Weeks passed without news of Anthropoid. Then Vera got copies of “a German spy's report” to the German intelligence chief on the Eastern Front, General Reinhard Gehlen. It quoted Donovan as saying the Russians had 360 divisions ready for a new counteroffensive against the Germans. Gehlen saw the report on May 24, 1942.
Three days later, the Czech team's long silence was broken with news that Heydrich had been assassinated. Two brave men with limited weapons had shown they could pierce Hitler's armor. But the Führer concluded that he himself had avoided the murderous conspirators and, in delivering the eulogy at Heydrich's funeral, once again boasted that he was untouchable. He rejected Gehlen's theory that the West was trying to undermine German morale with fake breaches of security and other deceptions. Hitler issued instead a so-called Commando Order: “All terror and sabotage troops of the British and their accomplices who do not act like soldiers but instead like bandits will be treated as such.”4
Heydrich's killers had been dropped from one of a small number of RAF bombers available for all clandestine operations. The operation cost no aircraft. Still, Vera was encountering stubborn opposition. “The war has to be won fair and square,” she was told by Sir Arthur Harris, commanding RAF bombers. SOE, Harris said for the record, “is amateurish, ignorant, irresponsible, and mendacious.”5
A heavy price was paid for Anthropoid. German reprisals caused 5,000–10,000 civilian deaths. The Czech team, with other agents sent from England, died in gun battles. Hitler issued a direct order: all men in the Czech mining village of Lidice were to be killed, the women imprisoned, the children taken away. In October 1942, he ordered the execution of all captured parachutists even if they served in regular military units.
Vera argued that Donovan's unconventional tactic of planting an apparent leak on a “German spy” broke the rules but advanced the cause. He used the same “German spy” to report an impending Allied invasion. The German High Command wondered if this was genuine or another bluff. Operation Anthropoid reprisals cost little, compared with civilian casualties caused by the use of overwheming power. Vera won U.S. support: SOE agents could be dropped by aircraft code-named Carpetbagger, drawn from the 801st/42nd U.S. Bomb Group stationed at Harrington in Northamptonshire. This countered the RAF's reluctance to release planes for Vera, and further tightened her alliance with Donovan.
His best U.S. agent, Allen Dulles in Switzerland, reported what could be bluff on the German side. Colonel General Rudolf Schmidt had vanished from his German panzer command. Did this mean his brother, Hans-Thilo, who first sold Enigma secrets, was under arrest? Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, the intelligence arm of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW), was already leaking information through Switzerland. He reported that Hans-Thilo had been in Gestapo hands since early April 1943. The Berlin Cipher Office thought the new Enigma was secure, because Hans-Thilo's activities had been “disclosed” by his original spymaster, Rodolphe Lemoine, caught in Paris during the previous month. In truth, Lemoine deceived Berlin by saying Hans-Thilo merely sold long ago early Enigma versions that were dismissed by French and British intelligence as outdated commercial machines.
Allen Welsh Dulles was a coconspirator with Stephenson against control by the SIS and U.S. “do-nothings.” Born in 1893 and now aged forty-nine, he was a veteran of The Room in New York, a peacetime lawyer and diplomat, who single-mindedly took over as Coordinator of Information in New York, evicting the Guild of Organists and the Rough Diamond and Van Dam Corporations from offices one floor above those of Stephenson operating as the “United Kingdom Commercial Corporation” on the twenty-fourth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The proximity of the two meant easy and unseen exchanges of information.
Stephenson had arranged for Dulles to consult Vera before he went to Bern as Donovan's chief agent in Europe. Dulles learned that Bletchley and ULTRA code breakers were limited to German signals transmitted by wireless telegraph. The enemy also used landlines and couriers. He worked out other ways to collect gossip, including tapping into international phone calls and cables, which, even from occupied Europe, continued. He met night visitors from over the German borders in his darkened garden apartment at Herrengasse 23 in Bern. In this way, he prepared another anti-Nazi German channel. He had Vera's word for it that Canaris was among those top-level Germans hoping for an Allied victory. Canaris needed to discuss this with a top-level American at some remote venue—not Switzerland, where he would be quickly identified. Vera thought of her friend Gardyne de Chastelain, whose wife Marion now worked for Stephenson in New York. Gardyne was in Istanbul, where he knew another disillusioned German, Paul Leverkuehn, head of the Istanbul branch of the German “War Organization suboffice.” Leverkuehn had recently seen Canaris and proposed a secret meeting with the U.S. naval attaché in Turkey, Commander George H. Earle, a former governor of Pennsylvania and a good friend of President Roosevelt. In January 1943 Canaris had asked Commander Earle if Roosevelt would help anti-Nazis overthrow Hitler. Canaris's proposals were lengthy and sensibly detailed, but eventually Roosevelt rejected them. Canaris, hoping for an armistice that would allow Germany to finish off the war against Russia, then fed information through the Swiss Intelligence Agency to Dulles. The Swiss, Vera had long ago discovered, ran one of the most efficient secret services in the world. “They had to. Nothing else would defend their neutrality,” she told Marion. And their best people were anti-Nazi, despite the Swiss-German cantons. Dulles accumulated growing quantities of intelligence. He detested “generals looking over my shoulder,” and chose to speak with Vera instead of Whitehall. He believed Admiral Canaris truly did not think the Berlin coding system had been broken. Hans-Thilo was in a Gestapo prison and as yet there had been no trial. More importance seemed to be attached to his brother Rudolf, arrested as one of the Führer's favorite generals. Heydrich's murder had unsettled the Führer, after all. He said Rudolf was “guilty of ungrateful disloyalty.”6
But was this intended to mislead Hitler's enemies? Bluff and double-bluff created a quagmire of uncertainty. Suppose disinformation were planted in Enigma-coded messages to mislead Bletchley? So far, its code breakers, now including Americans, had recovered nothing from enemy traffic that lacked corroboration from other sources. Vera was worried when “wireless games” between the enemy and SOE grew. More agents fell into German hands and were forced to transmit as if still at liberty. She knew this by instinct and was already making deductions, in addition to instructing her agents how to warn the signalmasters in England if they were sending under enemy control. When this happened, messages from England to the captured agents gave false information to deceive the other side. But frequently the warnings from captured SOE agents were missed, and discovered only when it was too late to save agents’ lives.
Vera got some relief from the nerve-wracking intensity of monitoring whispers emerging from the ether when she dealt with aircrews who had been shot down and worked with resistance groups before escaping with hard, indisputable reports of realities. The pilots’ discipline in the air was strict. On the ground, they defied uniformity: the top button left undone on their battledress tunics, their caps crumpled and visors bent, their booze-ups at the bar to bury emotions after a comrade was killed. Their breezy style upset uptight senior commanders, but reflected a very special kind of personal initiative. Secrecy for secrecy's sake exasperated pilots dealing with SIS officers. The SIS had built a departmental structure in India, which was beyond Vera's control. Her Australian friend Terence O'Brien, a seasoned pilot, said SIS secrecy imposed needless stress on pilots flying SOE agents under orders from a new Inter-Services Liaison Department (ISLD), which he called “a particularly deceptive title for SIS as an organization renowned for its lack of liaison with anyone or any department.” Dangerous misundertandings arose when SIS bureaucrats ruled that pilots must not disclose mission details to the agents they carried.7
Vera digested the lessons. In Europe, SOE flights followed sensible guidelines. Wing Commander Verity
, by the summer of 1943, celebrated an increase in European operations with a note: WONDERFUL MOONS FOR THE LYSANDERS! The disfigured fighter pilot Bill Simpson admired the way Vera's image as a buttoned-up flying officer concealed the secret authority that alienated the SIS.
She discussed her unease about the narrow line between state-run terrorism and games of deception with Charlie Dunne, the Canadian pilot who survived flying old Gloster Gladiator biplane fighters from small ships at the start of the war to fly Liberators on long flights across the Bay of Bengal, dropping SOE's Force 136 agents. “We live in a new world of terror,” he said. “We have to be better at it than the enemy.” This was echoed in a moving appeal to Churchill written by Prince Svasti, descended from the Siamese monarch who was the model for the musical The King and I, and cousin of the boy king still in Lausanne. The prince wrote, “Buddhists abhor taking life. But we kill the greater evil.” After missions in Japanese-occupied territory, he set forth the need for better coordination between regular British armed services and “their poor cousins of SOE.”8
Coordination improved for Operation Foxley, the code name for killing Hitler, because the plot demanded research from military experts and their intelligence on the current precautions to protect the Führer, on precise details about his hideaways and the arms and uniforms and routine of the highly trained special forces guarding him. From Berlin, Admiral Canaris conveyed a scheme to kill Hitler by anti-Nazi generals, arguing that an enterprise that seemed to be homegrown would win support from German civilians for a new regime.
In Whitehall, the underground armies were still seen as a disorganized rabble. Acknowledging this inescapable reality, the Free French poet Emmanuel d'Astier wrote to Vera: “Churchill is a hero out of the Iliad, the lone and jealous governor. It is useless to look to anyone else for help.”
Vera knew a rebel able to make Churchill listen, regardless of interference run by Desmond Morton, the intelligence adviser who had been condemned by Nowak as “the voice of anti-SOE elements.”
30
The White Rabbit Hops into the “Governor's” Den
The White Rabbit, Tommy Yeo-Thomas, returning to Baker Street after one of his runs into France, agreed that Vera could not bypass Desmond Morton without prompting risky political speculation. She told him: “The civil war goes on…”
“Nobody need know if you hop into the Guv's den,” suggested SOE's chief cryptographer, Leo Marks. He thought Tommy could slip through the fences erected in Whitehall after all the dangers he had overcome.
Tommy had scrambled out of France in the dead of night on November 15, 1943, with two French girl agents hidden in a hearse. The funeral was organized by Berthe Fraser, arrested in September 1941 while helping British prisoners escape. She survived fifteen months’ interrogation by dishing out useless misinformation, and was then released as “a burden on resources” by Admiral Canaris's men in Paris, who “never take their jobs seriously,” Canaris's aide Inga Haag told Vera. A Berliner, Inga helped Canaris use his foreign-intelligence position to pick away at Hitler's grip on power. Her diplomat husband was posted to Romania, where Inga helped escaping Jews.1
The White Rabbit said Whitehall's departmental warfare reflected the gap between the Gestapo and Canaris's men. Agents were less at risk if questioned by the latter, but Whitehall was deaf to such tips from the old folk in France, the sédentaires. Tommy greatly valued their experience. Weighed down by years of toil, they formed sixaines, groups of five under an elected “sergeant,” and hid homemade Cross of Lorraine flags to await “the uprising.” They wrote information in tiny French script on wafers of paper for Tommy to take to London, where they imagined a well-oiled machine was purring away.
Berthe had buried the White Rabbit under funereal flowers, observing that “Germans think it's traditional to transport a corpse through the night.” The local undertaker provided grilled steaks and wine for the cortege winding its way through dark country lanes. A reception committee of armed French farmworkers guarded the makeshift landing field. German antisubversion squads prowled the region. Ten Resistance fighters escorted the trio when a Lysander purred into the meadow. Their leader apologized for France's surrender: a formal little speech from a dignified old man. “It is a great honor for us to guard an English officer,” he said. Into the Lysander the French stuffed small comforts they feared were not available in England: calvados, wine, champagne, perfumes, and cheeses of all kinds. And a catalogue of what they desperately needed: benzedrine, daggers, grenades, guns with silencers…
The White Rabbit contrasted this with Leo Marks's deskbound struggle against outdated SIS coding systems. Vera said, “Leo suspects some SOE agents are caught and send back deceptive messages dictated by their German captors. When Leo tries to warn Bletchley, he has to go through third parties who don't listen. If incoming messages contain no mistakes, he senses trouble. There isn't an agent born who doesn't make mistakes.”
SOE now had an executive committee that hesitated to send Tommy back into the field, because he knew too much. Meanwhile he went with Vera to give lectures to girls who turned Morse signals from the field into readable messages to be teletyped to a network of specialists now spread over a large rural area around Bletchley. He praised their persistence in unscrambling “indecipherables” and helped them see that behind the indecipherables were French patriots who took terrible risks. He described a French grandmother croaking the name of a captured agent outside a Gestapo-run prison until she got a response that identified the cell from which his escape might be organized. He spoke of a captured French woman agent who was waiting among deportees to be herded onto wagons at a Paris railroad station; she saw a colleague in a Red Cross food van, grabbed a smock, and handed out sandwiches until they could both suddenly drive off. He told the girls, “The English Channel immunizes you from a world where homes are torn apart by men wearing death's-head patches, searching for our agents. Yet our French friends stick to a rule: ‘Save the agent at all costs.’”
The chasm between two worlds hit Tommy when he wore his RAF uniform to receive from General de Gaulle the Croix de Guerre with palm, and was told by the Air Ministry that he could not wear it because de Gaulle had no authority. He got the Military Cross from the British army, and was ordered to give it back. “An army medal cannot be worn on your air force uniform!” said a chairborne air commodore, demanding why Tommy had failed to read the latest Air Ministry Order (AMO) on this important point of etiquette.
“I was in France, sir, where I don't get AMOs,” said Tommy.
“Well, don't let it happen again,” snapped the air commodore.
A neighbor shoved through his letter-box a white feather pinned on a sheet of paper with one word: COWARD. His secret missions imposed silence on his wife, Barbara, whose only link with him was oneway. Her terse reassurances were broadcast by the BBC and prefaced “du moineau au lapin”—from the sparrow to the rabbit.
In England, Tommy spoke to restless Americans held in quarantined country houses. They included two future CIA directors, and his audiences sensed politics behind the delay in parachuting them into France. He brought them to their feet by shouting: “Great is de Gaulle of the French!” He told Operation Carpetbagger aircrews and RAF special-duty pilots not to quit reception areas too hurriedly if signal lights were delayed. Resistance fighters bicycled for miles in all weathers to the rendezvous and might find substandard batteries were failing, so then bicycled in search of replacement torches. Everything was makeshift. These irregular francs-tireurs needed daytime jobs to keep alive, and dodged the pro-German milice, the Vichy French paramilitaries who had already helped deport 80,000 suspected resisters to Germany. Resistance was equated with “disorder” by Vichy.
“Disorder seems to be the RAF's interpretation, too,” Tommy said when Vera disclosed that their allocation of aircraft had suddenly dwindled. The White Rabbit sounded depressed.
She urged him: “See the man that d'Astier calls ‘the governor.’”
“You short-circuited those official channels,” admonished Churchill. “This might make trouble for you.” Then he broke into his most cherubic smile. “But I shall see… ah… that no such thing shall be allowed to happen.”
Churchill asked Desmond Morton why he had failed to forward the reports that Tommy said he had written on these matters. Morton stumbled in his responses: doubted the claim that saboteurs caused systematic damage to vital railroads at far less cost than aerial bombings; that “train-busting” air raids against railroads wasted huge resources and were far less effective than a couple of agents trained to halt enemy traffic with dynamite; that RAF bombings more often devastated civilian neighborhoods.
Churchill brought Tommy back and asked how many aircraft he needed. The answer: “At least one hundred, to carry out two hundred fifty sorties within each moon period.” Forty-eight hours later, Vera got word that seventy four-engined RAF bombers were available for parachute drops, with additional light planes for pickups. After all the past parsimony, it seemed an armada.
“I don't put much beyond our Tommy if it helps the Free French,” Nick Nicholls, SOE's director of signals, told Vera. “But to have gone all the way to the prime minister on his own initiative defies belief. The whole of SOE is in his debt.” Still, Nick shivered to think that guerrilla armies were salvaged because one bold man had a back door to Churchill. It underlined Vera's handicap as a woman. Clever and efficient, she could never talk freely to a male-dominated professional intelligence service where she was a nonentity.2 Even her prewar cooperation with Morton no longer counted.
Spymistress Page 30