Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  From May to June 1940, Gubby's guerrillas had fought as best they could. “Our last battle was covered by all the fighter aircraft that the RAF had to spare—two biplane Gloster Gladiators,” he told Vera after he escaped. She was glad to have him back as an ally. They had been working in the close relationship of a loving brother and sister. He was a forty-four-year-old junior colonel whose Strikers fought a vastly superior enemy by blowing up transport facilities. He brought back Norwegians whose work as SOE agents would later destroy material that German scientists regarded as the means for making an atomic bomb. Gubby had proved primitive methods could undermine the most advanced technology, and Kermit Roosevelt admiringly reported this to FDR.

  Vera marveled at English eccentricity. Alexander Cadogan at the Foreign Office wrote in his diary: “Situation awful… Our [Chiefs of Staff] living in days of the Zulu war.” Yet newspapers still advertised holidays on the south coast. The Evening Star devoted six of its eight pages to horse races. The Daily Mail promoted the Isle of Wight as “peaceful, carefree” until France fell and the “carefree” Isle of Wight requisitioned its holidaymakers’ steamers to rescue Allied armies at Dunkirk. In the week ending June 4, 1940, some 861 ships of all shapes and sizes crossed the English Channel to snatch 224,586 British and 112,546 French troops out of the jaws of the enemy. “I feel happier now that we have no more allies to be polite to and pamper,” said King George VI. News vendors echoed this new sentiment by scribbling on billboards: alone at last!

  The swift improvisation of fishermen, small boats, and amateur sailors for that extraordinary armada appeared to Vera to confirm her faith in the improvisations of ordinary folk for closework. Chamberlain's appeasement-minded government had left France with the impression that Britain would prove perfidious in war. Rodolphe Lemoine, who had played such a key role in the Enigma saga, had angrily disappeared back into France, jumping ashore from a Royal Navy rescue ship when its boyish skipper called him just another French deserter. Vera worried that the German-born Lemoine might give away the Polish code breakers still in France, but he was to turn up in diffi-cult circumstances, still loyal to her.

  In a prison camp in France, Vera's old friend the Earl of Cardigan wrote in his diary that his German captors boasted of driving the British into the sea. He recalled a Punch magazine cartoon from the 1914–18 war: “The Turkish Sultan told the German Kaiser that the British at Gallipoli had been pushed into the sea. Replied the Kaiser: ‘You fool! That's their element!’”

  “A gigantic guerrilla” was proposed by Churchill, “specially trained troops of the hunter class to develop a reign of terror down these [enemy-held] coasts with at first a ‘butcher and bolt’ policy, a vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive against the whole German occupied coastline.”6

  But when France sued for peace, there was a silence in Whitehall that Vera described to Bill Stephenson as “sinister.” He noted, “Powerful Whitehall influences say it's only Churchill's hatred of Hitler stops us making peace with Germany.” To counter this, Stephenson moved to New York to form an organization to reinforce Churchill's reign of terror from that neutral base. Churchill took Lord Halifax's contaminating presence out of Whitehall and parked his “Holy Fox” in Washington as ambassador. Churchill was making the best use of the worst appeasers.

  “Bring in the United States, I don't care how,” Churchill demanded. The short way was to prove SOE's value. On June 18, he broadcast to Americans: “If Hitler wins and we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a New Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science.”

  This was a reference to secret German work on an atomic bomb, using heavy water available only in Norway. The French secret service had brought out an existing stock of 185 kilograms in twenty-six cans. Colonel Louis Rivet, who was in England to run French secret armies, said he needed somewhere to hide the cans. Vera looked for space at Wormwood Scrubs, but the old prison was starting to burst with secret agencies. The only totally secure storage site, said Vera, was beneath the throne.

  She was remembering the cheeky remark “The safest place to keep a secret is under His Majesty's bottom” uttered by a Dr. Whynant of the Uncommon Languages Group at Wormwood Scrubs, who dealt with intercepted correspondence and came from the Ancient Guild of British Museum Curators.

  “What did Dr. Whynant mean?” Vera asked Tony Samuel, the Jewish banker who had met her as a military intelligence corps officer studying the sabotage of Romanian supplies to Germany.

  “Windsor Castle!” he replied.

  Sure enough, Windsor Castle was the repository of the world's entire stock of heavy water, later used by Tube Alloys, the cover name for British nuclear research, shared with the U.S. to produce the first atomic bomb.

  On July 16, 1940, Hitler ordered the invasion of Britain. Dr. Dalton was declared answerable to Parliament for Special Operations Executive. Vera still carried the tin helmet, gas mask, and armband of a volunteer warden while raising “the gigantic guerrilla” in France. Churchill's opponent, Neville Chamberlain, drafted the SOE charter as Lord President of the Council in the War Cabinet. Old Umbrella had wanted peace. German terror bombing made certain he would not capitulate. With tears in his eyes, he gave SOE his blessing, and died soon after.

  16

  The Lips of a Strange Woman

  In an open two-seater 1924 Humber convertible with the coachmaker's plaque implanted in the running boards and a throttle lever on the wooden steering wheel, the bluff multimillionaire Wall Street lawyer William J. Donovan sat beside the pretty young flying officer of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force driving him through the English countryside on his first wartime secret mission. He had been chauffeured around London in sleek limousines. He had called upon King George VI, who stuttered a gracious welcome, had met the dandies who fronted the official secret intelligence services, and had listened to hearty commanders speak of bashing the Hun. He felt more comfortable in this khaki-camouflaged jalopy bouncing along narrow winding lanes during one of the unofficial holes in his official schedule.

  His secret forays were made under skies that had never been so blue, perfect weather for streams of German bombers pulverizing the cities. His pretty young driver said a version of a fighter used in the 1914–18 war was in the aerial battles overhead: the Boulton Paul Defiant. From her description, he wondered if she was also a pilot. She said, “The Defiant's only gun turret is behind the cockpit. You can only attack an enemy bomber after you've already passed the bastard.”

  Donovan was fascinated by Vera Atkins in her trim sky blue uniform and by her underworld of scruffy, baggy-trousered, wild-haired, and unpaid or underpaid amateurs, who fiddled with bits of metal bicycle tubing for guns, faked horse manure to conceal explosives, or wired big radio valves in a colossal decoding machine hidden inside the most hideous of Victorian country mansions. He was getting a different picture from the one painted during splendid dinners in what was left of London's fanciest restaurants. Donovan was more encouraged by this untidy scene than by the stuffed shirts of a crumbling British empire that he detested. And he liked the absence of any bull from his blunt-spoken escort.

  On Sunday, July 14, 1940, William Joseph Donovan, WJD, left New York on the Lisbon Clipper, a Pan-American flying boat bound for the United Kingdom by way of Portugal. President Roosevelt had been waiting until SOE's charter was signed by ex-premier Chamberlain. The show of British unity was important, even if Chamberlain's part in the charter was kept secret from the public.

  Vera had been mining a rich vein of human resources: highly trained airmen escaping from Europe. There were more downed RAF pilots than those still flying. A senior Air Ministry friend described a moment in the cabinet during the Battle of Britain: “The chief of RAF Fighter Command, Hugh Dowding, looked as if he was going to hit Winston. But all he did was hand him a graph. In ten days, Fighter Command would be wiped ou
t.”

  Squadron leader Bill Simpson, shot down over France, became one of Vera's assets. French farmers had wrapped his badly burned body from head to toe in sheets, allowing maggots to eat away dead flesh. Despite horrendous facial scars, missing nose and ears, eyes bulging from the loss of surrounding lids and skin, shriveled hands bent into birdlike claws, he escaped to England, where he found Vera. His wife, unable to bear the sight of him, left. There was no way to hide his appalling injuries, and instead of returning to France as an agent, as he wished, he became a talent-spotter. He found Virginia Hall, who replaced Tyler Kent at the U.S. embassy. She became an SOE legend. Disguised for a time as a news correspondent in Vichy France, she led a guerrilla army, unhampered by Cuthbert, her name for the wooden prosthetic for her missing lower leg.

  Such recruits were law-abiding citizens until a barbaric enemy brought out a taste for mayhem: “Ruse and treachery, the bomb, the dagger, an original and sinister touch which leaves the enemy puzzled.” The words were Churchill's. “There are many kinds of maneuver in war, some only of which take place on the battlefield.”1 On July 8, 1940, he told Lord Beaverbrook: “We have no Continental army which can defeat German military power.” The one sure path to victory was to “set Europe ablaze.”2

  While walking with Elder Wills through Hyde Park, Vera said, “Women are best at such clandestine work.” The two came upon the small brick palace of Kensington, glistening in pale afternoon sunshine through a soft rain. It seemed as if nothing had changed and horse-drawn carriages would come rolling into sight at any moment. Instead, taxicabs were parked along one side of the palace. The black boxlike cabs could turn on a dime in burning streets, and now trailed water pumps. The palace lawns were vegetable allotments. Two little princesses, one the future queen Elizabeth II, were in Brownie and Girl Guide uniforms, peering into the engine of an army truck.

  J. Elder Wills, an RAF veteran of World War I, worked among BBC producers, writers, and filmmakers, and was a scenic artist at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London. He invented spy gadgets; his workshops expanded, some in august locations like the Natural History Museum, others in pubs like the Thatched Barn roadhouse. In 1940 he was with the British Expeditionary Force in France when that country surrendered. Wills escaped through Dunkirk and still limped from his wounds. What Vera called his “cussedness” was indicated in his prewar movies, including Song of Freedom with Paul Robeson. He now staged deadly deceptions. He agreed about the suitability of women for closework.

  “Sex discrimination and class divide this country,” she continued. “It hampers full use of the working classes.”

  He gave her a sideways glance. “Churchill's given the workers a voice in cabinet. But he's never really liked Hugh Dalton.”

  “Why?”

  “Winnie sees him as a socialist who betrayed his upper-class origins.”

  “Winston's changed his mind,” said Vera. “Like he's changed his mind about lady killers.” Her face closed up again.

  “She never came closer to revealing how high she'd climbed in a world run by men,” Elder Wills said later. He never really knew until later who employed his theatrical talents in producing mockups of airfields and military bases to deceive the enemy.

  Whatever Vera might say about Churchill's present tolerance of Hugh Dalton, she knew he was still resented by others. Lord Halifax, while foreign secretary, pretended Dalton did not exist as minister of economic warfare, with the real power to oversee secret operations. Instead, Halifax had dictated hilarious guidelines for hiring spies: “If obliged to recruit local secret agents, His Majesty's representative should consult the following list that defines matters which can be discussed with the authorities of the country concerned… and activities which cannot be discussed officially by a more or less legitimate outfit to produce unusual and respectable weapons, the gentlemen concerned all being in uniform and therefore not to be confused with saboteurs.” Halifax had insisted that the Secret Fund could not cover the costs of “a cloak and dagger outfit.”

  What made Vera a woman “bitter as wormwood” were not these past follies, but the news that Stringbag was lost at sea. She blamed senior intelligence officers for ignoring warnings from a twenty-one-year-old Bletchley analyst, Harry Hinsley, who regularly sent information to the Admiralty's Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) in the Citadel near Trafalgar Square. His disembodied lower-class accents fell upon the deaf ears of pukka naval officers. During the Norwegian campaign, he deduced that German warships were breaking out of the Baltic into the North Sea from listening to enemy wireless instructions that were repeated on other frequencies never before used. The Citadel failed to pass along his conclusions to warships at sea. The German battle cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst ambushed the British aircraft carrier Glorious on the evening of June 8, and quickly sank it. There was not even time to launch its planes.

  Vera, not being listed as next of kin, knew few details until Ian Fleming belatedly broke the news that Stringbag was missing. Hinsley had been ignored “as some snotty-nosed kid basing hunches on broadcasts picked up in a hut in the countryside.” But his rare ability to reach accurate conclusions from scant details was shared by Churchill, who brought Hinsley into his inner circle. The country bumpkin became a senior intelligence guru.

  She received more bad news. Vincent Doblin, the German mathematical genius who joined the French army instead of working on codes, had remained at his Maginot Line post to delay advancing German troops and cover his comrades’ withdrawal. The Jewish refugee who might have helped solve Enigma shot himself with his last bullet rather than risk capture as a disposable Jew.

  Vera began chain-smoking Passing Cloud cigarettes. Stiff shots of Scotch also helped. She faced problems like those confronting Gubby, who had to plan homeland guerrilla resistance to potential invaders. “I had a blank check, but was there money in the bank to meet it?” he said later. “We had perhaps six weeks before German forces could launch a full-scale invasion.”

  Vera, too, had a blank check but little visible cash. Stephenson, who had known Bill Donovan since the 1914–18 war and trusted him despite his wish to see the British Empire dismantled, impressed on her SOE's immediate task: win U.S. covert help. She must show Donovan everything about SOE. But what was there to show? Everything seemed jerry-built, except at the old Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, known as The Shop. It produced a time pencil-fuse and yellow soft plastic that a saboteur could drop on a fire or blast with a shotgun. Nothing would happen unless it was properly detonated. Tommy Davies had snatched platinum worth a fortune from under German noses during the rush out of France, and this generated some funds. In and around Bletchley, university undergraduates were paid a pittance while they sweated over German codes.

  She sensed that these humble measures impressed Donovan more than the Whitehall grandees who tried to “duchess” him while the wine flowed at private dinners. His legal career had taught him the artfulness of con men. Britain was in a mess now as a result of leaders like Lord Halifax, who, as recently as July 1938, had told Hitler's adjutant, Fritz Wiedemann, that the foreign secretary “would like to see the Führer entering London at the side of the King amid the acclamations of the English people.”3

  17

  Sabotage Etcetera Etcetera

  Vera was briefed on SOE's special task by Bill Stephenson between his two secret visits to the United States, the first in March–April 1940, when he was identified as a company director representing the British Ministry of Supply and teamed up again with William J. Donovan, who argued for a coordinated intelligence service during meetings in the Manhattan apartment known as The Room. On his second visit, Stephenson was identified as a British civil servant. His casual Canadian style disarmed those Americans described by the canny Scottish industrialist, Sir Harold Mitchell, as “extremely hostile to Britain.” Mitchell was hurrying home through the United States to become military liaison officer with Polish armed forces in England. All the occupied countries now had governm
ents-in-exile along with their own military missions in London, a drab locale but less smug than Paris.

  Vera had to win over Donovan, also courted by Stewart Menzies, whose confirmation as C, the SIS chief, had been unsuccessfully opposed by Churchill. Stephenson, an outsider and colonial, was looked down upon by Menzies and his class. Vera hoped they would hide their distaste for Donovan, the Irish-Catholic opponent of British imperialism.1

  Vera was disclosing to Donovan the hidden world of SOE, while the SIS and its political supporters argued against SOE plans to foment mass uprisings. Steve Mackenzie of the SIS recalled being warned to “stay clear of Stephenson” during a wartime assignment to the United States. The white man's clandestine methods might inspire black, brown, and yellow imitators in Arabia, Africa, and Asia. This fear was evident when SOE's Sir Douglas Dodds-Parker, who ran secret wartime operations in North Africa, had to abandon a postwar lecture tour in South Africa because the white government at the time was afraid black Africans would adopt SOE methods. Dodds-Parker planned to discuss how SOE's black African agents in Ethiopia had defeated white Italians.2

  Vera memorized Stephenson's thumbnail sketch of Donovan: “Born in Buffalo, N.Y.; destined for priesthood; fought in Mexico with the U.S. cavalry; commanded the 1st Battalion of the 69th Infantry Regiment, the ‘Fighting Irish,’ in the 1914–18 war; given a Congressional Medal of Honor and the nickname Wild Bill; wants America to lead the world, not retreat into isolationism. Roosevelt is sending him on first ‘special intelligence mission’ to measure British resolve.”3

  Donovan's known opposition to FDR's domestic policies made him unlikely to draw the attention of German spies monitoring Pan-Am flights. In any case, Hitler wanted his spies to focus on the Duke of Windsor, dithering in neutral Lisbon over promises to restore him to the throne if he would collaborate. Donovan passed through Lisbon unnoticed, and in London slipped away at intervals from the official agenda. He said nothing about what he was looking for, nor why he was really here. There was an unspoken understanding between him and Vera. He liked her steely beauty, her long lustrous black hair tied in a bun, her dark intelligent eyes peering at him from under her RAF cap. The trim blue uniform advertised an athletic figure. He was amused that she had to drive him in a series of old cars, including the snub-nosed Humber of which she said, “It's as old as I am.” She was thirty-two, but looked younger.