Spymistress

by William Stevenson

  “Why did Algiers disregard the call for proper arms?” Krystyna asked Cammaerts. He said Americans had planned to invade the south of France from Algiers. Churchill objected: invading southern France would divert forces from Field Marshal Harold Alexander's drive to knock Italy out of the war, a plan that followed ULTRA's decoding of Hitler's order that Italy “must be the final line blocking [Allied] entry into [Italy], which would have incalculable military and political consequences for Germany.” Roosevelt stuck to his plan to invade southern France. Churchill gave way, but said this dashed all hope for a swift victory in Italy. He was astonished when U.S. General George Marshall said that, if absolute weight had been given to these ULTRA insights, Overlord and the D-day landings might never have been necessary.3

  Cammaerts believed it had now been downgraded by all Allied commanders. Krystyna feared that Vera's organization was also being treated with near contempt. “Power is as power does,” Krystyna told Cammaerts. Recalling her words later, he said, “Krystyna was not intimidated by the thunder and lightning of mighty armies but believed in improvisation. If the Alpine passes were vital to Hitler, she'd subvert German satellite soldiers guarding those passes. I followed her for days while she spoke with Eastern European conscripts. She was sure they would throw away their weapons, especially the Poles. But when we returned, the Germans had blockaded all eight roads into the Vercors.”

  Hostages were taken and brutalized before being shot. Peasants were forced to walk ahead of German troops to set off landmines. Others were made to bring up ammunition and then were shot in the back as they walked away. The maquis, horrified by the savagery, collapsed. Krystyna saw five children buried under one destroyed house. “Only eleven-year-old Arlette Blanc remained alive but for five days lay trapped, pleading for water from German soldiers who passed by her, laughing. Arlette died from gangrene. One woman was raped by seventeen men. A German army doctor checked her pulse in case she fainted before the next soldier's turn. Another woman's stomach was slit open and her guts strung around her neck,” Krystyna wirelessed Vera.4

  Cammaerts and two companions were caught and taken to the Vichy French militia and Gestapo facility at Digne. Krystyna decided that if she tried an armed rescue, Cammaerts would be killed. Instead, she walked into the Gestapo-militia office. Cammaerts himself later told Vera: “She said she was General Montgomery's niece and his armies were just around the corner. She would save the jailers if they released her friends. A Gestapo interpreter, Max Waem, had to listen for three hours to all of this. She knew we were to be shot that evening and warned Waem the Gestapo would pay a frightful price. Then she declared, ‘Lord Vansittart is my uncle.’”

  The veteran diplomat's hatred of Nazis was well known, and Krystyna said she would radio His Lordship and get him to pardon Waem if the prisoners were freed. Waem hurriedly advised the Vichy-run militia to free the prisoners. At SOE/Cairo, General W. A. M. Stawell recommended that Krystyna receive the George Cross, the highest civilian award, “for one of the most remarkable personal exploits of the war.” But what Krystyna wanted was British citizenship. A French hero tried to help. General de Lattre de Tassigny, who commanded the First French Army of 250,000 men, testified to her “good character and superior judgment in war.” De Lattre had fought with inferior arms against General Heinz Guderian's panzers, and then escaped to North Africa.5 His word carried weight everywhere but in Whitehall. MI5's B Branch espionage section's officers, who had never heard a shot fired in anger, questioned Krystyna's loyalties even as Vera endorsed what General Stawell called, “Krystyna's hairiest mission yet.”6

  37

  “But If the Cause Be Not Good…”

  Vera moved with the self-assurance of a pilot officer. She commandeered a Stinson Reliant monoplane to shuttle between London and liberated Paris. She became ever more acutely aware of the daily tensions within the Allied camp.

  England was tired. London suffered more destruction: the homeless burrowed like troglodytes into the London Underground. Housewives queued for whale meat, a substitute for normal fare, and claimed their egg-per-person-per-month, if lucky. The movie house near Trafalgar Square screened newsreels of heavy fighting, but the main attraction was escape from the depressing sight of rats and rubble. To feed the demands of war, every domestic need was in short supply.

  Vera flew unchallenged within the unbroken stream of uniforms and machines pouring out of the island kingdom to prosecute a war that in Paris was regarded as over by Charles de Gaulle. He now demanded respect as head of a provisional government of France. When he entered Paris on foot on August 25, 1944, Vera was there to meet Resistance leaders from the two largest quarreling factions: Gaullists and communists. “You see in Paris the romantic tension that surrounds great events,” said Henri Tanguy, and recalled that lovemaking had been the chief diversion of ladies fleeing the parochialism of prewar Romania. “Hop into bed” was the answer to all stress. She just smiled; she needed his full report on the fruits of the financing sent to fuel insurrection in Paris. The results were not bad: rail and police strikes had begun two weeks before de Gaulle arrived. But that was after he had a disastrous quarrel with Churchill on the eve of D-day. She had read the reports.

  Henri Tanguy's posters called for revolutionary action. The tri-color on Notre Dame spurred on Resistance fighters in gun battles against German military units still holding out in city blocks even as de Gaulle came down the Champs Elysées with his long stride and his sour expression. Vera knew the foibles that made him awkward, but she was not in a forgiving mood. In London, civilians endured the absence of every necessity, while in Paris many had lived well off the occupiers, while supplies were showered upon a Resistance now fighting itself.

  André Malraux, a future minister of culture under de Gaulle, told her, “The partisan forces held together only to get the Germans out of France.” At age forty-three, Malraux boasted of his brave record in the Resistance. Vera said resisters could prevent entire German divisions from reaching the Fatherland. Malraux predicted, accurately as it turned out, that one in a thousand of his countrymen would be killed in battles between Gaullist administrators, anti-Gaullists, and communists.

  Vera's Paris base was Special Forces Advanced Headquarters. She had offices in the Hotel Cecil and at 37 boulevard des Capucines. The latest Gestapo Enigma, known as TGD, remained unbroken, and she needed to crack it as one way to learn the fate of missing agents, some perhaps betrayed by French collaborators in the dispatch of Jews. She had to know who, where, and why. Her Mossad sources were helpful, but the Jewish Agency and the chief rabbi of London, J. N. Hertz, reminded her that many soldiers in the new Jewish Brigade felt bitter about British policy in Palestine. To offset this, Rabbi Hertz publicly applauded British formation of a Jewish Brigade within the British army. Privately, he worried about “a splinter off a splinter” off the mainstream Zionist movement using terror to protest the British ban on migration to Palestine.

  The Jewish Brigade had a covert command to salvage what was left of European Jewry, and it welcomed Vera's unmatched experience. But SOE came first. London's sensibilities had been dulled, and few there questioned the cost in British overseas territories and long-term loans for U.S. heavy arms and aircraft. SOE had to struggle. Harold Macmillan, a future prime minister, was the influential minister-resident in Algiers when he rejected SIS/Foreign Office condemnation of SOE as “disobedient, ungovernable, unpredictable, and dangerous.” The critics were conditioned by traditional, tidy routine. SOE was anything but tidily regulated. “That,” said Macmillan,” is its strength.”

  Vera had hoped for support from General de Gaulle for SOE's extension into an inter-Allied agency. SOE had lost only one hundred aircraft, while its 507 experts had trained and armed more than 50,000 maquisards. “They were the equivalent of fifteen divisions, and shortened the war by months in facilitating the rapidity of our advance across France,” Eisenhower told de Gaulle.1 But the Frenchman had been visibly upset two days before D-day whe
n he went to Churchill's temporary quarters in a train near Portsmouth and said he wanted to lead France, not have it taken over by the Americans. Churchill urged him to speak about this with Roosevelt. De Gaulle bristled. Was he supposed to submit his candidacy to the U.S. president? Churchill burst out: “We are going to liberate Europe because the Americans are with us to do it…. Every time I have to choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall choose Roosevelt.”2

  Now de Gaulle wanted SOE out of France. Vera had hoped for a reprieve after his exchange with SOE's George Starr. On September 18, 1944, de Gaulle accused Starr of being sent behind the lines to undercut Gaullist administrators. Starr shouted back that he was loyal to his French superior officers. He had been parachuted in November 1942 to take over the large Toulouse circuit whose leader, Philippe de Vomécourt, and all wireless operators had been killed or captured. Starr had fought long and fierce battles against German reinforcements before and after D-day. De Gaulle accused Starr of meddling in French affairs by continuing to fight. Starr replied, “The situation is like that of feudal baronetcies: local commanders are taking advantage of lawlessness and confusion…. You are full of shit, merde!” De Gaulle ordered him to leave France at once, and then suddenly shook his hand and said there was one thing Starr got right: “You know how to say merde.”

  Months of fighting in Germany still lay ahead, from which de Gaulle appeared detached. This endangered Vera's long-term aims. She impressed upon Malraux the need to rescue Jewish survivors in the camps and to look for agents who might yet be saved from execution. Thirty-two of her young women had been inserted into occupied France since the start of the year, nine of them after D-day. Malraux was sympathetic and said de Gaulle was flexible after having his distrust of covert action confirmed by Arthur Stratton. Stratton, who was recruiting for the U.S. Seventh Army, wrote to Bill Donovan that French women agents were, more often than not, prostitutes: Madame X “enjoyed danger, enjoyed the spotlight of being a spy, and enjoyed all the men she could…. her method of getting information was that she stole, she lied, she cheated.” Stratton denigrated another woman “who could not bring herself to jump from the plane.” The ultimate insult was Stratton's afterthought: “Her name I forget.”3

  Malraux said later this helped Vera to continue without de Gaulle's approval. There were still pockets of pro-Nazi resistance. She was trusted as a spymistress by the Jewish Brigade's covert-action specialists, who had nurtured the Mossad escape lines. Now hundreds of thousands of homeless refugees were being labeled DPs, displaced persons, and Allied commanders were herding them into camps pending an accommodation of Stalin's demand of May 31, 1944, for the return to Soviet control of “Russian prisoners,” of whom Vera reckoned only 10 percent were Russian. The rest had lived in eastern European countries where Stalin would have them enslaved if they reappeared in territories where he took control with tacit Allied approval.

  Vera had always marveled at Shakespeare's understanding of war. The lines from King Henry V, spoken by a soldier on the eve of battle in France, now haunted her:

  But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make; when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, “We died at such a place”…

  The Western cause was no good, Vera wrote angrily to Gubbins, if “those we professed to fight for are abandoned.” He had to watch his beloved Poland disappear into Stalin's pocket, and discovered an un-publicized finding by the legal adviser to the British Foreign Office, drafted on June 24, 1944, but kept secret: “This [surrender of prisoners and DPs] is purely a question for the Soviet authorities and does not concern His Majesty's Government…. all those with whom the Soviet authorities desire to deal must be handed over to them, and we are not concerned with the fact that they may be shot.”

  38

  “If These Do Not Die Well, It Will Be a Black Matter”

  Vera was afraid for agents held in camps overrun by Russian armies. Eisenhower had said he would not race the Russians for Berlin. What did this mean for millions of innocents drifting between the armies? She made Leo Marks comb through old transmissions of agents. At twenty-four he still had a boyish quality, although he was at last recognized as a genius in cryptography even at Bletchley, where he said later, “I was originally rejected because I was a Yid of the shopkeeper class. Did they fear a Jew might use Bletchley to create Eretz-Israel, Land of Israel? Stalin by 1945 was conspiring to shovel homeless Jews into Palestine, and the Nazis did, to ignite Arab violence against the British.”

  In Paris, Vera heard more about Henri Dericourt, the air movements officer linked to the fate of Princess Noor Inayat Khan. There was talk that some of his curious behavior indicated that he was a Russian mole when communists and Gaullists worked together. Noor was born in the Kremlin. Vera reviewed the missing agent's file and Leo's recollections.

  Noor had stunned Leo by saying her father taught her never to lie.

  “Her life depends on telling lies!” Leo had said in anguish to Vera in 1943. “Her father heads a sect that says anyone who lies is damned.”

  Noor was directly descended from Tipu Sultan, the last Muslim leader of southern India, the Tiger of Mysore. Her father, Hasra Inayat Khan, was teaching Sufism in New York when he married a niece of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Noor was born in 1914 when her father taught at the Conservatoire in Moscow, and she was thirteen when he died.

  Leo had shown Noor how to insert “bluff security checks” if she was caught and forced to send radio messages under German control. “That would be telling lies!” she exclaimed. Leo quoted her own words to her from a prewar storybook she had written and published, Twenty Jataka Tales.1 In it, monkeys reach safety when a prince who becomes the Buddha makes his body into a bridge for them to cross a canyon. Leo said that each time Noor encoded, she must see the letters as monkeys making a bridge to London. “When there's a truth to be passed on, don't let your code tell lies.”

  Leo's mystic interpretation satisfied the girl. Her astonishing beauty, he had concluded, grew out of inner tranquillity. But it was hard to take seriously a girl so gorgeous. A commando instructor reported that “a sudden pistol shot during an exercise startled her into a Sufi-like trance lasting several hours.” She had been known to prewar French radio listeners for her readings of children's stories, and this put her on the German Sonderpfändungliste, the Wanted List of persons to be arrested in occupied countries. Nonetheless, she was flown by Lysander to France in June 1943. The promised Resistance reception committee was missing. She flew back to England and waited patiently until the moonlit night of June 16, when she arrived with Diana Hope Rowden and was met by Henri Dericourt. Noor made her own way to Paris. Within days her Resistance contacts were blown or under scrutiny. She worked with other French resisters, constantly changing her address after leaving the first apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, where she first learned of the collapse of three subcircuits of the sprawling Prosper network. Vera recalled telling Noor to return to England. She had refused “until a replacement can be found.”

  Vera now knew the Germans were always aware of Noor's activities. They intercepted messages but found it hard to catch her. How had she lasted four months? She was arrested on October 13, 1943. She escaped twice, and was recaptured. She had apparently given away nothing, despite the cunning of her captors, but might have unwittingly led the Germans to her contacts.

  Vera explored the possibiity that the French secret service officers who first worked with the German Enigma spy, Hans-Thilo Schmidt, might shed light on the strange coincidences surrounding Noor's capture. She concluded that Schmidt's early French contacts had disclosed SOE methods. Months before D-day, ten SOE dropping grounds were in German hands. Vera turned to Paul Mellon, an oil tycoon from Pittsburgh, who was working with the OSS in London. He shot holes in a theory that Schmidt was still alive. Mellon said there was no doubt that Schmidt had died from self-administered potass
ium cyanide in a Gestapo jail in September 1943. His brother, General Rudolf Schmidt, had arranged the burial because neither the Catholic Church nor the state would take responsibility. Rudolf, “one of the Führer's favorite generals,” had been discharged from the army during the inquiry into his brother's activities, and yet he remained free. Was it the Russians who were now playing mind games?

  Pierre Raynaud, the young Free French officer who joined Cammaerts's original circuit, met Vera at 37 boulevard des Capucines in Paris to claim that the two SOE Canadians dispatched with other agents from Fresnes Prison, Frank Pickersgill and John Macalister, had incriminating evidence planted on them by London Control before they left England. When they were captured—two brave and doomed men—the planted evidence could have helped the Gestapo to draw a net around other SOE agents and subagents. Raynaud himself had escaped to take charge of the Third Battalion of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). He had been with Noor when both were waiting to leave on different missions. In a Moonlight Squadron hut, he was astounded to see her studying a prewar French railway timetable. He thought then she was out of her depth. Now he believed she was meant to be caught. Raynaud later deposited with the National Archives in Paris a dossier that he said contained proof that Noor and other agents were used by London Control. He quoted a French girl, a cellmate of Noor at Fresnes Prison, Alix d'Unienville. She had worked at General de Gaulle's headquarters in London before Vera parachuted her in, at the end of March 1944, with 40 million francs for distribution by the Gaullist delegate-general in Paris. On D-day, Alix was caught in a German roundup. While in prison, she was told by Noor that the Germans knew about the parachutage in the Vercors. Alix herself made a death-defying escape when the train carrying prisoners destined for Buchenwald was bombed.2