Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  The enemies of democracy were free to bellow treason. He took her to Hyde Park to watch a rally of Blackshirts led by Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists. It was a warm summer's afternoon in 1935. The Anglo-German naval treaty had provoked Churchill to protest that “the League of Nations has been weakened by our action, the principle of collective security has been impaired. German treaty-breaking has been condoned and even extolled.”

  At the rally, Stringbag ran into a newspaper friend. He told the reporter: “Germany's got a bigger navy than you dare report.”

  “‘Try me,” said the friend, and wrote in his notebook what String-bag knew about the secret numbers of German U-boats under construction, and a good deal more that the British government did not want people to hear.

  The Blackshirt rally turned nasty. Vera found herself listening to anti-Jewish verbal filth straight from Hitler's Mein Kampf. Some people in the crowd yelled protests. Blackshirt knuckle-dusters silenced them. Blackshirt thugs menaced children in the park playgrounds, and cowed their parents. Childhood notions that Vera once shared with the German ambassador about diverting the evil energies of adults now looked hopelessly idealistic. She vowed never to become vulnerable by having children of her own, at the risk of putting their welfare first, at the cost of her beliefs.

  If Stringbag had been in his naval uniform, the Blackshirts would have savaged him as a symbol of everything they hated. They had switched from the Labour (socialist) Party to fascism. “The police leave them alone because the alternative is communism,” said a man who joined Stringbag and Vera. “If you're unemployed, you go to extremes. Hitler's genius is to give the hungry something to sink their teeth into. Jews.”

  The newcomer was Israel (later Lord) Sieff. Vera had been a guest at his turreted family house, Cleeve Lodge, by Hyde Park Gate. His wife's father, Michael Marks, had started out like her father, wandering across the anti-Semitic landscape of Eastern Europe. But oppressors could not chase Michael Marks over land borders shouting “You have no country of origin!” because England had no land borders. In 1882 Michael, the peddler of trifles, was free to build his penny bazaar into the giant retailer Marks & Spencer, whose Baker Street headquarters would later shelter Vera's secret operations. Israel had been curious about Sir Oswald Mosley and invited him to speak at a Cleeve Lodge dinner. Mosley said a new political party like his needed “a hate plank” in its platform and “the best hate plank is the Jews.”

  “Sir Oswald is leaving,” said Israel, summoning a butler.

  Stringbag heard the story from his father, one of a group of London industrialists and economists at the dinner. None had heard Mosley voice his anti-Semitic views. Most thought vaguely, if they thought at all about the British Union, that Mosley ran a fiercely patriotic movement to free his country from trade unions and striking workers.

  “You should be having fun, Miss Atkins,” said Israel, taking the lovers home for an impromptu supper. But the fun evening turned into deadly serious discussions. Stringbag believed young Jewish refugees could be trained to resist the Nazis. Whitehall feared antagonizing the Arabs by teaching Jews to fight in Palestine. Yet a professional Scottish soldier, Orde Wingate, was training Jewish fighters in irregular warfare in Palestine. This had Churchill's approval. In 1899, with remarkable self-confidence for a very young survivor of British wars, Churchill foresaw in his book The River War that civilization might fall to Muslims whose religion paralyzed their social development. “No more retrograde force exists in the world,” wrote Churchill. As First Lord of the Admiralty in 1913, he urged the government to go into the oil business to protect supplies during the radical switch from coal-fired warships to oil. At the Colonial Office in 1921, he chose the emir Faisal as a client king in Mesopotamia (Iraq) to ensure British control between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Out of office in 1923, Churchill tried to merge Royal Dutch Shell and Burma Oil with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, in which the British government owned most of the voting shares. Vera now understood the link between Gardyne de Chastelain and Persian Oil, and why Gardyne in Bucharest criticized T. E. Shaw, aka Lawrence of Arabia, for training Arabs in irregular “closework” combat.

  Orde Wingate trained Jewish fighters in closework, even though this enraged the Arabs. Mollifying Arabs while supporting Jews was a tricky balancing act. Churchill believed the Jews could fight persecution only from a homeland. Millions of Jews were being driven by Hitler through Romanian ports to Palestine to stoke up Arab rage against the British. As a result, Churchill's views met with ferocious opposition in Whitehall.3

  Vera felt she would never fully absorb the complications of British conflicts of interest, and the magnitude of the task facing those determined to stop Hitler. Her father had emphasized a passage in the Talmud: “Pray for the welfare of government. Without it, men swallow each other alive.” This meant a government concerned for the welfare of the people, said Hélène Allatini, the Parisian Vera had first met in Bucharest and who was now staying in London. Hélène said few governments gave guidance in this time when heartrending decisions were made. A relative, Robert Rothschild, was told in Paris not to help the Irgun, the independent secret Jewish army, because the French government could hurt Rothschild businesses. Prominent Jews thought they should stay put, even though Europe's exit doors were closing and future entry into the free democracies was not certain.4

  “Vera dug up unexpected sources,” Bill Stephenson recalled. “I wanted her to travel in Europe. The Secret Intelligence Service was inefficient and suffered from tight budgets after the 1929 crash on Wall Street. SIS officers were still expected to have independent incomes. This meant recruiting among the privileged upper class. Churchill's loss of office in the general election of 1929 had deprived him of authority to press for anything better. Desmond Morton of the Industrial Intelligence Centre was shouldered aside by Whitehall. In secret, he planned for closework.”

  Because Major Desmond Morton carried in his heart the bullet that had hit him in the 1914–18 Great War, many wondered how he could still be alive and if he was ready for any work. As secretary of state for war in 1919, Churchill had asked Morton to collate intelligence on Russia. Morton took a cottage in Kent. From there, he could now stride unseen across the fields to Churchill's country house, Chartwell, and deliver intelligence on defense inadequacies. Parliamentary privilege supposedly protected Churchill against charges of giving away secrets. Yet his son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, had to hire lawyers after he was threatened with prosecution for telling Parliament about the same defense weaknesses.

  Vera heard from Schulenburg that he would like to see her in Berlin while he took a break from his Moscow posting. She asked Bill Stephenson if she should go, and later told Mary: “I used to be scared before going in to see your husband, his look is so penetrating.”

  “And now?”

  “It's the wide peripheral vision he had as a fighter pilot.”

  “He was called Machine-Gun Billy,” said Mary. “As a champion boxer in the armed forces, he used breadth of vision to anticipate an opponent by seeming not to face the opponent head on. You have the same style!”

  Bill told Vera to keep the Berlin rendezvous. Germany was still astonishingly open. This was confirmed by aviators who made use of Stringbag's aero-club on flights to Berlin. One pilot had cameras mounted in his private plane. Another was a one-man RAF intelligence service, but without clients among the RAF's top brass. These were bizarre times.5

  While Vera waited to hear more of Schulenburg's plans, she moved into a small cottage in Winchelsea. Her mother was always glad to see Vera, but an invisible screen separated them. Hilda Atkins could not understand her daughter's preoccupations in London, and Vera could not make Hilda “semi-conscious,” in the jargon the Mutual Friends had adopted from the official secret agencies. Hilda Atkins was afraid that her life in Germany during the last war, and her origins as a Russian Jew, might well arouse suspicion if another conflict erupted. Winchelsea had confronted invaders s
ince 1350, when King Edward III set forth from this coastal haven to disperse the Spanish Armada. The townsfolk now ignored upheavals across the Channel. They had turned back wave after wave of invaders, and kept their powder dry, rather than talk about future tactics.

  Vera obeyed an impulse to pray in Winchelsea's seven-hundred-year-old church, dedicated to St. Thomas à Becket, the martyr of Canterbury murdered by barons, who mistook the wishes of their king. Current events cried out for divine intervention, but not in the way suggested by the present archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, chaplain to the nation, whose musings carried weight. He asked if war could be justified. The House of Bishops responded that there were absolutely no grounds for fighting Nazism.

  So Vera prayed in this ancient church named after the martyr. She expected no divine intervention to curb the folly of clerics, but she found a calmness of spirit within herself. She sensed no conflict with her Jewish upbringing, but felt close to the many graveyards of English yeomen who had fought for freedom. One of her favorite poems was Thomas Gray's “Elegy in a Country Churchyard.” A vision of war inspired a pilot, Geoffrey Wellum, to compose in the style of Gray's elegy, “The fire will come… and thou shalt lift thine eyes… to watch a long drawn battle in the skies.”

  The words were prophetic. Soon enough, Winchelsea folk would lift their eyes to watch the Battle of Britain fought in the skies above them.

  In London, the Blackshirts accused Churchill of taking Jewish money to champion the cause of an Israeli state. When Dr. Chaim Weizmann had earlier lost the Zionist movement's presidency, Churchill protested: “I don't believe the Jewish people are so stupid.” The origin of the Balfour Declaration for a Jewish national home was a 1906 meeting between Arthur Balfour and Weizmann, at the time a lecturer on organic chemistry at Manchester University, who convinced Balfour of the need for a Jewish homeland. Now there was a tenfold increase in migration to Palestine's unoccupied deserts. The Mannheim Jewish Study Institute called upon Jews to prepare for terrible trials to come. The British government responded by cutting Jewish immigration to the level of Palestine's “absorptive capacity.”

  Israel Sieff and Simon Marks backed a Fund for German Jewry, and brought Vera together with Victor, 3rd Baron Rothschild. He was two years younger, and she found him handsome and self-effacing. In 1935 he was elected to a prize fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, but was more concerned about the electrical properties of frogs’ eggs. He often dined with King George V, who would boom out, “Ah, Rothschild, don't take any frog's eggs into the bank with you, ha-ha!”6 Victor de Rothschild had his own natural history museum above the financial base in the City of N. M. Rothschild & Sons. He “found no point in moving money from where it is to where it was needed.” The family made him put in time at the bank's subsidiary, the Royal Mint Refinery. There, in another laboratory, he investigated the nature of fertilization in small creatures and searched for clues to the origins of life. His inventive curiosity was to test his courage and powers of concentration when war came. He recounted to Vera the racial slurs from which he had suffered in his schooldays. He recalled the headwaiter at a restaurant asking if he was Jewish and, when he said this was pretty obvious, being asked to leave. He was the youngest ever to receive the Trinity fellowship, and fellow students said he got it because he was “filthy rich” and the college was low on funds and needed Jewish money. These experiences toughened him. He had set out to excel in sports and to challenge much older men in many branches of scientific research. Some of his closest contemporaries at university were later exposed as Soviet spies, but he never considered that their political activities were any of his business. This turned out to be a tragic mistake, but in the decade after he met Vera in 1935, their friendship reinforced her own resolve. He received heartrending letters telling of child victims of Nazi racism, and in a public plea for Jewish refugees he said, “It is difficult for me to believe that I shall ever become the rather carefree and happy scientist I was before all this began.”

  A close relative of Victor was destined to die as an agent. Another future agent, the author Malcolm Muggeridge, wrote of Victor that “somewhere between White's Club and the Ark of the Covenant, between the Old and the New Testament, between the Kremlin and the House of Lords, [Victor] lost his way. This Socialist millionaire, this rabbinical skeptic, this epicurean ascetic, this Wise Man followed the wrong star and found his way to the wrong manger—one complete with chef, central heating and a lift.”

  Vera understood his inner conflicts. By 1936, public opposition to appeasement was slowly rising. The regular intelligence services suffered from a form of snobbery reflected in an old copy of the Naval and Military Record, republished in 1933: “We should view with grave apprehension any attempt to make officers out of men of humble birth.” The original publication was dated June 22, 1910. Stringbag borrowed it to show Vera, because this attitude persisted, whereas modern Germany recruited among the poor, and educated them and trained them hard to become part of a modern war machine.

  Shifts in public opinion led Vernon Bartlett, a popular English writer and commentator, to drop his opposition to defense preparations. He now produced a book, Nazi Germany Explained. He was to become chief of intelligence in psychological warfare. Vera had congratulated him on his about-face, and he invited her to lunch and swamped her with stories about Oxford and Cambridge universities, inhabited by homosexuals driven underground by the law. Bartlett said some learned from this experience to hide their pro-Soviet activities, and these would have dire consequences.

  The “seedy level” of English life at this time was noted by novelist Graham Greene, another future agent. Arthur Calder-Marshall, also a well-known author, wrote that Greene had returned to find an England where the rich Jew was despised by aristocrats; where army majors in hotels ordered up “a pig in a poke” from the brothels. This was a land “inglorious… vicious” and made up of sadists, masochists, incestuous sex fiends, and cowards.

  Such reactions did little to shake the self-satisfaction of those who never saw England from outside. There were elements of farce, apparent to outsiders. The chief of the SIS was known to the public only as C. He directed the secret service, also called C. Each was a state secret, protected by custom and laws that made it impossible to judge how well C the man, or C the organization, performed. Stringbag, temporarily posted to a naval intelligence office, said to Vera: “The general opinion is that SIS reports are unadulterated fiction. Any porter can point out C's residence in Queen Anne's Gate or himself on a morning stroll, maybe to check if Buckingham Palace has fallen down, or maybe taking a turn through St. James's Park to admire the dome of the India Office and the towers of Whitehall, appropriately wrapped in fog.”

  Beverley Nichols, a popular antiwar journalist, protested in his book Cry Havoc! against “Blowing up babies in Baghdad by pressing a button in Birmingham.” He matched the pacifist mood on both sides of the Atlantic. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to accept the U.S. Neutrality Act to pacify New Dealers opposed to intervention in another war.

  Vera learned about such maneuvers when, in 1935, she met for the first time William J. Donovan, an American hero of World War I. On private business as a Wall Street lawyer, he called in at Stephenson's office. Vera was there and heard Donovan say that Roosevelt had to play the political game and, if he failed to retain power, could do nothing about the Nazi menace. FDR got independent intelligence from a New York group of business magnates, who would be perfectly willing to direct a dark and dirty underground war from which orthodox military men would shrink.7

  Like those across the Atlantic, Stephenson looked for unconventional talent. Such businessmen looked for weaknesses in the potential enemy. Swedish iron ore was vital to the German arms industry, for instance, and Bill already had tentative plans to sabotage supplies, for he knew a great deal about explosives, too.

  So did Victor de Rothschild. He studied the use of miniature explosives in examining natural phenomena. Vera c
ould leave messages for him at New Court, off St. Swithin's Lane, where he oversaw the Fund for German Jewry. One wealthy German Jew, Eugen Spier, picked up the bills for FOCUS, a luncheon club at the Hotel Victoria on Northumberland Avenue. It brought together those worried about Hitler even if they were at opposite ends of the political spectrum. One was a noisy member of Parliament, Dr. Hugh Dalton, a radical product of King's College, Cambridge, who loudly mocked his own Labour Party's pacifist stance. Dalton was one of a few who could bridge left- and right-wing tribalism. He knew trade unionists in Europe who could organize anti-Nazi uprisings. He bellowed his rage at Labour's denunciations of “Churchill the Warmonger.”8

  Vera, still needing to fill in the blanks in her knowledge of this England of contradictions, found in her research that Churchill himself had gone through a passionate antiwar phase. In notes made as secretary of state for war, he recorded, after the end of the Great War, that German atrocities were “followed step by step by the desperate and ultimately avenging nations. Every outrage against humanity or international law was repaid by reprisals… The wounded died between the lines; the dead mouldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames. … When all was over, torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.”