Sarah Helm

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

  Valençay was chosen for the memorial in part because it was close to many early SOE operations. It also happened to be close to where Pearl Witherington (now Madame Cornioley) lived and near where, as “Pauline,” she had taken command of Wrestler. Pearl was to lay the wreath at this year's ceremony.

  The Lion d'Or, in Valençay, was where Vera's “retinue,” as one observer put it, always stayed on the occasion of the memorial service. I found the hotel bar quite empty apart from a small group of elderly women—probably Vera's retinue—talking quietly around a crochet-clothed table. From another room came a high-pitched wailing that nobody appeared to notice.

  The landlady told me she had no recollection of a Vera Atkins, though she knew Pauline very well. Pauline was, she said, “une des grandes ici.” And then she asked if Vera Atkins was perhaps “la dame qui a toujours pris la chambre deux” and she affected a haughty pose. Yes, she remembered Vera now. “C'etait une très belle chambre. La meilleure.”

  The wailing became louder as an elderly woman in black moved towards me with hands outstretched, as if to speak. But just as she was about to grab my arm, she moved away, still wailing. I was evidently not who she thought I was.

  I went to join Vera's retinue. They too were talking about the “travesty” of the latest controversial film about SOE, Charlotte Gray. Vera also would have considered the film a travesty, had she been here, we all agreed. The Valençay booklet, which Vera had partly written, stated: “All, men and women alike, were motivated by a loathing of Nazi ideology, a love of freedom and a desire to make an individual contribution to the liberation of France.”

  Until the very end of her life Vera had found herself defending the decision to send women behind the lines. In 1996 she picked up her pen yet again to rebut criticism of the decision to send Nora Inayat Khan to France. On the back of a bank statement, in a now-faltering hand, Vera drafted a letter to the Daily Telegraph describing how Nora had evaded capture, made two escape attempts, given nothing away, and was kept in chains as an exceptionally dangerous prisoner. “This is the record of Nora Inayat Khan and her answer to those who doubted her,” Vera concluded. The letter was also her answer to those who doubted her; because every claim that the women should not have been sent was, by implication, an attack on Vera herself. After two years researching her life, there remained many unanswered questions about Vera, but of one thing I was now quite sure: an important key to her character was her overwhelming sense that she was always right.

  As I talked to Vera's friends, the hotel bar began to fill with SOE veterans and families. There was a little flurry across the room as another carload arrived from England, among them the SOE adviser in a French beret and red V-neck jersey, and his assistant Valerie, SOE in France under her arm.

  And then the woman in black appeared again, still wailing but apparently recognising one or two of the new arrivals. I noticed now that her face was deathly pale and her eyes bloodshot. She clutched an SOE veteran and started speaking to him very fast in French, occasionally breaking off to cry. The man patted his supplicant kindly while clearly trying to extricate himself if he possibly could.

  He later explained that the woman came every year. She was still mourning her fiancé, who was killed while serving with SOE in France, but she had never been told quite how he was killed or where he died. I wondered whether the woman in black had grabbed Vera's arm and how Vera had responded.

  I had not always been able to make sense of Vera's mixed responses to the survivors and the families of the dead. “Before joining, the agents had been warned that their chances of survival were estimated at about even. But in fact something like three agents in four survived,” stated the Valençay booklet. As everyone here knew, had it not been for Vera, very little would ever have been known of the fate of those who did not survive.

  I had found letters from the bereaved spilling from Vera's files. To many she offered emotional and financial support until the end of her life. Latterly, for example, the case of Francine Agazarian, wife of Jack Agazar-ian, who was hanged at Flossenbürg, had taken up a great deal of Vera's time. “I am most grateful for the cheque, and deeply touched by your kindness; once again let me thank you with all my heart,” wrote Francine in 1988. On another occasion: “For many years I felt it was not right that I should be alive. I should have gone when they did and in the same manner.”

  And yet precisely because I had seen such examples of Vera's sympathy and understanding, the examples of her coldness in other cases were so hard to comprehend. Vera's heartless disregard, in the immediate postwar years, for the family of Sonia Olschanesky, who were never informed that she had died at Natzweiler, was the starkest example. Often the neediest were shown the coldest face. Occasionally Vera's reserve even had the paradoxical effect of transferring a sense of blame or guilt to the other person. When, in her early twenties, Tania Szabo came to see Vera to talk about her murdered mother, she found a distant and disapproving Vera. Yet far from feeling let down by Vera, Tania left the meeting blaming herself for having “disappointed” her and hoping to make amends.

  On other occasions, when Vera feared accusation, she automatically played down her personality, as if to hide herself. Vilayat Inayat Khan's wife, Mary, told me that when she met Vera at Nora's memorial service in Suresnes she was “mouselike” and “made no impression.” This must have been deliberate on Vera's part. The former F Section agent George Millar, an admirer of Vera's, once told me always to remember one thing about her: “Everything Vera did was deliberate.”

  Many I spoke to detested this coldness in Vera. Some saw it as sinister. But others saw it as another facet of her inability to concede that mistakes might have been made.

  Close friends felt only sympathy for Vera. Behind that controlled facade they sensed that she was all the time suppressing her own emotion and her own guilt. From time to time Vera would—just momentarily— lose that control. Nigel Smith, an amateur historian who worked with Vera on securing the SOE memorials, came to know her well in later years. On one occasion in the 1980s, when Vera was talking to him about Violette Szabo, she started to describe what Violette was wearing the day she saw her off to France. She recalled every tiny detail of Violette's clothes—her shoes, the shirt, and the dress—and she described them several times. “I think the dress was of blue and white flowers,” said Nigel. “It was as if she had never shaken the image from her head. That was the only time I saw her show emotion. She was obviously moved.”

  “She was imperturbable—contrôlée,” said the former F Section agent Jean-Bernard Badaire. After surviving Neuengamme concentration camp, Badaire managed to escape from a train that was transporting him to Belsen, two days before the liberation, and miraculously he made his way to the British lines. His friendship with Vera after the war was as close as anyone's. Yet she had never once shown concern for what had happened to him in German captivity. “Jamais une question” he said with a flourish of his hands. “But just occasionally something would suddenly come out,” he added. “One day a subject came up, and she suddenly began to talk about a German she had interrogated who had murdered little children. She told me she said to this man: ‘How could you do such a thing?' And he said to her: ‘Like pictures, I hung them all along the wall.' Badaire had evidently been very struck, not so much by the German's comment but by the way Vera had repeated it all those years later. “Elle a dit ga,” he said, looking at me. “ ‘Like pictures I hung them along the wall.' I think she was haunted by that phrase. It had come out in a moment she wasn't thinking. When she wasn't in control.”

  Badaire believed that Vera could not talk to him about the concentration camps precisely because she knew he had seen everything. “I think if you talk to somebody who has been in a camp and has seen all the horrors, you are wary of him, if you feel he might think it was you who sent him there. That is what Vera feared, that we might think it was her who sent us there.” He paused. “It is …” he said, and struggled for a word. “En frangais
on dit ‘rancune.' You understand?” He explained. The word meant a grudge. “Particularly for the families of the girls. Vera always feared that elles ont gardé une rancune centre elle. This, perhaps, was the key to her comportment.”

  Some of Vera's other closest friends had made similar observations. And Vera's niece Zenna Atkins was quite sure that her aunt's “mental wiring” meant she was able to control her emotions. “But I think when she discovered all that awful horror, it was like a series of body blows. Then she spent the rest of her life recovering from those blows.”

  As we milled around waiting to take our seats for dinner, Pearl appeared, followed by a TV crew complete with cameraman and sound recordist. Channel Four had interviewed Pearl recently for a documentary on The Real Charlotte Grays. Now the BBC were filming her for a new programme about Violette Szabo.

  The producers had interviewed a woman who had shared a cell with Violette and who broke down on camera as she described how Violette had been raped by a German guard. The TV investigators had also apparently discovered that Violette's famous battle, holding off her German captors with her Sten gun, was probably a fabrication. The story had formed part of Violette's citation for her George Cross.

  Those early attempts to sanitise the stories of agents, as in the case of Violette, and then embellish their heroics was another manifestation of Vera's determination to be always right. It also sprang from an understandable determination on the part of Vera and Buckmaster, supported by many former F Section colleagues, that SOE should be valued and remembered. The sense of deep betrayal at the end of the war, when SOE was closed down, to be forgotten, cannot be overstated. “They all just wanted us scrubbed off the face of the earth,” one F Section staff member told me, referring to MI6, the Foreign Office, and other Whitehall antagonists.

  Yet the publicity drive only diverted attention from the true heroism of several of the agents. At Ravensbrück Violette's cheerful spirit and defiance in the face of unremitting Nazi degradation was an inspiration to weaker prisoners. Whichever of the women it was who scratched the face of Peter Straub, the Natzweiler executioner, as she was pushed, drugged, into the furnace, surely deserved to be remembered for such extraordinary resistance. Letters in Vera's files suggested the woman might have been Vera Leigh, because she was once put forward for a George Cross; although inexplicably the proposal was not pursued. None of the citations for Nora Inayat Khan mentioned that her last word to those who had already beaten her to certain death was liberté.

  The publicity drive had another unintended result: it fuelled conspiracy theories, which then obscured the very success stories that Vera and Buckmaster had hoped to promote.

  Around the table at Valençay most people tried to find something kind to say about Buckmaster, whose last job was public relations manager for the French champagne industry. Former colleagues still remembered him as the grand old man of F Section, but ever since his death in 1992 there had been much talk of his “gullibility” and “naivety.” Some said he had arrived at SOE with a chip on his shoulder—perhaps because he had not taken his exhibition up to Oxford. Then when he unexpectedly secured the post as head of F Section, he felt a need to prove himself and secure, in the words of Colin Gubbins, “the highest possible dividend” for F Section—but zeal and patriotism, and a link to the old-boy network, were not enough. Perhaps Buckmaster sensed, as Gubbins said after the war, that he got the job “because there was nobody else.”

  When things went wrong, Buckmaster, rather than face up to reality, retreated into fantasy, from which he rarely seems to have emerged. In his later years, when confronted with the facts of his gaffes, he, like others, took refuge in conspiracy theories, saying, for example, that he had known all along that Déricourt was a double agent but he had been following orders from on high. Sometimes when confronted with the facts, Buckmaster simply cried.

  The question of Buckmaster, of course, always led back to the question of Vera's wartime role. How much had he really depended on her? Here, at the Lion d'Or, Vera was considered by most to have been his “number two,” and everyone considered her to have been “Buckmaster's brains.” “We saw her as la vraie patronne,” said Bob Maloubier, the tips of his white moustache curling up in affectionate memory. “Vera was the real boss.”

  Yet the greater the influence ascribed to Vera within the organisation, the more questions arose about her role in the flawed decision-making. If she was the brains behind Buckmaster, why did she not warn him—or others, if he would not listen—of the errors? And why did she continue to protect him so vehemently after the war?

  One answer is, of course, that Vera was not, as she insisted, always right. While cleverer than most of those around her, she was an amateur like all the rest, and in the confusion and chaos of war Vera was quite capable of being wrong. When I met her at Winchelsea in 1998, I asked when she first believed that Nora was captured. Her answer gave a small hint of the acute anxiety that had surrounded that “wrong” assessment in December 1943 that Nora was free. “The Germans captured several radio operators. There were many mutilated messages. When she was arrested in October we were suspicious. By January we felt she must be all right.”

  Furthermore, indispensable though Vera became to F Section, the simple fact was that she joined the organisation as a mere secretary and by the winter of 1944 still held only a junior officer's rank and was both a Jew and a woman. It was perhaps partly because of her “inferior” status that she felt such an overwhelming need to cover up mistakes.

  On top of these considerations, Vera had her own exceptional reason for feeling personally insecure. For most of the war her status as an enemy alien meant she was highly vulnerable and could not afford to rock the boat. And then, tucked away somewhere inside British intelligence files, the case of Karen and Fritz Rosenberg was lurking. The consequences for Vera, had details of her mission to the Low Countries ever emerged during the war, would have been grave indeed. Had it become known that she had passed a large sum of money to pay a bribe to the Abwehr, there is little doubt that she would have been ejected from SOE and packed off to someplace where she could do no harm. Whatever she may have suspected about captured wireless operators, whatever she may have thought about Buckmaster's judgements, Vera could not risk losing Buckmaster's support or provoking any investigation into her own past. Her own survival was at stake.

  Although after the war Vera remained loyal to Buckmaster, the character of their relationship changed. Her loyalty to him in later years, though still respectful, became almost maternal. Perhaps her indebtedness to him for his protection during her difficult times was such that she instinctively protected him in return when he came under attack for F Section's failings.

  There were occasionally small chinks in that loyalty—signs, almost, of rivalry. Asked once about the long hours Buckmaster worked at F Section, Vera scoffed, saying he was “the worst clock-watcher of all.” And she also allowed a difference of opinion to open up with her former boss over Déricourt. She had told me she never trusted Déricourt, and I soon discovered that in older age she had made a point of telling many people the same thing, even giving interviews for TV documentaries on the subject. Yet nobody pressed Vera to explain why, if that was the case, she had not ensured his conviction back in 1948.

  While Vera's failure to speak out about errors during the war could be explained, her failure to ensure that evidence against Déricourt was put before the French tribunal in 1948 remained one of the greatest puzzles of all. Déricourt could not be held responsible for anything like all of F Section's failings, but his treachery had clearly hastened many agents to their deaths. The Foreign Office may well have advised former SOE officers in 1948 that this was a French affair and a British presence could stir up sensitivities. But such advice would not have deterred Vera from trying to convict Déricourt. Revenge was never a motivating factor in her “private enterprise,” but she certainly wanted to see justice done. Yet when Déricourt went on trial, Vera stayed away
.

  “Imagine,” said the French SOE agent Bob Maloubier, giving one credible explanation: “ ‘Antelme, captured on landing.' ‘Damerment, captured on landing.' ‘Lee, captured on landing.' ‘ “Michel,” captured on landing.' ” And his list of agents “captured on landing” went on and on. Twenty-seven SOE agents were named in the Valençay booklet as captured on landing or very soon afterwards. “They would not have wanted to be in court to hear that.”

  The next day Valençay was covered by low grey clouds as we all headed off for the service at the SOE memorial, which stands at one end of an avenue of plane trees. At the other end of the avenue are the gates of the Château de Valençay, famous as the home of Talleyrand, Napoleon's foreign minister. The sun was trying to break through, although most people were hovering under trees waiting to see whether it would rain.

  Soon everyone was surging around the memorial. There was quite a crowd. Judith Hiller was standing upright, proudly wearing her husband's medals on her royal-blue suit. The SOE adviser was talking to a man who had come down from the embassy and was bemoaning the fact that “on a perdu le soleil.” Examining the list of names on the memorial, I noticed someone was missing. Sonia Olschanesky, captured while working as a courier for F Section and murdered as an F Section “spy” at Natzweiler, was not on the memorial to F Section's dead. Vera had forcefully argued for Sonia's name to be included, I was told, but she was overruled by a committee that decided that, as a local recruit, not commissioned in the British armed forces, Sonia Olschanesky could not be remembered here.

  Somewhere in the mêlée I bumped into Prosper's son Anthony Sut-till. He and his brother Francis had recently found more evidence to undermine the theory that their father had made a pact with the Germans. Yet as Anthony knew, the truth about the pact was now unlikely ever to be known, because Vera had taken it with her to her grave.