Donovan saw a countryside enjoying rare sunny weather. Outnumbered RAF fighters scrawled chalk-white contrails across the bluest skies. Some peculiar planes were sent up against the enemy. When Vera talked about them, her understated humor reminded him of others who had faced death with stylish buffoonery. When comrades were lost, RAF aviators gathered around the piano, quaffed beer, and sang this lament:
So lift up your glasses steady,
Let's sing in this vale full of woe,
Let's drink to the dead already,
And here's to the next one to go.
He surmised that Vera's polite avoidance of personal matters concealed a burning rage. The nation was not fully mobilized. There were not enough uniforms nor guns to go round. Yet the land was as calm on the surface as when Drake played bowls while waiting for the Spanish Armada. Flying Officer Atkins put on a happy face at the edge of the precipice. Not knowing her origins, Donovan supposed the English were not as uptight as he thought.
Vera treated him as part of what Stephenson called “a conspiracy of patriots” in Astor's Room, named after Vincent Astor, a more likely choice for this secret liaison because of his English family connections. After the original deliberations in 1927 the small apartment on East 62nd Street became The Room. Intelligence was collected and compared among well-to-do adventurers: banker Winthrop Aldrich; David K. E. Bruce, later to liaise with SOE; publisher Nelson Doubleday; and Astor himself, who knew how to trace foreign plotters through bank accounts. “Every spy needs money,” he told FDR at his 1933 presidential inauguration. By mid-1940, FDR was astonishing intimates like his treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, with proposals for blowing up oil wells and blockading Europe by sea, “leaving a small channel open directly to England.” Such schemes, Morgenthau recorded in his diary, “left me with my breath taken away.”4
Roosevelt tacitly approved Stephenson's creation of a coordinated intelligence agency in New York, but wanted his own man to scrutinize SOE, not some notorious Anglophile. Donovan was a critic of the Imperial Preference that hampered U.S. trade with British colonies. FDR's political caution was not always understood. “U.S. aid is not possible,” Churchill wrote despondently the previous Christmas Day. “Roosevelt is our best friend, but I suppose he wants to be reelected and U.S. isolationism is the winning ticket.” FDR assigned a man thought to be anti-British “to discover if we were worth supporting,” recalled Ian Fleming's nominal spy chief, Admiral John Godfrey, in his memoirs. America First isolationists would not suspect Donovan of favoring the British.
Donovan suspected that SOE would take years to be up and running properly, especially in the face of Whitehall opposition. “Delay is the last weapon in the bureaucratic armory,” he observed from his own experience in interdepartmental wars. Churchill was half American. Perhaps this accounted for the miracles of improvisation revealed by Vera. She took initiatives that exceeded her apparently low-level authority. Donovan wondered if the name Vera Atkins was a cover, it was so commonplace.
She drove him along a route taken months earlier by three charabancs loaded with Captain Ridley's Hunting Party, which was the cover for the Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS). The name struck Donovan as hilarious. The route went by way of Marble Arch and some forty-seven miles northward along the old Roman road known as Watling Street, through the villages of Great and Little Brickhill, turning left at Fenny Stratford, then right onto Bletchley Road. He had been here before. Now she wanted him to catch the authentic flavor of the country's largest clandestine operation, in which participants were ordinary folk with no pretensions. She paused for a pub lunch at the Shoulder of Mutton in Old Bletchley and was amused by his reaction to young men in patched tweed jackets and girls who mostly looked just young enough to attend finishing schools. She drove on, beyond an extraordinary muddle of stables and huts where code breakers worked. Donovan was unprepared for off-duty youths in gray flannel trousers who played cricket beside a muddy lake that was overlooked by the mansion called BP for Bletchley Park. BP was strategically located at the intersection of railways running north, south, east, and west, and was easily accessible by train for its Oxford and Cambridge “boffins,” many of them long-haired and gaunt, who shambled through BP's barn doors. Old buildings had been converted and muddy lanes paved over by a Mr. Faulkner who turned up in full foxhunting gear on his way to ride with the Whaddon Chase Hunt. Mr. Faulkner had been instructed to take to the grave the secrets he knew. He was developing a priceless property: its core would become known as ULTRA.
Donovan was entrusted with an overview of work that revolved more and more around Enigma. It was clear that U.S. industrial capacity was needed. Even machines as elementary as teletypes, which shift increasingly heavy loads of text at high speed between outlying signal stations and analysts, were unobtainable in sufficient quantity. For starters, GCCS and a network of secret departments required four seven-line and two twelve-line Hellschreiber machines from America. The threat to shipping increased or decreased according to how speedily Bletchley deciphered orders to U-boats. On April 26, 1940, for instance, a German trawler had been targeted so that up-to-date Enigma documents could be seized. A prolonged period in which U-boat signals were not read could be disastrous. U-boats were built and launched faster than the British could sink them. U-boat torpedoes caused a near-fatal drop in supplies to the United Kingdom.
Vera showed Donovan the contrast to the extravagances of his own country, which was far more advanced in the efficient management of production lines. BPers, cloaked in wooden sheds by heavy blackout curtains, made their calculations with pencil stubs and stumbled around in apparent disorder. Ian Fleming devised a scheme to capture a German rescue boat with another naval Enigma on board. A German bomber, gently forced down onto an English field, was restored for flight with a crew of British closework experts disguised in the gear of captured German fliers. The commandos were to crash it in the English Channel. When a German air-sea rescue boat arrived, the operatives were to board it, remove everything to do with the latest Enigma, kill the German rescuers, and make sure Berlin did not detect a ruse. Ian's code name for this was Ruthless. Vera feared even someone nicknamed Wild Bill might see Ruthless as the brainstorm of a crackpot. She redirected Donovan away from Ian Fleming to the less flamboyant Colin McVean Gubbins.
Gubby coolly answered questions about the MM-4 mission in Poland, knowing Donovan might be asked to carry out work abroad for SOE, under cover of U.S. neutrality. Gubby joked that he had learned from Donovan's Irish cousins how to wage guerrilla warfare. This neutrality shrank in significance after Hitler's Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan. Americans were inclined to see the pact as a bulwark against communism. Gubby was happy to be assured that Donovan felt it foreshadowed a global war against the Allies.
Vera had mesmeric powers at her disposal. They were unnecessary in the case of Donovan. The day before his departure, Cadogan, now Churchill's chief adviser, coolly noted, “Quite a good air battle over Dover. C has news that invasion will come. Hope so.”
This defiant spirit reinforced Donovan's endorsement of collaboration with SOE when he joined President Roosevelt in the New England countryside on August 10, 1940. He had flown back to New York in a camouflaged British Sunderland flying boat. SOE seemed a model of future coordination for the U.S. navy and the U.S. army, which absurdly hugged their own secrets and took turns—the navy one day, the army the next—submitting decrypts of intercepted signals. Churchill had decreed, “All Secret Service reports about affairs in France or other captive countries are to be shown to Major [Desmond] Morton. [He] is to see everything and submit authentic documents for me in their original form.”5
Donovan discussed with FDR the inclusion of open-code messages to agents in regular BBC transmissions. Vera had suggested a similar use of FBI shortwave stations and commercial transmitters. For example, the Christian Science radio station WRUL broadcast as far away as the Middle East and the Balkans, regions where Allied agents might soon be nee
ded. Hyphenated Americans born in Europe, with language and other skills, could train in SOE methods on the U.S.-Canada border, at a base to which recruits would travel unhindered from the neutral United States into wartime Canada. FDR quietly approved of these and other proposals, provided they caused him no political embarrassments.
During the last week of Donovan's British tour, “Sabotage Etcetera Etcetera” described the agenda of a War Cabinet attempt to get rid of Hugh Dalton as economic warfare minister. Vera had avoided any mention to Donovan of this maneuver to bring SOE under the influence of the Well-Bred Horse Brigade: he might have lost faith in SOE's future. Even Cadogan was infuriated by the game playing. “This is sloppy,” his diary noted. “We want to get someone to take a grip on Sabotage &c. and pull it into shape.”
Dalton, nicknamed Doctor Dynamo for his wildly energetic resolve to arm European workers for mass uprisings, rekindled fears of “Bolshie revolutions.” He wanted Vera to “take a grip” on sabotage and other imaginative ways of creating mayhem. She did not have to advertise her position in the hierarchy with epaulets of high rank and impressive titles. She was not required to consult Churchill and stride through the corridors of power, as did many who wished to create an illusion of their own importance. In handling Donovan, she succeeded through quiet force of personality in pulling things into shape.
18
A Year Alone
Only Vera could give Donovan an overview of SOE's rapid but seemingly chaotic multicellular growth by the time he returned to London in December 1940. He knew more about her: that she favored brand names in cigarettes and booze, that her aura of a well-brought-up English gentlewoman did not mean she came from a distinguished family nest, that she could escape through hostile borders, that she charmed foreign intelligence chiefs, that she had shot her way out of a pro-Nazi Romanian border trap, that she was compiling a register of potential agents, each of whom she personally vetted even after recruiters questioned them.
“No woman in the history of espionage has exercised such power,” Stephenson recalled telling Donovan before they flew together from New York into England's dismal Christmas season. It was the middle of what was later called the Year Alone by the islanders, who felt isolated by the enemy. Stephenson, busy with operational plans to undermine the enemy in the Western Hemisphere, was also worried by Britain's detention of enemy aliens. It would be a disaster if Vera were scooped up along with Jewish refugees, to be shipped to detention camps in Canada. Even if SOE spoke to the right people, it still had powerful enemies at home.
“Document her as your permanent secretary,” joked Ian Fleming.
Stephenson wondered later if this marked the moment when Fleming dreamed up James Bond and a secretary named Moneypenny. Bond's alias, 007, was used by British intelligence to denote Germany's diplomatic code in the 1914–18 war.
“Vera kept a lowly position, and avoided the attention of officials rounding up foreigners,” Mary Stephenson recalled. Mary had moved to New York by now and was missed by Vera, whose letters were hand-carried by recruits sent to work for Bill, whose cable address was now Intrepid.
Donovan had submitted to Roosevelt a paper titled “The Way the British Government Gathers Intelligence.” FDR, safely reelected for a third term, approved of Donovan's unofficial return to inspect SOE's progress.
Vera had widened SOE's scope. Free from spit and polish, scientists and skilled workers beavered away in hurriedly converted shacks, barnyards, stables, country houses, and churches. Assets called each other “chums” and improvised sleeve guns, exploding rats and cow dung, decoy footprints, and false identity cards. Estates like Beaulieu, the family home of Lord Montagu, became bases for training in field-work. SOE, said Donovan, stood for Stately ’Omes of England.
Donovan was fifty-seven and heavily built. Stephenson, forty-four, still looked like the bantamweight boxer he once was. Their support of Vera angered SOE's enemies in Whitehall. The Air Ministry had already refused to “provide planes for assassins.” Vera had to point out that agents parachuted behind the lines to organize resistance armies and not to eliminate Nazi leaders.
Vera could now show Donovan a spreading network of secret bases where would-be agents underwent rugged physical training. She took him to the Scottish estate of Sir Harold Mitchell, whose family castle hosted the Polish president in exile, Wladyslaw Rackiewicz, and General Wladyslaw Sikorski, whose soldiers trained there for subversive operations in German-occupied Poland. Mitchell, now in the armed forces, owned coal mines, ships, and railways. One railway conveniently ran through the training grounds.
Donovan watched a nail-biting scene. Tied to the railway tracks was a blindfolded girl, Rolande Colas, who later would be memorialized by U.S. Special Forces at Fort Bragg. She was back from a brief mission in France and was taking special training to deal with dangers she understood firsthand, but for which few trainee agents were fully prepared.
For this exercise, she was told to guard a piece of information with her life. She was told a train would thunder through within five minutes. She still had time to confess. Vera, playing her conducting officer, said to the training sergeant, within the girl's hearing, “Switch the points, Sarge. I hear the train coming!”
“Yes, ma'am. Pass me the lever.”
“I gave it to you!”
“You've got it, ma'am!”
“Oh shit! Where is it?”
The noise of the train reverberated. Vera shouted, “Cut the girl free!”
“Too late, ma'am. Jump clear!”
Rolande stayed silent. The train passed on the other track. Donovan had not been let in on the ruse. “If this one becomes known to recruits,” Vera said briskly to a somewhat shaken Donovan, “some new level of sadistic testing will have to be invented.”
Donovan met with Gubbins, who was preparing for British guerrilla warfare against possible German occupiers while “encouraging and enabling the peoples of the occupied countries to harass the German war effort by sabotage, subversion, and other methods.” British defense units, short of everything, were teaching civilians to fight behind the lines at home and abroad. SOE was to deliver personnel and ordinance to occupied territories. Agents had to be parachuted “blind” until reception committees were organized by local resistance groups: there were no underground elements to receive the agent on the dropping ground, no household known to be ready to give shelter, conceal kit, and arrange onward passage.
Rolande Colas, on her first mission, brought the communist organizer Henri Tanguy, “Colonel Rol,” into contact with Vera. “Communist networks grew in Europe after Stalin set up the Comintern,” Rolande explained. “The best are in France. They're trained in sabotage. It's more efficient than assassination. And covert action is more humane than mass bombing, don't you think?”
Such an ethical question already bothered Ian Fleming's brother, Peter, who was back in Scotland after Norway's collapse. He fostered what he called “a Shetland bus service,” shuttling agents between Norway and the islands of Shetland. Vera said a saboteur wreaked more havoc with a single cunningly placed pencil-bomb in a factory than a fleet of bombers.
“What about innocent civilians killed in reprisals?” asked Peter.
“Their numbers won't ever come near the losses of our bomber crews or the masses of civilians killed by aerial bombs,” she replied.
She was thinking far ahead. Gubbins had to tackle the immediate task of building from scratch an underground army to torment any German invaders of Britain. “We must raise very small units that will melt away after a battle,” he told his old chief, General Sir Edmund Ironside, now commander in chief of Home Forces. “We need an overall title, uninteresting so as not to catch attention, but necessary when filling out forms to get supplies.” Getting supplies from the bureaucracy was like squeezing blood from a stone, so Gubby visited police stations to collect weapons taken out of private hands, as required under war emergency powers. He found that other such weapons had been tossed into village
duck ponds or dumped in the sea. An interim title was found that impressed the police but meant nothing to the listening enemy: Auxiliary Units.
Peter Fleming described their hideouts in cellars, woodlands, farms, and badger holes as “like the Lost Boys’ subterranean home in the second act of Peter Pan.” In charge of auxiliaries was an officer from the Sixth Rajputana Rifles of India. Veterans were hauled out of retirement and blossomed as instructors and inventors of devices that would fool the enemy. Small units had to communicate without wireless sets and telephones, so “bunny runs” were reamed out between two-man underground posts. Messages in gutted golf balls were rolled through these artificial rabbit channels. Pitchforks and shotguns were shared out among elderly town clerks, lords of the manor, poachers, retired chief constables, and anyone else able to stand on two legs and swear without blushing an oath under the Official Secrets Act that he or she had a clean record.
Laurence Grand put aside his furled umbrella and the daily carnation in his buttonhole and, without visible authority, set up civilian stay-behind teams. He improvised Station XII at Aston House in Hertfordshire, an hour's drive north of London, Station IX at the Fryth Private Hotel in Welwyn Garden City, Station XVII near Hertford, and a decidedly ungodly hit-and-run unit at the Old Rectory in Hertingfordbury. Stations were numbered out of sequence to deceive the enemy. From America came pistols and ammunition. Friends there had asked what would help. Anything, replied Gubby, that goes bang.
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