Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  He shrugged. “There you are, then. Nuffink but secrets.” He hesitated. “It's some bunch of funnies. Ministry of Economic Warfare. Don't mean much. We can't even fight a regular war.”

  Soon I would circumnavigate new bomb craters. Each courier run was the whiff of a potent drug: danger. I consulted the cardboard token from the woman with long silken legs: Air-Raid Warden Vera Atkins. A very English name. A very posh English accent. Yet under the cool clipped speech of the English upper class was a trace of my mother's Continental warmth. This was not the only contradiction about Miss Atkins I noticed. How did she get silk stockings in a time of severe rationing? Did she honor the spirit of wartime rules by wearing woolen bloomers, just out of sight? Such a woman, stepping out of the deferential role of peacetime drudgery, aroused a wild surmise. Beside her name on the token was a telephone number. “Never ’eard of it,” said the police sergeant when I wanted to dial the number from an outside phone booth, but it rang, and I did get Vera on the line.

  My father was flown out of France in an antique Lysander. The pinstriped man who seemed Vera's superior was Dr. Hugh Dalton, dressed up as economic warfare minister, an old Etonian with upper-crust credentials who had long planned a working-class revolution against the Nazis. The Lysander was an army spotter plane, obsolete, but agile enough to ferry agents behind enemy lines.

  My reunited family moved to 109 Bletchley Road, Bletchley, home of the ULTRA code breakers who sat in cold wooden huts, struggling daily to solve the ever-changing conundrums in encrypted Enigma signals. The townsfolk never breathed a word. I had to wait until 2001 to be told by a cousin, Jacques Deleporte, how his family in France were shocked when Father returned before D-day. Germans surrounded the house, which sheltered a Jewish family. Father was in uniform as insurance against being shot as a spy. He never spoke of this. Nor did my mother. It was Jacques who finally told me how my mother taught raw agents to mangle their classroom French, if they wanted to survive in Occupied Europe.

  In the years leading up to World War II, Vera had provided Winston Churchill with information on Germany's secret preparations for a blitzkrieg when he was in the political wilderness, maligned as a drink-sodden warmonger. In mid-1940 he was suddenly in charge of a war that seemed already lost. In response, Churchill officially founded the Special Operations Executive (SOE), an intelligence agency that specialized in nontraditional methods. Vera became one of its most valuable assets, a spymistress. SOE's structure was so fluid that if she chose to wear the modest uniform of a pilot-officer, she could still give orders to a major general.

  With a deliberate lack of secrecy, Churchill proclaimed SOE's directives: Set Europe ablaze! Make Hitler's life an eternal torment! Hit and run! Butcher and bolt! The rhetoric was meant to make Hitler rethink his invasion plans and show Americans their help would not be wasted. After that, SOE became practically invisible, except when Vera was authorized to show an influential American, OSS director William J. Donovan, on his first secret mission for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the preparations for what she called “closework”: the close engagement of a physically superior foe by clandestine armies supplied with hurriedly invented weapons that could be quickly assembled in the field for sabotage, assassination, and hand-to-hand combat.

  Vera recruited her agents carefully, trained them until they dropped from exhaustion, constantly tested them, then personally packed them off on missions. Her clandestine army went deep behind enemy lines, linked up with resistance fighters, destroyed vital targets, helped Allied pilots escape capture, and radioed information back to London. Her agents and saboteurs were not armed with aerial fighting machines. If they chose to die to evade capture, they crunched on lethal cyanide pills. They were willing to do everything to liberate Europe from the Nazis.

  Before SOE's official birth, Vera worked with impoverished prewar secret agencies and the obscure Industrial Intelligence Centre of the Committee of Imperial Defence (IICCID), which had been formed “to discover and report plans for manufacture of armaments and war stores in foreign countries.” The IICCID languished during years of neglect, and its chief, Desmond Morton, conveyed information to Churchill from anti-Nazis like Vera and from active servicemen who risked prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. They disclosed information because they felt their armed forces were betrayed by poor leadership and a lack of vision, or worse. Lord Londonderry, the air minister who presided over the decline of the Royal Air Force (RAF), sent a letter on the eve of war to the German air force chief, Hermann Göring. It began: “Dear General der Flieger and Minister President (though I would prefer to call you ‘Siegfried’ as you are my conception of a Siegfried of modern times).” It was not only the British Union of Fascists who admired Hitler: the evidence was buried in secret files until now.

  Those of Hitler's admirers who were already known among the political and social elite of England in the false peace of the 1920s and 1930s were called Guilty Men, against whom an underground war was fought by a group of self-styled Mutual Friends who combined their special knowledge to warn of Britain's terrifying vulnerability before the open conflict with Germany began. Vera's ideas about covert warfare stemmed from her part in this underground war.

  When SOE was born, Vera Atkins's true identity as a Jew of Romanian extraction could have gotten her interned as a wartime “enemy alien.” She was uniquely vulnerable to the application of old secrecy laws. Later, as a naval fighter pilot who flew spy planes and was drawn into intelligence gathering, I was bound by the same oath of secrecy that sealed Vera's lips.

  Vera acquired a “sterile identity”; personal data would lead only to blank spaces in official registers. In the public domain are 1945–47 postwar reports on how she hunted down those who tortured and killed 118 of her agents who never returned from behind enemy lines, and pursued some of their tormentors into Stalinist territory. Other accounts of her heroic career come from Mutual Friends in the intelligence world, some of whom need to remain anonymous. Some SOE survivors took the risk of talking about the shabby reasons behind the pitiless termination of SOE and the destruction of its records after World War II. They told me their stories of the woman they had greatly admired until her death in 2000. I recorded the authoritative recollections of many who knew Vera, and read notes kept by Sir William Stephenson—the man called Intrepid, who ran British Security Coordination (BSC) out of New York—and his wife, Lady Mary. Stephenson was Canadian; Mary was from Tennessee. Neither had to swear a British oath of secrecy, and so they were valuable sources of information. Their discussions with Vera began in prewar Bucharest, and continued in Britain. Vera's close friend SOE agent Sonia “Tony” d'Artois provided or corroborated much of the personal information. She and her husband, Guy, parachuted behind the lines, fought with distinction, and said they always felt safe in the hands of the formidably efficient Miss Atkins. Sonia described Vera to me as the liveliest of fun-loving companions, when free from professional cares. Another source was SOE's director of operations, Major General Colin “Gubby” Gubbins, who was on a secret mission with Vera in Poland in 1939 when Hitler unleashed the first blitzkrieg. Her unique knowledge of the terrain enabled them to escape with Polish code breakers and copies of the German Enigma coding machines.

  In France, I found many records unavailable in London. Other foreign archives are far less restricted. The Swiss Intelligence Agency (SIA) keeps files that were readily opened for me; a director-general of the SIA pointed out that his small country survived on superb foreign intelligence. Americans, often accused of being obsessed with secrecy, gladly allowed me to examine the records of the wartime Office of Strategic Studies (OSS), precursor to the CIA. Bill Colby, a wartime agent and later a CIA chief, shared with me his memories of Vera. Bill Donovan, who launched the OSS, was first shown SOE's improvisations by Vera, before Pearl Harbor, when she convinced him that Britain was not as ramshackle as it looked and was worth U.S. support.

  Ian Fleming, who was himself a spy, used Vera as the model fo
r Miss Moneypenny, the secretary to his fictional James Bond, and said, “In the real world of spies, Vera Atkins was the boss.” She received no public recognition until 1995, when French president François Mitterrand astounded everyone by making her a Commandant of the Légion d'Honneur. Pete Lee, one of her former agents, said, “Now that her gallantry has been recognized at last, a number of us take great pleasure in lobbying for Queen Elizabeth II to make her a Companion of the British Empire.” The Victoria Cross, the highest decoration for courage, was for men only.

  This book is my tribute to the incomparable Vera Atkins and all the courageous men and women of SOE.

  Terms and Abbreviations

  Abwehr

  German military intelligence.

  Arisaig:

  Perfect for training nighttime forces, this is a wild and desolate part of Scotland, ranging from Fort William to the Isle of Skye. SOE's main school was Arisaig House, where agents underwent tough training in hand-to-hand combat, telegraphy, and sabotage. They planted bogus explosives on the area's single winding railroad, had to find notional targets among gale-swept islands, hidden coves, and freezing lochs, and snuck across scrub-covered hills and bogs undetected. A small plaque commemorates the training ground at Arisaig House, now an exclusive hotel.

  BCRA

  Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action. De Gaulle's intelligence service when he arrived in London, which became Direction Générale des Services Spéciaux from 1940 to 1944.

  Black Chamber

  Facility for code breaking and interception of correspondence and communications.

  Bombe

  Device linking several captured or replica Enigma machines in an effort to break codes generated by German operators. A later British adaptation was called a bomba.

  Brûlé

  “Burned.” Said of a French network or agent that is exposed or “blown.”

  BSC

  British Security Coordination. Run from New York by William Stephenson.

  C

  Britain's secret service, SIS. Its chief was also traditionally known only as “C.”

  Circuit

  Loosely, a network, group of agents or guerrilla forces.

  Deuxième Bureau

  Intelligence section of French general staff.

  D/F

  Direction-finding. German D/F vans were used to pinpoint sources of clandestine radio transmissions.

  DMI

  Director of Military Intelligence (British).

  DNI

  Director of Naval Intelligence (British).

  Enigma

  German coding machine. Berlin Cipher Office thought it impossible to crack.

  FANY

  First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Membership in this British women's auxiliary was sometimes accorded to women agents in the faint hope that, if captured, they would be treated as prisoners of war.

  FFI

  Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur. Free French forces of General de Gaulle.

  F Section

  SOE section dealing with France.

  FTP

  Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. Resistance movement originating with pro-Soviet agents in France.

  Gadgets

  SOE workshops supplied catalogs from which Resistance armies and SOE agents could order special devices by airmail. Q Gadgets included incendiary bricks, limpet mines, tire bursters, silenced weapons, daggers, magnets, rope ladders, railroad charges, underwater gear, dehydrated rations, double-sided briefcases, pedal generators, a one-man submarine, whiskey flasks, folding shovels, watersuits, and explosives disguised as wine bottles, driftwood, plastic fruit and flowers, rusty bolts, stone lanterns, bicycle pumps and even a German flashlight that detonated when switched on. By 1945, the catalog of secret gadgetry filled two hundred pages.

  GCCS

  Government Code and Cipher School. Bletchley code breakers.

  Gestapo

  Geheime Staatspolizei. German secret state police.

  IICCID

  Industrial Intelligence Centre of the Committee of Imperial Defence (British).

  Jedburghs

  Small teams of American and British agents with French liaison officers, parachuted behind enemy lines during D-day period to help coordinate closework with Allied invaders.

  Kripo

  Kriminalpolizei. German criminal police.

  Maquis

  French resistance forces, named for the Mediterranean underbrush in which they often took refuge. Originally made up of those evading German forced labor in France. Later, French resisters in general. They were armed and trained by SOE and the OSS and worked with other underground fighters in occupied Europe, sending London vital intelligence from inside German industrial, military, and transport bases. By D-day, Maquis units were so well organized that they sabotaged or fought crack German military units pouring in to encircle Allied landing areas and helped turn the tide when the Allies seemed unable to break out from the Normandy beachheads.

  MI

  Military Intelligence. The organizations to which the designation is applied are not always strictly military.

  MI5

  Internal security service, or counterintelligence (British).

  MI6

  Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) (British).

  MI9

  Escape-and-evasion section of British War Office, charged with running lines for escapees and training military personnel in escape techniques.

  Milice

  Widely feared paramilitary police run by the pro-Nazi Vichy government, infiltrated by pro-Allied Frenchmen later in the war.

  One-Time Pad

  A set of encryption algorithms to be used only once. The wireless operator or sender composes a message and enciphers it by adding to each character the corresponding “key” from a sheet of the one-time pad. The number of the sheet used is included with the message, and the sheet is then destroyed. The recipient, who has a copy of the same pad, deciphers the message using the matching sheet, which is in turn destroyed. The one-off nature of the exchange should guarantee that any message sent this way cannot be broken. The original Russian one-time pad usually had fifty pages. Leo Marks at SOE produced an advanced version, using “silks” divided into numbered squares.

  OSS

  Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA. “The club” included men of enough power to help Vera in wartime—men who later served as presidential advisers (Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Walt Rostow), UN ambassador (Arthur Goldberg), treasury secretary (Douglas Dillon), and CIA director (Allen Dulles and Richard Helms). Former OSS officers became U.S. ambassadors in a score of countries. David Bruce, who commanded OSS in the European Theater, was ambassador successively to England, France, Germany, and NATO and to Vietnam peace talks in Paris. Bruce was outspoken about the “smug self-satisfaction” of OSS enemies in the State Department.

  OWI

  Office of War Information (USA).

  Pianist

  Wireless operator, in SOE and Russian intelligence slang.

  PWE

  Political Warfare Executive. British agency producing “black” propaganda and misleading information, often through fake German radio stations.

  Réseau

  Network. In France, a circuit of underground fighters.

  RF Section

  SOE French section cooperating with General de Gaulle's “independent” F section, originally outside SOE's jurisdiction. Vera worked to bring together six SOE sections that started out operating separately for similar political reasons, a situation she eventually resolved.

  Rote Kappelle:

  Red Orchestra, a cryptonym coined by the RSHA for Soviet espionage networks. In France after 1940, it used funds salvaged from other occupied countries and investments sent by the Soviet Union for controlled export firms like SIMEX in Paris. Moscow agents controlled seven circuits in France; each network operated independently and reported only to the “Grand Chef.” These Soviet operations were highly skilled in
spycraft and caused mutual suspicions between exile governments and especially between de Gaulle and SOE's own French section. At the end of the war, de Gaulle remained deeply worried about the potential power of the Rote Kappelle to seize control in France, although by 1945 it had become difficult to distinguish between dedicated communists and French resisters who simply joined the nearest available anti-Nazi operation.

  RSHA

  Reichssicherheitshauptamt. German central security office, which included the SD and Sipo.

  SAS

  Special Air Service (British). Colonel David Stirling founded SAS during World War II to send small mobile teams behind enemy lines to make daring raids. “He destroyed more enemy aircraft on the ground than the RAF did in the air,” said Vera, arguing that “butcher-and-bolt” tactics needed to be given more support. The SAS reinforced French resistance armies, parachuting men trained in unconventional SOE-style warfare.

  SD

  Sicherheitsdienst. Nazi Party security service under Himmler, fiercely competitive with the Ab-wehr in acting against closework resisters.

  Secret Army

  Armée Secrète. Amalgamated military forces of the French resistance.

  Section D

  Sabotage branch of UK War Office. Later morphed into SOE.

  Silk

  Material, more compact than paper, easy to burn, easy to conceal, and favored by SOE for one-time pads (q.v.). Also, such a “pad.”

  Sipo

  Sicherheitspolizei. German security police. Executive organ of Gestapo and Kripo.