Spymistress

by William Stevenson

The German campaign was over in three weeks. MM-4 groped its way back to the Romanian border. On the Polish side, a guard demanded: “What are you doing in Poland?” Gubby pacified the officer, but said in a bitter aside to Vera: “What are we doing here?”

  The Polish code breakers had no way out except with the mission. Vera had three: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki, and Henryk Zygalski. Jerzy was with his wife, who had been advised along the way to strangle their baby because of German atrocities. She chose to care for the infant and urged Jerzy to go. He would never see his wife or child again. The other two code breakers had been unable to bring their families with them. Their chiefs, Gwido Langer and Maksymilian Ciezki, carried the latest Enigma replicas and bombes, urgently needed in England. They crossed the border, but fell afoul of Romanian soldiers, who insisted on sending them to a refugee camp. Vera got into the camp and told the pair they would have to somehow survive until she could find the means to get them out.

  She took the other code breakers by train to Bucharest, where the British legation chief was asked to provide them with visas and arrange shelter and onward transport. He chose to wait for instructions from London. Vera knew what this meant: SIS obstruction. She found a French diplomat, a secret service officer she had known in Paris. Immediately he booked the Poles on the Simplon-Orient Express to Paris. The three cryptologists were to resume work at a French intelligence base, Château de Vignolles, forty miles northeast of Paris.

  Gubby's mission assembled on the lawns of the British legation in Bucharest just as news broke of the assassination of Romania's prime minister, Armand Calinescu. German propaganda blamed the British legation, saying it had pressured Calinescu to stop the traffic in Jewish refugees, and further claimed that only the Jewish Question stopped the Chamberlain government from accepting a new German peace offer on September 29, 1939, after Warsaw fell. Goebbels, master of the Big Lie, said a British mission arranged the assassination to sabotage any chance of ending the war. Britain had limited its declaration of war to Poland. That war was over.5

  Gubby's men on the legation lawn were suddenly aware of how easily they might be portrayed as the assassins. Most shipped out hastily the next day for Egypt. Gubbins and General Carton de Wiart hid inside the British legation to write their reports and make a case for properly arming the Polish resistance. Vera still had influential friends in Bucharest to effect the release of Langer and Ciezki from the refugee camp without drawing attention to their importance in breaking German codes. After Gubby and Carton de Wiart left Romania on the Simplon-Orient Express as civilians, Vera followed. She was back in London six weeks after the launch of the mission. She told Hugh Dalton that her first experience under fire had taught her invaluable lessons. But at the War Office, MM-4's report was read with skepticism by those who saw the Maginot Line, a “Western Front in concrete” along the Franco-German border, as the guarantee that German armies would never reach the English Channel.

  There was an unusually long delay—nine months—before MM-4 were awarded a niggardly Mention-in-Dispatches. Nine months was how long it would take Churchill to override those in Whitehall to whom Hitler appealed in another, oddly arrogant peace offer on October 6, 1939.

  Hitler knew that although Churchill was back at the Admiralty, he was pitted against powerful figures whose opposition was easily perceived from Berlin. Sir Ernest Benn, a prominent and influential publisher, protested against talk of Churchill becoming prime minister: “I pray that such a catastrophe will be averted.”6 Benn feared a transfer from “the restraint and breeding” of men like Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to warmongers. After all, the war announced by Chamberlain was now over, wasn't it? Major political figures like Lloyd George issued powerful public arguments for British-German peace talks. Churchill became the target of the worst verbal onslaughts from Berlin and from his fellow parliamentarians.

  “Any lessons from Poland,” Vera said to Bill Stephenson, “have been trashed.” Churchill's Mutual Friend in the Foreign Office, Sir Robert (later Lord) Vansittart, was removed as permanent undersecretary of state despite Churchill's protest that this would be represented “as a victory for the pro-Germans in England.” Two months after the fall of Poland, the artist Paul Maze wrote that “the German propaganda spread about is most harmful, especially within Mayfair society.”

  Churchill fought to have his current director of naval intelligence, John Godfrey, replace Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, chief of the SIS, who had died after a long illness. Prime Minister Chamberlain furiously fought this, insisting that Stewart Graham Menzies must become the new SIS chief. Vera asked Stephenson what lay behind this. He said Churchill feared that Menzies, acting in Sinclair's absence, had let the SIS grow slack. Americans, whose clandestine help was vital, were not impressed by “English gentlemen” sharing the goodies among others of the same upper-class origins. Menzies was an old Etonian, a member of the Household Cavalry, and worked in a National Preventive Intelligence Service during the 1914–18 war that focused on the Bolshevik Revolution and the danger of similar uprisings destroying the British Empire. This did not impress anticolonialist Americans, who shared a widespread suspicion that they had been tricked into joining the 1914–18 war by the British secret service.

  Menzies had a shadow deputy, Colonel Claude Marjoribanks Dansey. In the 1914–18 war Dansey was a military attaché in Washington, where he was regarded as a man of the lowest cunning. “He sees Bolshies under the bed,” continued Stephenson. “He shares this obsession with Hankey.” Sir Maurice (later Lord) Hankey was in Chamberlain's current War Cabinet. Two years earlier Hankey, as permanent secretary to the cabinet and the Defence Committee, had “jumped on Churchill for turning over alarming facts about the RAF's utter inferiority.” Hankey had expressed shock “that senior officers in the armed forces are in direct communication with a leading Statesman, Churchill, a critic of the departments under whom these officers serve.” Such officers, Hankey warned, were “subversive” and should suffer the disastrous consequences. Vera might yet be pounced upon as subversive by Stewart Menzies, who as the acting SIS chief was now in secret contact with Hitler. This partly explained Churchill's resolve to replace him. There was a colossal SIS intelligence failure caused by attempts to pacify Hitler, who was encouraged to think Britain would call off the war tomorrow.

  Hitler used tactics that worked in Germany: firing up fears of communists. He said in one speech that pro-German Englishmen saw Bolshevism as the true enemy. His account was surprisingly detailed. He said terrorists had always been associated in London with Bolshevik anarchists. When Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair was appointed secret service chief in 1923, he moved his private office to a small alley off Kensington High Street. To make sure no terrorists would be led there by his highly visible Lancia Landau, he used the car only to make the club rounds in Pall Mall and St. James's Street. A year later, Sinclair had engineered the downfall of the first socialist government. “So much for political objectivity,” said Stephenson.

  Hugh Dalton felt Vera should look into an SIS foul-up that yielded the Nazis so much information. Dalton wanted “terrorist acts against traitors and German leaders, not a military job at all… explosions, chaos and revolution.” This was precisely what the present SIS leaders did not want.7

  He was not yet in a ministerial position to launch such irregular actions. Vera was the ideal person to look into SIS failures. She was “out of sanction,” not beholden to any secret agency. She was back from a dangerous mission without formal Whitehall approval. She knew talented Poles who had escaped and were streaming into Paris to train for guerrilla warfare.

  Churchill's inflexible opposition to the confirmation of Stewart Menzies as SIS chief caused prolonged ferment. It became less puzzling in November 1939 when two key British agents were kidnapped on the Dutch-German border by Germans pretending to represent anti-Nazi generals who wanted to make a deal. Between them, the kidnapped men knew pretty much everything about the SIS. Menzies, convinced that “good” Ger
mans sought British allies against communism, had allowed his two agents to walk into a trap. They had wined, dined, and cultivated Nazi intelligence experts who posed as pro-British army officers. Then Hitler narrowly escaped death from a bomb and, in a fury, ordered the snatching of the SIS agents. It was the end of one game, but the start of another for the Gestapo. One of the kidnapped men was identified by Nazi propaganda as chief of SIS in Europe.

  The end of Poland was the beginning of a so-called Phony War, during which Hitler's next intended victims began to think they were safe.

  12

  KBO: Keep Buggering On

  Vera felt she had failed a country she helped encourage to resist German occupation. She spoke of this with Stringbag's protégé Nigel Fisher, nicknamed the Fish, who was related to the former First Sea Lord, Admiral “Jackie” Fisher, the charismatic genius revered by Churchill as insidious and ruthless in building the navy that won the 1914–18 war. The Fish was a pilot, yet still school-boyish in a way that was comforting. He recalled “talking the nights away with Vera. She was hard on herself and upset by the gulf between Warsaw's agony and London's cool detachment. People said, ‘Don't you know there's a war on?’ to excuse incompetence. But it was a phony war, a false twilight.”

  The visionary Admiral Fisher, anticipating World War I, had created hunter-killer battle cruisers, fast to attack, quick to escape. He fought endless interdepartmental conflicts. In a moment of exasperation, King George V had once said “he should be hung from the yardarm.” Vera felt the equal of an admiral who was a scoundrel to some but whose old brave comradeship braced Churchill for the political battles to come.

  Those battles would have to be fought through a democratic process, the outcome dependent upon Churchill's parliamentary skills. Hitler's authority was based on fear, spread through the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the Main Security Office. Vera saw the RSHA as a personal enemy, with powers to spy on the citizenry, to interrogate, to torture, and to execute extending through the Gestapo, the State Security Police, and the SS. In Prague, Adolf Eichmann drew authority from the RSHA. In Warsaw, the RSHA first liquidated those identified as mentally ill or racially inferior, though it actually was aimed at all those opposing German authority. And yet messengers and mail for London still slipped through this apparatus built on blind fear.

  Here in London, opponents of Chamberlain could freely challenge his government's wrongheaded authority in early 1940, even with the country at war. Germany's film, radio, and the press were mobilized with unprecedented efficiency to serve up propaganda lies. Vera wondered if the future creation of diabolical counterweapons like London Control, with its specialists in sabotage drawn from ordinary folk, would subvert democracy. London Control was now merely fore-shadowed by a central office of information. Winston Churchill, deeply respectful of democratic tradition, could be ruthless in action. “Well,” said the Fish, listening to her reflections, “Churchill's got his toehold in Admiralty.”

  Was Churchill's an adequate toehold from which to fight the appeasers? She had not grown up in the company of Churchill's reputation. She had to piece him together from fragments. In 1934 he was saying, “I'm a ghost, witnessing my own demise.” He kept bailiffs at bay by writing prodigiously. His motto was KBO: Keep Buggering On. His enemies said he was a tired old man at the age of sixty-four. Back at his desk in the Admiralty, though, he launched hunter-killer raids against superior fighting ships that Germany had constructed while England slept.

  Vera could foresee his hunter-killer instincts emerging in close-work. He had always possessed this kind of ferocity. He was shaping it into a vision for Special Operations Executive from his modest base at the Admiralty. In 1928 Churchill had been at the peak of his career as chancellor of the exchequer. Members of Parliament had crowded the House of Commons to applaud his oratory, and heralded him as the next leader of the Conservative Party. A year later the Conservatives were voted out of office. Churchill quarreled with their leaders on issues he felt were important. In 1931 he was shut out when a national government was formed. He kept his seat in Parliament and, during almost a decade of ridicule, devised his own guerrilla tactics. “Attack! Attack! Attack! Never, never, never give in!” he declared. It underpinned the concept of Special Operations Executive, although his authority to launch it was still a long way off.

  The Chamberlain government could do little to stop Churchill from using his position as First Lord of the Admiralty in the War Cabinet to wage irregular war. Churchill seized real executive power within his naval kingdom. He drew upon lessons he had learned as First Lord of the Admiralty from October 1911 to May 1915, when he had been at the same desk where he now sat. Admiral Fisher was then one of his senior advisers. A former assistant to Fisher was Dudley Pound, now Churchill's senior adviser. No wonder Churchill always spoke of “the resumption of World War.”

  Vera learned from the limited guerrilla warfare that Churchill was able to initiate from the Admiralty. He suffused the Rhine, the main river of German trade and life, with a plague of floating mines. He planned to sabotage iron-ore shipments from Norway and Sweden, exploiting Fritz Thyssen, who had turned against Hitler and was uniquely informed as head of the Thyssen industrial empire. Thyssen said the side that won mastery of iron ores and magnetic iron would be the victor. But Churchill's hands were tied, as he said, by “the awful difficulties which our machinery of war-conduct presents to positive action.”

  On December 2, 1939, Vera learned that mobile gas chambers were used to murder patients in Poland's mental hospitals. Underground Jewish youth movements in Warsaw were resisting with homemade bombs. Vera listed their needs. At the very top was money. Some of it already came from Jewish organizations. She anticipated a need for the forgery of huge amounts of foreign currency notes. The moralizers in Whitehall would object to counterfeiting money. She would have to break the law so long as Lord Halifax sat in judgment: Churchill called him the Holy Fox for using his High Anglican Church connections. The Holy Fox had an odd sense of ethics: it was he who had approved the decision to deprive Poland of Hurricane fighter planes because it could not pay the cost of shipping them.

  In December 1939, Vera had visited Gubby in Paris, where he was in touch with the Polish and Czech general staffs that had withdrawn to France. Stanislaw Gano of Polish Intelligence reunited Vera with Countess Krystyna Skarbek. Krystyna had no idea of the fate of her Jewish mother, Stephanie Goldfeder. She was planning to help with escape lines from Poland to Hungary, and gather arms and explosives for an expanding Polish underground.

  Vera also reconnected with Rodolphe Lemoine, the French secret service officer code-named Rex, who gave her disturbing news. The key Polish code breakers Gwido Langer and Maksymilian Ciezki were still held in the Romanian refugee camp. The French needed them, but if France were to meet the same fate as Poland, some way must be found to stop these Poles from falling into German hands. Lemoine had a transcript from a German propaganda broadcast on Saturday, November 18, 1939, alleging that a Max Rosenberg had taken part in a British-Zionist conspiracy to assassinate the Romanian prime minister. Vera recalled the scene on the British legation lawn. Perhaps the Germans had merely stumbled across someone called Rosenberg? Her father was dead. That same day, nine Czech students had been shot for anti-German activities. “Prague is paralyzed, silent with awe,” Gobbels boasted. The so-called conspiracy in Romania was, she decided, an expression of Nazi fear of popular uprisings. The Rosenberg name had been pulled out of a hat to justify brutality by the Iron Guard. As Vera Atkins, she had surely escaped the attention of German security services.

  Gubby planned to give her some protection as an officer in the RAF. If she fell into German hands, she could claim prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Convention. On paper, she worked for an interservice Training Development Centre in the Royal Marine barracks at Portsmouth, which was to raise paramilitary units for Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was planning combined operations. His outfit fabricated documents, and co
uld wipe out any indication of her origins.

  Vera gave Dalton the news that Langer and Ciezki were still virtual prisoners in the Romanian refugee camp. When Churchill was told, he demanded that Chamberlain make Romania account for its “odious behavior” in maltreating those who escaped Nazi brutality. Surprisingly, the demand was relayed. The code breakers were released.

  Behind the government's back, Churchill created the new post of Personal Adviser to the First Lord in Scientific Matters, with “a place beside Churchill's Private Office.” The adviser was Professor Frederick Lindemann, and the place—a chair beside Churchill's desk—was called the Statistical Office.1

  Churchill impishly sparked the imaginations of those who would later have to deceive a more vicious enemy than the chiefs of staff. He told Prime Minister Chamberlain that the chiefs were “an obstacle to imaginative debate. The War Cabinet should meet without them when there are matters beyond their competence to be discussed.”2 Lieutenant Colonel Ian Jacob, a War Cabinet observer, wrote that “Winston's mind was so immensely active, he could only be prime minister.”3

  Churchill told Parliament stirring tales of war at sea while Chamberlain sulked. Even followers of Old Umbrella began to whisper, “We have now found our leader.” President Roosevelt started a secret correspondence with Churchill, astonishing between the chief of state of a neutral power and an unrecognized foreign leader. Their exchanges were signed “Naval Person” for Churchill and “POTUS” for President of the United States.4

  Vera had been talent-spotting in Paris in the harsh winter of 1939–40. There was a certain delicacy about relations with the French, who must not get the idea that exiled Polish and Czech military chiefs might be preparing a hurried transfer to England. Vera was a useful foil. Her appearance at the Hotel Régina, where the Polish general staff was based, gave a certain flavor to clandestine meetings with the intelligence chief, Stanislaw Gano. The French saw her as his mistress. Gano needed speedier ways to communicate with Poland's underground army. Vera was asked to bring in mobile wireless gear from London. They needed automatic weapons and transport. The first request, for eight sets of secret wireless equipment, was rejected by the SIS, which controlled all secret communications, on the grounds that nothing was available. As for automatics, the British army had never found much use for them. The Poles could have .38 revolvers, but these only fired rimmed ammunition, which was not available in Central Europe. Besides, the revolvers were too clumsy for skullduggery. Transport was also exclusively in the hands of the SIS, and although Gubby was told, “We can send in wagonsful, dear chap, wagonsful,” none appeared.