Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (68 page)

“And what did you conclude?”

“I thought she was sounding me out for possible sympathy. If I showed the least interest in what she was saying, she was going to recruit me. I was very frightened by it.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“Who on earth should I tell?”

Then I looked at Jean's face. Even at eighty-eight, the horror she had felt remained written in those alert and darting eyes. “Can you imagine how this felt?” she said. “I was all alone. I could tell nobody. I wanted her out of my flat. She smelled of danger.”

For a while after meeting Jean I pursued the theory that Vera was a Soviet spy. If true, it could explain her defensiveness, her extraordinarily secretive nature, and her sometimes utterly inexplicable loyalty to Buck-master. She was certainly clever enough to have got away with it. As the SOE man George Millar had said to me: “She could have been anything she was so bloody clever.”

I met a Soviet defector in the Home Counties and asked him over borscht and smoked salmon to discuss the possibility. Was she the right profile? He said it was not impossible but unlikely. “On a scale of one to ten,” I asked, did he think she was a Soviet spy? “Two she was, eight she wasn't,” he said.

I then discovered that there had been countless Soviet agents operating in Britain during and after the Second World War but that, to this day, we don't know who most of them were. Their wireless signals to
Moscow—known as the Venona traffic—were partly decoded after the war and were all now on file in the National Archives. I thought of examining the decoded Venona signals myself. I would have enjoyed trying to identify Vera's “fist.” But I soon had more productive avenues to pursue.

25.
Belgian Ladies

E
arly in my research into Vera's life I had a call from a woman named Judith Hiller, a close friend of Vera's and widow of the SOE agent George Hiller, who wanted to know if I knew about “a Belgian lady.” No, I said. What Belgian lady?

There was a Belgian lady at Vera's funeral, said Judith. I should talk to her. She had helped Vera escape from Belgium early in the war. There had been some sort of incident with the Gestapo on a train. Vera was not in Belgium at the beginning of the war, I said. She was in England. She had arrived here from Romania in 1937 with her mother. She stayed here and joined SOE in 1941. She had never worked for SOE in the field.

Judith Hiller said perhaps I should find the Belgian lady. She had lost the name and address but recalled that she lived in Kensington. “What did she look like?” I asked. “She was a little dumpy,” said Judith.

The funeral service for Vera May Atkins took place at the Church of St. Thomas the Martyr, Winchelsea, on Monday, July 3, 2000. Vera had supported Winchelsea church over the years, although her views on religion were always closely guarded. She once told a friend she had read the whole Bible through from start to finish, but when asked if she was religious, she simply responded: “I think I have a reasonable line to God.”

The death notice, which appeared in The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Rye Observer on June 23, said the funeral was for close friends and family only. At the service the different groups from different compartments and periods of Vera's life did not mingle. Judith Hiller, however, noticed that the lady in the pew in front of her knew nobody at all. She appeared a little nervous and was carrying a Marks & Spencer plastic bag containing sandwiches.

Outside the church, when the coffin had departed, somebody asked if anyone had left a plastic bag. Judith swiftly reunited the bag with its owner, who was already leaving to catch a train home. Judith offered to give the lady a lift to Winchelsea station, and it was in the car that she heard the story. Peter Lee, the former SOE staff officer, was in the car too.

The lady told Judith that she was Belgian (Peter Lee thought she said Dutch) and had met Vera somewhere in Belgium (Peter Lee thought Holland) in the early years of the war, after the German invasion of the Low Countries in May 1940. There was an incident on a train with the Gestapo. Vera needed help and had to go into hiding as it was already dangerous for Jews. The Belgian (or Dutch) lady helped Vera to find a safe house. At that point in the story they arrived at the station.

I found nobody else who remembered a Belgian or Dutch lady at Vera's funeral. Most of Vera's SOE friends said the tale was obviously untrue. If she had really ever operated in the field, the fact would have been hard to conceal after the war, even for Vera. The poor Belgian (or Dutch) woman must have been deluded. SOE attracted fantasists. And what on earth would Vera, a Jew who had already fled Europe, have been doing on the Continent at that time? After the German invasion all ports were closed.

Yet there was something intriguing about the story. Winchelsea was not an easy place to reach for an elderly lady, Belgian or otherwise, and funerals are not events to attend without good reason. The mystery lady had not trumpeted her story of rescuing Vera; on the contrary it was pressed from her by Judith Hiller, who seemed to believe it.

Furthermore, the trail Vera had left of her pre-SOE years in England had always made me uneasy. There were long gaps I had not properly
filled in. Was she really playing bridge with divorcees in South Kensington all day, as one acquaintance had recalled?

British intelligence was, like the rest of the world, totally unprepared for the German invasion of the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, but sabotage operations—“Scarlet Pimpernel missions,” as one writer put it— were launched. One venture was a spectacular mission to Amsterdam to snatch industrial diamonds from under the Germans' noses. The man involved in the diamond swoop was Montague “Monty” Chidson, the MI6 officer who had once proposed to Vera in Bucharest and who by 1940 was attached to Section D, MI6's special operations department. Any number of Vera's intelligence contacts from her Bucharest days could have drawn her into clandestine work on the eve of war, including Leslie Humphreys himself, the man who eventually recruited her for SOE. Thomas Kendrick, who later sponsored Vera's naturalisation, was back in England in 1939, having been expelled from Vienna by the Germans. And another of Vera's four sponsors, Reginald Pearson, was by 1939 based in Basle, working for yet another “secret show,” known as the Z network, a deniable spying organisation within MI6 run by Claude Dansey, then assistant chief of the secret intelligence service. The Z network had its headquarters in Switzerland in 1939, with agents operating all over Europe.

Vera, as noted on her naturalisation files, had made two trips to Switzerland in early 1939, travelling presumably on her Romanian passport, as her only British identity paper was an Aliens Registration Certificate. I had proof that both trips were ostensibly skiing holidays: a photograph of Vera as Bluebeard during the first trip and pictures of her in the mountains with Dick Ketton-Cremer for the second. Nevertheless, it had always seemed surprising that Vera should have travelled to Switzerland twice on the eve of war. On her Home Office form she was vague about the purpose of the second trip and even vaguer about the dates she was away, saying only that the trip lasted thirty-nine days—a long and costly skiing holiday for a woman short of money.

There was, however, no record on the files of Vera's involvement in any secret work immediately before she joined SOE, I was told. But then I was told, even if she had been involved, there would not be any record. When I wrote to one intelligence source, asking what Vera might have been up to in Belgium or Holland, I received a tantalising reply: “I do not feel the need to unburden myself about Vera's pre-SOE connections. There are secrets, which don't and shouldn't die, and perhaps this is one of them.”

A few months later I was sitting in a house in Woodditton, in Cambridgeshire, with a Belgian lady named Gilberte Brunsdon-Lenaerts. Born Gilberte Lenaerts in Antwerp, she had married a British military officer named Roger Brunsdon and lived in England from 1945. Gilberte had been to Vera's funeral. I had finally found her through the military attaché at the Belgian embassy. She had been until recently president of the Amicale des Anciens Combattants Anglo-Belges.

Gilberte was only nineteen when she first encountered Vera Rosenberg in Antwerp in the winter of 1940–41, she told me. Her father, Jean Lenaerts, worked in the diamond trade and helped Jewish diamond traders escape at the outbreak of war. Gilberte helped her father by delivering messages. Later she became famous as the “heroine on a bicycle” who helped rescue British pilots behind enemy lines.

Vera had come into contact with Gilberte's father through a well-known Antwerp Jewish family. “I went to meet her in the Schule near Pelikaan Straat in the diamond district. Others were there too,” said Gilberte, and then she paused. I could see she was uneasy and trying to think back.

“Now I will stop for a second and tell you a few things,” she said. “What do SOE say about all of this? What does her family say?”

They know nothing of it, I told Gilberte.

“Surely there must be papers. Somebody else must know something,” she said, suddenly worried that she was the only person who knew of this. Then she added: “Personally I think that this Rosenberg person led a double life,” saying “double life” with an anxious sort of lilt.

“What was she doing in Belgium?” I asked.

“That I don't know, dear. I had learned never to ask questions. You say: ‘What is your name and where do you want to go?' and that's it. And, of course, you are always looking out for German infiltrators. That was the time for it, wasn't it—the time to get German infiltrators across?”

“But do you know how Vera had got to you? Where had she come from?”

“She said she had come down from Holland, from Rotterdam, I think, or perhaps Amsterdam. You see, many of them thought parts of Belgium might remain free. And then they got stuck there too. I think her story was just that. That she was caught on tenth May and the Germans, as you know, only took five days to take Holland and in Belgium it took eighteen days. Well, you know, eventually we got our backs to the sea, but just the same we did fight for eighteen days. And it is all very well of them to say now we should have fought longer. Chapeau to the Belgian Army, I say. Chapeau.”

I pointed out that if Vera had “got stuck” in Holland after May 10, it had taken several months before she arrived in Antwerp to seek help. “There are certainly gaps in this lady's story, but it was definitely winter when I saw her. It is always better to get people out when it is winter because of the early curfew, so you can move them across the border.”

“Where did she go next, after she left you?”

“I do not know, dear. You see, they went from one place to another. Organised escape lines had not yet come into existence. Later there was the Comet line and the Ligne Libertas.

“And you have to remember that in that mêlée-mêlée you have Jewish people wanting to leave, and remember the banks were closed, so you start bartering with diamonds. You have to have people who are willing to take you over the border. It costs a lot of money.”

“Did you take Vera Rosenberg somewhere?”

“You know, my dear, I don't recall. She was one of hundreds that passed through my hands. I don't remember all of them.”

“But you do remember Vera Rosenberg?”

“Yes,” she said, but she could not explain quite why. “You know, my dear, there is something wrong here.
IIy a quelque chose qui cloche
.”

“When you remember her, in Pelikaan Straat, what do you see in your mind's eye?” I asked.

“I had gone on my bicycle to the Schule to investigate who was there. They were all there. They were panicking, but she was not. She came in. She was tall. She seemed in charge. She was most insistent—arrogant— no, there is a better English word for it. She was haughty. You know. And at that point the impression it made on me was: My God! You know. In charge! She did the talking. She gave the impression she was important and that she knew important people in England. Although she was tall, she had flat feet. Now why do I remember that? She had that Jewish walk. I remember that. She was wearing a hat and coat. She said: ‘I must get back. Can you help?'

“Was she with the rest of the group?”

“She was with a man. The man was not English. They spoke German together. They clung together in a way. I am sure there was a man,” said Gilberte, suddenly sounding unsure.

“What nationality did you think she was?”

“I think she spoke to me in French but I thought she was Dutch because she had come from Holland.”

Gilberte paused again to think and twist her rings.

“It has always worried me—no, bothered me, that is the word. Why did I never trust that woman? We had to be extremely careful who we helped.” And then she said: “You know, my dear, my feeling is we are dealing with a double agent here.”

“You mean a German double agent?”

Over recent weeks I had been told first that Vera worked for the CIA, then that she was a Soviet spy, and now somebody was seriously suggesting she was a German agent. My mind returned to Déricourt's bizarre depiction of Vera as “Lucy,” the German agent in Baker Street.

“You see, it was the time, as I say, wasn't it—to get them to England? And when you have been asked to help somebody like that, you think it might be a German agent, especially if they are not from Belgium but de passage.”

I said the suggestion seemed, on the face of it, preposterous, given all
I knew about Vera. For a start, why would she have gone to look for all the missing agents if she was a German spy?

“To make sure they were dead, perhaps. To make sure that those who might have learned something about her were dead. Or to look in the German papers and see what they knew.”

I looked hard at Gilberte, with her thick jet-black hair, darting eyes, and pale complexion. She had seemed quite lucid and had been credible in most respects. And yet, sitting in her tiny black velvet slippers, her black dress drawn high up to her neck, she worried me. The house was neat and dotted with delicate porcelain ornaments. Her suggestion that Vera was a German agent made me doubt some of her story. Was it really my Vera that she had met, or somebody else?