romantic attachment—I don't think there was. But I must admit that when I met Vera after the war, she always made me feel uneasy. I felt she wanted to be invited to our house as a special friend, and I feel guilty that we never did.”

  What Vera knew for sure in early 1937 was that it was time to leave for London. Even the most privileged Romanian Jews were now being ostracised. “It came very suddenly,” said Annie Samuelli. “Many of the young in our social circle suddenly joined up with the Iron Guard. Close friends of mine told me quite frankly they could not go on seeing me because I was a Jew. It was a horrible time. But I think it was even worse for Vera in some ways. Her family were cultured and wealthy German Jews who had been immune from anti-Semitism for so long. The ghettos were in Poland, not in Germany. So when the tables turned, it was worse for them than for anyone else. They had not expected it.”

  Mass demonstrations at the funerals of two members of the Iron Guard, killed fighting for Franco, had won new sympathisers for the movement throughout Romania, and regulations against “non pureblooded Romanians” were being tightened. The left in Vienna was crushed, and few now doubted that Hitler would march on Austria at any time. Fresh from completing his Ph.D. in Prague, Guy had seen at the closest quarters Hitler's aggressive manoeuvring and was pleading with his sister and mother to leave for England.

  Even Coulson now seemed to be reporting some “alarms and excursions,” referring to the “monster funerals” of the two Iron Guard members.

  The first hint of a decision to leave Romania was barely noticeable from Hilda's diaries. On Friday March 12, 1937, she wrote: “Spent morning sorting things. Afternoon people came to look over our furniture. Dinner with Rogers.” Life then continued: “Vera dinner at John C” and “Vera at country club.” And on May 12 Hilda notes: “Coronation.”

  Then on September 9 “furniture man came with estimates” before, on Saturday, September 25, “our furniture was taken away to be packed. We sorted some things and dined with Mrs. Rogers.” Sunday, noted Hilda, was a “dreadful day sorting things.” So was Monday: “Awful day packing. Vera went to look at packed furniture.”

  On Friday, October 1: “Our things left for Constanza docks.” Then, on Wednesday, October 20, Hilda and Vera left Bucharest for the last time. Hilda's words were: “Vera hair washed. Mrs. Rogers 7.30 at Station. Siegfried.”

  The following day Hilda noted, “Arrived in Vienna,” where they were met by Rosenberg relatives, with whom they stayed. On Friday, October 22: “We unpacked, Norah drove us to crematorium,” Hilda wrote of a visit to her husband's grave, and in the evening “dined at Kendricks,” a reference to the MI6 man. Vera and her mother stayed a week in Vienna, and then, on Thursday, October 28, “We packed and left Vienna at 3.15 for England.”

  The following day they had, Hilda noted, a “wonderful crossing.” Then: “Wilfred came to see us here.” She didn't say where “here” was, but her diary notes for the following days suggest clearly that it was somewhere in London.

  By Saturday morning Hilda's life appeared miraculously to be resuming a familiar pattern. There were even old friends from Bucharest to greet them. “Morning went out, evening went for drinks with Humphreys,” she wrote. Then it was Guy's birthday, and they “went to show at Palladium then drink at Café Royal.” Within a week or so Hilda was writing once again. “Massage morning, hair washed. Film. Alone.” Vera continued to come and go. It was as if they had transplanted their lives but nothing had really changed.

  A young woman named Mary Williams, Guy's girlfriend at the time, recalled their arrival in England differently. “It was as if they had just escaped from some very great danger,” said Mary, who had been taken by Guy to meet his mother and sister just after they disembarked. “I remember it very well. They were in a single room in an apartment. It was dark, and they were dressed in black. It was like a bedsitting room. The furniture was old and not theirs. And I think they had arrived with just their hand luggage.

  “They talked about some terrible trouble they had had getting away. They had packed everything they could possibly carry into suitcases. Then they had been stopped on the platform by the police or some kind of patrol, and people on the platform were being questioned. It was an awful moment when they thought they might not get away. They had been afraid of something, I sensed that. And they were terribly pleased to be here. I remember that Vera went out almost straight away and came back with a hat. It was a sort of pillbox hat with a veil, and she put it on and said to us: ‘Very Mayfair, don't you think?' I didn't really know what ‘very Mayfair' was.”

  At first it was hard to fill in the story of Vera's first three years of life in England. She had been obliged to give certain details herself for her Home Office naturalisation applications, but without the help I received from Mary Williams this period of Vera's life would have remained largely blank. The well-educated daughter of a northern mill owner, Mary had met Guy when she answered his advertisement for German lessons before the war. They became engaged, and when Hilda arrived in England, she viewed Mary as the perfect English daughter-in-law. But Mary later called off the engagement.

  “Mrs. Atkins was so anxious I should accept them, and I could not understand why she was so anxious as the
y seemed perfectly acceptable,” she told me. “She seemed to know everything about England and gave the impression that she had always lived here and that Romania had just been a temporary thing.”

  “How did she give that impression?”

  “Oh, by saying if I talked of places ‘Oh, yes, we've been there' or ‘We know that.' She was very patriotic, and I remember she said with great feeling when war broke out: ‘We must all do our little bit.' They were all very Empire- and Commonwealth-minded, I thought. And Mrs. Atkins was also very anxious that Vera should be accepted too.”

  For Vera these were difficult times. Unlike her mother and her brothers, she had no claim to British citizenship. Guy had secured his British naturalisation in 1933, when times were easier, and Hilda, being British-born, regained British naturalisation automatically. Ralph had been born in colonial South Africa and so also had a right to naturalisation. But Vera, born in Romania, had only Romanian citizenship, and one of her first acts on arriving in London was to go to Bow Street police station, where she was obliged to line up with scores of other refugees, to secure an Aliens Registration Certificate.

  As war approached, her sense of insecurity intensified. In September 1939 several of the family's German friends who had come to England as refugees were interned, including a woman friend of Guy's who was locked up in Holloway Prison. Britain did not declare war on Romania until December 7, 1941, and so Romanian refugees were not strictly classed as enemy aliens until that time. But Vera knew her German roots could have brought her under suspicion.