Exactly when the file on Vera was opened was a matter of guesswork, because it had been destroyed, but I knew it was in existence by the 1950s and I knew that at this time her card was also marked within the Foreign Office. When her name was proposed as an intermediary between the British government and a leading French trade unionist, diplomats immediately vetoed Vera because of her “left-wing views.”
Also guesswork was the reason the file on Vera was opened. Most people who knew her in her later years had gained the impression that she was, and always had been, right-wing; some thought her contacts were not with the Soviet Union but with the CIA. Sacha Smith, her former war crimes colleague, even recalled that Vera once told him she was “advising the CIA, on restructuring,” and being paid for it. Though he did not press her on what she meant, he guessed that her CIA contacts went back to the war, when she had contact with members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American counterpart of SOE and precursor of the CIA.
Then I found people who had gained an entirely different impression of Vera's politics. One of her former agents, Tony Brooks, remembered how she loathed de Gaulle and always emphasised the importance the Communist groups had played in the resistance. When I revealed to Brooks that Vera was an eastern European Jew, he took no more convincing that she was herself a Communist. But then Brooks himself had spent much of his career as a spy catcher for MI5.
Some of Vera's very closest friends often wondered about her. Most were lighthearted in their musings: “The only drawback to you of course,” wrote the former Chancellor circuit organiser, George Millar, in a letter to Vera in the early 1960s, “and it is minuscule really by contrast with your bounties, is that you are by nature so very discreet. So discreet indeed as to seem mysterious, if you are not mysterious.”
Other friends, though, including Jerrard Tickell, became over the years more serious in their suspicions of Vera.
Jerrard's son Sir Crispin Tickell, former British ambassador to the United Nations, recalled how, as a teenage public schoolboy, he often met Vera when his father was writing his biography of Odette. “I have an image of her with a slightly blonde moustache uttering quite left-wing sentiments at Sunday lunchtime. She was a slightly sinister lady and my mother hated her. One always wondered who she was working for,” he said. “She made a number of comments which struck me at the time as not so much politically left as inclined to the Soviet Union and Soviet Empire, along the lines of H. G. Wells or George Bernard Shaw—fed up with our society and there was a new Jerusalem over the hill. I know my father became very suspicious of her. She made me uneasy.”
Sir Crispin asked me what Vera had done after the war. I said she had worked for an educational body, sponsored by UNESCO. Certain bodies created by UNESCO at that time were used as little more than front organisations, he suggested. In the 1950s the Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges, which Vera worked for, might well have been “an umbrella for the Soviets,” he claimed.
But what precisely had brought Vera under suspicion of being a Communist or a Communist sympathiser? Perhaps it was her early friendship with Francis Cammaerts. MI5 certainly had a file on Cam-maerts, who at the outbreak of war was a conscientious objector, which immediately marked him out as a left-wing radical. “They had files on anyone,” Cammaerts scoffed when I asked him for his views on Vera's politics. “MI5 and MI6 were the stupidest people I have ever known. Of course Vera was not a Communist. She had the politics of a right-wing Kensington lady, which was what she wanted to be.”
Vera's links with another left-winger, Landon Temple, prominent in Communist Party politics in London in the 1950s and 1960s, may have aroused even more suspicion. During his most active years as a Communist, Temple was Vera's deputy at the Central Bureau. Vera was always “tolerant” of his political views, he recalled, as well as a good friend and respected colleague.
When Temple was sacked from the bureau in 1961, for voicing pro-Soviet, anti-American sentiments while on a bureau visit to Poland, Vera had defended him. This may have brought suspicion of “the establishment” upon her, he said. It may even have contributed to her own resignation from the bureau, ostensibly over lack of funding, later the same year. But such “witch-hunts” were all part of the “Anglo-American, anti-Communist conspiracy of the times,” said Temple, who never considered that Vera was particularly left-wing herself, and he thought it “very unlikely” that she was ever a Communist.
“Her life was very compartmentalised, but I always had the impression that she was socially rather stuffy and she had a lot of right-wing people around her. On the other hand, Vera was not a conventional person. She was highly intelligent and intelligent enough to be interested in many points of view. She was certainly understanding of mine, and on some things I'm sure we agreed.”
Mistrust of Vera may also have sprung from suspicions of her younger brother, Guy, on whom MI5 also had a file. Guy was an obvious target for the spy catchers. Jewish, born in Romania, educated at Oxford and at Prague in the 1930s, he took a job in 1948 lecturing in Bantu languages—learned with the East Africa Rifles during the war—at SOAS, London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, which was considered a left-wing campus.
And yet I found no evidence that Guy had ever shown an active interest in politics of any kind. Former colleagues at SOAS remembered mostly his “brilliance and wit” and considered that his “contempt for humbug” was such that he probably steered away from politics.
Jean Overton's Fuller's typing was wobbly at eighty-eight, but her meaning was crystal clear. She could not tell me what she knew about “Miss Atkins” until after the publication of her next book on SOE, which was not due out for several months. In it she intended to reveal certain things about Vera that would cause “great shock.” She apologised for being so tantalising, but I would have to wait.
Eventually we met at her cottage in a quiet Northamptonshire village. “What did you make of it?” she asked me as soon as I was in the door. Jean's latest book had been published, and now she felt free to talk. Before waiting for me to answer, she said. “The oddest thing was not so much what she said but that she said it to me like that. Why? Why did she say it to me? Then?”
“Why do you think?”
“I felt it was dangerous. It worried me deeply,” said Jean as she disappeared into a tiny kitchen to make coffee. I tried to find a seat, but it was hard, because the room was strewn with papers, manuscripts, and other debris of a restless mind. All over the walls were marvellous pictures, painted by Jean, of cats. She emerged with coffee, and we began to discuss the revelation in her book: that Vera Atkins might have been a Soviet spy.
Jean published this claim in 2002 in Espionage as a Fine Art. The main body of the book was a collection of fictional short stories, written by Henri Déricourt, based on his life as Gilbert. Déricourt died in Laos in 1962 when the small plane he was flying, carrying gold bars to pay for opium, crashed on landing. Well before his death he had told Jean about his short stories, and all these years later she had the opportunity to publish them with a detailed commentary. It was in the somewhat surreal context of her commentary on Déricourt s labyrinthine short stories that Jean made the claim about Vera.
In one story Déricourt wrote about a woman in the Baker Street headquarters of SOE named “Lucy” who was a German agent. Lucy, said Jean in her commentary, was supposed to be Vera. This in itself was extraordinary: the SOE tangle of conspiracy theories had at last come full circle and had indeed caught up Vera. Here was the traitor Déricourt, whom Vera, above all people, had always mistrusted, turning the tables and now accusing her—in the guise of “Lucy”—of being a traitor, all in a work of fiction published after his death.
This little paradox, however, was not Jean Overton Fuller's point. In her commentary she went on to explain that “Lucy” was obviously meant by Déricourt to be Vera, because Déricourt had also referred to “Lucy” as a lesbian. “He had told me he believed she was a lesbian,” she
wrote. “Was she? Her exceptionally low-pitched, exceedingly husky voice and something in her face and figure had reminded me of Marlene Dietrich; on the other hand, I had never heard of her having a woman-friend or, for that matter, a man-friend either. She lived behind iron bars, which she had had set across the window of her small flat in Nell Gwynne Mansions, Chelsea. In case of burglars, she said, which made me think she must house secret files.”
However, Jean's commentary continued: “If Déricourt ever toyed with the idea that Vera Atkins could be a German agent, he was on the wrong tack. Her loathing of the Nazis was, I am sure, genuine. She was after all Jewish, which made that natural.”
Jean went on to write that Vera, far from being a German sympathiser, was “very far to the left.”
When Jean had first encountered Miss Atkins, she told me, she had found her “not unsympathetic.” She was “obviously very reserved, but I thought that natural for somebody in that job. Just out of curiosity I asked her then what she had done before SOE. She said: Just this and that.'
Jean then explained how her suspicions of Vera were first provoked at a dinner for just the two of them, in Vera's flat, soon after they met. At the dinner Jean told Vera she had traced one of the Germans at Avenue Foch, Ernest Vogt, and hoped to interview him. Jean was cock-a-hoop and thought Vera would be pleased too, but she was not. “She said I would be spending my money on an expensive train journey to Germany and would learn nothing. I thought at the time, Why doesn't she want me to see this man? I thought there must be something she knew he would tell me. I didn't know what it was exactly. I just knew she had something that she feared Vogt might tell me. The atmosphere was thick. I felt something was wrong.”
Adding to Jean's anxiety that evening was Vera's apparel. Jean recalled that when she arrived, Vera greeted her in a black lacy evening dress. “I remember thinking this was very elegant, but it was very transparent and the shoulder straps were showing—there was a lot of lace. What has happened to the lining? I thought. It was quite transparent. I thought it was very strange.”
When did the “dangerous” conversation take place? I asked.
It was not until after Madeleine appeared, in 1952, and it took place in Jean's tiny flat, on the occasion Jean had offered to make something “tasty to eat.” That evening she had expected Vera to want to talk about the book on Nora. But Vera hardly mentioned it. Instead she raised the case of Klaus Fuchs, who had recently been arrested and charged with spying for the Soviet Union.
Vera told Jean: “I don't think of him as a traitor. During the war we shared all our secrets with the Russians, and after it he just went on. I don't call that being a traitor.”
Jean was surprised and said nothing. “This was while we were still eating,” she told me. “Miss Atkins was facing me across a very narrow table.”
I asked what Vera was wearing that evening. Was she dressed provocatively this time too?
“Oh, no,” said Jean. “Then she was dressed quite differently. Rather dowdy, in a grey suit, if I remember.”
After the meal Vera and Jean moved to more comfortable chairs, and Vera said she had never been to America and would never go because of all the questions that would be asked. “ ‘Are you a Communist? Have you known a Communist?' You just have to decide whether you want to go to America and if so tell the necessary lies.” She said she didn't think it was worth it.
I pointed out to Jean that it was not so surprising that Vera should have talked like this. After all, it was true that Russia had been an ally for much of the war and Vera herself would have liaised with Russians who worked with SOE and been quite used to sharing secrets with them.
Jean was not persuaded. Vera had spoken of the Soviet Union with great “earnestness.” Vera told Jean: “I do believe in democracy—with perhaps a little more freedom than is possible in Russia at present—and I don't see why that should be impossible to achieve.”
It was the way Vera said the word “achieve” that struck Jean. “In England we generally thought of ourselves as living in a democracy, and the natural word would have been ‘preserve' rather than ‘achieve.'
I suggested that Jean's own suspicion had perhaps been influenced by the Cold War paranoia of the times. She said: “My main thought was: why is a person who is always so discreet about her views and private life, who never offers any information suddenly—and so deliberately—making these indiscreet disclosures?”
“And what did you conclude?”
“I thought she was sounding me out for possible sympathy. If I showed the least interest in what she was saying, she was going to recruit me. I was very frightened by it.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“Who on earth should I tell?”
Then I looked at Jean's face. Even at eighty-eight, the horror she had felt remained written in those alert and darting eyes. “Can you imagine how this felt?” she said. “I was all alone. I could tell nobody. I wanted her out of my flat. She smelled of danger.”
For a while after meeting Jean I pursued the theory that Vera was a Soviet spy. If true, it could explain her defensiveness, her extraordinarily secretive nature, and her sometimes utterly inexplicable loyalty to Buck-master. She was certainly clever enough to have got away with it. As the SOE man George Millar had said to me: “She could have been anything she was so bloody clever.”
I met a Soviet defector in the Home Counties and asked him over borscht and smoked salmon to discuss the possibility. Was she the right profile? He said it was not impossible but unlikely. “On a scale of one to ten,” I asked, did he think she was a Soviet spy? “Two she was, eight she wasn't,” he said.
I then discovered that there had been countless Soviet agents operating in Britain during and after the Second World War but that, to this day, we don't know who most of them were. Their wireless signals to Moscow—known as the Venona traffic—were partly decoded after the war and were all now on file in the National Archives. I thought of examining the decoded Venona signals myself. I would have enjoyed trying to identify Vera's “fist.” But I soon had more productive avenues to pursue.
25.
Belgian Ladies
Early in my research into Vera's life I had a call from a woman named Judith Hiller, a close friend of Vera's and widow of the SOE agent George Hiller, who wanted to know if I knew about “a Belgian lady.” No, I said. What Belgian lady?
There was a Belgian lady at Vera's funeral, said Judith. I should talk to her. She had helped Vera escape from Belgium early in the war. There had been some sort of incident with the Gestapo on a train. Vera was not in Belgium at the beginning of the war, I said. She was in England. She had arrived here from Romania in 1937 with her mother. She stayed here and joined SOE in 1941. She had never worked for SOE in the field.
Judith Hiller said perhaps I should find the Belgian lady. She had lost the name and address but recalled that she lived in Kensington. “What did she look like?” I asked. “She was a little dumpy,” said Judith.
The funeral service for Vera May Atkins took place at the Church of St. Thomas the Martyr, Winchelsea, on Monday, July 3, 2000. Vera had supported Winchelsea church over the years, although her views on religion were always closely guarded. She once told a friend she had read the whole Bible through from start to finish, but when asked if she was religious, she simply responded: “I think I have a reasonable line to God.”
The death notice, which appeared in The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Rye Observer on June 23, said the funeral was for close friends and family only. At the service the different groups from different compartments and periods of Vera's life did not mingle. Judith Hiller, however, noticed that the lady in the pew in front of her knew nobody at all. She appeared a little nervous and was carrying a Marks & Spencer plastic bag containing sandwiches.
Outside the church, when the coffin had departed, somebody asked if anyone had left a plastic bag. Judith swiftly reunited the bag with its owner, who was already leaving to catch a train hom
e. Judith offered to give the lady a lift to Winchelsea station, and it was in the car that she heard the story. Peter Lee, the former SOE staff officer, was in the car too.
The lady told Judith that she was Belgian (Peter Lee thought she said Dutch) and had met Vera somewhere in Belgium (Peter Lee thought Holland) in the early years of the war, after the German invasion of the Low Countries in May 1940. There was an incident on a train with the Gestapo. Vera needed help and had to go into hiding as it was already dangerous for Jews. The Belgian (or Dutch) lady helped Vera to find a safe house. At that point in the story they arrived at the station.
I found nobody else who remembered a Belgian or Dutch lady at Vera's funeral. Most of Vera's SOE friends said the tale was obviously untrue. If she had really ever operated in the field, the fact would have been hard to conceal after the war, even for Vera. The poor Belgian (or Dutch) woman must have been deluded. SOE attracted fantasists. And what on earth would Vera, a Jew who had already fled Europe, have been doing on the Continent at that time? After the German invasion all ports were closed.
Yet there was something intriguing about the story. Winchelsea was not an easy place to reach for an elderly lady, Belgian or otherwise, and funerals are not events to attend without good reason. The mystery lady had not trumpeted her story of rescuing Vera; on the contrary it was pressed from her by Judith Hiller, who seemed to believe it.
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