Spymistress
Page 34
Both sides were using deception to harm each other's self-confidence. There was the sudden revelation of a top-secret order from Hitler requiring “the extermination of enemy sabotage troops.” A turncoat who broadcast from Berlin, Lord Haw-Haw, boasted that all was known about Bletchley: “The hands on the town hall clock are stuck at five minutes before noon!” This was true, but the story could have been planted by London Control. Vera questioned Sefton Delmer, the first reporter to interview Hitler and now running black propaganda. He said: “I can't say we planted the story and I can't say we didn't. My bosses don't like SOE. They don't mind sacrificing SOE criminals. You'll see. None of our files will survive the war.”5
A criminal named Harold Cole saved British escapees but also worked with the Gestapo. “Worst traitor of the war,” Scotland Yard's deputy commander Reginald Spooner called him. Vera had known he was a con artist, but recruited him to use his crooked talents in the cause. He was hosting a cocktail party in Paris and calling himself “Captain Mason, a British Secret Agent” when identified and shot down “while resisting arrest.”
Vera recalled, “Other agents had criminal records, but they were ‘gentleman-burglar’ types, eager to serve in war. A billion francs or more were spread around to pay for SOE operations. Hardly a franc was unaccounted for.” Currency was forged after SOE ran out of gold bars. OSS, the rich partner, made up for the drain on dwindling British finances. Bletchley needed four-wheel Enigma replicas to speed up code breaking. “Without charging a cent, National Cash Register of Dayton, Ohio, turned out seventy-five replicas in six months, more than the total British production for the entire war,” Vera recalled. The U.S.-made bombes were stored at Mount Vernon School on Nebraska Avenue in Washington, D.C., until brought to London by U.S. liaison officers attached to Bletchley. One was Lewis Powell, a future Supreme Court justice. “I acquired a taste for a local Bletchley newspaper, the Leighton Buzzard Observer & North Bucks Times,” recalled Powell. “Just imagine! The geniuses who worked on the war's biggest secret relaxed with the weekly doings of the Ladies Bright Hour, published by Mister Midgeley.”
London Control's flimflam disheartened local resisters, who could not investigate firsthand the integrity of SOE's policy makers. Resistance misgivings were conveyed through Vera's returning agents: If Germans were identified as secret opponents of Hitler, would London go on to name non-Germans now fighting the Nazi occupiers of their country? Lewis Powell saw that if Control or a Double Cross XX Committee tried to bamboozle the other side, it might also fool itself. He later turned down directorship of the postwar CIA. He never publicly discussed his wartime visits to Bletchley, nor to Woburn and London Control. In private, he confided his concern that Control harbored Russian-run English agents, and quoted Sir Walter Scott: “O what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practise to deceive!”6
34
Deadly Mind and Wireless Games
“German Penetration of SOE,” a postwar investigation, was never made public. Maurice Buckmaster had played wireless games of deception which he couldn't confide to Vera. Whitehall, with its old-school-tie mindset, preferred an Old Etonian like Buckmaster to take charge of F Section's bluffs. Agents were desperately needed in France before D-day, expected by mid-1944. Some were hastily dispatched to networks penetrated by the enemy. One was a shorthand typist from London's East End, Peggy Knight, dropped by parachute on May 5, 1944. She was given information she could reveal under Gestapo interrogation: that the Allied invasion would be launched against the Pas-de-Calais. Three of her colleagues, hurriedly trained like Peggy, were quickly caught and eventually executed.
Peggy Knight's instructors assessed her as “raw” and in need of more training, refusing to recommend that she be sent into the field. She had made one practice parachute jump instead of the normal three, but nevertheless was dropped with a wireless operator in the Côte d'Or at the wrong place, and was found by Casse-Cou, or Break-Neck, an inauspicious name matched by that of the Donkeyman circuit, penetrated already for two years since a courier lost his briefcase with details of two hundred members of the circuit. Donkeyman founder André Girard turned up in the United States, lecturing on secret operations, until Bill Stephenson had him gagged and questioned by the FBI. A warning to Vera arrived too late to repair any damage.
Sensing betrayal, Peggy Knight had joined forces with William Egan Colby, a twenty-three-year-old native of St. Paul, Minnesota, who would later become a CIA director. Colby dropped with a Jedburgh team and worked with a maquis that won spectacular gunfights. Peggy “blazed away at Germans hunting her down,” Bill Simpson wrote later, “and fought with the ferocity you'd expect in a girl from the hardest hit part of London's blitzed slums.”1
Bill Donovan had suggested that to ensure full use of SOE in the coming invasion, Vera should show General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander, progress made in closework. This would offset anti-SOE comments from senior British commanders and invigorate Donovan's campaign for OSS to play a major role. The dissecting rooms of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington were turned into a showcase for “wizard factories” making imaginative weapons that ranged from one-man submarines to Sleeping Beauty, a small battery-driven sailboat with saddlebags for waterproofed underwater charges.
The staid Victoria & Albert Museum displayed special devices made at the inn called the Thatched Barn. One specialty was a torch with an ultraviolet beam and a handkerchief concealing code keys that could be read only when the torch was switched on. Bill Pietsch of OSS said later, “Camel dung, horse manure, and the droppings of elephants had been studied at the London Zoo. Explosives were wrapped into whatever form of shit was native to its destination. Deadly devices were made in little Kensington factories. Film studios camouflaged everything and picked the brains of brilliant set designer Beverley Woodner, daughter of a Chicago Jewish rabbi, who was a cross between Merle Oberon and Vivien Leigh.”
After working alongside Vera to make sure Ike also saw the SOE “finishing schools,” Bill Pietsch was dropped with a Jedburgh team. Beverley Woodner recalled a poignant visit to one school, at Beaulieu, close to the family home of Edmund de Rothschild, now on active service as commander of an artillery battery and expecting to join a Jewish Brigade. Beaulieu was near enough to the English Channel to make France seem close. “Vera never showed me her feelings, but for this once,” Beverley said. “She told me a cure for depression was the sound, color, and smells of the countryside… the miracle of the seasons… the healing powers of lapwings made of the same cells and tissues as ourselves but living in some invisible, unknowable place.”
There were sound reasons for Vera's depression and her need to wander among a dozen country houses dotting the Beaulieu estate, where tidal saltings teemed with birdlife and offered the vitamin-rich samphire, a combination of asparagus and seaweed that compensated for the meagerness of the wartime diet. Edmund de Rothschild's adjacent property had been requisitioned by the Admiralty, and the Royal Navy's white ensign was surrounded by woodland paths, rhododendrons, streams and pools, ferns and water lilies, cedars and smooth grassy lawns that provided Vera with the “wilderness therapy” she craved, although this was not exactly a wilderness. Plant hunters of the Rothschild clan had brought exotic botanical specimens here from all over the world. A new member of the family had planned to study them, the agent Jean-Pierre Reinach, who had been captured and executed. His widow, Naomi of the Rothschild clan, eased her pain by working with refugee children and planning Jewish resettlement after the war. Meanwhile Vera was dealing with the loss of Noor Inayat Khan, descended from the last Mughal emperor.
As part of her training, Noor had been sent from Beaulieu on a grueling ninety-six-hour exercise to the Welsh border, to arrange live and dead letter boxes, and to find three separate locations for secret wireless transmissions, without arousing local suspicion and without maps. Noor accomplished these tasks brilliantly but was assessed by some instructors as too emotionally unstable for closework o
perations. Vera knew that Noor was now at 84 avenue Foch in Paris, in stark contrast to bucolic Beaulieu. Avenue Foch elegance had sunk into a dungeonlike twilight, where SS Sturmbannführer Hans Kieffer wormed his way into the minds of captured agents. The betrayal of the Prosper circuit, which became known a few days after Noor landed, prompted Vera to wireless Noor to return immediately aboard a pickup plane. Noor turned down the offer. An unusually strong-minded young woman, she was driven by principle to finish every task. Before she was caught, she had accomplished wonders, drawing on deep reservoirs of energy until, in a moment of exhausted carelessness, she forgot the one lesson Vera had drummed into her time and again. At Beau-lieu, the last holding place before agents went into the field, one girl had been disqualified after she called out in English “Come in!” when instructors banged on her door in the middle of the night and shouted “Gestapo!” Noor's mistake was more dramatic.
Some sources insist that her fatal mistake was to leave one of her logbooks in a temporary safe house. Sonderführer Ernst Vogt testified in a postwar deposition that Noor had been denounced—and her network blown—on or about October 7. On October 13, Vogt trapped her when she returned to a temporary Paris apartment at 98 rue de la Faisenderie to pick up her wireless transmitter. She fought Vogt and bit through the hands of one of his German escorts, but was captured. She was held for several weeks at avenue Foch, managed to escape into the street, but was recaptured—destined for Dachau. If she did make mistakes, it was not from a lack of training.
Far from these requisitioned country houses, Lord Rothschild in London allowed his bank to be used as a testing ground for SOE. Precision armament parts and fuses were manufactured at the bank's facilities in the Royal Mint Refinery near the Tower of London, where before the war the Rothschilds had melted down and refined gold. SOE was the latest beneficiary of Rothschild skills. The N. M. Rothschild bank had provided the Duke of Wellington's armies in 1811 with gold coins and ingots to cover the costs of fighting Napoleon. A letter in the bank archives from the duke spoke of the need for gold, “having due consideration of the magnitude of the objectives in view, of the dispatch and secrecy it requires, and of the risk which may be incurred.” In SOE closework, a major problem was financing agents and resistance groups; again, the Rothschilds were able to help. Victor de Rothschild, an expert in 1944 at defusing time bombs, was asked to test a lock that was impossible to pick. The prototype was put in a container with incendiary material that made it explode if anyone tried to cut through it, and The Shop sent it to the bank for testing. The Shop was telephoned next day. Rothschild's bank now had a large hole burned through one floor. Victor gently suggested they all go back to the drawing board.
Knowing the chances were now good for Edmund de Rothschild to join a British army Jewish Brigade, Vera recovered her normal buoyancy and drew comfort from discussing with Beverley Woodner another age in England when Jews were not “lesser breeds” but part of a thriving and tolerant society. Edmund's father, Lionel, was the eldest son of Leo, and was married at the Central Synagogue in London on January 19, 1881. Albert, Queen Victoria's consort, had signed the marriage contract, and omnibus drivers on the Piccadilly route had sported the Rothschild colors of blue and yellow on their horsewhips to mark the coming of age of Edmund's father in 1903.
“I need to go back to a time that seems enviably predictable,” said Vera. “It helps deal with so much uncertainty.”
35
“The Life That I Have Is Yours”
Vera learned that in Paris she had been dealing with an antagonist who, while she knew him, appeared to know nothing about her: a formerly obscure small-town schoolteacher who had climbed in Hitler's esteem to become the SD wizard in mind games, Dr. Josef Goetz. The “Dr.” was typical of German pretentiousness, she thought, adopted by Goetz in the same spirit as “Dr.” Goebbels, to suggest academic superiorities that neither had.
Josef Goetz lurked at the Paris headquarters of Himmler's SD counterespionage service, west of the Arc de Triomphe, in two of the three houses at 82, 84, and 86 avenue Foch, where captured agents were interrogated. Vera knew the layout now, and that Goetz was also seen watching the Gestapo's torturers at 11 rue de Saussaies, behind the French Ministry of the Interior in charge of the pro-Nazi Vichy French police. Goetz used French police collaborators to pretend they were protecting SOE wireless operators held in custody. Vera reconstructed Goetz in her mind's eye: a well-fed, sedentary pen pusher with myopic blue eyes behind thick lenses, contentedly plotting to kill “subhumans” like her agents. She had to eliminate false information planted by the milice, the pro-Nazi police who had been seen in the immediate aftermath of the French surrender as Vichy's way to restore French honor. The milice now obeyed the violently pro-Nazi Joseph Darnand and mingled among resisters in the guise of French police “crossovers” to the Allied side. Vera cautioned her agents that local resisters talked too freely to “pseudo-crossovers.” The Resistance was too trusting of volunteers who flaunted their patriotism, whereas communists ran a disciplined system of cells and silence, enforced by Soviet-trained experts. Henri Dericourt—a highly experienced pre-war pilot and the French air movements officer for SOE flights into enemy territory—spoke of complicated traps hidden in a sinister world of uncertain loyalties. In answering Vera's carefully respectful questions, he let slip much about the fate of Noor Inayat Khan.
Arrogant in his belief that he was the indispensable traffic controller for her agents, Dericourt was not to know that Vera had growing numbers of experienced agents visiting her from the field by other routes than the ones he controlled. It gave her the power to cross-check information. Virginia Hall had been in London briefly for adjustments to Cuthbert, her artificial lower leg, and to consult her American compatriots at OSS headquarters. She was now back with Rolande Colas and the OSS in the Haute-Loire. Nearby was Pearl Witherington, aged seventeen when she first taught English in Paris. Now twenty-eight, she had sole command of an armed maquis of about 2,500 men and women. Violette Szabo had joined them before her capture, and was now in Fresnes Prison, ten miles outside Paris, historically the largest criminal facility in Europe.
The White Rabbit was also there when a sudden increase in BBC plain-language messages signaled the approach of D-day. French boys and girls bicycled around the prison and shouted BBC “stand by” messages for captured agents. On June 5, 1944, the BBC switched to “action.” One boy on a bicycle, Jacques Deleporte, guessed D-day was imminent. He told Vera later that Fresnes was “a sprawling complex, a labyrinth of dungeons, high landings, endless corridors. The SS controlled it, helped by les souris, the ugly and stupid SS women in gray. Hundreds of thousand of prisoners had been held there since the Revolution, when many threw themselves from the upper levels rather than wait for the guillotine. In 1944 there was little the Germans could do to outwit us. We were street urchins whose strength was our contempt for adults and authority.”1
Deception teams parachuted into the Pas-de-Calais to give the impression that this was the D-day target, using wind-up gramophones and the recorded sounds of armies. Ahead of the real invasion, too, landed twenty-two-year-old Charles Wheeler to scout behind enemy lines. He became the BBC's longest-serving foreign correspondent in postwar years. Another advance parachutist was George Millar, aged twenty-seven, former correspondent for the London Sunday Express in Paris, who in 1939 “reported how the French Army always ran away.” He joined the British Rifle Brigade, commanded a scout platoon, was captured, and jumped from a train to join Resistance groups that helped him cross the Pyrenees into Spain. From there he reached England, and laid the foundations of a lifelong friendship with Vera. By D-day, he was fighting alongside teenage resisters and had revised his views on the French fighting spirit. The French who “ran” in 1940, he now conceded, were tired old men afraid to repeat the 1914–18 carnage.2
In response to critics who smeared SOE as pro-Soviet, General Eisenhower declared his admiration for what SOE was accomplishing. Vera thought th
e Americans a godsend, free from rank-worship. This she had to tolerate with the influx of stiff-necked War Office disciplinarians at SOE headquarters. “I kept my head down, following the advice of an Australian, Richard ‘Dikko’ Hughes, who said ‘I've signed nothing, you can prove nothing.’“ Hughes's first wife was Jewish. A close friend of Ian Fleming, he later suggested that Fleming's 007 should run MOB, Miscellaneous Objectives Bureau, patterned on the thriller-writer's real-life Assault Unit intelligence-gathering command. Fleming, while still the star of naval intelligence, called it his Indecent Assault Unit.3
SAS teams advertised the fictional FUSAG or First U.S. Army Group and the Pas-de-Calais as their D-day target. This disinformation seemed to fool the Germans when a disconcerting enemy message boasted of fooling SOE. It came from a Prosper subcircuit, Butler, running since 1942 around Le Mans, southwest of Paris:
We thank you for the large deliveries of arms and ammunition you have been kind enough to send us. We also appreciate the many tips you have given us regarding your plans.
Vera knew the Prosper master circuit was penetrated by Goetz, and that Buckmaster had pretended to take at face value messages dispatched by Prosper operators under German control. To maintain his counterdeception, he parachuted precious supplies to Prosper but did not receive the bluff-check warnings from his Gestapo-controlled agents. Leo Marks had tried to alert him to the betrayal of the master circuit after picking up signs that the Bulter subcircuit was brulé, blown. Now Vera discovered why Leo's warnings had been stifled.