Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (66 page)

Jean chose not to confuse her biography of Nora with an exposé of
German penetration. In her next book, however, her sole purpose was to unveil the “radio game,” revealing at the same time how Starr had been victimised after the war because he knew too much. While she was writing The Starr Affair, a book entitled London Calling North Pole, by the former head of German counterespionage in Holland and Belgium, Lieutenant Colonel H. J. Giskes, was published in 1953, revealing that the Germans had operated the “radio game” with devastating success in those two countries. Giskes's revelations prompted questions in the Commons, which the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, answered by saying they were largely true.

Jean Overton Fuller's revelations that British and French women and men had similarly been parachuted into Gestapo hands in France prompted no official comment at all. However, other writers, as well as former SOE members, noted what she wrote. Vera opened a “controversial books” file, which from then filled up rapidly. “There was no Starr Affair until you started it,” wrote Vera to Jean when the book was published in 1954. “I did not mean to offend you personally,” Jean replied.

By the mid-1950s Vera was advising another young writer, Elizabeth Nicholas. Elizabeth had known Diana Rowden, and once again there were dinner invitations from Vera, but it soon became clear that Elizabeth, like Jean Overton Fuller, would ask the wrong questions. To deter her, Vera was not only uncooperative: on one matter she quite clearly lied.

One question Elizabeth Nicholas sought to answer was the identity of the fourth woman to die at Natzweiler, who, as far as she could see from the published record of the trial, was “unidentified.” Not realising that the record itself had already been altered to cover up Vera's initial error of identifying Nora as the fourth woman, Elizabeth then asked Vera if the identity had ever been established. Vera had known since 1947 that the fourth woman was Sonia Olschanesky, but she did not give Elizabeth her name. “All Vera Atkins could tell me was that she had not been sent to France by SOE;” in other words, the fourth woman was locally recruited in France to work with an SOE circuit. It was not until eight
months later that Elizabeth found out Sonia's name and her identity for herself. Elizabeth also discovered that Sonia's fiancé and family had never been informed of her fate, although they had made desperate attempts to trace her.

I found it hard to reconcile the callous streak in Vera, which had now begun to show itself, with her dedication in searching for the missing. The failure to tell Sonia's family what she had discovered was not the only example of callousness. For reasons never explained, Nora's family were never officially told the full facts of her death at Dachau. Although Vi-layat had gathered his own evidence that Nora did not die at Natzweiler, it was only when the family read Nora's citation for her George Cross in 1948 that they learned the final official version of what happened. The sudden news of an entirely different horror at Dachau produced a second devastating shock for Nora's mother, who died ten days later.

However, some people who knew Vera well were not surprised by this toughness in her character. “She was treated like a man, she had to behave like one,” said Vera's war crimes colleague and close friend Sacha Smith. Vera had once been close to the SOE agent Francis Cammaerts, who secured her the job at the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges. But when I met Cammaerts, it was clear that he and Vera had become estranged. “She was always a cold-blooded professional,” he said. She was the person the agents “trusted to lie;” in other words, she could be trusted not to tell their families the truth about their fate.

After the war, Cammaerts claimed, Vera only helped her “favourites.” She avoided those “who might rumble her.” A teacher by vocation, Cammaerts said: “For a teacher, having favourites was always the worst thing.”

When I asked why he had fallen out so bitterly with Vera, he told me he had discovered she was “a racist.” In the 1960s Vera had visited Cammaerts in Africa, where, after leaving the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges, he taught at the University of Nairobi. He was shocked at the way Vera treated his black colleagues and staff.

When Elizabeth Nicholas's book Death Be Not Proud was published in 1958, new questions were asked about how agents could have been flown to penetrated circuits, with London apparently unaware that SOE
radios had been captured. In the case of Nora's captured radio, Nicholas posed “a truly dreadful theory”: that London had deliberately dropped France Antelme, Madeleine Damerment, and Lionel Lee as part of a “double bluff.” She explained: “London had known very well that the ‘Poste Madeleine' had been taken over by the Germans and was busily feeding to it false information to deceive the enemy. More than this, in order to convince the Germans that London believed the ‘Poste Madeleine' was still in British hands, London had prepared to send agents deliberately to a reception committee organised by the Germans so as to maintain the deception.” She admitted she had been “unable to confirm that this was the case” but added that “a number of people, including officers of SOE, believe it was.” On the other hand, she continued: “the point has also been made that such action would demand a logical and cruel ruthlessness such as the British never employ, even in war.”

Buckmaster dismissed “Nicholas's nonsense” in a piece in the Empire News. But conspiracy theories about SOE's darker purpose were now being circulated as fast as the sanitised sentiment, epitomised in the 1958 film about Violette Szabo, Carve Her Name with Pride, on which Vera advised. Violette's portrait painter, Douglas Pigg, complaining about the film in a letter to Vera, wrote: “It was to my mind a great pity that the internment scenes were as brief. Surely it was here that the true fortitude and strength of the girls were most evident. How the girls would have wished it was as quick to the end as depicted.”

Buckmaster's complaint to Vera was not about the portrayal of Violette but about “the nauseating presentation of ourselves.” He wrote: “My agent tells me that in law we cannot stop the portrayal of ourselves either with our true names or with fictitious names, if the latter merely cover up well-known personalities (as believe it or not, we are).”

And on top of everything else, the Churchills' story was unravelling. Peter and Odette faced accusations, particularly in France, that instead of arming the resistance they spent their time in bed together, which was precisely where Hugo Bleicher, the Abwehr officer, found them when they were arrested in 1943 at a hotel in St. Jorioz. A rumour also now spread that Odette had been spared at Ravensbrück because she became
the mistress of the commandant, Fritz Suhren. There was no evidence for this claim. Sylvia Salvesen, the Norwegian prisoner, vouched for Odette's heroism, saying she had spent eleven months at Ravensbrück in an underground cell. But so fixed did the tale become in F Section's burgeoning mythology that Selwyn Jepson—who, as “Mr. Potter,” had been Odette's SOE interviewer—repeated the claim as a fact in a taped interview he gave to the Imperial War Museum in 1986. Jepson, who in civilian life had been a crime writer, was cut short by the embarrassed museum official, who changed the subject.

It was also being said that Odette had lied about having her toenails pulled out, though Stephen Stewart, the prosecuting barrister at Ravensbrück, asserted categorically that on this point her story was true. By the mid-1950s the fairy-tale marriage of Odette and Peter Churchill was over, and Peter wrote to Vera to say he was living alone in a caravan in the South of France “with a loaded gun behind the door to frighten away newspaper correspondents.”

Vera, though, by now had more to worry about than the portrayal of agents in books and films. She was deeply anxious about how the Conservative MP Dame Irene Ward might portray her in the House of Commons. An indomitable character, Ward had once hoped to be an opera singer but used her powerful voice instead to remonstrate with ministers on behalf of her Tynemouth constituents and in fighting for unpopular causes. In the early 1950s she was writing a book on the history of the FANY and, like Jean Overton Fuller and Elizabeth Nicholas, had come across the cases of the SOE girls. Irene was particularly intrigued by the case of Henri Déricourt, which had by now been explored by Jean Over-ton Fuller in her third book, Double Webs. Here Jean traced Déricourt himself, who told her he had indeed handed agents' mail over to the Gestapo but had been acting on instructions from a high authority in London. This claim then fuelled a theory that Déricourt himself was planted inside SOE by MI6. Perhaps MI6 was using Déricourt to keep tabs on the SOE camp and to further its own plans to deceive the Germans.

Writing to the foreign secretary, John Selwyn Lloyd, in 1958, Irene Ward warned she was “going to be an awful nuisance” unless she got some answers to certain questions. One of these questions was “whether Gilbert was working for one of our secret service organisations, and put into SOE to keep an eye on what was going on there, or was he working for the Germans?” The MP was also campaigning for Odette's George Cross to be rescinded. “She is a phoney. Buckmaster must have known,” wrote Ward in a note in 1959.

Ward was directed in the first instance to Vera for her answers. “Miss Atkins,” she noted, “was extremely pleasant but I gained absolutely nothing. To tell you the truth it ended with my being questioned.” Soon after this meeting Ward turned her sights on “Miss Atkins” herself.

“
HOME OFFICE
Minister's case R20340/3 Rosenberg Vera May alias Atkins,” was the heading on the papers relating to Ward's questions about Vera. She had heard a rumour that Vera Atkins was Romanian and demanded to know whether F Section's intelligence officer had been naturalised and, if so, when. Reluctantly the Home Office revealed Vera's Romanian origins to the MP, giving the date of her naturalisation in February 1944. Realising that Vera had therefore been an enemy alien at the time of her employment with SOE, Ward demanded to know more. How many naturalisations were granted by the Home Office in 1944 and in what circumstances?

She was told that in 1944 549 certificates of naturalisation were issued, of which 472 were in respect of persons who were being readmitted to British nationality, having previously held it. In all other cases naturalisation was not granted during the war except in cases of “national interest.” Vera's naturalisation must therefore have been granted “in the national interest.” Now Ward wanted the names of Vera's sponsors.

Vera would certainly have appreciated the full damage the MP's attack could cause. During the war it had been virtually a matter of life and death that her origins remain secret, a central tenet of clandestine operations being that agents in the field should trust implicitly their handlers in headquarters. The stakes may not have appeared so high now in peacetime, but Irene Ward's campaign nevertheless struck at Vera's very reputation.

If any suggestion emerged in public that there had been an enemy alien in SOE headquarters, conspiracy theorists already hunting for more controversy would have had a field day. Such was the climate of suspicion that Vera would herself have been caught up in those very conspiracies she had tried to dispel. The subtext of Ward's question was evident: she was exploring the possibility that Vera herself might have been playing some sort of double game. Certain conspiracy theorists were already developing suspicions of Vera—among them one of her own former agents.

In Vera's files were numerous letters from a man named Pierre Ray-naud, who, as a young soldier, had escaped from France in 1942. He was snapped up by F Section and parachuted back into France as an agent. Immediately after landing he escaped capture by the Gestapo only by a fluke. Raynaud had been due to link up on landing with the Canadians Frank Pickersgill and John Macalister, who had been dropped the night before, and was to have travelled with them, but horrified by Macalister's French accent, he decided to travel alone.

After the war Raynaud discovered numerous blunders committed by London that could have landed him—like Pickersgill and Macalister— in German hands. He decided that no intelligence body could have been so stupid as to commit these errors. Like Elizabeth Nicholas, Raynaud wondered if it was all part of a bigger strategy. He decided it was and that the strategy was to fill agents with false information in the knowledge that they would be captured and pass it to the Germans.

In the 1970s and 1980s new writers took up the theme, embellishing it with details from newly released papers on Cockade, the Allied plan to trick the Germans about the date and location of the D-Day invasion. It was now claimed that Henri Déricourt must have been deployed by MI6, or perhaps directly by Claude Dansey, the assistant chief of MI6, as part of the plan, ensuring that agents' mail containing phoney hints about D-Day reached the Germans. In his last years Buckmaster himself suddenly miraculously recalled that MI6 had indeed sent messages directly to some of the captured SOE radios. By this time most who had followed Buckmaster's delusions over the years ignored him. However, his thoughts were taken seriously by some and helped feed new
conspiracy theories so enticing that they were put into a novel, Larry Collins's Fall from Grace, published in 1985.

Like Vera, I had a pile of letters from SOE's archconspiracy theorist, Pierre Raynaud, who invited me to the Canary Islands to see his archive. I didn't go, but I did try to challenge him, saying that what happened could be only too easily explained by F Section bungling, which was allowed to run unchecked. But Raynaud told me that “Buckmaster's stupidity” had always been “the excuse.” He said Vera was SOE's “official liar,” appointed to cover up the truth. And he expected me to write her “official hagiography.”

Back in 1955 Vera could have had no idea how far the conspiracy theories about SOE might develop, but she certainly didn't want to be drawn into them. On November 7, 1955, the Home Office came to her aid by stopping any more questions about her origins. Exasperated by Irene Ward, who still had “the bit between her teeth,” an official wrote: “Miss Ward seems to be gathering ammunition for some sort of attack on Miss Atkins. I see no objection to telling her when Miss Atkins first came here but if more intimate questions follow we must call a halt.”