Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (10 page)

Most surprising was that Norman had forgotten to include the secret security check, carried by each agent, which gave London absolute confirmation that a wireless operator was transmitting freely. Each agent was given a bluff check and a true check, which they had to insert into a message.
These took the form of spelling mistakes or secret signals, agreed with London, that were inserted in the text to show the sender had not been caught. A bluff check was one that could, under torture, be yielded to the Germans. The one that mattered was the true check. If the true check was not present, it meant the agent was captured.

A number of explanations were posited for the peculiar message. At first Vera considered that the message had perhaps been transmitted by Nora, who had been practising on Norman's set. Another suggestion was that Norman was on the run and operating in difficult circumstances. Few, though, were prepared to countenance the possibility that he might be operating under German control.

As F Section was aware, the Germans had sent messages back to London over the radios of captured operators before. As recently as April 1943 an F Section wireless operator named Marcus Bloom, alias Bishop, had been captured and peculiar messages had been sent over his radio, but this case was seen as a one-off.

For the Germans to be operating Norman's radio, however, Norman himself must have passed over his codes and crystals. “He would rather have shot himself,” exclaimed Buckmaster when the possibility was proposed by Penelope Torr, the records officer.

Norman, an accountant by profession and an earnest young man, had passed every test in training with flying colours, and security in particular had become “second nature,” said his instructors, whose only criticism of him was that he tended “to talk too much.”

Miss Torr pointed out, however, that Home Station had examined Norman's back traffic and found that he had sent 149 near-perfect messages since going to the field and had never forgotten his security check before. Buckmaster was unmoved. There was only one explanation for Norman's mistake and that was carelessness. “You have forgotten your double security check,” he replied as soon as the operator's next sched came up. “Be more careful next time.”

F's morning meetings were now dominated by Prosper as staff pored over the latest reports on who was captured and who was not. Among those
reported safe was Nora, who was said to be lying low with France An-telme, another key Prosper man, who had escaped the roundup. But the clatter of messages now coming in was reporting mass arrests. The Gestapo were raiding all of Prosper's arms depots. Names of several traitors, among them key Prosper lieutenants, were already being mentioned in messages. Somebody was obviously talking. But none of the reports could be verified, and the position still remained anything but clear.

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.”

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.”