Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (12 page)

By the autumn of 1943 Vera was spending more and more of her time at airfields, seeing agents off on missions to France, a number of them women. Since the Prosper disaster of the summer, she had grown in stature within F Section. Throughout the crisis Vera's support for Buck-master had never wavered, and though she still held junior rank, he no longer addressed her as “Miss Atkins” but always as “Vera.” The two were nearly always together in the signals room or at Orchard Court; if not, they would be walking through the Ops room or sharing a late evening meal in the SOE canteen.

Relations between them were not always smooth. As Buckmaster
noted on Vera's personal file, she was “somewhat disinclined to accept instructions without argument. Requires handling.” For the most part, though—whether it was to compose an aide-mémoire or to choose a sabotage target—Buckmaster found that Vera was now the most reliable person to consult. After the losses of the summer Bomber Command had threatened to withdraw flights from SOE, using the Prosper collapse as yet further proof that planes and pilots were being wasted making drops to an ineffective resistance. Colin Gubbins, however, had fought back, defending F Section and exhorting Buckmaster in the strongest terms to prove Bomber Command and other critics of SOE wrong.

Although the date of D-Day was still a closely guarded secret, all the signs at this time were that it would take place sometime in the first half of 1944. As the invasion plans gathered pace, Buckmaster was left in no doubt of the central role that Gubbins expected F Section to play. He was also left in no doubt that, in order to succeed in its D-Day role, the section must brace itself for the sacrifice of very high numbers of agents.

“Strategically France is by far the most important country in the Western Theatre of War,” declared Gubbins, and the morale of the resistance “is a vital factor in our success.” He went on: “I think therefore that SOE should regard this theatre as one in which the suffering of heavy casualties is inevitable. But will yield the highest possible dividend. I would therefore increase to the maximum possible peak SOE aid to the French field from now on and so maintain it until D-Day.” The instruction called for the hiring, training, and dispatching of new agents to France as fast as possible, whatever the risks. As Buckmaster strove to achieve these aims, nobody gave him more support than Vera did.

The closing months of 1943, however, were not easy for F Section, and there were many new alarms. Several highly valued agents simply vanished, among them an expert in explosives who disappeared on his way to Pickersgill and Macalister's Archdeacon circuit in the Ardennes.

Wireless operators had also caused new fears. Extra security measures, agreed after the loss of Prosper, had brought in stricter rules on composing messages. For example, in addition to using his bluff check and true check, an operator named Marcel Rousset was instructed to sign off
“adiós” or “salut” if all was well, and “love and kisses” if he was caught. Over a nerve-racking weekend in Baker Street in September, Rousset sent a series of strange messages that suggested that he had forgotten his new rules. Buckmaster, without any senior staff to consult, anxiously showed the messages to the duty secretary, Nancy Fraser-Campbell, and asked for her advice, but the messages soon reverted to normal and fears were dispelled.

A technique called “electronic fingerprinting,” by which a wireless operator's “fist” could be electronically recorded by a machine before departure, had also been introduced. This “fingerprint” allowed London to compare a message sent later from the field with the “fingerprint” that the agent left behind. But often there was little time to make such checks, because of the volume of F Section activity in the field. Among operations carried out around this time was the bombing of the Miche-lin factory at Clermont-Ferrand, set up by one of Buckmaster s most trusted organisers, Maurice Southgate, alias Hector, with the assistance of his resourceful courier, Pearl Witherington. At the same time, another of F's best men, Francis Cammaerts, who had built up the highly successful Jockey network in the southeast, was blowing up railway locomotives about to be taken to Germany.

It was Nora Inayat Khan who caused the most regular alarms in Baker Street during the autumn of 1943. In early October a message had come in saying an informant, unknown in London, called Sonia had reported: “Madeleine had an accident and in hospital,” which clearly meant “burned,” or infiltrated, if not captured. Sonia's reliability was never confirmed and the anxiety sparked by her warning then passed, until, in November, somebody drew attention to a report from Paris that said that nobody in the field had set eyes on Nora for nearly two months. Buck-master held his nerve, saying she must be sensibly lying low. The fact that no handwritten letters had come from Nora since September was, in Buckmaster's view, another sign of her new concern for security. Her latest request to London for a new letterbox had been properly encoded and sent by wireless message. The message detailing these changes had come in from Nurse at 1415 GMT on October 17:

MY CACHETTE UNSAFE. NEW ADDRESS BELLIARD RPT BELLIARD 157 RUE VERCINGETORIX RPT VERCINGETORIX PARIS PASSWORD DE PART DE MONSIEUR DE RUAL RPT DE RUAL STOP. THIS PERFECTLY SAFE. TRUE CHECK PRESENT. BLUFF CHECK OMITTED GOODBYE.

Anxieties about Nora were therefore once again dispelled until, at Christmas, she caused further jitters in F Section. This time the operations officer, Gerry Morel, was letting it be known that he was not happy about Nora's fist. A respected figure, and one of the few Baker Street staff who had experience in the field, Morel was not a man to voice concerns lightly. Vera offered a solution: to send a test message for Nora containing questions of a personal nature that only she could answer. The message was designed to settle the doubts about Nora once and for all. If the questions were wrongly answered, it would have to be accepted that she was in German hands. Although slow in coming, the answers were in Vera's view quite satisfactory, and Buckmaster's confidence was immediately restored.

Cheering Christmas messages from other agents had also lifted his spirits, among them one from Frank Pickersgill. Buckmaster had been warned by Bodington back in August that Pickersgill's Archdeacon circuit “must be considered lost,” but he was now more convinced than ever that Bodington was wrong.

Kay Gimpel (née Moore), who worked for another branch of SOE, told me she saw in a flash that Pickersgill's Christmas message meant he was caught, but she never dreamed of telling Buckmaster. Like Pickersgill, Gimpel was a French Canadian and the two had long been friends. “He was a brilliant, charming boy,” she said. “Tall and gangly with a very sharp wit.” Before his mission Pickersgill and John Macalister, who was a Rhodes scholar, used to spend time at Kay's house at 54a Walton Street. “We all yacked a lot, and Frank loved to go off and make lots of tea.”

Kay used to travel into work on the same bus as Buckmaster, who one day in December 1943 sat down next to her and asked if she could think of a Christmas message for Frank. “I said tell him the samovar is still
bubbling at 54a.” The reply came back a few days later: “Thank you for your message.”

“It was an awful moment,” said Kay. “If he was all right, I knew he would have said something personal and secret to our little group.”

Why had she not told Buckmaster of her fears?

“He would not have listened to somebody like me. I was junior in rank.”

In January 1944 there were new crises to face. One agent who had been held briefly by the Gestapo at their Paris headquarters in Avenue Foch claimed that Prosper was cooperating with a German named Boemelburg and with another named Kieffer. Prosper was said to have plotted a large map for the Gestapo showing F Section circuits. “Total provocation. Obviously untrue,” noted Buckmaster.

Allegations of treachery against Henri Déricourt, first made the previous summer, had also spread. So persistent were the accusations against the air movements officer that in February 1944 Buckmaster was obliged by MI5 and SOE's own security directorate to recall him for investigation. Déricourt flew back to England on the night of February 8–9, bringing with him his wife, Jeanne. He protested his innocence and was reassured by Buckmaster, who told him he had nothing to fear from the charges and put him up in the Savoy.

Déricourt had won Buckmaster s trust from the moment they first met. The thirty-five-year-old from Château-Thierry, birthplace of La Fontaine (whose fables he loved to cite), had an easy manner, a quiet confidence, and a muscular physique, with fair hair curling into a quiff. His charms had impressed not only Buckmaster and most in F Section but also the pilots of “Moon Squadron.” The self-educated son of a postman, he had been drawn to the thrill of flying from a young age, going on to organise aerial events before training as a commercial pilot. In 1942 Déricourt had been promised a job by British Overseas Airways, but when offered a role with SOE, he had readily accepted this instead.

MI5, who checked the Frenchman's history, warned Buckmaster at the time that they were “unable to guarantee his reliability.” The reason
they gave was that, after he was first offered the job with British Overseas Airways, Déricourt had delayed coming to England, spending several more weeks in France. During this time “he would have been a likely subject for German attention,” cautioned MI5, but Buckmaster saw nothing to fear.

As Déricourt's interrogation began in February 1944, Buckmaster conceded that, should the allegations against the air movements officer prove true, every agent landed in France by air over the previous ten months, and every agent brought back to England, would be contaminated. But Buckmaster refused to believe the allegations would ever be proven and declared it an “SOE war objective” to clear Déricourt's name.

Throughout this time Vera had remained as loyal and diligent as ever, and Buckmaster recorded in another effusive note: “An extremely able, hard working, capable and loyal officer. Nothing is too much trouble for her.” While Buckmaster's dependency on Vera was by now quite evident, however, few could have been aware just how dependent she was on him, particularly at the turn of the year. In January and February 1944 small notices appeared in the personal columns of the Kensington News and West London Times, and Buckmaster was probably the only one of Vera's colleagues to be aware of them. “Notice is Hereby GIVEN that Vera May Atkins (otherwise Rosenberg) of 725 Nell Gwynne House, Sloane Avenue, SW3 in the County of London, Spinster, is applying to the Home Secretary for Naturalisation,” read the announcement.

Vera's first application for naturalisation as a British citizen had been made in February 1942 and was rejected. No reason was given, although, as Buckmaster was well aware, senior figures in SOE's security directorate were suspicious of her Romanian and Jewish origins. So to ensure that her application was not blocked again, Buckmaster himself was this time backing Vera's request for naturalisation.

A former SOE staff officer told me he recalled “a stink” and “a smell” in the office when Vera first joined SOE. The same person recalled a further “stink” when Vera first applied for naturalisation in 1942. When I asked
him the reason for the “stink,” the man said: “Something in her background.” He then thought for a moment and added: “I am not anti-Semitic but I am not very keen on Jews. They are always touching and pawing one, and the fleshy nose and all this flesh at the back of the neck,” and he then reached for the back of his neck.