Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  SIS

  Secret Intelligence Service (British). Sometimes referred to as “C,” as was its chief. Also identified as MI6.

  SOE

  Special Operations Executive. Secrecy about its existence was so tight that, inside the armed forces, even those at the top were not always aware that SO(1), SO(2), the Inter-Services Research Bureau, Special Training Schools Headquarters, NID(Q), MO1(SP) at the War Office, and Al 10 at the Air Ministry were all cover names for SOE.

  SR

  Service de Renseignements, run by the Deuxième Bureau and responsible for running agents, tapping telephones, and analyzing media reports and counterintelligence.

  SS

  Schutzstaffel. Blackshirt elite guard of the Nazi Party. Later evolved into units of special police under the Gestapo and SD.

  STS

  Special Training School.

  Sûreté

  French Special Branch, similar to the FBI or Scotland Yard.

  Vichy France

  Southern zone, unoccupied by Germans until November 1942 but subject to pro-Nazi policing and administration under a Third Republic set up by Marshal Pétain at the health spa of Vichy.

  WAAF

  Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Officially, Vera Atkins was a flying officer and later squadron leader in the WAAF.

  Woburn Abbey

  Estate of the Duke of Bedford, near Bletchley. Used as a country retreat by propagandists from London Control of PWE, who called the place CHQ.

  Spymistress

  1

  Max's Daughter

  At night you feel strange things stirring in the darkness.

  —D. H. Lawrence

  Vera Maria Rosenberg seems to have been an enigma from the day she was born. This was in 1908, on June 2 by the Romanian calendar or June 15 by the Western calendar.

  She was the only daughter of Max Rosenberg, who had read in the Oxford English Dictionary that an enigmatic person was “mysterious, baffling as to character, sentiments, identity, or history.” He told Vera: “There's safety in conjecture.” She saw her father as an enigma too, sticking to his Jewish name among anti-Semites in Romania, the land of her actual birth, when he could legitimately have claimed to be German. She took his advice and became known as tight-lipped, outspoken, kind, ruthless, beautiful, dowdy, a social butterfly, a scholar, proudly Jewish, more English than a vicar's daughter, forever falling in love with men or only interested in women. Such contradictions cloaked her secret wartime operations. She sought no medals. In her extreme old age, the French awarded her the highest rank in the Legion of Honor, and shamed the British into finally matching this long overdue recognition.

  When she died, the libel laws could no longer silence her enemies. Some said she was a communist agent. Others said German intelligence had controlled her. She was not alone in being calumniated. In the latter part of his life, her friend Victor, 3rd Baron Rothschild, heir to the Jewish banking dynasty, who had been awarded the George Cross created in the 1940 bombing of London for “acts of the greatest heroism,” had to fight false accusations that he had been an enemy spy.1

  Max once told Vera, “Names there be which have no memorial. They perish as though they had never been.” He quoted a London Cockney's rule: “Sign nothing and they can prove nothing.”2 So upon moving to Britain, she signed no papers. She invented her own cover names to carry out peacetime missions for an obscure intelligence branch of the British Committee of Imperial Defence. In the 1940 German bombing of London, she wore an air-raid warden's armband. When Hitler forecast the invasion of an almost defenseless Britain, Special Operations Executive was hastily improvised to sabotage the enemy. SOE agents joined women's auxiliaries or the armed forces in the hope of being treated as prisoners of war if caught, rather than tortured and executed, as most were. SOE directors had misleadingly modest titles. Vera took a middling air force rank. In 1946 SOE was abruptly shut down. Its files were lost in a fire at Vera's office on Baker Street, home of Sherlock Holmes. Bombs, it was said, destroyed her family papers.

  I had promised her not to disclose certain personal affairs. But in 2006 classified files were released to Britain's national archives, making it clear that not all files had been burned and that Vera's life had not been a closed book.3 She had been investigated by MI5 — the internal security agency, successor to a little-known Secret Service Bureau — that trawled through national census returns.4 In 1940 Europeans Jews who had fled to Britain from Nazi persecution were put into camps for “enemy aliens.” Vera had signed nothing at the successor to the Alien Office when she entered England years before, and she was questioned in 1941 when Romania fell under German rule. Surely Max would have relished this new set of contradictions, but he had died in 1932 when Vera was twenty-four.5

  Vera's mother was Hilda Atkins, daughter of Heinrich Etkins, who had fled from the Russian anti-Semitic pogroms and settled in 1874 in South Africa, where he shed his Jewish name and called himself Henry Atkins. His daughter registered herself as Hilda Atkins in 1902 at a London synagogue to become the wife of Max Rosenberg. Max joked wryly that he had “no country of origin.” He might be Polish, or Russian, or Westphalian. History taught him to be vague about such matters. He had gone to South Africa, and later joined relatives who went into business in Romania.6

  The British in Bucharest had taken an interest in Vera from the late 1920s. “Her mother's great grand-father, Yehuda Etkins, or Jehuda Etins, was born in Russia in 1766, and detained in settlements for Jews,” reported a British intelligence officer.7 “Yehuda's descendant, Heinrich Etkins, as Henry Atkins in South Africa was joined by Max Rosenberg, an architect-agronomist from Germany. When South Africa's economy collapsed in 1902, he salvaged some money from diamond mining, and moved to Romania to invest in the fur trade, timber, and Danube riverboats.”

  A curious gap appeared in British records on Vera between 1914 and 1918, the years of World War I. During those war years, Max lived without wife and children in a mansion beside the Danube. The river represented immense commercial opportunities. Its drainage basin extended across east and central Europe, almost to France, and the river wound from Germany to Romania's ports on the Black Sea. Max saw its potential. In Bohemia he had a cousin who later escaped from Auschwitz with drawings of gas chambers and ovens. The cousin used the name Rudolf Vrba to hide his Jewish origins and was active in Zionist movements that saw only one way to fight anti-Semitism: a return to the land of their fathers, Eretz Israel.8

  In the years since 1867, Romania had passed 196 laws that denied Jews rights. Throughout the region, Jews were repeatedly uprooted by despots who forced weaker neighbors to cede territory and shift borders. Drifters, Gypsies, and higglers were allowed to work for slave wages, but not Jews. The 1919 peace talks after World War I redrew the maps once more. Millions of Jews again had “no country of origin” and were penned within new borders. Anti-Semitism was widely seen as patriotic, with spiritual backing from the Roman Catholic Church and communist backing from Russia.9

  Vera grew closer to Max when she and her mother rejoined him after the war. Hilda admired Marie, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria who had re-created an English Victorian court in Bucharest after marrying Romania's king Ferdinand in 1893. Hilda encouraged Max to advise the Romanian royal family on investments. King Carol II was quite happy to consult wealthy Jewish businessmen. Max was memorably quoted as saying, “If a Jew makes money for a king, he is welcome at court. If he makes a mistake, he no longer exists.”

  “Nonexistence” was useful for Jews who traveled in the Zionist cause as itinerant workers under non-Jewish names. A down-at-heel peasant was not worth the attention of Romanian border guards, who pandered to the upper classes. They saw Max as rich and therefore respectable, and let him steer the poor barrow-pushing peasants through border formalities. Vera was in her midteens when she first began to accompany her father to help the barrow-pushers who were Zionist agents. Max drove a Mercedes-Benz with a throaty compressor that trumpeted the exci
ting new age of motoring. No man of mischief would advertise himself in this way. Vera learned that boldness favored the brave.

  “Follow the Jesus strategy,” Max told Vera. “Jesus built his power by showing love for the poorest among us.” She was always astonished by his breadth of vision. She said later, “He saw Jesus as a military strategist when monarchists ruled from the top down. Jesus put the poor at the top. His followers grew from a handful to a billion, drawn by his call for self-sacrifice. Only the poor made up armies equipped to fight evil.” At the time, Vera saw this evil as local history.

  “At the turn of the century, Bucharest boasted it was the Paris of the East. Count Dracula represented Romania's bloodsuckers,” I was told by Robert Mendelsohn, who later helped Jewish survivors of death camps reach Israel through Romanian ports. “Nothing changed in the thirties. The Paris of the East worshipped money, which was the real obsession.”10

  Max hired the best horsemen to teach Vera to ride, the best marksmen to teach her to use a gun, and the best dance teachers. He sent her to a secretarial college in London and employed her part-time at an office in Bucharest. She learned that Romania's oil was needed by Britain's empire, worried by Russian rearmament of Germany. Global corporations, diplomats, and spies eavesdropped upon each other. “Sex was still Bucharest's chief preoccupation,” wrote Vera's later colleague Ian Fleming. “Sexual intrigue was part of the shenanigans. Sex went with treachery, tangle within tangle, agent and double-agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger, and the firing party.”11

  Max was of good cheer. “Nobody liked Jews,” I was told by an Egyptian tycoon in Bucharest. “But Max Rosenberg had a mansion and lots of land in what was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He paved roads to isolated villages and built himself a popular rural base. His wife had the style of an English gentlewoman. She knew being Jewish raised doubts about loyalty.”

  At the kitchen table, Vera saw Max weep over the Book of Lamentations and the centuries of Jewish suffering: betrayal, tribulation, expulsion, forced conversion, burnings at the stake, massacres, pogroms. He recited: “The Lord is like an enemy…. Look O Lord, and consider: whom have you ever treated like this?”

  In Romania men of the Iron Guard movement endorsed the ancient hatred of Jews. Hilda spoke of safety in England, “where any problem can be solved over a nice cup of tea.” Max said any problem was best solved with a shot of vodka. His wife wanted to live among Englishmen who wore bowler hats and kept a stiff upper lip. Max shrugged: opportunism was a way of life for Romanians. He said that having declared war against Germany while the Allies were winning World War I, Romania had been rewarded by the Allies with Transylvania. When the tide turned and Germany clawed back half of that territory, Romania canceled its declaration of war and so managed to keep what was left. Then Germany faced defeat, and Romania redeclared war to reoccupy other lost territory.12

  Romanian skill in abandoning and reviving alliances drew foreign observers to Bucharest. Which way would Romania jump next time? Zionists said nobody would help Jews scattered by redefined landscapes. Max only wanted to give Vera the sophisticated air that got upper-class people through all borders. She went to finishing schools in France and Switzerland—which later led to friendship with the widowed mother of two schoolboys destined to become kings.13 They had ideas about using the magic of an ancient monarchy to change society. “Not in Romania,” Vera told them with a tight smile. “Romanian royalty is reinvented by wearers of turbans and red caftans who claim descent from Roman legionnaires. Men of lesser rank wear blue caftans and are castrated after they sire two children.” The royal widow recalled Vera's words for me, years later.

  Vera's mother moved into a house in Winchelsea, one of the ancient Cinque Ports on the English Channel. Vera liked Winchelsea, but returned alone to the apartment Max had given her in Bucharest. She felt she had work to do. Virulent anti-Semitism was reviving in Vienna. Masses of Jews were again transported along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Civilized countries shrugged off Hitler's anti-Jewish diatribes. In Whitehall, the staid center of England's civil and secret services, there was much hostility to Zionists. In Romania, the fascist Iron Guard leader Octavian Goga echoed Hitler's claim that the 1919 peace talks were a Jewish conspiracy to rearrange the map of Europe.

  Vera saw that what plagued Jews today would hurt all future dissenters of any faith. She read English spy thrillers whose heroes pitted their wits against what Rudyard Kipling damned as “Teutonic war parties.” Espionage required a knowledge of world affairs beyond the small-mindedness described by the Irish writer Walter Starkie: “Bucharest is the town of one street, one church and one idea… sex.” For Vera, life in Bucharest was made more exciting by a Canadian businessman, William Stephenson, and his American wife Mary, whom he teased as Mary from Tennessee. Vera met them first with Gardyne de Chastelain, representing Phoenix Oil of London, from where Stephenson ran his growing industrial empire. He had laid the groundwork of a small fortune by mass-producing a can opener stolen while escaping from a German prisoner-of-war camp: a perfectly good way to get back at the Germans after being gassed in trench warfare. Thinking that this had poisoned his lungs, and that high flight would repair them, he became an ace fighter pilot. By 1931, already a scientist and inventor, he was expanding into movies and investing abroad in steel, aviation, and mining.

  Stephenson was a small man with narrow, piercing blue eyes. He watched Vera's face while he filled in the gap in the story of her family. During World War I, Vera and her mother and both her brothers had lived in Germany. That was why Max had lived alone in his Danube-side mansion.

  Vera told the man she called Bill Stephenson about this strange period. In 1914, aged six, she was on a summer trip with her mother and a younger brother, Wilfred. On the way to England, they were trapped in Berlin when war broke out in August. Vera's older brother, studying in England under the name Ralph Atkins, had joined them, and they took refuge in Cologne with the family of Max's brother, who was in the German army. Vera lived in a household split between pro-German and pro-English factions. Reunited with her father in 1919, she saw why Max had kept a low profile during World War I. He was a German Jew.

  Stephenson now served voluntarily in the Industrial Intelligence Centre, an almost forgotten British agency within the Committee of Imperial Defence. He had learned about Vera through Sir Vernon Kell, who had fished for traitors in the national census that presented a picture of life in Britain. Kell's security service cast a shadow over Vera, but Stephenson saw her German experience as an advantage. He came often to Bucharest. Behind a screen of commercial activity, he weighed Romania's place in the next world war, which he told Vera was “inevitable as a resumption of the last one.” He was interested in the German ambassador to Romania, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, a tall, elegant, silver-haired Saxon in his midfifties, manifestly bored by Bucharest small talk. Pretty women brought him to life.

  Stephenson saw Schulenburg as loyal to the Reich president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, a decent man who did not take Nazism seriously. Stephenson had earned the name Boxing Billy as a lightweight champion boxer in the Allied forces, and was light on his feet. He opposed those in England who sided with Germany as a victim of unfair peace terms dictated by the victors in the last war. He did agree that the German foreign office upheld the highest standards of diplomacy, and at a routine embassy party he introduced Vera to Count von der Schulenburg.

  Predictably, the ambassador came to life. Beauty and brains were an intoxicating brew. He spoke of a cultural renaissance in Berlin. Vera asked how this could last, if the Nazis built power among unemployed war veterans and appealed to primitive racism. He dismissed the Nazis as ignobile vulgus led by a madman who talked wildly about a Gothic empire and about shipping purebred Germans through Romanian ports to “living space” in the Crimea. He damned Hitler as a political spy who infiltrated the military command during the 1918 Spartacus Revolt, betrayed the German Workers’ Party to his
conservative paymasters, and renamed it the National Socialist, or Nazi, Party.

  Vera got her chance to size up Schulenburg at a winter ball at Peles Castle. She told him the castle was ridiculed for its overwhelming display of bad taste. Passengers from Paris on the 1883 inaugural journey of the Orient Express to Bucharest had arrived just as King Carol I ceremoniously put the last brick in place to celebrate the castle's completion. The foreigners, Vera said, had scoffed at this as just another attempt to ape the English royal court. Schulenburg laughed.

  She danced all night with the ambassador. She could not have imagined the part he was to play in secret missions, nor the role of the Orient Express. The count liked her gift for witty responses and her use of epigrams worthy of the Byzantine Greeks. The friendship blossomed. He took her to little restaurants, away from tiresome chatter-boxes, and confessed his love for her. She encouraged the infatuation of this man who was thirty-three years older than she. Vera was just twenty-three.

  Reporting back to Bill Stephenson, she said the reason Schulenburg put up with the boredom of this Bucharest backwater was because he saw it as a window into Russia. He was obsessed with the warning sounded by his hero, Otto von Bismarck: “Avoid war with Russia at all costs.” Bismarck had attacked the Catholic Church for demonizing Jews. He said Jewish-driven culture made Germany the heart of intellectual achievement, and this would end the evil years following 1743 when Jews could enter Berlin only through a gate reserved for themselves and cows. When she heard this, Vera bristled. She pointed out to Schulenburg that Bismarck had founded a Prussian nationalist newspaper in 1848, the same year Karl Marx had founded his propagandist newspaper on the German Rhine. Now German nationalism called for order, and the Soviet Union sought world power.