Women Wartime Spies

by Ann Kramer

  Marthe McKenna was born Marthe Cnockaert in Westroosebeke, Belgium, one of five children; her father was a farmer. She studied at the medical school in Ghent but the outbreak of war interrupted her studies and she was in Westroosebeke when it was overrun by German troops in 1914. In her book she describes the retreating French and Allied troops and the devastation inflicted by the invading forces who set a number of houses on fire, including that of her family. Nuns set up an emergency hospital to treat German and Allied soldiers, and Cnockaert, who spoke fluent German and English as well as Flemish and French, volunteered her services as a nurse. Fearful of spies, the Germans evacuated most of the villagers, including Marthe’s mother, but allowed Marthe to remain behind nursing wounded German and Allied soldiers.

  In January 1915 the German authorities, impressed by Marthe’s nursing, sent her to work at a military hospital in Roulers, a small market town near the Menin Road. There Marthe was re-united with her mother and both took lodgings in a house where German soldiers were also billeted. As a nurse, Marthe was given a night pass, which would allow her to walk around the streets at any time of the night should there be an emergency at the hospital; it meant that she, unlike most other civilians, was able to avoid the nightly curfew which operated from 7.00 pm until 5.00 am.

  Not long after Marthe arrived in Roulers she found herself a ‘participant in strange events of a nature which in my wildest dreams I had never pictured myself taking part’. Early one morning a close family friend, Lucille Delconck, arrived at their house, having crossed the frontier from Holland. Warning Marthe and her mother to keep her visit secret, Delconck not only brought letters from Marthe’s brothers but also revealed that she was a spy for British intelligence and wanted to recruit Marthe. Ever since its earliest beginnings spying has always been regarded as an unsavoury profession but despite its reputation, Marthe, with her mother’s approval, accepted, seeing it as an opportunity to serve her country and in due course was put in touch with local agents and given her instructions.

  ‘I knew what she must mean, a spy, and for a moment I was filled with horror. I knew that spies existed in Belgium and that they were serving their country, yet somehow I had regarded them as things inhuman and far removed from my own sphere.’

  (Marthe McKenna, I Was a Spy!)

  For the next two years, Marthe McKenna, or Cnoeckart as she still was during the war, worked at the German hospital in Roulers, nursing German soldiers and the occasional Allied prisoner. She was a conscientious nurse and made good friends among the German hospital staff, who trusted and admired her so much so that having been at the hospital for some while, and ironically after returning from a spying mission, she was presented with the German Iron Cross in acknowledgement of her humanitarian work. Simultaneously, however, she was working for British intelligence, using her position as a nurse to carefully pry out information about troop movements, the positioning of military formations, artillery supply dumps and any military activities taking place or due to take place in the town. She also helped two wounded Allied soldiers to escape from the hospital to freedom.

  Marthe worked closely with two other female agents, one of them a 70-year-old woman, known as ‘Canteen Ma’, who came into Roulers frequently to sell fruit and vegetables and was seen as harmless by the Germans, and who briefed Marthe with instructions from British intelligence, and the other known simply as ‘No 63’, who was their ‘letter box’ and smuggled the intelligence passed on by couriers across the border into Holland. Marthe Cnoeckart’s code name was ‘Laura’; her instructions were to code any information she obtained, and pass it to ‘Agent 63’, whom she never met. She wrote the coded messages on tiny slips of paper, rolled them up tightly, hid them in her hair or sewed them into her skirt and passed them through Agent 63’s window late at night. She relied on her special pass to walk through the town after curfew, but often hid from German military police who patrolled the town. From time to time other agents arrived in Roulers and made contact with Marthe. Described as ‘safety-pin men’ in Marthe McKenna’s account, the agents identified themselves by two safety pins worn diagonally under their collars.

  In March 1915 Marthe found herself with another potential source of military intelligence when her parents took over the proprietorship of the Carillon Café in Roulers. Marthe, then still in her early twenties, recognized this as an opportunity; ‘Men will talk and boast over strong liquor, and men are also apt to pay attention to the proprietress’ daughter. I realized that much useful information might be picked up in this way.’ She did however worry that she might draw too much attention to herself. The Germans had already arrested a number of so-called ‘café girls’ whom they suspected of trying to obtain information from soldiers. Allied intelligence too suspected local women who appeared to be collaborating with the enemy.

  By all accounts, Marthe McKenna was an extremely successful spy: she made regular reports about the build-up of troops locally, troop movements, weapon stocks and German military planning, and provided timely warning about a planned Zeppelin raid on London. She took some extraordinary risks, such as searching the room of one of the German soldiers billeted in their house, and the information that she fed back to British intelligence resulted in a number of successful Allied bombing raids. Marthe was often distressed by the destruction and deaths that followed, deaths that included the deaths of German men whom she had known. Following an Allied raid on Roulers train station, she ‘crept upstairs… thinking of the smoking ruins of the station and the fate of my little German officer friend of the Railway Transport. The groans of the mangled Germans whom I knew must lie thick about the station seemed ringing in my ears.‘ Nevertheless, Marthe never doubted that it was her patriotic duty to continue her espionage activities, and according to her account also believed that her nursing perhaps compensated to some extent.

  Marthe appears to have won the confidence not only of the hospital staff but also of various German officers that she met and who were obviously attracted to her. In order to obtain as much information as possible she encouraged their interest and dined with various officers and on one occasion even went to Brussels with one high-ranking officer in an attempt to learn whatever she could about the Kaiser who was apparently due to visit Roulers. Not surprisingly, the Germans whom she befriended expected that the encounters would lead to sex but Marthe managed to escape their advances and gain the information she needed. She was, however, realistic and aware that she might not always be able to escape the inevitable sexual encounters, saying in her memoirs, ‘I was a Secret Agent, not a ridiculous young girl.’

  On one occasion a German officer, Otto von Promft, who was billeted at her house approached Marthe and invited her into his room. Worried that her cover had by now been blown, she was astounded to be asked whether she would act as a spy for the German Secret Service, obtaining information about local inhabitants suspected of being spies. In a ‘terrible quandary’ and fearing that she might end up being ‘a spy for friend and foe’, and also suspecting that this was a trap designed to discover her true loyalties, Marthe produced some false information and told one of the local agents what had happened. Two days later the officer was found dead, no doubt shot by one of the ‘safety-pin’ men.

  For Marthe it was the ‘more outstanding episodes of my life as a spy’ that left a lasting impression. According to her own account, these included disguising herself as a wounded German soldier and destroying a German intelligence telephone wire, and a successful act of sabotage in 1916 that eventually led to her arrest. Working with another agent, who had discovered a long disused sewer that ran from the hospital to a German munitions supply dump, she helped to blow it up. A few days later she noticed she had lost her wristwatch. Some time later, the Germans posted a notice about lost property that included a wristwatch. For some reason, and against her better judgement, she went to claim her watch but what she did not know was that the watch had been found at the site of explosion. German military police arrived
at her house, discovered two coded messages in her room, hidden under some loose wallpaper behind her washbasin, and she was arrested and imprisoned. For some months she was interrogated but refused to betray her colleagues. Brought to trial, in November 1916 she was charged with espionage and sentenced to death by firing squad. She expected to die but when it was discovered that she had been awarded the Iron Cross her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Marthe spent the remainder of the war in appalling conditions in Ghent prison, being released two years later when the Armistice was declared. She returned to Westroosebeke, then almost entirely destroyed, and met a British soldier, John McKenna, whom she married.

  Marthe’s entire family survived the war. When she was recovering from her prison ordeal, she discovered that she had been mentioned in dispatches on 8 November 1918 by Sir Douglas Haig ‘for gallant and distinguished service in the field’. The then Secretary of State, Winston Churchill, awarded her a certificate for her work for British intelligence and the French and Belgian governments decorated her with the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’honneur. Winston Churchill wrote a highly complimentary foreword to her book I Was a Spy! In which he said that Marthe McKenna ‘fulfilled in every respect the conditions which make the terrible profession of a spy dignified and honourable’. Marthe McKenna herself said ‘Because I am a woman I could not serve my country as a soldier. I took the only course open to me. And let it be remembered by those who disdain the spy, that in every case where I played with another’s life, I was also playing with my own!’

  Marthe Richer: double agent

  THE LIFE OF A DOUBLE agent is particularly difficult: while spying for her own country, the double agent has to pretend to be spying for the enemy, something that double agent Marthe Richer defined as being ‘caught between two fires the whole time.’ Born Marthe Betenfeld in France in 1889, Marthe Richer was something of an adventuress. According to some accounts she worked as a prostitute before marrying Henri Richer in 1907. Her husband was a keen pilot and she in turn took up flying, gaining her pilot’s licence in June 1913. When war began she and other women formed L’Union Patriotique des Avatrices Françaises (The Patriotic Union of French Women Aviators) and offered their services to the French government who refused. In 1916 her husband was killed at the front and she, a highly skilled linguist, became a spy for France, operating in Madrid. Her spymaster was Georges Ladoux, who had also recruited Mata Hari. Apparently the two women met in Madrid. Following instructions from Ladoux, Richer, whose codename was l’Alouette (the Lark), established contact with, and became the mistress of, Baron Hans von Krohn, the German naval attaché in Madrid. She managed to convince von Krohn that she wanted to spy for Germany, while surreptitiously extracting information that she sent back to Ladoux. According to her memoirs Richer eventually told von Krohn that she had duped him and had been a French agent all along. Richer fed back important information to the French about German U-boat refuelling points on the Spanish coast and the routes taken by German agents across the Pyrenees but when the war ended, the French government ignored her because of her affaire with von Krohn. As she herself had said, being a double agent meant being distrusted by both sides. Richer remarried and in 1933 was finally awarded the Légion d’honneur. She also wrote a colourful account of her spying career, I Spied for France, which was published in 1935 and became an instant best seller; it was adapted for a 1937 film starring Erich von Stroheim. During the 1930s she was regarded as a French heroine but since the 1970s various French newspapers have questioned the accuracy of her account, suggesting that much of the information in her book is inaccurate or wildly exaggerated. During the Second World War she worked for the Resistance, then after the war entered politics, becoming a municipal councillor, working successfully to close brothels in France. She finally died in 1982, aged 92.

  Chapter 4

  Backroom Women

  ‘She should… be a responsible type who could be trusted to hold her tongue.’

  DOROTHY LINE

  Acquiring secret information about an enemy’s intentions is not only a matter of sending spies or agents into the field; it also involves backroom workers who essentially ‘listen in’ to the enemy’s secrets, intercepting and decoding enemy signals and communications in order to discover the enemy’s plans. This work may not be as dangerous as spying in the field but its role in espionage is just as important. During the First World War, whilst some women operated as spies for British military intelligence risking their lives in occupied territory, there was a positive army of hundreds of women who also fought in this secret intelligence war but from behind desks or in the corridors of the offices of British military intelligence, working as clerks, typists, telephonists, censors, decoders and translators, helping to intercept and process top-secret information. Some were completely untrained for the work, others already had clerical experience but all of them made a huge contribution to the early development and operations of British intelligence and the British Secret Service, although until quite recently their contribution was either forgotten or overlooked in favour of those of men.

  Twenty years later, during the Second World War, signals intelligence assumed a far greater importance. The nature of warfare had changed. Instead of static trench warfare, military forces on land, at sea and in the air moved at lightning speed necessitating fast, efficient communication across long distances. Radio communication made this possible and every military commander relied on codes and ciphers to send signals that would be indecipherable by the other side. Making sense of these signals was vital. During the Second World War thousands of British women played a crucial role, listening in to enemy radio traffic, de-coding and code-breaking enemy communications at Bletchley Park or in isolated listening stations – Y stations – which were dotted around the British coastline. They carried out their work in total secrecy, unable to tell anyone what they were doing. Their activity did not carry the same sense of glamour as that of spies, but it has been suggested the work they did helped to shorten the Second World War by up to two years.

  Early beginnings

  When it was first formed in 1909, Vernon Kell’s Secret Service Bureau was housed in one room in the War Office and operated with a small annual budget and a staff of not more than ten, including Kell himself. By April 1914 the number of staff had grown to about twenty-four, of whom four were women. Once war broke out, the increasing need to track suspicious activities and individuals in Britain meant a rapid expansion of staff and premises. The Bureau was put under the command of the War Office and given the name MO5(g) and in 1916 became section 5 within the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI), so acquiring the name by which it is best known – MI5. The offices were moved to rooms in Waterloo House, Charles Street, Haymarket, in London’s West End, and people were recruited for the ever-growing task of tracking and catching enemy spies, intercepting and censoring mail, decoding intelligence and filing data. Traditionally, men were responsible for this spy-catching work, but as war progressed women were also recruited. By 1919 more than 600 women were working for MI5 alone and many hundreds more were employed in the several other sections and sub-sections of British military intelligence, carrying out a range of duties from catering, cleaning and typing through to translating, recording and storing top secret information.

  ‘White blouse’ jobs

  During the years leading up to the First World War increasing numbers of women had entered clerical work of various kinds. Clerical work itself had been transformed: the increasing use of telegraphy and telephony, new developments such as the typewriter, shorthand, adding machines and Dictaphones, as well as new ways of storing data such as card indexes and ledgers, had transformed the work, paving the way for the multi-tasking information-processing office. With the growth of large commercial firms from the mid-nineteenth century and the expansion of banking, insurance and communications to say nothing of the new office practices and technology, employment opportunities for women expanded hugely. Un
til the middle of the nineteenth century clerical work had been seen mainly as a male preserve but as early as the 1860s the feminist and London-based ‘Ladies of Langham Place’ realized that clerical work was particularly suitable for women and had actively lobbied to promote their employment in that field. The typewriter, which was initially compared to a piano – hence its moveable letters being known as ‘keys’ – not only helped to transform clerical work but was also seen as a piece of technology that was eminently suitable for women.

  The post office was the first and largest government department to employ women. According to evidence within a Report on the Reorganization of the Telegraph System in 1871, the reasons why the post office, and other bureaucratic organizations, were keen to employ women as clerks and telegraphers were that women had quick eyes and ears and a ‘delicacy of touch’, which made them good operators, that they would take more kindly and patiently to sedentary work than men, and finally that the low wages, which would draw ‘male operators from an inferior class of the community, will draw female operators of a superior class.’ Coming from a ‘superior class’, women would by and large write and spell better than men and, in a mixed office, would also raise the tone. Finally – and extremely importantly for employers – while male civil servants would expect to rise up through the ranks and hence earn increasing salaries, women were unlikely to because they would retire as soon as they got married. Also, it was argued that women would be less likely to ‘combine for the purpose of extorting higher wages’, that is they would not join trade unions, a view that eventually turned out to be inaccurate.