Women Wartime Spies

by Ann Kramer

  ‘We only knew the subject of the key and never the contents of the messages. It was quite heavy work and [I] now understand why we were all of good height and eyesight as the work had to be done at top speed and 100 per cent accuracy was essential. The bombes made a considerable noise as the drums revolved and would suddenly stop and a reading was taken. If the letters matched the menus, the Enigma wheel-setting had been found for that particular key. To make it more difficult the Germans changed the setting every day. The reading was phoned through to the Controller at Bletchley Park where the complete messages were deciphered and translated. The good news would be a call back to say “Job up; strip machine”.’

  In all cases, accuracy was essential. From late autumn 1942 Helen Currie worked on the Tunny machines, which were housed in ‘brick-built huts surrounded by protective walls’ in the grounds of Bletchley Park. They were huge machines to which were attached teleprinters: ‘the keyboard was the same as that of a modern typewriter and so it was no problem to operate them, providing one had some typing skill’, which Helen Currie already had. More ATS women joined the work as war intensified and with it, the volume of encoded material pouring into Bletchley. As Helen remembered:

  ‘We were divided into three shifts to enable the machines to be operated around the clock – one week 9.00 am – 4.00 pm, the next midnight until 9.00 am and the third (which we hated) 4.00 pm until midnight.

  ‘On the Tunny machine there were numbered circuits each operated by its own button, which was pressed to gain the correct setting. The operating procedure consisted of setting up the machine by pressing in the key numbers which were written on the message pad by the cryptographers. All the important code-breaking was done in the next room, separated from ours only by a partition. Provided the machine was set correctly and the coded letters were accurately typed, what came out onto the roll of white paper fitted to the teleprinter was clear German. It seemed like magic at first.

  ‘Even without knowing the language it was easy to recognize German, and just as easy to see that gibberish was coming out when something went wrong. This happened when a letter was missed out, or one was typed that wasn’t there. Mostly this occurred when a letter of the coded text had been missed during interception (or maybe many letters if the reception was bad, as it often was). Then it would be necessary to step the impulses on until the text became clear again. This was often a matter of trial and error – pushing the buttons and then typing the text, and only when clear German again appeared could one breathe a sigh of relief and carry on typing. We typed to the end of the German message and placed it in our basket… As time went on, and news from the various fronts was good and bad by turn, the volume of our work (and the number of people employed at Bletchley Park) increased enormously. Our fingers flew over the teleprinter keys. Clever young men hovered behind our chairs reading as we typed, waiting to take the messages away to be analyzed. Sometimes it was taken page by page: we knew those ones were very important.’

  Silent geese

  Like Cynthia Waterhouse, most women at Bletchley or the listening stations only saw their particular part of the work they were doing; they were effectively links in an information chain and only a few people saw the entire decoded messages and complete intelligence. Nevertheless, virtually everyone at Bletchley knew the importance of what they were doing and when a particular code was cracked and information came through that was vital to the war effort, rumours spread around and there was a sense of achievement. When the war ended and to maintain secrecy everything at Bletchley was dismantled, Ultra files were locked away, and all the machines were dismantled and their blueprints destroyed.

  One of the most extraordinary things about Bletchley and its network was that everyone who worked there remained absolutely silent about the work they had been doing not just during the war but also for many years afterwards. Their achievements and their silence were recognized by certain influential people, notably Winston Churchill, who used to refer to the intelligence acquired at Bletchley as his ‘golden eggs’, and later spoke about the team at Bletchley as ‘the geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled’ but the public had no idea that this secret work was taking place. According to many women however staying silent was not difficult: most of them recognized the importance of their work. As Cynthia Waterhouse commented: ‘It was amazing that none of this information leaked out, and if it had, our work would have been rendered useless. I cannot remember it being in any way difficult to keep silent. There was only one thought in everyone’s minds, which unified the whole country – and that was to defeat Nazi Germany.’

  For some thirty years the British public remained unaware of the vital secret intelligence war that had been carried out at Bletchley, which had played a key role in helping Allied forces under Montgomery in the North African campaign of 1942, and had helped to divert Allied shipping away from German U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic. With the publication of The Ultra Secret by F.W. Winterbotham in 1974, however, the work of the women and men at Bletchley Park began to enter the public domain and the secret was finally out. Remembering the long years of silence, Helen Currie said:

  ‘There was the state-imposed silence, lasting thirty years. My family had no idea what I had been doing. I can only describe those silent years as a fading of memories. If I did recall the experience, it took on a dream-like quality… Then one day I saw in Picture Post… some photographs of a Bletchley machine and a description of the work that had gone on there during the war. I was excited, amazed, delighted. I could now talk about that unique experience… The years of silence were over.’

  Chapter 5

  Special Operations Executive

  ‘The sort of person who volunteered was in the main someone prepared to operate on their own with a considerable amount of courage and prepared to take considerable risks.’

  VERA ATKINS, SOE

  Lodged in the National Archives at Kew Gardens, in London, are some fascinating and sometimes poignant documents – the personal files of women who worked as spies or agents for Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), the secret army set up to foment resistance, carry out sabotage and acquire information from behind enemy lines during the Second World War. Reading through the files is a very moving experience not least because the contents of the files bring to life the remarkable personalities, courage and dedication of the women who risked torture and death to take part in this highly dangerous covert war, parachuting behind enemy lines, taking on false identities, helping to organize resistance movements, acting as couriers and wireless operators and sending back vital information to London. Some of them never returned.

  Set Europe ablaze

  The SOE was set up in 1940 following the Fall of France. Between 1939-1940, German forces swept through Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and into France. Between 26 May and 3 June 1940, more than 330,000 Allied soldiers were evacuated from the Dunkirk beaches and on 9 June German forces launched a major attack on Paris, entering the city five days later. France surrendered on 22 June, leaving Britain and its Commonwealth partners alone and vulnerable. With large swathes of Europe under enemy occupation, in July 1940, following correspondence between the Minister for Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, Lord Halifax and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a new highly secret organization was set up in Britain – the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Its mission was to promote subversive warfare in enemy-occupied territories, or, as Winston Churchill commanded, to ‘set Europe ablaze’. SOE would send spies or secret agents out from Britain into occupied territories to gather information, encourage resistance movements, supply arms, provide training, carry out sabotage and harass enemy forces in whatever way possible. Effectively they were to conduct a secret war behind enemy lines. In the words of Hugh Dalton, in a letter to Lord Halifax, dated 2 July 1940:

  ‘What is needed is a new organization to co-ordinate, inspire, control and assist the nationals of the oppressed countries who must
themselves be the direct participants. We need absolute secrecy, a certain fanatical enthusiasm, willingness to work with people of different nationalities, complete political reliability… the organization should… be entirely independent of the War Office machine.’

  Three much smaller units were joined together to create SOE. One was MI(R), or Military Intelligence (Research), which was a secret War Office department whose task had been to look into irregular ways of causing trouble in enemy-occupied countries. One of its officers, Colin Gubbins, a dynamic Highland Scot, with a toothbrush moustache, who had fought in Ireland and written handbooks on guerrilla warfare, was seconded to SOE as head of training and operations in November 1940. Another was Section D, a small sabotage branch of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) or MI6, which was concerned mainly with action in countries that were likely to come under Axis control. The third was a propaganda organization, known as Department EH (after Elektra House, its headquarters) but this was later separated out to form another organization.

  ‘An organization is being established to co-ordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas. This organisation will be known as the Special Operations Executive.’

  (SOE Charter, approved 22 July 1940)

  MI(R) had been sending agents into Poland, Scandinavia and the Balkans since 1939 with the aim of helping to set up resistance to invading German forces but it had had little success. From 1940 SOE took over the task. Using a cover name, the Inter-Services Research Bureau (ISRB), SOE set up its headquarters at 64 Baker Street, London, not far from 221b Baker Street, the home of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, a location which gave rise to SOE personnel being nicknamed the ‘Baker Street irregulars’, after the gangs of street boys who assisted Sherlock Holmes. The organization, which did have a flavour of Boys’ Own adventure about it, was shrouded in absolute secrecy; according to one staff officer’s account, the cover name meant that people could wander in and out of the building without arousing suspicion because to all intents and purposes the Baker Street premises only housed a research unit. The telephone number too was listed in the War Office telephone directory as ‘MOI (SP)’, which staff jokingly said stood for ‘Mysterious Operations In Secret Places’.

  As time went on, and work and staff increased, other buildings were also taken over including Michael House opposite, which was the headquarters of Marks & Spencer and which housed the Security, Photographic and Passport Section, Norgeby House, where staff of the French section occupied many offices and Montague Mansions, as well as various country houses which were used as training centres and to house agents, produce specialist equipment and as radio centres for maintaining links with agents behind enemy lines. A mews building at the back of Michael House contained SOE’s code and cipher rooms, which were presided over by SOE’s brilliant code master and cryptographer, Leo Marks, who was based in Norgeby House. SOE also had other establishments around Britain, including what was known as Station IX, the Frythe Estate, which was used for weapons research and development, and Station XV, the Thatched Barn, where staff produced suitable clothing for agents going behind enemy lines as well as developing a variety of extraordinary devices and exploding booby traps that agents could use, among them exploding pens and explosives designed to look like animal droppings; they blew up if an unwary person stepped on them. SOE also requisitioned country properties around Britain, which were used as Special Training Schools (STS) and set up centres in Cairo, Palestine, India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

  SOE came under the aegis of the Minister for Economic Warfare, initially Sir Hugh Dalton and later – from 1942 – Lord Selbourne. Many of their senior staff were recruited from industry or the City. The first chief of service was Sir Frank Nelson. In April 1942 Sir Charles Hambro, head of the Hambro banking firm, replaced him but from September 1943 Major General Colin Gubbins took over as chief of the service, a position he held until the end of the war. SOE was unpopular in Whitehall and in some parts of the older British secret service. SIS (MI6) in particular was opposed to SOE largely because it saw the new organization as amateurish, dangerous and out to create mayhem and conflict rather than obtaining intelligence in more subtle and traditional ways. They feared that acts of sabotage would draw too much attention to Allied covert intelligence-gathering. Some senior members of the armed forces too were unhappy about SOE: Air Chief Marshall Charles Portal, for example, considered that dropping men in civilian clothes into occupied territory to effectively function as ‘assassins’ was not ethically correct and out of keeping with what he considered to be the ‘time-honoured’ operation of placing a spy behind enemy lines. Despite all this SOE went ahead and recruiting began.

  FANYs

  In 1944, at the peak of its operations, SOE employed some 13,000 people in a wide variety of roles, as secretaries, administrators, trainers, dispatch riders, explosive experts, engineers, wireless operators and – of course – agents. SOE recruited civilians and people from the military; about 3,000 of the total personnel were women. Most of the people attached to SOE had staff roles doing clerical work, helping to train and look after agents, decoding messages, producing forged documents and creating false identities for agents and liaising with agents in the field. Because of the extreme secrecy surrounding SOE, recruitment could not be done openly. Instead, suitable candidates were invited to join the SOE: men were usually found through public schools, universities, industry and, of course, the ‘old boys’ networks. Women tended to be recruited from the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), although they also came from other services.

  The FANY – its members never seem to have objected to the acronym – was a civilian voluntary organization, which was first created in 1907 as a first aid link between front-line fighting and field hospitals. Mounted on horseback, FANYs had a medical combat role, rescuing and treating the wounded directly from the front line. They were taught cavalry techniques, as well as signalling and first aid skills. To this day the FANY remain a fiercely independent all-woman organization whose members are always volunteers; until and during the Second World War they tended to be a very exclusive and rather dashing group of women from privileged upper-class backgrounds, often from Army families. During the First World War, sometimes dressed flamboyantly in fur coats and boots, FANYs drove ambulances, ran field hospitals and set up soup kitchens and troop canteens, often under highly dangerous conditions. Their bravery won them several decorations, including seventeen Military Medals, one Légion d’honneur and twenty-seven Croix de Guerre.

  When the Second World War broke out there was a move to combine the FANY with other services but the FANY preferred to remain independent. They formed the nucleus of the Motor Drive Companies of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) but many were recruited for SOE, following an approach to their commandant by Colonel Gubbins who arranged with her to provide personnel for SOE. Most uniformed FANYs worked on signals, coding and decoding and liaising with agents in the field. Gwendoline Lees was one of the FANY signal planners. She, like many other FANYs, was ‘responsible for working all the wireless sets and dealing directly with agents in the field, listening for and receiving their “skeds” as they were known, their schedules and sending messages’. FANYs, also provided administrative and technical support for SOE’s Special Training Schools (STS) and from time to time looked after and provided some hospitality for male agents preparing to leave for covert action behind enemy lines, a task they carried out with great efficiency. Some male agents remembered, with great fondness, the hospitality and sophistication of FANYs who, resplendent in ball gowns, organized eve-of-departure parties.

  Obviously FANYs did far more than just staff parties but whatever their various tasks, their work, and that of those recruited from other fields, was absolutely top secret – so much so that many new members of staff had very little idea what they would be doing until they arrived. Elizabeth Small, for example, had wanted to join the WRNS but was sent to SOE because she spoke French and
had excellent secretarial skills. At her interview she was told only that the work she would be doing would be ‘interesting’. On her first day she had to sign the Official Secrets Act and was told she would be working in the French section for a Captain Noble; it was not until much later that she discovered Captain Noble was actually Georges Bégué, the first SOE wireless operator to be parachuted into France. The intense secrecy often caused difficulties when friends and families asked about the war work the women were doing. Odette Brown, for instance, was a FANY who worked as a secretary for the French Section at SOE headquarters in London. Interviewed by the Imperial War Museum, she remembered:

  ‘We would say we were in the FANYs and people would say, “What do you do?” We were not supposed to say that our work was secret, which was far more difficult than if we had been allowed to say so. Lots of people worked in all sorts of things in wartime and if you asked them they used to say, “Hush-hush,” which meant, “I can’t talk about it.” But we were not allowed to say that we couldn’t talk about it, so one of the cover stories was the FANY Equipment Office. The other was the Inter-Services Research Bureau. That was a bit easier. The FANY Equipment Office made no sense at all. Why did you work all hours? What could you possibly be doing till midnight at the FANY Equipment Office?’

  From 1941 SOE began sending agents into Nazi-occupied territories. The organization was divided into different country sections often with its own distinctive initial – F for instance referred to the French section – and as the war progressed SOE had agents working covertly in all the occupied countries: France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Greece, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark, Poland and Romania. Agents were also sent to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and South-East Asia.