Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  This came about through Lord Tweedsmuir, better known to President Roosevelt as John Buchan, the author of spy novels. As governor-general of Canada, Tweedsmuir proposed during the period of U.S. neutrality “to slip down inconspicuously to discuss delicate matters” with FDR, who wrote back, “I am almost literally walking on eggs. I am at the moment saying nothing, seeing nothing, and hearing nothing.” Lord Tweedsmuir took a train to New York for “a medical check-up” and met Roosevelt at Hyde Park.

  This was the last great espionage adventure for Tweedsmuir. The Scotsman was a committed Zionist, his name later inscribed in Israel's Golden Book. FDR agreed to direct U.S. transatlantic air and sea postal services through Bermuda and Trinidad, colonies under tight British control. Girls sent from Britain had been trained to open and reseal packages without leaving a trace. Tweedsmuir died at the age of sixty-four, at a bad moment in 1940 when his knowledge of covert action was needed in a burgeoning U.S.-U.K. intelligence alliance. The records were never released in Britain, but government archives in Bermuda contain messages exchanged between Stephenson and Imperial Censorship, specifying which letters or cargos from North America to Europe should be scrutinized, leading to an abundance of useful intelligence.

  Vera learned of German plans to mobilize slave workers and hitch French factories to the production of weapons and munitions. Time was needed, though, to improve sabotage devices, time to persuade French industrialists to make things easy for SOE demolition experts. Postwar compensation was guaranteed by BBC broadcasts incorporating a phrase of the French manufacturer's own choice. Some occupied French ports built U-boats; this provided swift access to British trade routes, reducing the need for German ocean raiders to follow longer and stormier lanes through the North Sea and around Scotland. SOE battlefields were extended to countries with coasts capable of penetration. Norway was closer to British northern bases than those bases were to London. Norwegian agents were already operating there. Denmark was reached through Sweden. Holland produced Joop Westerweel and Joachim Simon, who sent Jewish escapees through Andorra.

  Most urgently, Vera wanted to use the young New York editor she had met in Berlin, Varian Fry. At the age of thirty-two, he moved to France to help Jewish refugees threatened with extradition to Nazi Germany under the infamous surrender-on-demand clause that was agreed upon by Vichy after the French surrender. Nearly four million refugees were squeezed into the unoccupied zone. In Marseilles, Fry began to plan an American Rescue Center, enraged that the French defeat received less press attention in New York than the World's Fair. Vera located Fry through Stephenson's agency in New York. She needed Jewish mathematicians and scientists who could be put to good use. “The Nazis stupidly threw away the very talents needed to develop new weapons,” she recalled. Another new agency, MI9, collected intelligence from Allied servicemen trickling home. MI9 escape routes, to remain secure, were kept separate from Fry's organization. Fry had priceless help from a Viennese cartoonist, Bill Freier, who purchased blank identity cards from tobacco shops, inserted an imitation of the rubber stamp of the local prefecture to give the ID cards an official gloss, then wrote in false names and backgrounds. Fry himself learned tricks of the subversive trade, and a new career awaited him when he was finally forced to leave France.

  The U.S. embassy in London watched coded correspondence from U.S. legations in Europe that might help Vera. This was arranged by David Bruce, who had backing from those who agreed with the damning conclusion reached by Ian Fleming and Admiral Godfrey after trips to Washington: “There is no U.S. Secret Intelligence Service. When Americans refer to their SIS, they mean the small and uncoordinated force of special agents who travel abroad on behalf of government departments. These agents, are, for the most part, amateurs without special qualifications.” Until Donovan got his own spy service, the New York Times was, Fleming wrote, “more reliable, faster, and cheaper.”

  In London, Vera kept small rooms in shabby hotels for some administrative work. Gubby used offices vacated by His Majesty's Prison Commissioners in the Marks & Spencer complex. Outside 64B Baker Street there was now a brass plate labeled Inter-Services Research Bureau. Each occupied country in Europe had its own intelligence group, and their liaison officers dealt with the bureau's country section representatives.

  Young Leo Marks joked that he was hired by SOE only because it was thought he was related to Marks & Spencer, and could get the owners to provide SOE with more accommodations. His job description as “specially employed and not paid from army funds” illustrated the difficulty many had in pinning down who came from what department to work where.

  Vera had a mental list of “double-rankers,” servicemen in civilian clothing. Ben Levy, a prominent playwright, was “specially employed” when he was posted to New York under a false name. He presented himself at BSC as “Mister Charles.” A secretary said, “Oh, you must be Ben Levy.” After that, he was never confident about security, especially when running agents into Albania by sea.1 Lord Halifax in Washington knew Bill Stephenson as “Mister Williams.” Such precautions caused the sort of muddle that was also useful in shrouding SOE and BSC activities from their enemies at Whitehall. Vera did what she pleased “within the constitutional spirit of SOE, which is to break the rules.” Stephenson's main offices in Rockefeller Center were flagrantly shared with Bill Donovan.

  Donovan was named coordinator of information in an interoffice memo scribbled by FDR with the request “Please set this up confidentially.” Under this shroud, Donovan returned to London. He found Vera in “a broom cupboard” among the cluster of Baker Street offices happily remote from Whitehall. SOE's main switchboard was also designed to mislead, plugged into exchanges geographically wide apart in a public telephone system that all subscribers used, dialing the first three letters, followed by numbers: WELbeck, AMBassador, ABBey. SOE numbers were secret, and unauthorized callers were mystified when sidetracked to some innocent subscriber.

  Young officers who fancied joining SOE were informed: “You do not go to Baker Street. You are invited.” Vera told Donovan, “It's like a club unlike other clubs. Women can join. The membership committee looks you over, in an office at the Horse Guards or a room somewhere in central London.” She knew Donovan was not fond of clubs confined to England's ruling class. King George VI's brother-in-law David Bowes-Lyon and officers of the royal household were members of SOE, but it was one club open to street hawkers, too. Its administrators were bankers, but it was not accountable to any board of directors.

  Enormous financial backing was being mustered for Donovan's equivalent to SOE. He saw how Vera had to beg for crumbs. She was anonymous, and unable to state her case for U.S. funding. Yet there was growing American goodwill as Londoners were seen to emerge from the 1940–41 aerial bombings with heads unbowed. Money and arms could have been raised by Mrs. Miniver, a stiff-upper-lip English-woman venerated by Americans since the release of a popular movie whose propaganda value, said Churchill, was worth a battle fleet. She was sent on North American lecture tours, but could say nothing about SOE's plight. There was no real Mrs. Miniver. She was played by a columnist, Jan Struthers, who before the war wrote in the Times about the simple joys of London life, of a country home in Kent, and nothing more worrisome than flighty parlormaids and a hubby who fell asleep behind his newspaper after dinner. In wartime, Americans believed her to be Mrs. Miniver, plucky housewife, gallant mom, holding up against the Hun. The Roosevelts had her stay at the White House, and Hollywood turned Mrs. Miniver into Greer Garson.

  Donovan asked about Ian Fleming's Ruthless. “It was buggered up,” Vera said. “Bletchley needed the latest German navy version of a three-rotor Enigma. We made the wreck of a twin-engine Heinkel flyable. We called in Charles Fraser-Smith, who had managed the Moroccan royal family's farmlands. He was in an English village working on Q gadgets, named after the Q gunships that are disguised as trawlers to trap U-boats. We robbed an old airship base near Bedford, forty minutes by motorbike from Bletchley. We took
flying gear from crashed German airmen. Fleming was in Dover to direct the operation. Then it was scrapped. We had no control over SIS wireless signals, and these were monitored by the Germans, who might figure Ruthless was a decoy to capture one of the latest Enigma machines. Then the cat would be out of the bag.”

  The cat, of course, was Bletchley's breaking of Enigma codes, and the incessant demand for the latest German versions. The dispute over control of wireless communications came to a head. While SOE's messages were decoded by the SIS before being passed on, the deputy SIS chief, “Uncle Claude” Dansey, could hold back information. Dansey accused SOE of loud bangs that drew enemy attention to his own operations. Vera had yet to believe that any such operations were possible after the SIS debacle. Secrecy protected the bungling of all intelligence agencies from public exposure. Vera needed U.S.-made equipment manufactured to SOE's designs. Fraser-Smith designed new kinds of wireless transmitters and transceivers, but he was hampered by shortages of materials and qualified workers.

  It was not easy for Donovan to see behind the security screens. Vera had said her family records were lost in the 1940–41 bombing raids. There was no way to disprove this. Donovan was now used to local customs of discretion and understatement. “Very heavy attack on the city” was all that Alexander Cadogan noted of a raid that almost incinerated St. Paul's Cathedral.

  Vera contrasted Cadogan's verbal brevity with his formal title of Permanent Undersecretary and Therefore Principal Official Adviser to the Foreign Secretary. She said, “The Brits hide behind long titles and few words.” Cadogan used two words for terror bombers: “Dirty dogs.”

  The bombing that broke the 1940 Christmas truce brought Donovan firmly on Britain's side. After SOE finally wrested control over its own system of signals, Vera insisted that messages be kept short. Long-windedness gave the enemy time to home in on agents, which almost terminated the Polish countess Krystyna Skarbek, known to Vera as Madame Marchand and later as Christina Granville.

  21

  “She Could Do Anything with Dynamite Except Eat It”

  Poland's agony intensified. Vera turned from the discouraging distractions of interdepartmental warfare to draw strength from the Polish countess's bravery and ingenuity. Krystyna worked alone to bring out surviving Polish servicemen. For an underground army rising from the rubble left by the German onslaught, she smuggled in supplies, using her own resourcefulness. Her reports from inside Poland made painful reading for Gubby, scarred by his inability to keep his word to arm Polish guerrillas. Air drops were planned, but the withholding of suitable RAF planes delayed the missions.

  Krystyna Skarbek was born in May 1915 on a large family estate outside Warsaw. She had been a rebel at school. “It was Catholic, and I had a Jewish mother,” Krystyna said later. “That was as bad as having divorced parents. I was stigmatized as ‘unruly’ after I set fire to a nun.”

  She regularly climbed mountains as a youngster, got to know all the ski instructors at the winter resort of Zakopane, and smuggled cigarettes, tobacco, and Polish vodka across the frontier for fun. The experience was proving more useful now than good marks.

  She had first arrived in England in 1940–41, the twenty-five-year-old wife of Jerzy Gizycki, whose ambition to write adventure stories had taken them to East Africa. “I was walking down Pall Mall and got talking with a man I'd known in the East African Rifles,” Jerzy said later. “He asked if I was doing anything and I said no, just bored in a publishing house. He said, ‘They're looking for dumb asses like you to jump out of airplanes into France.’ And he gave me an address. There was a stony-faced woman there, attractive but cold as charity, and that's pretty chilly. I know now that she was Vera Atkins. She listened to me, and when I said I spoke French, she said, ‘Well, doesn't everyone?’ and I thought she was an idiot because everyone doesn't speak French. I was leaving when she said something in French slang that made me come back. She'd been checking me out. She gave me someone to see at a place that sounded like Bare Arsehole. It was Blair Atholl on this duke's estate. Sergeant majors shouted orders like, ‘Kill the bastids!’ I saw no sign of parachutes.”

  Jerzy needed no parachute. He was “specially employed,” in the same way as Kavan Elliott, British Agent D/M 97, whose son Geoffrey was unable to document his activities until the twenty-first century. Jerzy took commando training, was sent to Paris as a soap salesman for Lever Brothers, and was told to sit tight.

  Krystyna was interviewed by a Major Gielgud. She later discovered that he was the brother of Sir John Gielgud. The major was delighted by the clarity and detail of the reporting from this astonishingly attractive young woman. Krystyna said the Germans behaved like bullies when they moved in packs, but pissed in their pants when separated from their pals, and shat in their pants if attacked singly. She proposed, with great passion, ways to reinforce Polish morale, and to let them know they were not forgotten. Gielgud passed her over to Vera. The two spoke the same language: sabotage, subversion, scare the shit out of the Germans. Krystyna said she was able to return to Poland by skiing over the mountains. She could send back reports through Budapest, where she had friends who were able to travel freely in Hungary, and even Austria.

  Vera arranged for Krystyna to be based in Budapest, and to be paid the equivalent in today's money of $10,000 over a six-month period as a news correspondent. Payments would go through the bank account of the Manchester Guardian writer Frederick Voigt. The money originated with George Taylor, the thick-skinned and wealthy Australian businessman who helped finance closework.

  Krystyna first worked with Andrzej Kowerski, running escape lines for Polish and Czech servicemen on their way to England to resume the fight. Her sexual allure allegedly drove a potential SOE agent to despair when she rejected his advances. He threw himself into the Danube. “Fortunately,” Vera noted acidly, “the Danube was frozen.”

  Krystyna wanted to install a mobile radio news station in Budapest that broadcast in Polish. She understood the importance of getting as much accurate information into the country as possible. She first returned on skis, and gathered details of disorder within the German ranks during five weeks of constant travel. Krystyna scooped up a ragbag of detailed information that contradicted Whitehall's impressions. She reported: the German army and the Gestapo detested one another; there had been a massacre of some ten thousand German soldiers from Bavaria when they had tried to rebel against Berlin's High Command; about one hundred Poles were shot dead every night in Warsaw. The Polish people only needed weapons to rise up against their German oppressors. There existed an estimated 100,000 armed men in eighteen militant resistance groups. Their few arms were either stolen from German depots or gathered from massacred Polish officers. She identified German army units moving eastward to what she had heard called “the Russian front.” But the countess failed in the one thing dearest to her heart: she could not persuade her Jewish mother to leave Warsaw.

  Her husband, Jerzy, meanwhile sent a message to Vera, whom he knew only as X-3, saying he was fed up, had nothing to do in Paris except dodge the Gestapo, and above all missed Krystyna. He was told to make his own way to Istanbul and report to Gardyne de Chastelain.

  Gardyne had first parachuted back into Romania, knowing the ways of Marshal Ion Antonescu, who had declared Romania's Nazi Iron Guard the only recognized political party. Gardyne hoped to mend a two-year break in communications between the Romanian resistance and London, but local police picked up his three-man team. He was released when he said he had come back to make peace with Antonescu and preempt a Russian attack. He left by sea for Istanbul, where he was attached to an intelligence section at the British legation. He knew Krystyna's movements, but was unable to disclose them to Jerzy, who was encouraged to try his hand at some local espionage.

  Krystyna made six crossings from Hungary over the mountains to Poland, and another eight crossings through Slovak frontiers. She gave a comprehensive picture of munitions moving eastward on the German rail systems. She described a w
agon that appeared to carry a “gassing chamber.” She reported on U-boats under construction in Danzig. On January 24, 1941, the Hungarian police arrested her and delivered her into the hands of the Gestapo. She denied the accusation that she had British friends, and insisted she was a writer and broadcaster. She chewed her own tongue until blood spilled over her clothing when the Gestapo seemed ready to move from rough questioning to torture. Between bouts of coughing, she said she suffered from tuberculosis. A sympathetic Hungarian doctor confirmed this. She was released and, thumbing her nose at the Gestapo thugs who thought she had furtive reasons for knowing the British, went straight to the British legation. The minister, Sir Owen O'Malley, told her to get out of Hungary before worse things happened, and issued her a British passport in the name of Christina Granville. Then he hid her in the trunk of his official car and drove her over the border into Yugoslavia. In Belgrade, she delivered to the British legation the last of the microfilm she regularly collected from Poland, hidden in her ski gloves.

  O'Malley said that Krystyna was the bravest person he had ever known. “She could do anything with dynamite except eat it.”

  Later she was awarded the George Cross, the highest recognition for bravery given to civilians. In her final large-scale action, she led her French maquisards in a spectacular military battle. When the French maquis entangled German reinforcements sent to help repulse the Allies on D-day, other enemy forces were trapped in the Falaise Gap by armed Poles. She called that “a nice poetic touch.” This, Vera said later, was uncharacteristically wordy. Krystyna customarily used terse language in her written intelligence summaries.

  Krystyna's accomplishments in the year 1941–42 alone proved that closework was not a stopgap, it was absolutely indispensable. Yet Vera could disclose nothing that risked breaching security, and SOE still had to fight for supplies from the regular armed forces. Beaulieu Manor in the New Forest, the family home of Lord Montagu, was loaned to SOE as a finishing school, the last holding center before agents left for the field. There were now nine covert agencies, cloaked in such secrecy that the Political Warfare Executive's official history was classified until the end of the century, and still obscured more than it revealed. Donovan glimpsed some of its work after Vera pointed out that he could “find” U.S. shortwave transmitters to expand PWE's Propaganda in Enemy Countries.