Sarah Helm

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

  “One day I was in the officers' club in Berlin when I was told there was a call for me from a man called Peter Burchett,” said Smith. Burchett had worked in Berlin for the Daily Mail and been friendly with Smith, often covering war crimes cases, until he surprised everyone by defecting. He was calling his old friend from somewhere in the Russian zone.

  “I had to take the call from Burchett in a cupboard with no light bulb, so I couldn't see what I was writing and the line was bad, so I couldn't hear well,” Smith told me. “Even though he had chosen to go over to the other side, he was calling as a favour, because he knew I would want to know about the Sachsenhausen trial, and we wouldn't get to hear otherwise. I had to scratch down what I could in the dark. I just got that people were convicted but certainly no details and nothing about Suttill. But I was able to pass on what I had to Tony Somerhough, who I am sure told Vera.” Six months later, during the Berlin airlift, Smith became the last British officer to leave Berlin by road. The Cold War had now begun.

  Nevertheless, by the time she left Germany, Vera had achieved much of what she set out to do: the fate of all the women had been settled, as had the fate of the majority of the men imprisoned in camps liberated by Americans or British. Now she hoped she could put the tragedies behind her and devote her time to helping survivors, securing honours and awards, and promoting positive memories of SOE.

  And yet Vera's enquiries were not quite over. Although her investigation into the fate of the missing appeared to have run its course, her investigation into how agents were captured was certainly not complete. Vera was still hoping that certain senior German officers, particularly those responsible for rounding up her people, would be tracked down. On September 11, 1946, she had issued a note to the Haystack team passing on new intelligence as to where these men—Horst Kopkow, the Berlin coun-terintelligence chief, and Hans Kieffer, of the Paris Sicherheitsdienst— might be found. As she admitted in that note: “It seems impossible to stop this game of War Crimes once you have begun.”

  And even now Vera was making her way across Essex to another interrogation. Along with thousands of German internees and suspect war criminals, Dr. Josef Goetz, the radio mastermind at Avenue Foch, had been brought to England for investigation and was being held in a disused army barracks at Colchester now serving as a camp for prisoners of war.

  Vera was already seated at a table when Dr. Goetz was led in. She didn't offer him a seat but simply observed him. She already knew a fair amount about him. Dr. Goetz was a schoolteacher from Hamburg who had been selected for the Sicherheitsdienst because of his facility with languages. She saw now that he was a tall man with a high-domed cranium, brown eyes, and glasses. His hair was white, but he could not have been more than forty.

  Dr. Goetz also observed Vera, then pulled up a chair and sat down opposite her. She was annoyed at this impudence but said nothing and took out a cigarette, as did he. She lit her cigarette without offering him a light, so he asked her for one. He had a deep bass voice. She paused, looked at him again, and offered him the light. Then Vera laughed, and she signalled to the attending corporal that he could leave the room and wait outside the door.

  Vera's discussions with Dr. Goetz were to be conducted on quite different terms from her earlier interrogations of SS concentration camp staff in Germany. Those meetings had been held to establish how and where her agents were killed. Dr. Goetz had not been hired to kill. He had been hired to outwit the British by playing back the radios of captured agents. He then pretended to be those agents, talking by Morse signal directly to London. Vera had not only spent the last months piecing together how her people died, she had also been slowly piecing together how they were caught, and on that subject Dr. Goetz would be able to tell her more than any German officer she had seen so far.

  “How did it begin?” asked Vera.

  “It began with Bishop,” said Goetz, and Vera nodded. They were going to understand each other well. In a sense they had met before—or at least communicated—as Vera herself had sent messages to Dr. Goetz, believing him at different times to be Gilbert Norman, Marcel Rousset, Nora Inayat Khan, Lionel Lee, or one of the other dozen or so captured signallers whose radios he had operated. She had also received his messages back.

  And in a sense they also had a lot in common. Dr. Goetz was probably the only person in the world who knew the French Section agents— their aliases, their codes, their messages—as well as Vera. Vera had helped create their cover stories, but Dr. Goetz had had to learn every last detail about these people in order to imitate them when playing back their radios. So both Vera and Dr. Goetz knew that Bishop was the alias for the radio operator named Marcus Bloom, the gutsy and flamboyant north-London Jewish businessman, infiltrated into France by boat in November 1942 to work with the Pimento circuit, headed by Tony Brooks. On his return to England after the war, Brooks claimed to Vera and others that Bloom had arrived in Toulouse in a loud check coat, smoking a pipe, and looking as though he had stepped off a train from Victoria. Nearly blowing Brooks s cover, Bloom greeted him with the words “ 'Ow are ya, mate,” so Brooks decided to have nothing more to do with him. Vera had established that Marcus Bloom was shot at Mauthausen.

  When Bishop was arrested, said Dr. Goetz, his radio was found with all his codes. This gave Goetz's boss, Hans Kieffer, his first chance to play back a captured radio. He told Dr. Goetz to experiment, so he sent a few messages. But it didn't work well. He needed more practice.

  Vera remembered the worries in the late spring of 1943 when Bloom's strange messages came in, but the worries had not lasted. Though F Section had been duped before by enemy radio deception, staff officers in early 1943 were confident that they could prevent it happening again.

  And nothing was known in F Section at that time about the systematic way such deception had already been worked on other SOE sections. Only since the end of the war had Vera learned the full story of how, the year before Bloom was captured, the Germans had been playing the Funkspiel, or “radio game,” to devastating effect against SOE's Dutch and Belgian sections (N and T sections). As a result of that deception, almost every SOE agent parachuted into the Low Countries had been dropped into German hands.

  In 2003 a raft of secret wartime documents were finally made public in the British National Archives, showing that senior figures in MI5, MI6, and SOE knew a great deal about the disaster in the Low Countries as early as spring 1943, yet Maurice Buckmaster and his staff were never warned that they might face the same threat in France.

  The danger of the enemy “turning” SOE and SIS agents was “by no means hypothetical,” wrote Dick White, an assistant director of MI5 in March 1943, later head of MI5 and then MI6. “Perhaps the most important [example] of all is that of the SOE organisation in Belgium which ran for many months without SOE realising that it was almost completely under the control of the Germans. It is impossible even now to say how much damage was done by this,” wrote White, setting out plans for an “early warning system” to prevent a recurrence. Yet the same newly released files revealed that White's proposals for ensuring the deception did not recur were never acted on. There was no definitive explanation in the files as to why the warnings were ignored, but there was overwhelming evidence of self-serving, interagency wrangling involving SOE, MI5, MI6, and the Foreign Office, in the midst of which White's proposals were most probably buried.

  Why SOE's own senior staff—Colin Gubbins and his European directors—failed to alert Buckmaster to the dangers exposed by the Low Countries disaster remains a mystery. One retrospective report by security staff found a ready explanation for Buckmaster's own misjudgements, saying that country sections “were always full of understandable optimism and a natural unwillingness to regard an agent as lost, particularly if they liked or had befriended them.”

  As SOE's official historian, Michael Foot, pointed out, however, those above Buckmaster in the hierarchy had no such excuse as they hardly knew the agents at all. “Yet they [the senior staff] were
necessarily remote from the day to day business of running operations in progress and this hindered them from noticing anything was going astray in France,” wrote Foot.

  Although F Section was never officially informed, rumours of the Low Countries disaster did reach F Section's floor in Norgeby House. As I had heard from Vera's friend and former colleague, Nancy Roberts, gossip about N and T sections was exchanged in the ladies' on the half landing. Staff, however, carried on regardless because they knew they were “not supposed to know.”

  Although the Bishop playback in early 1943 had not worked, continued Dr. Goetz, Kieffer was determined to persist. Kieffer was a competitive man and wanted to pull off the same coup as his rival Hermann Giskes, the Abwehr officer who captured numerous British agents in the Low Countries by playing the Funkspiel. But to achieve anything like the success of Giskes, Kieffer needed to capture more radio operators. As Vera now knew, this was exactly what Kieffer then did. In June 1943 Frank Pickersgill and his wireless operator, John Macalister, were captured, and three days later Francis Suttill was caught, followed by his radio operator, Gilbert Norman.

  “I remember the arrest of Prosper [Suttill] very well as I was away on leave in Germany,” Dr. Goetz said. “My wife was having a baby. I was called back and ordered to return just after the baby was born, which was June 25. My wife wept, but I had to go back. I was loyal to Kieffer.” When Dr. Goetz reached Avenue Foch on June 26, he found the place in a state of excitement over the arrest of Prosper. But Kieffer was equally excited about the capture of Gilbert Norman (alias Archambaud), the radio operator, because he had his radio and crystals as well. The radio— with back messages—was seized when he was captured, and Gilbert Norman's crystals, with details of frequencies, had been found in a package brought to France by Pickersgill and Macalister, conveniently labelled by HQ in London. Using Norman's previous messages, therefore, Dr. Goetz's men set to work figuring out his codes, transmission times, and security check.

  Kieffer's men brought Gilbert Norman to Dr. Goetz's room to see if he would help with a transmission, but Dr. Goetz got nothing out of him at first. Dr. Goetz's first message to London as Gilbert Norman (call sign Butcher) announced Prospers arrest. Only when London replied, “You have forgotten your true security check. Take more care,” did Norman go into a fury. He soon began to behave differently.

  Among the secret files now placed in the National Archives were the SOE personal files, which I had first seen two years earlier on the SOE adviser's desk, awaiting declassification. The files were numerous, but it was pot luck if papers on a particular agent or a particular episode had survived.

  Vera herself had been responsible for “weeding” many F Section files before SOE closed down. A fire in Norman Mott's office was also said to have destroyed files, although a note written by Mott to Vera on March 8, 1946, mentioning the fire, said that “nothing much of historical importance was lost.”

  Even where files survived, crucial paragraphs or whole pages were often blanked out under secrecy legislation. Among the reasons for these omissions, I was told, were “unsubstantiated accusations of treachery” or “personal sensitivities.” Yet slurs abounded, like the comment made by Roger de Wesselow, head of an F Section training school, who, in an official training report, called Marcus Bloom “this pink yid.” And “unsubstantiated allegations of treachery” were printed here with gay abandon—as in the case of Gilbert Norman, who was hanged at Mauthausen. A note appeared on Norman's casualty report, signed by Buckmaster in 1945, saying: “Probably fell for a Gestapo trap. Nothing ever proven against him.”

  After a while I became familiar with certain voices in these files— like the voice of a distraught father battling tirelessly to clear his dead son's name. Mr. Maurice Norman, a prominent chartered accountant working in Paris, had been at first angered by the failure of SOE to tell him, until nine months after Gilbert's capture, that his son was missing. His wife fell critically ill from grief and never recovered.

  When, in the months after the end of the war, Gilbert Norman, along with Francis Suttill, was accused in France of making a “pact” with the Germans and selling out the Prosper network, Maurice Norman refused to allow his son to become a scapegoat and called on the British government to stand up for him. It was Vera who advised on how to handle Mr. Norman, and her responses were often chilling. She had evidence by now that Norman had given away information to the Gestapo. But she also knew better than anyone what exactly had led him to break down: Buckmaster had blown the agent's cover by revealing the existence of a second security check.

  But when asked for her views on the Norman case, Vera simply stated that he “probably fell for the German trick of you play fair by us and we'll play fair by you.” Of Norman's father, she said: “He is an awkward customer who for some reason has a grudge against SOE.”

  Once Dr. Goetz had trapped London into revealing the existence of Gilbert Norman's second security check, his task of playing back Norman's radio became much easier, he told Vera. And Norman began to talk. Norman gave Dr. Goetz his first insight into the French Section and “had been quite helpful especially as regards the moral effect his appearance on apparently good terms with his captors had on agents later.”

  Dr. Goetz paused again and observed Vera. He found her “haughty” but also beautiful.

  “Go on,” said Vera.

  “And once they [the agents] could see how much we already knew about their organisation they saw the sense in talking. They realised there was a traitor. You see,” said Dr. Goetz, “it was mostly down to the mail.”

  Vera asked him to explain.

  “Kieffer had copies of all the agents' mail, which was sent back to London,” said Dr. Goetz. He had their letters home, their reports to headquarters—everything. When captured agents were shown their mail, the effect on them was quite dramatic.

  Vera had heard this story about the captured mail many times before, and always it was Henri Déricourt (Gilbert) who was accused of passing the mail to the Germans, but no SOE or MI5 investigation to date had found evidence strong enough to charge him. One theory, put about by Déricourt s defenders, including Buckmaster, was that the Gestapo had deliberately blackened his name to unsettle fellow agents or to divert attention from a genuine German double agent.

  “Where had Kieffer got the mail?” Vera then asked Dr. Goetz.

  Goetz said it came from an agent called Gilbert who worked for Karl Boemelburg, Kieffer's commanding officer. Boemelburg handed the mail to Kieffer, but Kieffer himself had never encountered Gilbert. He didn't wish to meet him, said Dr. Goetz. Kieffer didn't trust Gilbert. “He thought he was a double. But he found him useful.”

  But on occasion Dr. Goetz himself had encountered Gilbert. Kieffer wanted Dr. Goetz to be present at meetings between Boemelburg and Gilbert in case any information emerged that would help him with his radio deception. Gilbert had “dark blond wavy hair and a sportive figure,” he said. Vera then showed Dr. Goetz a photograph of Déricourt, and Dr. Goetz recognised him as Gilbert. He also said that all the photostats—prints derived from photographs of the agents' mail—carried the marking “BOE 48,” which he understood to refer to the fact that Gilbert was Boemelburg s forty-eighth agent.

  Vera asked Dr. Goetz when exactly the mail was first used in interrogations. Dr. Goetz had heard that the mail had been used in the Prosper interrogation, carried out by another German officer who was now dead. Dr. Goetz himself first used the mail in the case of Gilbert Norman. “He could see we knew everything already,” said Dr. Goetz. “It was not then hard to convince him that the best course for him was to save as many lives as possible by helping us.”

  At first the Norman transmissions had been of only limited use, said Dr. Goetz. Mostly London just sent questions back asking about Prosper: “Where is Prosper? Where has he been taken? What news of Prosper?” and so on. And then, he said, a request came through for a rendezvous address in Paris. London said that two officers were coming over from London
and wanted a safe house for a meeting with Gilbert Norman. “I sent a message back with a rendezvous address at rue de Rome,” said Dr. Goetz. “We set up surveillance at the place for days, waiting for these officers to turn up. Eventually one did.”

  It was obvious to Vera that Dr. Goetz was now referring to the decision to send out Nicholas Bodington to Paris to investigate the extent of the Prosper disaster. Bodington had insisted on going and took with him the radio operator Jack Agazarian. Dr. Goetz was now confirming what Vera had known since the end of the war: that the rendezvous was made directly with the enemy. On arriving, Bodington suddenly decided not to go himself to the meeting, sending Agazarian along instead. Bodington said on his return to England that he and Agazarian had tossed a coin over who was to go, and Agazarian lost. Vera had traced Agazarian to Flossenbürg, where he was hanged.

  “But even that explanation never made any sense, however you look at it,” the SOE agent Tony Brooks told me. “Even if they did toss a coin, everyone knows in those circumstances what you do: you arrange for a signal at the window, like placing a pot of flowers in a certain position to show the rendezvous is safe, and if the signal isn't there, don't go. Or else before you go up there, you give a small boy a coin and say: run and give a message to my girlfriend on the third floor. If he comes back and says, ‘There is no girl but a couple of men,' you scarper.”

  What was Bodington like? I asked.

  “A crook,” said Brooks, but neither he nor anyone else knew what sort of crook. SOE colleagues all said he was profoundly dislikeable—“a shifty little cove”—and never had any money on him. His former Reuters colleagues called him something of a “romancer,” or fantasist, who was always asking for pay rises.