Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  “We had heard of the conference beforehand,” Churchill told Parliament, “and, although not invited to join in the discussion, did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings.”

  Ambassador von der Schulenburg's letters foreshadowed the Molotov-Hitler meeting. Moscow had accused Germany of violating the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Ribbentrop sent Schulenburg a telegram to hand to Stalin. It proposed to divide the world between Germany, Japan, Italy, and the Soviet Union. Schulenburg waited four days before giving it to Molotov, not Stalin. The ambassador shirked facing Stalin's wrath over Hitler's evasions.

  When Molotov went to Berlin to ask when Germany would invade, Hitler said he was waiting for the weather in the English Channel to improve. The Soviet commissar said weather in winter never improved. What were the Nazi leader's real intentions? There was a blistering row. Then Hitler switched moods, painted the British Empire as a worldwide estate in bankruptcy, and purred, “Those who would share the plunder must not quarrel.” With British bombs ringing in his ears, Molotov said the empire was evidently not so easily carved up.

  Vera's sources claimed that Hitler wanted Romania before Stalin exploited it as a base for subversion throughout the Balkans. One expert observer, now in London, Charles “Dick” Ellis, met her at a rendezvous on the little bridge in St. James's Park. He remembered telling her that Romania was lost. Hitler had dispatched a military mission to Bucharest. “To the world their tasks will be to guide friendly Roman-ian relations,” Hitler told his High Command. “The real tasks will be to protect the oil and protect the southern flank in the coming war with Russia.”

  King Carol abdicated and moved to Switzerland. Vera thought it useful to talk again with him. She had the excuse of visiting her acquaintance in Lausanne, the widowed mother of young King Ananda of Siam, now Thailand. Ellis advised caution. “The Swiss intelligence service is the best. It needs to be, for a small country bounded by hostile forces. It's a means for us to meet friendly Germans on neutral ground.”

  Also in November 1940, Gubbins was formally installed at Baker Street. On the twenty-fifth came the first official SOE directive: “to undermine the strength of spirit of the enemy forces, especially those in the Occupied territories.” This was one in the eye for the SIS, whose loss of networks had prompted Churchill's anguished cry “I'm cut off from all intelligence out of Europe.”2

  Vera obtained Hitler's directive for Operation Barbarossa, dated December 18, 1940, “to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign before the end of the war against England.” One version came through her U.S. consulate friend in Berlin, the former Associated Press correspondent William Russell. This was repeated by the U.S. commercial counselor, Sam Woods, who regularly met informants in a Berlin moviehouse. Woods had been in Rome when Mussolini boasted that his mighty navy made the Mediterranean “an Italian lake.” British ships would be expelled from the sea lanes to vital Mideast bases.

  On the day Churchill honored Chamberlain's memory, twenty Swordfish biplanes crippled Mussolini's battle fleet at its Taranto base. Italian warships were sheltered in the shallow Taranto anchorage, but Swordfish torpedoes ran near the surface, guided by wooden fins jury-rigged by ship's carpenters on the carrier Illustrious. This had never been done before. Vera taught SOE trainees the lesson: “Timing, surprise, imagination, and audacity can undermine a more powerful enemy.”

  The Japanese embassy in Berlin dispatched naval experts to study the operation. Six weeks later, U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew in Tokyo reported rumors of plans for a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

  If the Japanese learned from Taranto, so did Vera. The Ruthless plan to capture an Enigma machine had been delayed by lack of independent means of communication. The Swordfish raiders had kept radio silence, but air gunners trailed long wire aerials for telegraphing in Morse code. SOE had no signals system independent of the SIS or the Diplomatic Wireless Service, which retained control of wireless communications. Vera asked Fleming, planner of Ruthless, for help. He found her some coils of aerials used by the navy's ancient Walrus amphibians. Vera prepared her own wireless operators to use such long aerials.

  In that dark November, Vera learned of other simple ways to overcome a lack of sophisticated gear. Boy Scouts, and those with special skills who were called King's Scouts, bicycled messages when bombs cut telephone lines. Wearing her air-raid warden's armband, she asked one biker why dummies of Guy Fawkes were still pushed through the streets, just as before the war.

  “There are three words you need to know about Guy,” was the cryptic response. “Ask old man Marks at 84 Charing Cross Road.”

  Vera did not find old man Marks but his young son, Leo.

  “Ah, yes,” said Leo. “Gunpowder, treason, and plot.”

  “But why push Guy around in the middle of the blitz and bombs?”

  “Guy Fawkes reminds us that Hitler can blow up Parliament, betray it, plot against it, but we'll hang, draw, and quarter him for it, just like we did Mister Fawkes,” said Leo, the precocious young rebel.

  Jews in France were already being registered and warned they would pay for acts of terror. Vera's agents must be invisible, like the paper-stuffed dummies that were part of the London scene. Her operatives must perform in separate cells, in touch only through couriers who disappeared into the scenery. Girls on bicycles. Farmworkers trudging between hedgerows. Home base would have wireless operators in the field, equipped with the kind of aerials trailed behind the outdated Swordfish and Walrus.

  Leo Marks's first encounter with Vera preceded his entry into SOE. As chief cryptographer, he dabbled in psychology and wrote one movie script so grim that it was banned by censors. He would ask each girl who wanted to work on codes, “Do you do crosswords?” If they did, they were in. Leo's explanations came later. He was the Jewish genius who invented a safer option to SOE's old coding system. He produced one-time coding pads of finest silk, inserted in the lining of an agent's clothes. Random numbers were printed on the silk; each line of numbers was used for coding one message only, and was then cut off. If the Gestapo closed in, the silk vanished at the touch of a match. His silks gave an agent the chance to live a little longer, rather than swallow a cyanide pill to cheat the torturers. Later, Vera said that the agents worked “between silk and cyanide.”3

  A recurring nightmare haunted Vera during this winter of 1940–41. It reenacted a scene observed by her father, Max Rosenberg: Villagers in a graveyard at midnight, digging up a body. A pitchfork driven through the corpse. The heart removed. Garlic spread over the mutilated corpse before it was laid back in its grave. The heart carried on the pitchfork to a crossroads, where it was burned, the ashes dissolved in water, the solution drunk by children and parents. The villagers, thinking they were chased by a vampire that drank their blood after rising nightly from the grave, had followed a ritual that inspired the 1897 classic Dracula by Bram Stoker, a resurrection of the terrifying legends of Transylvania. Such superstitions were being spread again through Europe by Nazi propaganda against the Jews.

  Her nightmare left Vera feeling isolated. Within her London circle, nobody had her uncommon insight into the Nazi mind. She had watched Count von der Schulenburg in Bucharest awakening ever so slowly to Berlin's stealthy corrosion. Now she watched Occupied France in a similar stupor. A colonial-style administration was run from Paris by the German military commander. His regional commanders negotiated with local officials. Deals were made, as in prewar Berlin, to humbug honest folk. Mimicking Hitler's early appeal for national resurgence, the authority of the delegate-general of the French government in the Occupied Territories was invoked. France would rise again through work, family, and fatherland. Vera knew people would rebel against the hocus-pocus. But informers would betray resisters. Small businessmen would rat on rivals. Article 19 of the German-French armistice, known as the surrender-on-demand clause, meant in reality that rich Jews would be robbed by those who denounced them.

  A German ordinance required a census of Jews. At Tours, the Feldkom
mandant made Jews carry identity cards stamped “Juif.” At Saint-Nazaire, René Ross, who had won medals for outstanding bravery in the 1914–18 war and again in 1939–40, was listed among Jewish hostages to be killed in reprisals. Forgotten was the French Revolution, which had removed the stigma of being called a Jew. Nazis and their sympathizers revived it—slowly at first, but Vera knew the pace would quicken. She would need to watch for little local treacheries that could destroy an SOE network.

  To ease the tension that gripped agents on the night they left for hostile territory, she never permitted anyone to see on her face or in her manner anything other than the understated English way she had cultivated of handling threats with humor. She would joke with Moonlight Squadron pilots who had to creep at shallow levels across hostile territory, “Mother always told me to fly low and slow.”

  20

  “Specially Employed and Not Paid from Army Funds”

  The winter's terror bombing of London for seventy-six consecutive nights in 1940–41 began a twelve-month stretch that ended when Hitler declared war on the United States in December, thinking that Japan had dealt a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor. Instead, Americans mobilized. During the Year Alone, Vera fought for scraps from the bare table of the chiefs of staff: SOE was starved for aircraft and ships until Bill Donovan's men in London, like David Bruce, were empowered openly to lend a hand. Bruce recalled: “Ill-equipped agents gave evidence of solitary courage that Vera found hard to describe except in the words of the French writer François, duc de La Rochefoucauld, ‘Perfect courage is to do without witnesses what one would be capable of doing with the world looking on.’”

  One agent, Virginia Hall, preferred to quote Tweedledum: “I'm very brave generally… only today I happen to have a headache.”

  Virginia worked undercover first as the New York Post correspondent in Vichy France. She cabled her reports like any neutral journalist. After SOE recruited her, she followed the same procedure. There was safety in this. Cable companies did not hand out Press Collect cards to just anyone. Counterespionage watchdogs expected that an agent pretending to be a journalist would have reverse-charge cables rejected at the other end. She relied on legwork and the wooden prosthetic that she called Cuthbert. Her activities became increasingly complex, in step with Vera's needs.

  Virginia's prewar life might have aroused German suspicion. After studies at European universities and an intensive French-language course at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., she worked in Poland with the U.S. diplomatic service. A shooting accident in Turkey led to her acquisition of Cuthbert. She traveled through Spain to England and became a coding clerk in the military section of the U.S. embassy, where David Bruce passed her on to SOE. When Paris fell, Virginia was driving ambulances. She escaped to London, and returned after a defeated France was divided. Germans occupied the larger Atlantic-coast and northern zone, nominally governed from Vichy, whose militia did much of the Gestapo's dirty work in the unoccupied zone. Charles de Gaulle, an obscure junior French general, sounded a call to arms from London four days before the armistice, in defiance of what he called “this French state government run from Vichy.”

  Virginia reported, “The French are stunned by the nightmare of occupation. Acts of resistance begin as small pinpricks. Ninety percent of the population work the land, and a peasant revolution spreads.” She later sheltered escaping Allied servicemen, some of whom she called her “carrier pigeons.” They transported coded reports that could not be cabled. “Not,” she said later, “real pigeons sent into France by the SIS, whose agents were supposed to tie secret messages to the pigeons’ legs and send them home.”

  In February 1941 Vera directed Virginia to Squadron Leader Bill Simpson, who was still undergoing plastic surgery, his hands so badly damaged that he was never again able to write except with a pencil jammed between a mutilated thumb and the stump of the adjoining finger. But, in compensation, “I developed a precise memory!” he told me later. He trained others in memory development. “Not needed by Virginia,” he said. “She already had a photographic memory.”

  On August 23, 1941, armed with an American passport, she took a commercial London-Lisbon flight and then a train to Barcelona. In Spain she acquired a new U.S. passport and accreditation to cover Vichy government affairs. By September 4 she was filing “think pieces” full of valuable insights. She described Vichy as “an infinitesimally small place to accommodate the government of France and the French Empire.”

  Virginia found that her press reports could deal with small details of everyday life, which were useful for Vera, without alarming Vichy's censors. Much could be read between the lines by SOE. She wrote seemingly harmless observations, conveying vital information: “There are no taxis at the station, only half a dozen buses and a few one-horse shays. I took a bus using gazogene, charcoal instead of gas.” She contacted French farmers who had helped Bill Simpson. Some, he had told her, were abreast of Nazi activities. “Abreast is literally true in the case of a brothel keeper and her tarts,” she joked later in a coded letter to Vera. She analyzed small-town newspapers that covered local affairs in revealing detail. In November 1941 she relayed an ominous item: “Dutch farmers are being resettled in Poland.”

  Daily broadcasts from Christian Science Radio on WRUL short-wave from Boston helped her make deductions. She cultivated Vichy officials identified as anti-German in U.S. shortwave broadcasts controlled by the FBI. Its director, J. Edgar Hoover, was collaborating with Stephenson's secret agency based in New York, and proposed the title by which it became known: British Security Coordination, BSC.

  So long as America remained neutral, she had access to U.S. consular offices with code rooms through which she could communicate sensitive material. Later Bill Donovan arranged further cover for her as a Chicago Times correspondent, paid through the New York branch of the Bank of London–South America, and asked for her transfer to neutral Spain, where she helped Allied escapees deal with local police. After four months, Virginia protested that life in Spain was too boring and returned to France.

  In the early days Virginia had about the same freedom of movement as Sam Woods, the Texan in Berlin. She had journalistic cover; he used his consular position to gather intelligence. Unlike Virginia, who concealed Cuthbert with long athletic strides during overland journeys, he was not handicapped. She found the French inventor of special oil burners used on the great ocean liner Normandie; he had been under pressure to work for German shipbuilders, escaped, and volunteered his expertise to the British navy.

  Virginia had an apartment in Lyons, a safe haven on an escape line along which Allied servicemen who burrowed their way out of prison camps traveled to neutral territories. One downed pilot, Hartley Watlington, later said, “In her kitchen, you could pretty well count on meeting most of your friends passing along the escape route.” He recalled her advice: “Say something loud in a bistro, and nobody pays heed. Whisper and a dozen ears tune in.”

  A Gestapo chief famously said, “I'd give anything to get my hands on that Canadian bitch!” By then she was no longer passing for a foreign correspondent, and had to operate underground among resisters who thought she was French-Canadian. In October 1941 eleven agents were caught in Marseilles, one of her regions. This was a serious blow to resistance networks in southern France. Virginia built up her own fighting units, and called in other British agents, including Peter Churchill.

  Wireless transmitters might lead to the entrapment of an entire network, but Virginia conceded the need for them as SOE expanded. Vera needed SOE signal masters to sort out messages from operators in the field. The Germans were refining methods of tracking secret transmitters in France, whose huge industrial capacity was harnessed to the German military machine and needed protection against saboteurs.

  Vera missed Bill Stephenson's presence in London, although he came back on short, mysterious visits. He was a priceless source of ideas. After his own escape as a war prisoner in 1918, he had plunged into a go
lden age of garden-shed invention. His first radio set was built in a cottage cluttered with glass valves, copper wire, and soldering irons. He had progressed to the powerful wireless sets of stamped gray steel that became the bulky means of communicating by telegraphy. His home in New York was the Hotel Dorset, in a penthouse Mary rented from Marion Davies, the widow of William Randolph Hearst. There he could talk openly with Vincent Astor and other intelligence-minded Americans. He foresaw laser-beam technology before the public had even heard the word “laser.” In these hard times, he resorted to simple improvisations. If factories and freight trains were blown up, France would resort to what he called a bicycle economy. Agents on bikes would become part of the scenery.

  Vera also missed Billy “because he mixed the deadliest martinis. Booth's gin, high and dry, easy on the vermouth, twist of lemon peel, shaken not stirred.” Ian Fleming copied the recipe during one of his naval intelligence conferences in the U.S. and used it in his James Bond thrillers.

  Vera received word from Algeria that the Polish code breakers had been evacuated there, but were sent back to a code-breaking base in the unoccupied zone. It seemed inevitable that the Enigma secret would be uncovered by the Germans if they took control of all continental France. Hans-Thilo Schmidt, the Enigma spy, had been sighted in Switzerland on a trip from Berlin. Was he now playing a double-agent role?

  Count von der Schulenburg was back in Moscow, and in touch with Vera. The idiosyncrasies of diplomatic life allowed officials from one side to bump into those from the other at lavish receptions. This allowed him to pass letters to an intermediary for dispatch in a British diplomatic bag. The dangers of interception were multiplying. But another rich source of essential intelligence had opened up: Imperial Censorship.