Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  Noor's presence in France had been known to Goetz. SOE agents had been dropped into the hands of three German-controlled circuits. Hitler, according to Goetz's later testimony, decided this was the best psychological moment to shake Allied confidence in the reliability of resistance movements. In SOE's counterplay, Goetz's attention was directed to circuits in a region well away from the D-day landings. Goetz received agents lured by his own game-playing and primed to distract his attention from the very big resistance networks still undetected.

  Vera wondered if London Control had told Buckmaster to keep on dropping agents and supplies to fool the Germans in a double deception, stifling Leo's warnings. On the German side of Control's game was Josef Goetz; on the Allied side was Uncle Claude, whose real aim was to control SOE. Buckmaster was prepared to cooperate, but complained that the Secret Intelligence Service, he said, had “intruded on my turf.”4

  Prosper was allowed to grow too fast after a woman courier, Andrée Borrel, had been dropped near Paris on September 24–25, 1942. She was followed by Francis Suttill, who had the task of rebuilding a circuit around Paris. Suttill, a peacetime barrister aged thirty-two, was not as careful as he should have been about developing subagents and subcircuits. From the Ardennes to the Atlantic, the enterprise became too big to be supervised. Every Prosper agent save two had been betrayed, and executed after torture.

  One missing agent was thirty-year-old Odette Sansom, married to a Combined Operations naval commander and mother of two daughters. On an autumn evening in 1942 she had wiped away her SOE number, S.23, chalked on a wall inside the Wimpole Street hide-away where agents memorized orders. In France she became entangled in the game run by Josef Goetz. Hugo Ernst Bleicher, aged forty-five and a member of Admiral Canaris's intelligence service, hooked her name out of SOE wireless traffic. Bleicher saw Odette after her arrest and said he would leave her free to negotiate peace terms on behalf of the German High Command. Odette was unsure if this was a ruse in order to have her lead his men to other SOE agents. A colleague, Peter Churchill, made a similar miscalculation, and both agents were now prisoners.

  As far back as April 1943, Vera had urged Odette not to try to outwit the enemy. When she searched for lost agents later, she found Maurice Southgate, one of three out of forty British agents still alive in Buchenwald. He said girls in captivity were sent to the ovens after telling him they tried to warn London of their capture. “The responsible SOE officer,” he said, “should be court-martialed for causing the death of so many courageous women.”

  De Gaulle insisted that France was liberating itself, while in fact eighty-three Jedburgh teams, a score of American Operational Groups, the SAS, and the État-major des Forces Françaises de l'Interieur had been dropped behind the lines to join local French groups. The military wing of the Communist National Liberation Front, Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, worked with Gaullist Free French, pending a war within a war between de Gaulle and communist leaders. Yeo-Thomas, the White Rabbit, heard other voices coming through the air vents of his dungeon, singing “La Marseillaise.” These were new prisoners who told of bitter fighting by French resisters. He had always put faith in a modernized form of guerrilla warfare and had talked so often with Vera about how “primitive” closework could empower impoverished victims of any tyranny, agreeing with her that if anyone should be part of SOE, it was the Jews whose only haven, Palestine, was denied them by both sides. Now he waited for his opportunity to get back into action.

  Colin Gubbins wanted the Polish Home Army to be given unstinting help in defeating the German occupiers before Poland fell completely into the hands of the Russians. There had been only two successful SOE airdrops into Poland in four months. The Free Poles in London asked if four squadrons of a new Polish Air Force, made up from those who had flown with the RAF, could land at bases the Home Army had already recaptured from the Germans, ahead of the Russian advance into Poland. The request was rejected.

  Jan Zurakowski went directly to Vera. “I'm sorry, Zura,” she told him. “Something's going on at higher levels I don't understand.”

  “I'd never seen her show emotion,” he said later. “She had tears in her eyes and bent forward and lit a cigarette. Then she turned icy cold and said, ‘Our Foreign Office and Washington are obsessed with one thing: What will Stalin think if we help you?’ I told her it was obvious the Soviet Union intended to run our guerrilla formations in Europe.”5

  With crisis piling upon crisis, to think ahead was difficult for SOE. Before the Operation Overlord landings, three battalions of British sappers went ashore at low tide to clear the mined beaches; three-quarters of the men were cut down by enemy machine guns. Such frightful losses were commonplace among French Resistance armies. SOE officers told of fierce battles to delay German reinforcements. French saboteurs cut telephone lines to force the Germans onto the airwaves for Bletchley to listen in. German reinforcements from the Eastern Front were attacked. In the agonizing weeks of uncertainty when, after D-day, the Allied advance stalled, Pimento's French railroad workers derailed 1,005 troop trains. Every German army train rushed up from the south was derailed by resisters. The German 11th Panzer Division, with the Tiger tanks that outgunned the Russians, took only a week to reach the Rhine from that front, but bogged down for another three weeks in French guerrilla quagmires. If it had reached Normandy sooner, it might have helped fling the Allies back into the sea. Montgomery's plans to quickly capture the strategic city of Caen were frighteningly delayed by the unsuspected presence of German forces within the ancient walls. Cadogan at the Foreign Office noted with studied insouciance on July 28, 1944, “We seem to be stuck against heavy opposition in Normandy.” A secret Polish army in northern France, and a Polish Parachute Brigade reinforced by Polish workers who had escaped from German camps, managed to prevent a German counterattack that could have turned “stuck” into a total withdrawal of Allied invasion forces. Gubbins called SOE “a howling success.” He had to beat the drum to break the silence of top commanders like Montgomery, who totally ignored the part SOE played and the clandestine forces it nurtured.6

  Donovan, now better known as General William J., confirmed to Vera that the SS Panzer Division Das Reich was in southwest France when it should have been on the Russian front. Das Reich was reputedly one of the most formidable fighting units in the world. A French professional soldier, Jérôme Lescanne, posing as a farmer and watching the region between Bordeaux and Marseilles, had obtained the railway orders for Das Reich that would have landed the SS division at the Normandy bridgehead in time to defeat Overlord. Vera's agents worked with the French national railway to force trainloads of Das Reich men and equipment onto mined and booby-trapped roads. Wheelwright, a large SOE-run circuit, waited until the Allied landings to blow up the division's fuel dumps. Two French schoolgirls, graduates of Pimento's impromptu training program, sabotaged axle boxes of transporter cars with abrasive powders. Chuck Yeager, after his escape, had told Vera that the powders were compact and easily hidden. “Even a schoolgirl could use them,” he reported prophetically. After Das Reich panzers shook free at Toulouse, they ran another gauntlet of circuits: Digger, Fireman, the SAS team Bulbasket. What remained of the division then had to deal with Miss Pearl Witherington.

  Miss Witherington's ancestor had fought on his knees after his legs were cut off at the battle of Chevy Chase. Her own early life was less spectacular. As a teenager, after her father left the family destitute, she had to find work in Paris to help her mother get by. When Paris fell, she escaped to London, became restless as a shorthand typist in Whitehall, and let it be known that she wanted to fight with the French underground. She was asked how she knew such a thing existed. “If it doesn't, it should,” she replied. Vera dispatched her as a courier, but Miss Witherington took command of a guerrilla force when her organizer was killed. She had joined SOE in June 1943, parachuted into Maurice Southgate's circuit, and was reunited with her boyfriend, Henri Cornioley, a German prison camp escapee. Both were with Rola
nde Colas, making professional cuts to the strategically vital main rail line between Bordeaux and Paris, when a reward was put on Pearl Witherington's head. German placards displayed her photograph with offers of a million francs for anyone who turned her in.

  “The Resistance liberated France south of the Loire, not the Allied armies,” she said to Vera in a later debriefing. Sabotage, exploding fuel dumps, and twisted railway lines had forced German troops to use roads where guerrillas could further harrass them. There was no enemy opposition to Allied forces that landed on the Riviera two months after D-day. Their way was open along the lower Rhone valley all the way to Grenoble.

  But a terrible price was paid by French civilians. Back in London after meetings with OSS representatives in North Africa in August 1944, Bill Donovan got detailed accounts from Allen Dulles in Bern. In Pearl Witherington's battleground was Limoges, the great porcelain and enamel center. It was in a virtual state of siege. Dulles reported:

  Its barricades and block houses are held by Vichy's pro-Nazi security police and militia. Disorganized actions against the Germans by the citizenry result in reprisals that bathe the whole region in blood. The maquis were driven out of the city and attacked a German garrison, killing a colonel in a Das Reich SS regiment. In revenge, the SS moved into the neighboring village of Oradoursur-Glane on June 10, where hundreds of children were on summer vacation. All the children were locked inside a church, which was then set on fire, and any child running out was machine-gunned to death. This savagery on the part of the Germans at Oradour is inexplicable. All the men were shut up in barns, women and children in a church among houses that were set on fire, the flames spreading to the barns and church. Some seven hundred innocents were killed, mostly burned alive…. The fate of Limoges and that of all the cities in the center of France is very much the same…. The only comfort in this frightful situation is to be found in the intense patriotism of these people.

  German terrorist reprisals, Pearl Witherington argued, only inflamed civilian resistance. She weighed the cost against very heavy losses from conventional, and often unsuccessful, regular operations. A resister accomplished much more for much less. Within her region, a strategic French tunnel was plastered by RAF Squadron 617, using the biggest and costliest Tallboy bombs, just after D-day. This risked highly trained Pathfinder pilots but failed to close the tunnel. Miss Witherington did it with SOE explosives. No lives were lost. Armada, Vera's code name for a circuit of one chauffeur, a fireman, a garage hand, and a student, crippled a major arms factory and stopped canal traffic. A large force of regular troops would need to be diverted from hand-to-hand battles in Normandy to get the same results.

  But reliance on individuals in covert action meant that the loss of one could have widespread, disastrous consequences. Das Reich panzers captured Violette Szabo after Vera dispatched her the night before D-day to the Limoges region. Violette was a crack shot. The Das Reich division was entangled in the brushwood of the maquisards three days after she arrived. She was sent in an old Renault on a liaison mission. A Das Reich patrol intercepted her car. She had a Sten gun and two magazines, each with thirty-two rounds. She took cover in a wheat field with her driver, and they crawled toward a wooded lot. German armored cars circled the field, and the infantry closed in. Violette waved her driver to make a final dash for the trees while she held off the Germans. She was bleeding heavily and too weak to run. She was taken alive when she had nothing left to fight with except her bare hands, and dragged off to Limoges, where she was interrogated by the SS major who had hanged ninety-nine hostages the previous day in retaliation for a maquis attack that had killed forty German soldiers.

  Some details reached Vera later, with a mutilated, undecipherable wireless signal. Leo Marks remembered standing in silence while Vera attacked it. She spotted merde. Shit. The letters were scattered. Then Theo. She heard again the voice of Rolande, when she was the pale-faced skinny medical student in Paris long ago, “Moi, je ne le laisserai plus m'emmerder” (As for me, I'm not going to put up with this shit any longer), meaning Hitler. Bit by bit, Vera broke the indecipherable. There was no triumph in her voice when she said to Leo: “Someone transmitted this for Rolande Colas. The Germans are ‘sending our Joes up-the-chimney.’ Trains are taking prisoners to crematoria in Germany. Violette Szabo's on the same transport, and so is Yeo-Thomas.”

  Rolande had provided a glimpse of the fate awaiting herself and Violette and the White Rabbit. Death-camp commanders were anxious to leave no living testimony and were incinerating prisoners of war, slave workers, and any other witnesses. Vera walked over to 70 Upper Grosvenor Street and the office of the OSS chief in Europe, David Bruce. Could someone at the very top warn that legal action would be taken against German executioners of prisoners? Within days, President Roosevelt told a press conference of the Oradour atrocities.

  Still, as closework successes mounted, enemy fury increased against civilians. German lines of march were in chaos: divisions reached the bridgehead late, reduced often to mere companies and battalions. The 77th Infantry took thirteen days to make what should have been a two-day journey. The delays allowed the swelling tide of Allied power to sweep inland. SOE secrecy shrouded its own and other clandestine work. A prizewinning Normandy historian, Raymond Ruffin, waited thirty more years to write La Résistance normande face à la Gestapo after finally reconstructing the records of thirty-five groups of maquisards, francs-tireurs, and other irregulars within a single key target area—one hundred miles from Cherbourg to Dieppe, and inland by fifty miles to Domfront, with twenty-one German divisions within this tight space. Vengeful SS troops ravaged Domfront, the medieval town of misfortune where Vera had once noted the ancient warning: “Arrive at noon, hanged by one o'clock.” Civilians were killed and raped on the pretext of flushing out terrorists. In Calvados country, groupes de résistance had held together despite months of German killings prior to D-day.

  Vera worked under the physical stress of German V-1 missiles that began to hit London a week after D-day. One SOE agent located French quarries where the Germans had stored two thousand pilotless V-1 “buzz-bombs.” Vera received a list of thirteen French cities where factories were making “flying bomb” parts. The BBC warned that the factories would be bombed, advising workers to stay home. She was leaving BBC headquarters at Bush House when a V-1 fell into Aldwych and killed everyone in a double-decker bus. The Guards’ Chapel on Birdcage Walk was hit and sixty civilians were killed. This was the Sunday after Winston Churchill visited Normandy on June 12, 1944. London was undergoing another trial by fire. “London is full of people enjoying the sunshine,” Churchill lied to Stalin. By July 6, Vera saw a three-week tally: 2,754 flying bombs killed 2,752 civilians: almost one for one. By August 30, 6,000 people had been killed and 750,000 houses hit. In the end, what Londoners called “doodlebugs” had struck 1,404,000 houses, 149 schools, 11 churches, and 95 hospitals. The high-flying V-2s, a prototype of ballistic missiles, killed 2,500 Londoners. The head of MI5's espionage B Branch, Guy Liddell, suggested using “the uranium bomb as a threat of retaliation.” He was one of the few who knew about Allied development of an atomic bomb.

  Despite all these losses, few tears were shed abroad for Londoners: all attention was on the desperate Allied struggle to break out of the heavily defended triangle extending inland from the Normandy beaches. Vera, knowing that agents and the maquis faced greater challenges ahead, had to pacify exiled secret-army chiefs like the Poles, who naturally thought they were solely responsible for anticipating the hailstorm of flying bombs and missiles. Their agents had retrieved an unexploded V-2 that fell in a swamp eighty miles east of Warsaw some two months before the attacks began. The Poles were unaware of earlier intelligence on the missiles from Norway in 1940. In June 1943, Scandinavian sources had identified the Baltic island of Peenemünde as the base for development of the FZG-76, the V-1, and the V-2. This prompted an attack by 330 heavy bombers on August 16–17, 1943, that set back Peenemünde's development program.
For security reasons, one group could never be told of the successes of another country's agents.

  The Polish underground's outstanding record in other fields should have helped Vera's efforts to meet urgent Polish requests for air backing. The Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, with the Red Army within a few miles, was a tragic example of unsupported gallantry: Stalin refused to let Allied aircraft refuel on landing fields under his control. Nazi death squads killed or captured nearly 200,000 Poles, one-fifth of Warsaw's population, during August and September 1944 while the West celebrated the final breakout of its forces in Normandy. The neglect of Central and East European “lesser breeds,” Vera later wrote bitterly to Mary Stephenson, “lies behind indifference and prejudice, and still influences decision-makers at the top.” SOE could no longer operate in Romania “because we are told that military operations are conducted there by the Russians and not by ourselves.” The country of her birth was dismissed again as “a Balkan mess.”

  “She shared my faith in the superiority of individuals over machines, in thinking of the millions soon to face another tyrant's control,” Bill Stephenson recalled. “Technical triumphs of the Berlin Cipher Office had been undercut by human intelligence. Hitler's new space-age weapons were foiled by the ingenuity of RAF pilots who invented a way to slide their wings under the fins of missiles and tip them away from their targets.”

  In the month following D-day, Hitler survived the thirty-first attempt on his life. It made Vera even more vigorous in championing SOE methods, but opponents who advocated mass bombing of German cities said the failure of the attempt proved them right. On July 20, 1944, a bomb had been planted next to Hitler by Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg in a briefing room in the Wolf's Lair in eastern Germany. It blew up beside Hitler, but a table leg saved him. “I am invulnerable!” he gloated. His supporters thought he must be right. His opponents were decimated in his revenge killings of the alleged plotters.