Sarah Helm

by Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins;the Missing Agents of WWII

  There was even some uncertainty now about the fate of the two Canadians, Pickersgill and Macalister, who had not signalled to London since they arrived on June 16.

  Meanwhile Miss Torr had compiled another report for Buckmaster detailing the latest analysis of Norman's “peculiar” message. The crypt-analysts were now insisting that the fist was “very out of character” and “unusually hesitant” and that the message “could quite easily be the work of a flustered man doing his first transmission under protest.”

  Buckmaster, however, pointed out that all Norman's messages had been technically quite normal since he had been reminded about missing his true check. He ordered staff to continue sending messages to Norman, particularly to ask him for news of Suttill. Where had he been taken? Was he injured? The replies never answered the questions.

  For a better picture, F Section could only wait for the July moon, when France Antelme was due to fly back, bringing firsthand news.

  “I did like tidy records, and nobody had really bothered with records before,” Penelope Torr told me. She talked very fast and recalled being accused by her male superiors at SOE of being “a talky bitch.”

  “I had a new kind of flip-flop file: you pulled a card out and had different colours for each circuit so you could see exactly what had happened in that circuit. When the messages came in, they brought them to me and I filed them, and Buckmaster used to come and ask me to get them out so he could remind himself what they had said and what had happened, because he often didn't seem to know. He never wanted to believe anyone was captured. All his geese were swans.

  “The horrifying thing was that when somebody had been captured, you had to take a card out and put it in another file, and then later I discovered the agents had been strung up on meat hooks.”

  Did Vera ever come to see the records? I asked her.

  “Oh, no. She would never speak to me. She wasn't interested in me. She was abrasive and tiresome. She was abrasive in a quiet way. She didn't say much. But she was sarcastic. ‘What are you doing here, you upstart' sort of tone. She always seemed to be very pleased with herself—she had an ‘I know best' attitude. I don't think she could stand the fact that there was another woman of equal rank who could attend the morning meetings.”

  Sitting in her flat on the Banbury Road in Oxford, in a block of sheltered housing, Penelope Torr seemed suddenly haunted by the very thought of Vera. “I found it disturbing when she came into a room for the morning meeting. I thought, now what, you know,” she said, and laughed nervously. “I dislike what I remember of her.”

  Then she paused a while and said: “It sounds like a terrible thing to say, but I have been waiting till Vera died before I ever said anything of this. I never wanted anything I said to get back to her. I was worried she would immediately call me up and start belittling me.”

  A businessman before the war, France Antelme, a broad-shouldered, handsome British Mauritian in his midforties, had been sent to France by SOE, charged with arranging finance and supplies for Allied troops after the landings. Arriving back in London in mid-July, Antelme, normally resilient and proud, was a shaken man. Events were unfolding even as he had left the field, he said, and he himself had missed being caught up in the disaster only because he had left Paris for a rendezvous with a contact in Poitiers.

  Antelme reported for sure that Suttill had been arrested in Paris on June 24, but he did not know how. He also revealed other arrests as yet unknown to London, including that of Yvonne Rudellat and her subcir-cuit organiser. Scores of other local recruits had been rounded up in the days after Suttill was taken and either shot or put in prison at Fresnes, near Paris. The arrests seemed systematic and based on very accurate information.

  Nora had survived the roundup, the Mauritian confirmed, but only just. On the day of Suttill's arrest she went to the agricultural college at Grignon, intending to meet up with Gilbert Norman and to practise transmitting, but Norman had not turned up. The area was swarming with Gestapo. Later the base was raided by the Germans. Serge Bala-chowsky, another Prosper man, a distinguished biologist, hid whatever equipment he could in the grounds of the college, including Nora's wireless transmitter, which he buried under lettuces. Balachowsky himself was then later arrested.

  Antelme said he had done what he could to put Nora on her feet before leaving for England. He had spent the last two weeks with her in Paris, hiding out in a safe house. Before leaving he had placed her in contact with Henri Déricourt, who needed a W/T operator and would no doubt be able to guide her. Nevertheless, now that he himself was safely back, Antelme was evidently concerned that he had left Nora in such danger.

  Considered a shrewd judge of character, Antelme was then pressed for his view on what had become of Norman, but he could not say for sure if he had or hadn't been arrested. Antelme had been to Norman's flat since the disappearance, and it appeared not to have been searched. Everything looked tidy, and there were two bicycle clips lying next to Norman's bicycle, which was leaning against the wall.

  If Norman was still free, Antelme thought it was surprising that he should have transmitted badly, as he always transmitted with extreme ease and often chatted away while he was tapping out messages. He remembered hearing Norman telling Nora to memorise her plans and codes and then burn them, which suggested he would have done the same himself. And if Norman were free, Antelme was puzzled as to why he was refusing to answer questions in his latest messages about Suttill's whereabouts.

  Penelope Torr, who then examined Norman's recent traffic with Antelme, wrote Buckmaster another long note: “The sequencing of the events described in his messages makes no sense,” she reported. “The only explanation I can think of is that Archambaud may have coded up a number of his messages and left them somewhere for transmission in rotation. If they were then found by one of the traitors after his arrest, they would naturally send them in rotation to maintain normality, not realising that part of the text was now hopelessly out of date. I hope somebody can find a more favourable explanation.”

  Buckmaster still insisted that nobody could have imitated Archambaud, but Penelope Torr suggested exactly how it might have been done, adding: “There is no reason to suppose that the Gestapo have not prepared for just such an eventuality by providing trained W/T operators of their own.”

  She added that Antelme had now told her that Norman had 250 BBC messages in his wallet, which he took to the field last time, and he suggested they be cancelled.

  On July 19 there was good news. The call sign for John Macalister, Frank Pickersgill's signaller, finally came up on the signals room board.

  “Would Vera ever have challenged Buckmaster?” I asked another F Section staff member, Nancy Roberts. Nancy was closer to Vera than anyone in F Section. I had hunted for memos, notes, or jottings from Vera at this time—any hint of what views she might have formed about suspect radio traffic. But unlike Penelope Torr, Vera had committed nothing to paper, or if she had, it had not survived. Yet Vera was studying the messages as closely as anyone. She had Buckmaster s ear. What would she have said to him in the summer of 1943?

  “Vera didn't think like a woman,” said Nancy. “She didn't have irrelevant, womanish ideas like the rest of us.” We were talking in the drawing room of the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge. “She didn't waste time wondering what to do. And though the men around her hated to admit it, they knew she was always right.”

  “So might she have told Buckmaster he was sometimes wrong?” A portrait of Vera was gazing out over our heads, and I couldn't help wondering if she wasn't a little irritated still by the design of the upholstery. She resigned in a huff from the committee of the Special Forces Club in 1971 because she was right about the redecoration plans and the committee was wrong. “She would not have told him he was wrong exactly,” said Nancy. “She was always loyal to Buck. And I always had the impression she was in awe of Buck. He didn't have her dexterity of mind. But he was very much the officer class, and she admired all that.”r />
  We carried on up the stairs to the bar, passing all the famous faces: Suttill, Baseden, Szabo. And here were Buckmaster and Vera. She was in WAAF uniform. “But Vera didn't get that uniform until very late in the war,” said Nancy. “Buckmaster always wanted her to join the FANYs, but she knew that was a Cinderella corps. She waited until she could be commissioned in the WAAF.”

  Sinking into a chair under a picture of the queen mother, Nancy explained: “You see, Vera was very ambitious. It was she who recruited me for F Section very early on, before Buck was even head.” People were perching on green leather stools while a barman squirted spirits from upturned bottles.

  “How did she recruit you?” I asked.

  “In the ladies' in Norgeby House.”

  “To do what?”

  “To take over her job as secretary to BP [Major R. A. Bourne-Paterson].”

  “Why?”

  “So she could move on, I suppose.” Vera had never let anyone know that she had started out at F Section as secretary to BP.

  Before joining F Section, Nancy was with the Air Liaison section on the first floor. “There was no mixing between sections,” said Nancy, “but of course we powdered noses together in the ladies' and picked up the gossip.” The women's cloakroom was on the half landing, and it was here that Vera came to take an interest in Nancy. Even at this time Nancy was aware of Vera's reputation and was flattered that she should pay attention to her, although Nancy too had a reputation—as an auburn beauty with a mind of her own. In those days, as Nancy Fraser-Campbell, she also had an impeccable upper-crust name and a Scottish pedigree to match.

  Nancy didn't like working for BP. A City accountant before the war, he was “a snide man,” said Nancy, laughing as she described how he used to swing back on his War Office wooden chair while dictating. “One day he lost his balance, fell in a heap to the floor, rolled under his desk, climbed back on to his chair, and never for a moment stopped talking.”

  At the time that Vera was trying to secure Nancy a job as BP's new secretary, F Section was deeply divided over who should be its new head, after a recruit from Courtaulds was sacked for getting nothing done. Buckmaster was eager for the job, and Vera backed him early on. It was when Buckmaster took over as F, towards the end of 1941, that Nancy took Vera's job and Vera was given officer status by Buckmaster, no doubt partly as a reward for her loyalty.

  Nancy and Vera always remained close friends. “I know she admired me, and it touched me a great deal. I was quite useful to her, I know that. And she used to imitate me. She used to try to dress like me. I was even invited to meet her mother and to have dinner at their flat. It had a rather eastern European feel. It was dark, with rugs on the wall.”

  Given that Vera was “always right,” what view did Nancy think she would have taken about the confused radio messages? I asked again.

  Sometimes, she told me, she would see Vera enter “Buck's” office and the door did not always fully close behind her. Through the crack she would hear them talking, in quite insistent, though never heated, terms.

  Might she have told him she thought an agent had been captured?

  “She would not have said anything as direct as that,” said Nancy. “But she might have simply said something like ‘Perhaps we should look again at a message' or ‘Perhaps we should reconsider' or something to that effect. She would have taken a much more practical view than Buck, who was somewhat up in the clouds.”

  “And what would Buckmaster have done?”

  “He would have shrugged, gone silent, and turned to look out of the window.”

  It was not until August 7 that Buckmaster finally accepted that Gilbert Norman was caught or, as he put it, “Butcher is a goner,” but his realisation did not come in time to save Jack Agazarian.

  Amid the continuing confusion of mid-July 1943, Nicholas Boding-ton, then Buckmaster's deputy, was pressing to go out to Paris in person to investigate the collapse of Prosper. Sending such a senior London staff officer to the field was highly controversial; staff officers knew so much that it could be catastrophic if they were caught. But Bodington, a former Reuters man in Paris, had always been a law unto himself. At the outbreak of war he had applied for “anti fifth column work” with MI6 but was rejected as unsuitable and taken on by SOE instead. A loner, considered by colleagues to have a high opinion of himself, Bodington was unpopular with everyone except Buckmaster, who admired him as a hustler who could get things done.

  So with Buckmaster's authority, Bodington planned to fly to France, first contacting Norman by radio, asking for a rendezvous in Paris with Archambaud and giving the BBC message that would be broadcast when he arrived: “N'oubliez pas de renvoyer I'ascenseur” (Don't forget to send the lift back). Norman's message came back, giving an address for the meeting at rue de Rome.

  Bodington then insisted on taking his own wireless man with him for the trip, and he chose Jack Agazarian, even though Agazarian was just back from the field on leave.

  On the night of July 22 Bodington and Agazarian flew out and were received by Déricourt. Just over a week later a message reached London that Agazarian was captured. Agazarian, not Bodington, had gone to the prearranged meeting with Norman, and the Gestapo were waiting.

  When Bodington returned to London, his report was anxiously awaited in Baker Street. “The entire Prosper organisation is destroyed,” it said. “No element of it should be touched.” Arms dumps had been seized, and arrests were still ongoing. “Prosper should be considered dead.” Referring to the new Archdeacon circuit, which was to have been set up by the Canadians Pickersgill and Macalister in the Ardennes, Bodington wrote: “No one has the slightest knowledge of the Ardennes group, which must be considered lost.”

  Bodington also told HQ on his return of other “alarming” stories he had heard in Paris, passed on to him by one of F Section's most experienced agents, Henri Frager, who ran the important Donkeyman circuit in northwestern France. Frager claimed to have been told that the Gestapo knew of Bodington's presence in Paris but had not arrested him because they wanted him to “run for a while.” Frager's story was a strange and complicated one, as it had come direct from a German who introduced himself to him only as Colonel Heinrich. Frager claimed to have met the German by chance at the Monte Carlo café in Paris. Heinrich worked for the Abwehr, the German armed forces intelligence, which loathed the Gestapo. For reasons of his own—possibly jealousy of his Gestapo rivals—he passed on to the British agent what he had heard about the Gestapo's “nationwide drive.” He also warned Frager that “I'homme qui fait le pick-up”—the head of the British Lysander operations, who was obviously Henri Déricourt—had been “infiltrated.”

  These allegations were “obviously not true,” commented Bodington, who then mentioned another claim Frager had made. Frager had also alleged that his reports back to London, sent in SOE mailbags, were being copied before they left France and given to the Gestapo. He appeared to have some evidence for this and accused Déricourt of somehow passing the reports to the Germans. Nevertheless, Bodington concluded that these allegations also were “obviously untrue.”

  Bodington's report on the lost circuits evidently painted an unsettling picture for Baker Street, but Buckmaster saw no reason to take further action over the reports on Déricourt, which he dismissed.

  One action Buckmaster had taken, however, even before he had read Bodington's report, was to recall several agents who might have been contaminated by the Prosper debacle. Some were told to return by the August moon and others to escape across the Pyrenees. But one agent who was not ordered back at this time of acute danger was Nora Inayat Khan. Probably the most contaminated agent of all, she was nevertheless now considered F Section's most important remaining radio link between Paris and London. Nora had become overnight one of Buckmaster s foremost agents in France.

  Vera, watching in the signals room, could tell that Nora was now operating under the greatest stress. Her communication had become erratic and often did not occu
r at her regular sched time. She appeared to be constantly on the move, and Home Station had been instructed to set up an emergency listening watch for her each day at 1500 hours.

  Yet Buckmaster knew that if F Section was to have any chance of recovering from the disaster, Nora's continued presence in Paris was vital. And on August 15, as other agents were heading back, Buckmaster instructed signals staff: “If Nurse does not take the message no. 6 on her QRX [schedule] at 17.30 today will you please ensure that it is sent on the first possible occasion as it is extremely urgent. I particularly want to get it to her before 1500 hours tomorrow 16 August.”

  Buckmaster's “message no. 6” was an instruction to Nora to meet up with Frank Pickersgill and John Macalister, who were working to form the Archdeacon circuit in the Ardennes. Contrary to what Bodington concluded in his report, Buckmaster did not believe the Ardennes circuit was “lost.” He saw the meeting between Nora and the two Canadians, which was to take place in Paris at the Café Colisée in the Champs-Elysées, as a first move to reconstitute the Prosper circuit. Reports later reached London that the meeting was successful. Nora passed on useful contacts to Pickersgill and Macalister, and further meetings were arranged.

  When mail from Nora arrived with the August and September moons, Baker Street had cause to be cheered by her high morale—as well as unnerved by her glaring lack of security. In one long letter in her own girlish, looped writing, she requested a series of new scheds and crystals, setting out precisely that they were to be en clair and thereby breaking the security rule that required all sensitive information to be encoded. She wrote: “From Madeleine—Ops—Please arrange everyday scheds also using 3407—if sched is missed possible recontact at 1800 GMT same day—Please send another 3408 crystal.” The letter also asked: “Someday, if possible please send white mac FANY style. Thanks a lot. It's grand working with you. The best moments I have had yet.”