Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (67 page)

It was puzzling that the Home Office refused to divulge the names of Vera s sponsors, as such a list of eminently English names—Kendrick, Rogers, Pearson, and Coverley-Price—all proclaiming Vera as “English to the core” would surely have been reassuring. Ward did win one battle, however. It was largely due to her campaigning that a historian called M.R.D. (Michael) Foot, a young lecturer at Oxford, was appointed to write an officially sponsored history of the French Section of SOE. “However,” said the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, in a note to Ward, “I doubt in fact it will ever be possible to establish exactly where praise or blame may have lain in all these intricate clandestine operations.”

Just as the Home Office was closing down Irene Ward, however, others were beginning to ask questions about Vera's loyalties that were potentially of an even more threatening kind. The Cold War was by now being fought, not only across the Iron Curtain but in the corridors of Whitehall and anywhere the spy catchers of MI5 might sniff out a
traitor. In 1950 a German-born scientist, Klaus Fuchs, who came to Britain in 1933 after fleeing the Nazis and was interned at the start of the war, had been caught passing U.S. nuclear secrets to the Russians. Then in 1951 came the dramatic flight to Moscow of two of the “Cambridge spies,” Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean. The intelligence agencies now clamped down, imposing positive vetting on all secret services and opening files on suspect individuals in any walk of life, on the most meagre of pretexts. The domestic security service, MI5, opened a file on Vera May Atkins.

Exactly when the file on Vera was opened was a matter of guesswork, because it had been destroyed, but I knew it was in existence by the 1950s and I knew that at this time her card was also marked within the Foreign Office. When her name was proposed as an intermediary between the British government and a leading French trade unionist, diplomats immediately vetoed Vera because of her “left-wing views.”

Also guesswork was the reason the file on Vera was opened. Most people who knew her in her later years had gained the impression that she was, and always had been, right-wing; some thought her contacts were not with the Soviet Union but with the CIA. Sacha Smith, her former war crimes colleague, even recalled that Vera once told him she was “advising the CIA, on restructuring,” and being paid for it. Though he did not press her on what she meant, he guessed that her CIA contacts went back to the war, when she had contact with members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American counterpart of SOE and precursor of the CIA.

Then I found people who had gained an entirely different impression of Vera's politics. One of her former agents, Tony Brooks, remembered how she loathed de Gaulle and always emphasised the importance the Communist groups had played in the resistance. When I revealed to Brooks that Vera was an eastern European Jew, he took no more convincing that she was herself a Communist. But then Brooks himself had spent much of his career as a spy catcher for MI5.

Some of Vera's very closest friends often wondered about her. Most were lighthearted in their musings: “The only drawback to you of course,” wrote the former Chancellor circuit organiser, George Millar, in
a letter to Vera in the early 1960s, “and it is minuscule really by contrast with your bounties, is that you are by nature so very discreet. So discreet indeed as to seem mysterious, if you are not mysterious.”

Other friends, though, including Jerrard Tickell, became over the years more serious in their suspicions of Vera.

Jerrard's son Sir Crispin Tickell, former British ambassador to the United Nations, recalled how, as a teenage public schoolboy, he often met Vera when his father was writing his biography of Odette. “I have an image of her with a slightly blonde moustache uttering quite left-wing sentiments at Sunday lunchtime. She was a slightly sinister lady and my mother hated her. One always wondered who she was working for,” he said. “She made a number of comments which struck me at the time as not so much politically left as inclined to the Soviet Union and Soviet Empire, along the lines of H. G. Wells or George Bernard Shaw—fed up with our society and there was a new Jerusalem over the hill. I know my father became very suspicious of her. She made me uneasy.”

Sir Crispin asked me what Vera had done after the war. I said she had worked for an educational body, sponsored by UNESCO. Certain bodies created by UNESCO at that time were used as little more than front organisations, he suggested. In the 1950s the Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges, which Vera worked for, might well have been “an umbrella for the Soviets,” he claimed.

But what precisely had brought Vera under suspicion of being a Communist or a Communist sympathiser? Perhaps it was her early friendship with Francis Cammaerts. MI5 certainly had a file on Cam-maerts, who at the outbreak of war was a conscientious objector, which immediately marked him out as a left-wing radical. “They had files on anyone,” Cammaerts scoffed when I asked him for his views on Vera's politics. “MI5 and MI6 were the stupidest people I have ever known. Of course Vera was not a Communist. She had the politics of a right-wing Kensington lady, which was what she wanted to be.”

Vera's links with another left-winger, Landon Temple, prominent in Communist Party politics in London in the 1950s and 1960s, may have aroused even more suspicion. During his most active years as a Communist,
Temple was Vera's deputy at the Central Bureau. Vera was always “tolerant” of his political views, he recalled, as well as a good friend and respected colleague.

When Temple was sacked from the bureau in 1961, for voicing pro-Soviet, anti-American sentiments while on a bureau visit to Poland, Vera had defended him. This may have brought suspicion of “the establishment” upon her, he said. It may even have contributed to her own resignation from the bureau, ostensibly over lack of funding, later the same year. But such “witch-hunts” were all part of the “Anglo-American, anti-Communist conspiracy of the times,” said Temple, who never considered that Vera was particularly left-wing herself, and he thought it “very unlikely” that she was ever a Communist.

“Her life was very compartmentalised, but I always had the impression that she was socially rather stuffy and she had a lot of right-wing people around her. On the other hand, Vera was not a conventional person. She was highly intelligent and intelligent enough to be interested in many points of view. She was certainly understanding of mine, and on some things I'm sure we agreed.”

Mistrust of Vera may also have sprung from suspicions of her younger brother, Guy, on whom MI5 also had a file. Guy was an obvious target for the spy catchers. Jewish, born in Romania, educated at Oxford and at Prague in the 1930s, he took a job in 1948 lecturing in Bantu languages—learned with the East Africa Rifles during the war—at SOAS, London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, which was considered a left-wing campus.

And yet I found no evidence that Guy had ever shown an active interest in politics of any kind. Former colleagues at SOAS remembered mostly his “brilliance and wit” and considered that his “contempt for humbug” was such that he probably steered away from politics.

Jean Overton's Fuller's typing was wobbly at eighty-eight, but her meaning was crystal clear. She could not tell me what she knew about “Miss Atkins” until after the publication of her next book on SOE, which was
not due out for several months. In it she intended to reveal certain things about Vera that would cause “great shock.” She apologised for being so tantalising, but I would have to wait.

Eventually we met at her cottage in a quiet Northamptonshire village. “What did you make of it?” she asked me as soon as I was in the door. Jean's latest book had been published, and now she felt free to talk. Before waiting for me to answer, she said. “The oddest thing was not so much what she said but that she said it to me like that. Why? Why did she say it to me? Then?”

“Why do you think?”

“I felt it was dangerous. It worried me deeply,” said Jean as she disappeared into a tiny kitchen to make coffee. I tried to find a seat, but it was hard, because the room was strewn with papers, manuscripts, and other debris of a restless mind. All over the walls were marvellous pictures, painted by Jean, of cats. She emerged with coffee, and we began to discuss the revelation in her book: that Vera Atkins might have been a Soviet spy.

Jean published this claim in 2002 in Espionage as a Fine Art. The main body of the book was a collection of fictional short stories, written by Henri Déricourt, based on his life as Gilbert. Déricourt died in Laos in 1962 when the small plane he was flying, carrying gold bars to pay for opium, crashed on landing. Well before his death he had told Jean about his short stories, and all these years later she had the opportunity to publish them with a detailed commentary. It was in the somewhat surreal context of her commentary on Déricourt s labyrinthine short stories that Jean made the claim about Vera.

In one story Déricourt wrote about a woman in the Baker Street headquarters of SOE named “Lucy” who was a German agent. Lucy, said Jean in her commentary, was supposed to be Vera. This in itself was extraordinary: the SOE tangle of conspiracy theories had at last come full circle and had indeed caught up Vera. Here was the traitor Déricourt, whom Vera, above all people, had always mistrusted, turning the tables and now accusing her—in the guise of “Lucy”—of being a traitor, all in a work of fiction published after his death.

This little paradox, however, was not Jean Overton Fuller's point. In
her commentary she went on to explain that “Lucy” was obviously meant by Déricourt to be Vera, because Déricourt had also referred to “Lucy” as a lesbian. “He had told me he believed she was a lesbian,” she wrote. “Was she? Her exceptionally low-pitched, exceedingly husky voice and something in her face and figure had reminded me of Marlene Dietrich; on the other hand, I had never heard of her having a woman-friend or, for that matter, a man-friend either. She lived behind iron bars, which she had had set across the window of her small flat in Nell Gwynne Mansions, Chelsea. In case of burglars, she said, which made me think she must house secret files.”

However, Jean's commentary continued: “If Déricourt ever toyed with the idea that Vera Atkins could be a German agent, he was on the wrong tack. Her loathing of the Nazis was, I am sure, genuine. She was after all Jewish, which made that natural.”

Jean went on to write that Vera, far from being a German sympathiser, was “very far to the left.”

When Jean had first encountered Miss Atkins, she told me, she had found her “not unsympathetic.” She was “obviously very reserved, but I thought that natural for somebody in that job. Just out of curiosity I asked her then what she had done before SOE. She said: Just this and that.'

Jean then explained how her suspicions of Vera were first provoked at a dinner for just the two of them, in Vera's flat, soon after they met. At the dinner Jean told Vera she had traced one of the Germans at Avenue Foch, Ernest Vogt, and hoped to interview him. Jean was cock-a-hoop and thought Vera would be pleased too, but she was not. “She said I would be spending my money on an expensive train journey to Germany and would learn nothing. I thought at the time, Why doesn't she want me to see this man? I thought there must be something she knew he would tell me. I didn't know what it was exactly. I just knew she had something that she feared Vogt might tell me. The atmosphere was thick. I felt something was wrong.”

Adding to Jean's anxiety that evening was Vera's apparel. Jean recalled that when she arrived, Vera greeted her in a black lacy evening dress. “I remember thinking this was very elegant, but it was very
transparent and the shoulder straps were showing—there was a lot of lace. What has happened to the lining? I thought. It was quite transparent. I thought it was very strange.”

When did the “dangerous” conversation take place? I asked.

It was not until after Madeleine appeared, in 1952, and it took place in Jean's tiny flat, on the occasion Jean had offered to make something “tasty to eat.” That evening she had expected Vera to want to talk about the book on Nora. But Vera hardly mentioned it. Instead she raised the case of Klaus Fuchs, who had recently been arrested and charged with spying for the Soviet Union.

Vera told Jean: “I don't think of him as a traitor. During the war we shared all our secrets with the Russians, and after it he just went on. I don't call that being a traitor.”

Jean was surprised and said nothing. “This was while we were still eating,” she told me. “Miss Atkins was facing me across a very narrow table.”

I asked what Vera was wearing that evening. Was she dressed provocatively this time too?

“Oh, no,” said Jean. “Then she was dressed quite differently. Rather dowdy, in a grey suit, if I remember.”

After the meal Vera and Jean moved to more comfortable chairs, and Vera said she had never been to America and would never go because of all the questions that would be asked. “ ‘Are you a Communist? Have you known a Communist?' You just have to decide whether you want to go to America and if so tell the necessary lies.” She said she didn't think it was worth it.

I pointed out to Jean that it was not so surprising that Vera should have talked like this. After all, it was true that Russia had been an ally for much of the war and Vera herself would have liaised with Russians who worked with SOE and been quite used to sharing secrets with them.

Jean was not persuaded. Vera had spoken of the Soviet Union with great “earnestness.” Vera told Jean: “I do believe in democracy—with perhaps a little more freedom than is possible in Russia at present—and I don't see why that should be impossible to achieve.”

It was the way Vera said the word “achieve” that struck Jean. “In England we generally thought of ourselves as living in a democracy, and the natural word would have been ‘preserve' rather than ‘achieve.'

I suggested that Jean's own suspicion had perhaps been influenced by the Cold War paranoia of the times. She said: “My main thought was: why is a person who is always so discreet about her views and private life, who never offers any information suddenly—and so deliberately—making these indiscreet disclosures?”