Jean Overton Fuller was cultivated and determined. She had also had a deep distrust of official secrecy ever since learning that her father's death in 1914, during the attack on Tanga, German East Africa, was an “official secret.” She gave an account of her first meeting with “Miss Atkins” in a preface to one of her books: “She said she did not know if the names of the schools in which my friend had trained had yet been taken off the security list. Nor could she tell me anything about the people Nora had been sent out to work with, who were, in any case dead.” Vera did, however, offer Jean suggestions about people she could talk to, and among them was John “Bob” Starr. He was, of course, a perfect contact because he could describe Nora's bravery at Avenue Foch, but as Vera well knew, he was embittered and very likely to reveal the damaging secrets of the “radio game.” So Vera warned Jean that should Starr “begin to spin some sort of story in which he is perfectly justified and the Section seems to have done everything wrong,” she should not believe him.
For some months Vera continued to help Jean as she pursued her research, and the couple dined together to talk about Nora. When Madeleine was published in 1952, Vera was generally pleased with the book, which revealed few damaging secrets, saying nothing about Nora's radio being played back. Vera had some small objections to the way she herself was portrayed, and she invited Jean to “talk over” these points with her, but by and large she considered the book “a very striking portrait of Nora” that “exposes her character as a live and lovely compound of intelligence and warmth, timidity and courage, simplicity and love of truth.”
Jean replied gratefully but evidently did not take up Vera's invitation to “talk over” the book, so Vera wrote a letter inviting Jean to dinner. In another note, preserved by Vera, Jean replied that she could not go on the day suggested by Vera and proposed a meeting at her own flat a week later. “I would like to prepare a little dinner—nothing terribly elegant but I will try to make something tasty to eat.”
In a further little note that Vera had kept, Jean wished Vera well after she had been ill over Christmas. Jean wrote: “I do hope you are feeling better now, as it must be miserable to spend Christmas in hospital.” The two women seemed to have become quite close.
Well before Jean's next book, The Starr Affair, however, Vera and Jean's friendship had irretrievably broken down. Early in her research for Madeleine Jean had spoken to Starr at length not only about Nora but about the way the Germans had captured the British radios and fooled London by playing them back. She found Starr “credible” and wrote: “I realised I had stumbled upon an inconvenient secret.” Vera had either been astonishingly naive in believing Jean would not pursue what Starr told her, or she was deceiving herself even then about the seriousness of what Starr knew. In any event, Jean now immediately widened her investigation. Tracking down all surviving witnesses to Nora's captivity, she found they were not all dead, as Vera had told her, and she even found Ernest Vogt, the interpreter at Avenue Foch, who had played a large part in interrogating Nora. When Jean told Vera she had found Vogt, she expected her to be pleased, but Vera advised her in the strongest terms to stay away from him. The idea that Jean should talk to one of Nora's German captors clearly horrified Vera, though Jean could not understand why.
Jean chose not to confuse her biography of Nora with an exposé of German penetration. In her next book, however, her sole purpose was to unveil the “radio game,” revealing at the same time how Starr had been victimised after the war because he knew too much. While she was writing The Starr Affair, a book entitled London Calling North Pole, by the former head of German counterespionage in Holland and Belgium, Lieutenant Colonel H. J. Giskes, was published in 1953, revealing that the Germans had operated the “radio game” with devastating success in those two countries. Giskes's revelations prompted questions in the Commons, which the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, answered by saying they were largely true.
Jean Overton Fuller's revelations that British and French women and men had similarly been parachuted into Gestapo hands in France prompted no official comment at all. However, other writers, as well as former SOE members, noted what she wrote. Vera opened a “controversial books” file, which from then filled up rapidly. “There was no Starr Affair until you started it,” wrote Vera to Jean when the book was published in 1954. “I did not mean to offend you personally,” Jean replied.
By the mid-1950s Vera was advising another young writer, Elizabeth Nicholas. Elizabeth had known Diana Rowden, and once again there were dinner invitations from Vera, but it soon became clear that Elizabeth, like Jean Overton Fuller, would ask the wrong questions. To deter her, Vera was not only uncooperative: on one matter she quite clearly lied.
One question Elizabeth Nicholas sought to answer was the identity of the fourth woman to die at Natzweiler, who, as far as she could see from the published record of the trial, was “unidentified.” Not realising that the record itself had already been altered to cover up Vera's initial error of identifying Nora as the fourth woman, Elizabeth then asked Vera if the identity had ever been established. Vera had known since 1947 that the fourth woman was Sonia Olschanesky, but she did not give Elizabeth her name. “All Vera Atkins could tell me was that she had not been sent to France by SOE;” in other words, the fourth woman was locally recruited in France to work with an SOE circuit. It was not until eight months later that Elizabeth found out Sonia's name and her identity for herself. Elizabeth also discovered that Sonia's fiancé and family had never been informed of her fate, although they had made desperate attempts to trace her.
I found it hard to reconcile the callous streak in Vera, which had now begun to show itself, with her dedication in searching for the missing. The failure to tell Sonia's family what she had discovered was not the only example of callousness. For reasons never explained, Nora's family were never officially told the full facts of her death at Dachau. Although Vi-layat had gathered his own evidence that Nora did not die at Natzweiler, it was only when the family read Nora's citation for her George Cross in 1948 that they learned the final official version of what happened. The sudden news of an entirely different horror at Dachau produced a second devastating shock for Nora's mother, who died ten days later.
However, some people who knew Vera well were not surprised by this toughness in her character. “She was treated like a man, she had to behave like one,” said Vera's war crimes colleague and close friend Sacha Smith. Vera had once been close to the SOE agent Francis Cammaerts, who secured her the job at the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges. But when I met Cammaerts, it was clear that he and Vera had become estranged. “She was always a cold-blooded professional,” he said. She was the person the agents “trusted to lie;” in other words, she could be trusted not to tell their families the truth about their fate.
After the war, Cammaerts claimed, Vera only helped her “favourites.” She avoided those “who might rumble her.” A teacher by vocation, Cammaerts said: “For a teacher, having favourites was always the worst thing.”
When I asked why he had fallen out so bitterly with Vera, he told me he had discovered she was “a racist.” In the 1960s Vera had visited Cammaerts in Africa, where, after leaving the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges, he taught at the University of Nairobi. He was shocked at the way Vera treated his black colleagues and staff.
When Elizabeth Nicholas's book Death Be Not Proud was published in 1958, new questions were asked about how agents could have been flown to penetrated circuits, with London apparently unaware that SOE radios had been captured. In the case of Nora's captured radio, Nicholas posed “a truly dreadful theory”: that London had deliberately dropped France Antelme, Madeleine Damerment, and Lionel Lee as part of a “double bluff.” She explained: “London had known very well that the ‘Poste Madeleine' had been taken over by the Germans and was busily feeding to it false information to deceive the enemy. More than this, in order to convince the Germans that London believed the ‘Poste M
adeleine' was still in British hands, London had prepared to send agents deliberately to a reception committee organised by the Germans so as to maintain the deception.” She admitted she had been “unable to confirm that this was the case” but added that “a number of people, including officers of SOE, believe it was.” On the other hand, she continued: “the point has also been made that such action would demand a logical and cruel ruthlessness such as the British never employ, even in war.”
Buckmaster dismissed “Nicholas's nonsense” in a piece in the Empire News. But conspiracy theories about SOE's darker purpose were now being circulated as fast as the sanitised sentiment, epitomised in the 1958 film about Violette Szabo, Carve Her Name with Pride, on which Vera advised. Violette's portrait painter, Douglas Pigg, complaining about the film in a letter to Vera, wrote: “It was to my mind a great pity that the internment scenes were as brief. Surely it was here that the true fortitude and strength of the girls were most evident. How the girls would have wished it was as quick to the end as depicted.”
Buckmaster's complaint to Vera was not about the portrayal of Violette but about “the nauseating presentation of ourselves.” He wrote: “My agent tells me that in law we cannot stop the portrayal of ourselves either with our true names or with fictitious names, if the latter merely cover up well-known personalities (as believe it or not, we are).”
And on top of everything else, the Churchills' story was unravelling. Peter and Odette faced accusations, particularly in France, that instead of arming the resistance they spent their time in bed together, which was precisely where Hugo Bleicher, the Abwehr officer, found them when they were arrested in 1943 at a hotel in St. Jorioz. A rumour also now spread that Odette had been spared at Ravensbrück because she became the mistress of the commandant, Fritz Suhren. There was no evidence for this claim. Sylvia Salvesen, the Norwegian prisoner, vouched for Odette's heroism, saying she had spent eleven months at Ravensbrück in an underground cell. But so fixed did the tale become in F Section's burgeoning mythology that Selwyn Jepson—who, as “Mr. Potter,” had been Odette's SOE interviewer—repeated the claim as a fact in a taped interview he gave to the Imperial War Museum in 1986. Jepson, who in civilian life had been a crime writer, was cut short by the embarrassed museum official, who changed the subject.
It was also being said that Odette had lied about having her toenails pulled out, though Stephen Stewart, the prosecuting barrister at Ravensbrück, asserted categorically that on this point her story was true. By the mid-1950s the fairy-tale marriage of Odette and Peter Churchill was over, and Peter wrote to Vera to say he was living alone in a caravan in the South of France “with a loaded gun behind the door to frighten away newspaper correspondents.”
Vera, though, by now had more to worry about than the portrayal of agents in books and films. She was deeply anxious about how the Conservative MP Dame Irene Ward might portray her in the House of Commons. An indomitable character, Ward had once hoped to be an opera singer but used her powerful voice instead to remonstrate with ministers on behalf of her Tynemouth constituents and in fighting for unpopular causes. In the early 1950s she was writing a book on the history of the FANY and, like Jean Overton Fuller and Elizabeth Nicholas, had come across the cases of the SOE girls. Irene was particularly intrigued by the case of Henri Déricourt, which had by now been explored by Jean Over-ton Fuller in her third book, Double Webs. Here Jean traced Déricourt himself, who told her he had indeed handed agents' mail over to the Gestapo but had been acting on instructions from a high authority in London. This claim then fuelled a theory that Déricourt himself was planted inside SOE by MI6. Perhaps MI6 was using Déricourt to keep tabs on the SOE camp and to further its own plans to deceive the Germans.
Writing to the foreign secretary, John Selwyn Lloyd, in 1958, Irene Ward warned she was “going to be an awful nuisance” unless she got some answers to certain questions. One of these questions was “whether Gilbert was working for one of our secret service organisations, and put into SOE to keep an eye on what was going on there, or was he working for the Germans?” The MP was also campaigning for Odette's George Cross to be rescinded. “She is a phoney. Buckmaster must have known,” wrote Ward in a note in 1959.
Ward was directed in the first instance to Vera for her answers. “Miss Atkins,” she noted, “was extremely pleasant but I gained absolutely nothing. To tell you the truth it ended with my being questioned.” Soon after this meeting Ward turned her sights on “Miss Atkins” herself.
“HOME OFFICE Minister's case R20340/3 Rosenberg Vera May alias Atkins,” was the heading on the papers relating to Ward's questions about Vera. She had heard a rumour that Vera Atkins was Romanian and demanded to know whether F Section's intelligence officer had been naturalised and, if so, when. Reluctantly the Home Office revealed Vera's Romanian origins to the MP, giving the date of her naturalisation in February 1944. Realising that Vera had therefore been an enemy alien at the time of her employment with SOE, Ward demanded to know more. How many naturalisations were granted by the Home Office in 1944 and in what circumstances?
She was told that in 1944 549 certificates of naturalisation were issued, of which 472 were in respect of persons who were being readmitted to British nationality, having previously held it. In all other cases naturalisation was not granted during the war except in cases of “national interest.” Vera's naturalisation must therefore have been granted “in the national interest.” Now Ward wanted the names of Vera's sponsors.
Vera would certainly have appreciated the full damage the MP's attack could cause. During the war it had been virtually a matter of life and death that her origins remain secret, a central tenet of clandestine operations being that agents in the field should trust implicitly their handlers in headquarters. The stakes may not have appeared so high now in peacetime, but Irene Ward's campaign nevertheless struck at Vera's very reputation.
If any suggestion emerged in public that there had been an enemy alien in SOE headquarters, conspiracy theorists already hunting for more controversy would have had a field day. Such was the climate of suspicion that Vera would herself have been caught up in those very conspiracies she had tried to dispel. The subtext of Ward's question was evident: she was exploring the possibility that Vera herself might have been playing some sort of double game. Certain conspiracy theorists were already developing suspicions of Vera—among them one of her own former agents.
In Vera's files were numerous letters from a man named Pierre Ray-naud, who, as a young soldier, had escaped from France in 1942. He was snapped up by F Section and parachuted back into France as an agent. Immediately after landing he escaped capture by the Gestapo only by a fluke. Raynaud had been due to link up on landing with the Canadians Frank Pickersgill and John Macalister, who had been dropped the night before, and was to have travelled with them, but horrified by Macalister's French accent, he decided to travel alone.
After the war Raynaud discovered numerous blunders committed by London that could have landed him—like Pickersgill and Macalister— in German hands. He decided that no intelligence body could have been so stupid as to commit these errors. Like Elizabeth Nicholas, Raynaud wondered if it was all part of a bigger strategy. He decided it was and that the strategy was to fill agents with false information in the knowledge that they would be captured and pass it to the Germans.
In the 1970s and 1980s new writers took up the theme, embellishing it with details from newly released papers on Cockade, the Allied plan to trick the Germans about the date and location of the D-Day invasion. It was now claimed that Henri Déricourt must have been deployed by MI6, or perhaps directly by Claude Dansey, the assistant chief of MI6, as part of the plan, ensuring that agents' mail containing phoney hints about D-Day reached the Germans. In his last years Buckmaster himself suddenly miraculously recalled that MI6 had indeed sent messages directly to some of the captured SOE radios. By this time most who had followed Buckmaster's delusions over the years ignored him. However, his thoughts were taken
seriously by some and helped feed new conspiracy theories so enticing that they were put into a novel, Larry Collins's Fall from Grace, published in 1985.
Like Vera, I had a pile of letters from SOE's archconspiracy theorist, Pierre Raynaud, who invited me to the Canary Islands to see his archive. I didn't go, but I did try to challenge him, saying that what happened could be only too easily explained by F Section bungling, which was allowed to run unchecked. But Raynaud told me that “Buckmaster's stupidity” had always been “the excuse.” He said Vera was SOE's “official liar,” appointed to cover up the truth. And he expected me to write her “official hagiography.”
Back in 1955 Vera could have had no idea how far the conspiracy theories about SOE might develop, but she certainly didn't want to be drawn into them. On November 7, 1955, the Home Office came to her aid by stopping any more questions about her origins. Exasperated by Irene Ward, who still had “the bit between her teeth,” an official wrote: “Miss Ward seems to be gathering ammunition for some sort of attack on Miss Atkins. I see no objection to telling her when Miss Atkins first came here but if more intimate questions follow we must call a halt.”
It was puzzling that the Home Office refused to divulge the names of Vera s sponsors, as such a list of eminently English names—Kendrick, Rogers, Pearson, and Coverley-Price—all proclaiming Vera as “English to the core” would surely have been reassuring. Ward did win one battle, however. It was largely due to her campaigning that a historian called M.R.D. (Michael) Foot, a young lecturer at Oxford, was appointed to write an officially sponsored history of the French Section of SOE. “However,” said the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, in a note to Ward, “I doubt in fact it will ever be possible to establish exactly where praise or blame may have lain in all these intricate clandestine operations.”
Just as the Home Office was closing down Irene Ward, however, others were beginning to ask questions about Vera's loyalties that were potentially of an even more threatening kind. The Cold War was by now being fought, not only across the Iron Curtain but in the corridors of Whitehall and anywhere the spy catchers of MI5 might sniff out a traitor. In 1950 a German-born scientist, Klaus Fuchs, who came to Britain in 1933 after fleeing the Nazis and was interned at the start of the war, had been caught passing U.S. nuclear secrets to the Russians. Then in 1951 came the dramatic flight to Moscow of two of the “Cambridge spies,” Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean. The intelligence agencies now clamped down, imposing positive vetting on all secret services and opening files on suspect individuals in any walk of life, on the most meagre of pretexts. The domestic security service, MI5, opened a file on Vera May Atkins.
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