Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  She was given the new one-time pad of “silks,” each slip printed with columns of random letters or figures. For coding each message, she was to use the top slip, then tear it off and burn it. Home base would have the same pad. Each message must have double security checks: a bluff check and a true check, peculiar to the individual operator. An early form of microwave transmission by S-phone had been tried during her first mission four years ago. It was finally in operation, with a fifty-mile range by air, fifteen miles at sea. A staff officer on a Moonlight plane could talk to the ground in emergencies.

  During these preparations, an operator was lost. He was attached to the Anvil network around Falaise. Rolande was asked to step in. She holed up in a grim Bayswater basement room during the holding period when agents were banned from popular haunts like the Free French Club in Cavendish Square, where there was too much loose talk.

  “I've wangled you a Women's Auxiliary Air Force commission,” said Vera. “You get flying officer's pay. It's still the case you've no family here?”

  “None.”

  “Good. Usually I write families once a month.”

  “Why?”

  “The chap who last asked me that had to be told, ‘Because you can't write letters home from the field.’ The idiot had to understand why nobody should know where he was. I said my letters would tell them he was in good fettle. ‘Or dead!’ he said plaintively. I told him not to pull out that stop!”

  In a Moonlight Squadron hut, Rolande was searched by a man from Scotland Yard who then gave her a parachute, a Sorbo spine pad, a .38 Browning, a flick knife, and a wad of 50,000 French francs. All remaining English money, final personal effects, and a stray No. 25 bus ticket were stuffed into an envelope with her real name on it. Vera counted out some pills to the familiar litany. “This, if you've been a long time awake and need to keep going. This to knock out a German who pesters you. How you get it into him is up to you. These pills are for sleeping. And this one puts you to sleep for good.” Then she shook her hand. Rolande thought for a moment that Vera really wanted to peck her on the cheek.

  Over the drop zone, the jumping strap between her legs, Rolande stood by the open door of the twin-engine Whitley. She had the wireless-suitcase on the end of a long cord, which she would pay out during the tranquillity that follows the heart-stopping exit. The cord would go slack when her belongings touched the ground, giving her enough warning to prepare for a jolt like jumping from a high wall. She saw the Whitley crew release containers first, and thought, They've got the sequence wrong.

  A stream of red tracer bullets rose lazily, then seemed suddenly to accelerate to dance along the starboard wing. An engine coughed. The Whitley banked steeply into a tight turn and raced for home.

  Next day Vera said, “You should have been dropped before the containers. But if you'd gone out first last night…” She hesitated. “Sure you want to try again?”

  “Mais naturellement.”

  Vera examined her nicotine-stained fingers. “Anvil's betrayed. We don't yet know how. We're sending you by sea to Brittany. You'll make your way by an established line to another réseau. It's big.” Vera gave her Virginia Hall's latest code name. “Her only pianist was killed in an ambush.”

  Rolande was accustomed to aborted missions. Agents sometimes elected to drop blind rather than endure more suspense. A voyage by sea would make a nice change.

  “Calvados est une liqueur tres forte.” Rolande heard the BBC message the following evening in a safehouse at Falaise, in the Calvados region of Normandy, a very slow three-hour drive inland from the coast by farm tractor. The BBC was her slender thread to Vera. The feeling of contact was comforting. In a stranger's attic above a water mill, in a narrow cot under a window open to the predawn song of nightingales, Rolande turned over and went to sleep like a baby. She later told all this to Aaron Bank, creator of the U.S. Green Berets. “It was like a home from home,” she said.

  33

  Tangled Webs

  Rolande had spoken of Gestapo interrogators referring to “a Jewish woman” at SOE, and Vera still stayed in the shadows to protect her identity. Enemy-run channels conveyed details of SOE's structure. Vera wanted nothing to provide ammunition to her other enemies in Whitehall, where she suspected a leak. “Uncle” Claude Dansey of SIS still wanted to rebuild SOE as his own. He ran NOCs—agents under Non-Official Cover—art dealers, travel reps, businessmen like Kavan Elliott, who was now underground in Yugoslavia. One NOC was Charles Andrew Buchanan King, who had represented himself as aide to the movie mogul Alexander Korda. “Never heard of him,” Korda told Vera.

  She found Andrew King in Switzerland. King was one of the prewar Cambridge students recruited by the Communist Party. Strange that he should be now in Bern, where Allen Dulles had a case file on King. It remained dormant until Dulles became director of the CIA in 1959. Then he began inquiries into the infiltration of the SIS by Soviet moles and concluded that their disclosure of Western secrets to Moscow not only prolonged the war at the cost of millions of lives but allowed Stalin to seize half of Europe.

  Vera had to focus on the known and immediate danger that Berlin's Cipher Office was only pretending to believe Enigma was unbreakable. Gustave Bertrand, the French intelligence specialist who first hired the Cipher Office informer Hans-Thilo Schmidt, had been arrested in January 1944 and then released. Why? On May 31 the BBC called him in with the message “The white lilacs have flowered.” Bertrand was prepared. He was anxious to clear his name, and to deny that Rodolphe Lemoine, or any missing Polish decoders, had disclosed what he called later “the greatest enigma of the war.” He was picked up on time and delivered to Vera.1

  The threat posed by ULTRA if the enemy knew it was breaking Enigma codes had been outlined on July 19, 1943, when Churchill told his chiefs of staff, “I do not believe twenty-seven Anglo-American divisions are sufficient for Overlord in view of the extraordinary fighting efficiency of the German army, and the much larger forces they could so readily bring to bear against our troops even if the landings were successfully accomplished.” If Allied reading of Enigma was known, the Germans could mislead invasion planners to the wrong conclusions.2

  In these tense months before D-day, Gustave Bertrand described how he had been released by the Germans because he undertook to inform on Resistance networks. The moment he was out on the street, he slipped away. Vera continued to broadcast BBC messages as if he were still in France. She was told that Bertrand had become a German-run double agent. She asked, “What's the source?”—the question so often heard after Churchill adopted the Bletchley analyst whose “intuitions” about the movement of enemy warships had initially been ignored.

  The answer now, as it had been before, was “Hinsley.”

  Harry Hinsley's intuition this time involved Bertrand and also Antoni Palluth, whose AVA company had studied the Enigma machine sent to the German embassy in Warsaw in 1929. Palluth was said to have been hunted by German counterintelligence. Hinsley asked: Why were the Germans so keen to find him? Was he in cahoots with Bertrand to fool the British? Hinsley now handled cooperation with the Americans on Bletchley's ULTRA. Since undergraduate days, his waking hours had been spent brooding over disembodied signals. Vera felt this made him insensitive to the streetwise tactics of those forever outwitting a murderous enemy. Bertrand might have saved himself by a ruse, but he had not betrayed ULTRA. She established that Palluth was killed in an Allied bombing raid.3

  Indications that the ULTRA secret was still safe came from intercepted enemy signals. FUSAG, a fictitious First U.S. Army Group, faked a large military buildup in Kent and Sussex, and drew the Germans into massing troops around the Pas-de-Calais on the opposite side. Field Marshal Gerd von Runstedt informed Berlin that the war had reached “a serious turning point.” Murders of German senior officers and sabotage would grow with the hiring of criminal gangs. The field marshal's Enigma-coded signals for Hitler admitted that he could not move in France without heavy protection. Von Runstedt made h
is staff officers practice English manners to divorce themselves from Hitler's “lowbrow Nazis.” He would still stand and fight, but Vera put him in the same category as Admiral Canaris, who had asked Roosevelt to help anti-Nazi Germans get rid of Hitler.

  An army of Whitehall military bureaucrats descended upon SOE's Baker Street offices. Gubbins, now a major general, recalled that he was obliged “to cheat and crawl” to get what he needed. SOE was variously called the Racket, Some Potty Outfit, Bedlam, and Stately ’Omes of England. Bill Donovan spoke up from the OSS side and said if SOE did nothing else, it justified its existence by the sabotage of Norsk Hydro, the source of heavy water that German scientists might use to retard nuclear reaction and build the bomb.

  There were unplanned anti-Nazi bombshells. One came from a middle-aged French spinster, whose heroic acts inspired a powerful letter from her bishop denouncing the deportation of French Jews. Vera first learned about it from Rolande, who reported from the field on Marie-Rose Gineste, an unmarried French social worker. Between the ages of forty-one and forty-four, she had pedaled hundreds of miles on a bicycle she called Semper, pilfering food ration cards for a Jewish underground. Finally she got her bishop, Pierre-Marie Théas of Montaubon Diocese, to write a pastoral letter “in an outraged protest of Christian conscience over men and women treated like wild animals,” and calling on all Catholics to protect Jews not yet deported. Bishop Théas proposed to post his denunciation outside all churches. Marie-Rose warned him that Vichy's pro-Nazi police would intercept the distributors. She proposed an alternative: the BBC. Rolande wirelessed the entire text and it was broadcast in the BBC French service. This marked a turning point. French families risked sheltering surviving Jews, while Marie-Rose continued her crusade in isolation, a self-motivated, self-taught resister.4

  By May 1944 Vera estimated 100,000 resisters in France needed a systematic SOE effort to bring together solitaries like Marie-Rose. “Uncle” Claude Dansey jeered that she multiplied the figure by fifty. Vera listed fifty active and well-organized SOE-run circuits, from Farmer in the north to Gardener in the south. These could be expanded to one hundred circuits with leadership from outside. Maquis commanders had 35,000 to 40,000 guerrillas, but only 10,000 were armed for more than a day's fighting. A Secret Army had a reserve of 350,000 youths. There were 500,000 railway men and 300,000 trade unionists ready to rise up. Much of the French workforce, about three million men and women, would help the Allies. SOE had to expand the training of agents to provide leadership, and this meant cutting down the time from two months to as little as two weeks.

  The Beaulieu estate near the English Channel, sometimes known as SOE “finishing school,” where wartime agents trained commando-style or waited for missions.

  (Courtesy of UK National Motor Museum and Beaulieu SOE Collection)

  The Westland Lysander, an all-purpose aircraft used to insert SOE agents into Nazi-controlled territory and to courier dispatches from behind enemy lines.

  (Courtesy of RAF Archives)

  U.S. Air Force B-17 bombers dropping supplies into France in 1944.

  (Courtesy of of BSC Papers and E-Spread)

  An agent parachuting into occupied France.

  (Courtesy of Sonia d'Artois)

  ABOVE: False ID card for “Michel Pontlevé,” real name Cyril Watney, a wireless operator involved in destroying French factories’ capacity to produce propellers for German aircraft. (Courtesy of Cyril Watney)

  BELOW: Suitcase wireless set carried by agents. (Courtesy of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation)

  ABOVE: Agent gadgets and weapons. (Courtesy of UK National Motor Museum and Beaulieu SOE Collection)

  BELOW: Agents packed dead rats with plastic explosives, then placed them near fires or furnaces in factories making products for the German forces. When guards found the rats and threw them into the fire, the resulting explosions caused a great deal of damage. (Courtesy of UK National Motor Museum and Beaulieu SOE Collection)

  Leo Marks, in 1998, displaying silk printed with SOE ciphers.

  (Courtesy of BBC History magazine)

  One of countless rail lines sabotaged by SOE agents with the help of French rail workers to prevent German reinforcements from reaching D-day beaches.

  (Courtesy of the Office of the French Prime Minister and Commission d'Histoire de l'Occupation et de la Libération de la France, Ministère de l'Education Nationale)

  Vincent Doblin and his probability theory equation.

  (Courtesy of the Office of the French Prime Minister and Serge Louveau, Commission d'Histoire de l'Occupation et de la Libération de la France, Ministère de l'Education Nationale)

  ABOVE: Hugh Dalton with Wl-adysl-aw Raczkiewicz, president of the Government of the Polish Republic in Exile, and General Wl-adysl-aw Sikorski. (Courtesy of BSC Papers and E-Spread)

  BELOW: Six female guards from the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Vera testified against these women at the British-controlled war crimes trials in Hamburg on December 10, 1946. Of the six pictured here, 1, 3, 4, and 5 were executed; 2 and 6 were imprisoned for ten years. (Private collection)

  Vera and Colonel Maurice Buckmaster in East Sussex in 1988 or ’89.

  (Courtesy of Michael Buckmaster)

  There was always the threat of turncoats slipping into the ranks. Vera now had other ways to spot deceptive messages. The shabby old Denmark Hill Police Station in South London ran machines to intercept, record, and analyze high-speed transmissions from the field, and search for evidence of entrapment. At Beaumanor, Chicksands, near Bletchley, one of ULTRA's founding fathers, Gordon Welchman, reminded Vera that the ultramodern Bismarck's fate was sealed when a high-ranking German officer sent a coded message to his son. The name matched one in Bletchley's files listing the crew of the battle cruiser, and this gave away its preparations to leave port. Since then, far larger files had been compiled so that enemy names, spotted in intercepted traffic, could be swiftly identified. In this way Welchman had independently come across incongruities to back Leo Marks's suspicion that the SOE network in Holland was under Gestapo control.

  Vera ruled that “SOE messages should never contain true names that can be checked against a German list of serving officers and men.” SOE stations were identified by letters of the alphabet and numbers. Propaganda officers at the Political Warfare Executive adopted the supersecret, ominous title London Control. Vera confided her misgivings about Control to a PWE officer, Vernon Bartlett, who wrote the prewar book Nazi Germany Explained. London Control was in fact near Bletchley, at Woburn Abbey on the Duke of Bedford's estate. Bored workers, transferred there from London, were compensated with French claret and gallons of gin and sherry. Little else amused them, other than skating on the duke's lake in winter or wandering through his zoo, where Bartlett liked to pretend “I was buggered by a llama and bitten by a rhea.” In the chaos, he said, nobody oversaw Control's activities.

  Kim Philby spun Control's broadcasts to Germany to serve Moscow's aims. His exposure as a Soviet mole was twenty years away. Broadcasts named Vera's anti-Nazi friends, like the lovely Russian princess Marie “Missie” Vassiltchikov, who was in the German foreign office and protected by Vera's Ambassador Von der Schulenburg. Old Fritz's secret letters ended abruptly after his recall from Moscow. Vera tracked him to Krummhübel, a ski resort on the Czech border that now sheltered foreign office staff from SS sniffer dogs. Its new inhabitants called it Spies’ Paradise because the servants were Czechs, the sawmills employed Serbs or disaffected Italians, and there was little supervision of labor imported from the sullen nearby lands where Vera's outstanding agent, the Polish countess Krystyna Skarbek, had slipped easily back and forth. Krystyna was still stuck in Cairo, but kept contacts along the Czech and Hungarian borders with Poland and reported that Schulenburg was making bold motoring trips to Budapest with Missie, who had been transferred from Berlin early in 1944. She had been met by Schulenburg when she arrived at the former resort on Monday, January 17. He wore a Russian fur hat acqu
ired in Moscow and said jauntily that the staff lived in mountaintop cabins and slid on small sledges to his offices in the valley. Schulenburg, living in a wooden chalet without plumbing, was saved by Missie's poorer accommodation. At least it had a bath. He used it daily.

  Vera cross-checked Krystyna's reports with other sources. One was Elizabeth Wiskemann, in neutral Switzerland, working for London Control and in touch with friends from her days in Berlin. Among her sources were anti-Nazi trade unionists, newsmen, and Geneva's Ecumenical Council of Churches, which helped escapees. Wiskemann's neighbors were the parents of Prince Heinrich zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, an ace night-fighter pilot who was credited with shooting down eighty-three Allied aircraft but who was a secret anti-Nazi. On the phone with Missie, he had spoken of blowing up Hitler and himself when next presented with more Oak Leaves to add to his Knight's Cross. Before that could happen, however, he was shot down.

  For some mysterious reason Miss Wiskemann refused to deal with SOE. Vera wished she could talk with Schulenburg, who had mentioned the woman among visitors to Moscow. Old Fritz might become a target of Control's exposure of anti-Nazis. He had seen Stalin charm bigwigs like Sir Stafford Cripps, the British ambassador in Moscow until 1942, who was now in Churchill's War Cabinet and demanding that SOE secrets be shared with Moscow. How Schulenburg would laugh! He had motored with Missie into the Czech Protectorate, where he said to one of Krystyna's contacts that London broadcasts that named anti-Nazis might be calculated to undermine Hitler's morale.