Sarah Helm

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

  “And there she was after a terrible night and there was the waiting, and she knew she would be killed, and then the Gauleiter kept kicking and beating her until she was—what did he say?—a ‘bloody mess.' And again I have been trying to represent to myself—here Vilayat coughed—“what it would have been like with her nose bleeding and her eyes bleeding—I don't know.”

  I didn't recognise the phrase “bloody mess” from Wickey's report. I asked Vilayat if he had ever received a letter from somebody in Gibraltar.

  Again he reached for his pink folder, and he handed me another piece of paper. It was a copy of a handwritten extract, obviously from a different letter. The light was fading outside, and we had only an oil lamp in the room, but I managed to make out the words: “Afterwards I spoke to Yoop, who told me that it was terrible what had happened. When Rup-pert got tired and the girl was a bloody mess, he told her that he would shoot her. First she had to kneel, and the only word she said before Rup-pert shot her from behind the head was ‘liberté.'

  Vilayat coughed again and shifted a little in his chair. “And then you see, for my eightieth birthday I conducted the B Minor Mass in Dachau.” Vilayat Inayat Khan, like all his family, was a talented musician and studied as a boy under Stravinsky. He shifted again and smiled.

  “I don't know how to say this. Let's see. Well, there is a picture of Noor there at the museum. It was a grey day, like today. And I am conducting and thinking, How can I communicate with Noor about what is happening?

  “Maybe she is alive, I thought. And I thought maybe I saw a smile on that picture. No. Then I thought, I need evidence that she is here.” He paused and sniffed. “I said: ‘No, I want you to give me a more tangible sign.' So then, all of a sudden, the sun came out from behind the clouds, and then went in again, just at that moment. How meaningful it is, I don't know.”

  I asked Vilayat how he received the Wickey papers. He could not remember exactly. They had come to him with the extract from the other letter. He thought the papers had all been sent on to him from his younger brother, Hidayat, who lived near The Hague. This fitted with the story of the provenance of these papers, which all went back to Jean Overton Fuller, Nora's biographer. After publication of the first edition of her book on Nora, Madeleine, Jean received, via her publisher, the so-called “Gibraltar letter,” which referred to a “Yoop” and a “Ruppert.” All Jean could recall today of the provenance of the letter was that it had been posted in Gibraltar and the writer signed himself “Peters.”

  “It was so sadistic that I thought it must have been written by somebody who was actually there. All that remains in my memory are the words ‘the girl was a bloody mess.' The writer was revelling in it, and it was disgusting.” Jean's instinct was to destroy the letter, but she was loath to incur the responsibility of destroying a historical document, so she kept a brief note of the contents and sent the original to “Miss Atkins.” This must have been in the mid-1950s. The fact that I had not found the Gibraltar letter in Vera's papers suggested almost certainly that she had destroyed it.

  In 1958, after publication of a second edition of Madeleine, retitled Born for Sacrifice, the Wickey letter also reached Jean, via her publisher, and it resembled the Gibraltar letter but was less detailed and less “sadistic.” Jean told me she kept the original of the Wickey letter herself for her records. Wickey stated that he had sent a copy of his letter to the War Office, so Jean saw no reason on this occasion to send the letter on to Vera.

  Years later, in the 1970s, when Jean was revising her biography of Nora again, she had a new publisher in Holland who wanted her to include the sanitised “official” story of Nora's death at Dachau. Jean had never believed that version of events, and having read Wickey and “Gibraltar,” she refused to repeat it. To show her publisher why she felt so strongly, she sent a copy of the Wickey letter and a description of the contents of the Gibraltar letter. She also scrawled a note on the side of Wickey s report, pointing out that it bore more resemblance to the Gibraltar letter than to the evidence Wassmer gave to Miss Atkins. Jean also requested that her publisher keep the material strictly to himself, but he passed the material on to Hidayat Inayat Khan, Vilayat's brother, whom he knew. Obviously Hidayat then passed the papers to Vilayat.

  In the light of this complicated sequence of events, the question that puzzled me was: how and when did Vera receive the Wickey papers? Given that she wrote to the Canadian Defence Department in 1975 to enquire about Wickey, it would appear that she had just received the papers at about that time. Presumably, therefore, the copy Wickey sent to the War Office in 1958 never reached Vera. In any event, as I now realised, Vera's copy was obviously not from the War Office, as it had Jean Overton Fuller's scrawled note to her publisher on the side.

  The only explanation for this was that Vilayat, having received the papers from his brother, then passed them to Vera. Not for the first time, it appeared, new and ever more shocking details about Nora's death had inexorably found their way out. And not for the first time, it may well have been Nora's brother Vilayat who passed on the new information to Vera about his sister's fate, and not the other way round.

  The Gibraltar letter, which had arrived in the mid-1950s, had been impossible for Vera to pursue. But such was the detail in the Wickey evidence that Vera felt obliged to follow it up, writing to Canada's Defence Department.

  So had Vilayat passed the papers to Vera?

  He might have done, he said, although he had not seen Vera for many years after the war. “It is the sort of thing I might have done, though. I would have thought, Well, she should know everything about what happened to my sister because only by knowing all the whole truth can anyone understand her real spirit, her real strength.”

  Then he recalled that Vera had come to a ceremony the family held in Suresnes many years after the war to erect a plaque on the wall of the house in Nora's memory. “Perhaps I gave her the papers then—I don't know. Both Vera Atkins and Buckmaster came on that occasion.”

  What Vilayat remembered very clearly was how Buckmaster had broken down in tears at the ceremony. “I think Buckmaster had fought with his conscience all that long time, and maybe he managed to forget about it all for many years. But finally he was devastated by his conscience, and when he came here, he could fight with it no more. He told my sister Claire that he bitterly regretted sending Nora. You know, seeing Claire might have reminded him of Nora. He told her he was overcome with remorse and said he could never forgive himself.”

  “Did Vera say anything of that sort?”

  “I did not talk to her so much. I think she was disappointed in me by then.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I think she looked at me and saw the long beard and the clothes. I think she thought, He used to be such a dashing naval officer, and now look at him—a phoney guru.”

  “Did she show any emotion?”

  “No. I think in her case she was able to bypass her conscience more easily. She was much more cold-blooded than Buckmaster.”

  “What makes you say she was cold-blooded?”

  “With Buckmaster, I think that when he sent these people out to their deaths, he was acting in defiance of his conscience because he knew that it was what he had to do for the war. But deep down he was emotionally devastated. As far as Vera Atkins was concerned, I don't think she was emotionally devastated, which is what makes me say she was cold-blooded. Or possibly she hid it—in which case she hid it even from herself because it was all justified in a good cause.”

  “But Vera did go and look for them all. Buckmaster did not. What was her motive then?”

  “I think Buckmaster was so… devastated he knew there was nothing now he could do about it. Of course, it was of interest to find out what happened to people, but it would not bring them back. So he was more readable. More visible—readable. ‘Readable'—is that the word? Yes, and Vera Atkins was harder to read.”

  “Why did she do it? Why did she go to look for them then?
”

  “My impression was that Vera Atkins was the intelligence officer who really wanted to find out what happened. She wanted to sort things out—to be clear about things. She didn't want to allow any details to escape her.”

  “You mean she just wanted to find out and that was it?”

  “Yes, she wanted to know. That was it.”

  “And perhaps she was hiding the emotion—even from her own self.”

  “And when she was sending these people out, she was simply following a course. She would be quite capable of following a course—even if it meant lying. And of course, she was good at lying and, what is more important, of remembering her lying—because a lot of people get caught when they forget their lies.”

  “Do you think she lied to you?”

  “Well, that was the thing, of course—they sent a girl who could not lie to be used in the big lie.”

  What did he mean? I asked.

  “Well, you see, we know now that all that time they were holding out hope that Nora was free, it was just because they didn't want the Nazis to know that they knew that she was captured. They just wanted to make the Nazis believe that they believed she was free, so that the Nazis could receive agents over her radio who would give them information that was wrong. And so that the Nazis could receive messages over her radio saying where the British were going to land, which was wrong. This is the irony. Nora could never lie but she was used for the big lie.”

  So Vilayat too believed the conspiracy theories.

  I asked how he had come to believe all this. Where was his information from? He suggested some books for me to read, all of which I had read and all of which expounded different versions of this conspiracy theory. I said I was surprised that he had accepted at face value what was in these books. There was a large amount of evidence that the capture of the agents was due simply to terrible incompetence and tragic mistakes. But Vilayat seemed not to hear.

  He told me he didn't mind if books written about Nora were fact or fiction as long as they honestly preserved her memory. As he talked some more, he seemed not to distinguish between information he had received that was supposed to be true and that which was not. The truth of how she died and the conspiracy about why she died were now all tangled up in his mind.

  Vilayat's wife, Mary, came in to give us some more light. Had she met Vera Atkins?

  “Once,” she said, when she came for the ceremony. “She did not strike me as interesting at all. She was somebody who made no impression—a kind of nonperson almost. She seemed to have no personality. A quiet figure—mouselike.”

  “She was a little bit aloof,” continued Vilayat. “It might just have been her English character.”

  “You know she wasn't English?” I said.

  Vilayat paused. Then he laughed. “Well, that is really surprising because her accent was very English. Like Leslie Howard—I would never have thought he was Hungarian.” And he laughed again.

  Then I asked Vilayat: “Can people really hide these things from themselves—these emotions that Vera must have felt?”

  “Yes, of course. People are continually hiding their guilt from themselves because their self-validation is so precious that if one admits one's guilt it gets worse, and so one finds it very difficult to admit that one hates oneself, so one is lying not really to other people but to oneself. So it has to be hidden, or bypassed. I think in Vera Atkins's case she bypassed the responsibility.”

  “How could she bypass such great responsibility?”

  “There is only one way to bypass it. Like a doctor or a surgeon, you have to be cold-blooded. You have to have strong self-control. That is what she had. That is what I sensed that she had.”

  I said I thought that Vera had been very fond of Nora, and I quoted something she once said to Jean Overton Fuller about her. “Her motives were so pure—of such a high spiritual order—it was as if she was from another world.”

  I asked if Vilayat thought that Vera, like so many others, was in love with Nora. “I think Nora was somebody who Vera Atkins respected,” he said. “But she was still able to use her to tell the lie.”

  “But you were grateful to Vera Atkins at the time that she returned from her search in Germany,” I said, and I showed him the card he had written to Vera that had tumbled from an envelope in the shed in Zen-nor. “ ‘To Vera Atkins. With gratitude—a feeling I know Nora would have shared for your enterprise in following in her tracks in the German wilderness of the aftermath.'

  He looked at his words, facing a photograph of Nora, and said: “Ah, yes. I was always grateful to everyone. I would not write that now.”

  When I returned to London, I looked once more for any sign of the Gibraltar letter in Vera's files, but there was none. That piece of evidence—the cruellest of all—had, it seemed, been well and truly destroyed. But with her new knowledge of Nora's suffering and of her bravery, what more could Vera realistically have done? Thirty years after the crime was committed, the criminals had long since died or disappeared, and it was inconceivable that the case could be reopened. Nora's citation for gallantry had already been rewritten four times between 1944 and 1948. Her published story could not now be changed yet again.

  Nora—and all the other dead agents—could, however, now be properly remembered. It was not until the early 1970s—about the time that this last information appeared about Nora's death—that the first F Section memorials started to go up at concentration camps, more than twenty-five years after the victims died. In the end it was only because Vera and others campaigned for memorials that they were ever erected. Britain offered an insulting £200 as a contribution towards the memorial stone for the four women agents who died at Natzweiler, a sum that hardly paid the airfare of a single WAAF or FANY delegate, so the French ended up paying for Britain's stone. Prime Minister Jacques Chirac attended the unveiling. The British just sent a defence attaché from the embassy in Paris.

  Vera devoted time not only to raising money but also to finalising the tiniest details for the memorials, including composing the inscriptions. One of her greatest supporters was Airey Neave, who became a friend of Vera's and had himself escaped from Colditz.

  Her correspondence showed that Vera took enormous care about the design of the memorials, sketching her own ideas and frequently admonishing others who made errors with the spelling of a name or wrongly remembered an award or date. In a note to Neave in 1974 about the choice of stone for the Natzweiler memorial, which was to go up in the crematorium where Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, Sonia Olschanesky, and Diana Rowden died, it was clear that Vera's attention to technical detail and linguistic precision was as acute as ever. “On the choice of material it would probably look best in marble with the flags in colour and the rest of the lettering in black,” she wrote. And she suggested that the memorial should give only one Christian name in full and leave out initials. “As not all the girls achieved the Croix de Guerre, would it not be nice, Airey, to forget about decorations which all so obviously merited?”

  And finally she added:

  “I enclose a very sketchy effort at layout and have tried to find a brief form of words to give minimum information. What do you think of the quotation, which is taken from a poem by Walt Whitman (American 19th century)? It appeals to me because it raises our sights from the sor-didness of the surroundings and places their sacrifice in the realm of timelessness. It does this for me but how does it strike you?: ‘Only the dark, dark night shows to our eyes the stars.'

  Epilogue

  The plane took off from Stansted Airport at six a.m., and we were soon over the Channel and following the loops of the Loire, before landing at Tours. Travelling with me was Yvette Pitt, daughter of Yvonne Cormeau, one of F Section's women agents, who was parachuted into southern France. Vera saw Yvonne off on her mission from Tempsford airbase, just west of Stansted village, in August 1943.

  Yvette had been only two years old at the time and was placed in a convent of Ursuline nuns where she stayed until s
he was five. “I don't remember much about the convent, but I do remember telling everyone there: ‘I have got a mummy. I know I have got a mummy' And people would ask me where she was. And I would say: ‘I don't know.'

  Yvette complained about the recently released film of the novel Charlotte Gray, which tells the story of a fictional SOE woman agent. The heroine of the film volunteers to parachute in behind enemy lines, mainly because she sees her mission as a chance to find her lover, a pilot, whom she believes has been shot down over France.

  “It is quite wrong to say that these women did what they did for romance,” said Yvette. She told me her own mother volunteered because she wanted to “do something.” She wanted “to save France from the Nazis.”

  I was coming to France for the annual ceremony in memory of all of the F Section dead, an event that began in 1991 with the inauguration of a spectacular memorial in the small town of Valençay, in the Loire Valley. Since 1991 Vera, with a small coterie of SOE loyalists, had made an annual pilgrimage here every May.

  “What happened was this,” said Vera's friend Judith Hiller. “I would motor down to Winchelsea in the Rover the night before, picking up Peter Lee on the way. There were usually at least two others squeezed in the back. Then we'd stay in a B&B overnight, ready to leave early next morning. Vera would prepare the picnic—usually four sorts of sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs with cheese sticks to nibble. It was such fun. Vera always sat in the front and chattered while everyone in the back strained to hear her.”

  I asked Judith why she liked Vera so much.

  “I liked to be part of her tapestry. And I enjoyed her mystery,” she said.

  I had with me a little booklet about the F Section memorial that provided a map of all the circuits. Our route along the River Cher now took us between the Ventriloquist and Wrestler circuits, and along the southern reaches of Prosper. Water meadows, blanketed with buttercups, ran down to the river's edge. Henri Déricourt had chosen several of his landing fields near the banks of the Cher and the Loire.