Hell Hath No Fury (49 page)

In my view women were very much better than men for the work. Women, as you must know, have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage than men. Men usually want a mate with them. Men don't work alone; their lives tend to be always in company with other men. There was opposition from most quarters until it went to Churchill, whom I had met before the war. He growled at me “What are you doing?” I told him and he said, “I see you are using women to do this,” and I said, “Yes, don't you think it is a very sensible thing to do?” and he said, “Yes, good luck to you.” That was my authority!

Equality was also observed in training for field operations. This can best be appreciated by viewing a fascinating documentary film of 1944,
Now It Can Be Told
(later retitled
School for Danger
), depicting the recruitment and some of the training of two real F Section agents, Harry Rée and Jacqueline Nearne. The rigorous program included exercises in physical fitness, raiding tactics, weapons handling and maintenance, sabotage, tradecraft, parachute drops, and radio transmission. The agents also faced tough mock interrogations and learned how to pick locks and break into safes. One SOE heroine,
Violette Szabo
(see Chapter 11), joked that the agency had equipped her for a wonderful career after the war—as a cat burglar.

In the field an SOE network, or circuit, depended on three figures—a courier, a wireless operator, and an organizer. Most of SOE's female field agents in France worked as couriers, traveling around as messengers and liaison officers. Because they were constantly on the move, couriers ran the highest risk of being stopped and arrested. It was thought that in this situation women would find it easier to invent plausible cover stories and would attract less attention than men, who from early 1942 were liable to be picked up by the Germans from the streets of France and sent to Germany as forced labor.

Women were also less likely to be body-searched and thus could more easily secrete messages. Other female SOE field agents, such as
Noor Inayat Khan
(see Chapter 11), worked as wireless operators, maintaining regular contact with London. Some, such as
Pearl Witherington
(see Chapter 11), rose to the position of organizer, heading an SOE network, recruiting local Resistance fighters, arming and supplying them with air drops from Britain, and identifying targets for sabotage.

Many of the female agents had been drawn from the
First Aid Nursing Yeomanry
(FANY, see Chapter 6). The commander of the FANY was a personal friend of General Sir Colin Gubbins, who had been appointed SOE's director of operations in November 1940 and who in September 1943 became the agency's executive head. As well as supplying some of SOE's female field agents, members of the FANY staffed SOE holding and wireless stations in the United Kingdom, North Africa, Italy (from 1943), and the Far East, handling communications and in some cases the decryption of encoded enemy radio traffic.

Reference: M. R. D. Foot,
SOE: The Special Operations Executive,
1984.

SZABO, VIOLETTE

British SOE Agent, b. 1918, d. 1945

The daughter of a French mother and an English father, Szabo grew up in South London. As a teenager, she gained the reputation of being a crack shot in the neighborhood shooting galleries, showing early signs of the unusual and adventurous temperament that was to lead her into the secret world of spies. Her precocious skill with a gun was also to prove invaluable in her underground work when she saved the life of a colleague, though at the cost of her own freedom and, eventually, her life.

After the outbreak of war, she married a young Free French officer, Etienne Szabo, and had a baby girl. When her husband was posted to the Middle East, she joined the
Auxiliary Territorial Service
(ATS, Chapter 6), serving in a
mixed antiaircraft battery
(see Chapter 7) defending the key British port of Liverpool. Later, as a member of the
First Aid Nursing Yeomanry
(FANY, see Chapter 6), she joined the Special Operations Executive's F Section.

Szabo was now a widow—her husband had been killed in the autumn of 1942—left alone to care for her small daughter. A note in her file, written by a FANY officer, read, “This girl has a young baby. I wonder if she fully realises what she is doing.”

In 1943, Szabo was prevented from undertaking her first mission by an ankle injury sustained in parachute training. She had to wait until April 1944, when she was flown to France in a Westland Lysander light aircraft during the buildup to D-Day. Her cover story was that she was Corinne Reine Le Roy (her mother's maiden name). Her primary mission was to establish whether one of SOE's subsidiary networks had been penetrated. Szabo returned to England three weeks later, having successfully ascertained that the operational usefulness of the circuit was at an end.

On June 6, 1944, Szabo was parachuted into France accompanied by Philippe Liewer, who was tasked with the revival of his Salesman network in the area of Limoges. On June 8, while with a Maquis colleague, she was captured by an advance party of the Second SS Panzer Division Das Reich near the village of Oradour-sur-Glane. Szabo had covered the escape of her colleague with a Sten gun, holding off some four hundred SS troops before her ammunition ran out and her suspect ankle gave way. Two days later, in a reprisal raid against the Resistance, one of Das Reich's panzergrenadier battalions surrounded Oradour, herded the entire population—men, women, and children—into the church and neighboring buildings, and set them alight. Those attempting to escape were shot. Some 642 people perished in this atrocity.

After her capture, Szabo was initially held in the Fresnes prison, near Paris, and later in the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück. On January 26, 1945, she was executed there alongside two fellow SOE agents, Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch.

Reference:
The Life That I Have,
Susan Ottoway, 2003. Szabo was played in the 1958 British film
Carve Her Name with Pride
by Virgina McKenna.

VERTEFEUILLE, JEANNE

CIA Counterintelligence Officer, b. ca. 1930

The Central Intelligence Agency, which was founded in 1947, grew out of the wartime
Office of Strategic Services
(OSS, see Chapter 11). Its first director was an old OSS hand, Allen Dulles. The agency's principal function was to obtain and analyze information about foreign governments and to disseminate this material into all branches of US government. The agency's methods and remit, including those for the mounting of clandestine operations, were in general terms roughly equivalent to those of the similar British secret agency, MI6.

By the mid-1990s, 41 percent of the agency's employees were female. One of them was Jeanne Vertefeuille, who had joined the agency in 1954, working in Africa and Europe before finding a niche in counterintelligence as head of the CIA's Soviet Research Section. In the mid-1980s she became the station chief in Libreville, the capital of Gabon. At the same time Aldrich Ames was assigned to Vertefeuille's former office in counterintelligence at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

In June 1985, Ames began to pass large amounts of secret material to Sergei Chuvakhin, first secretary in the Soviet embassy in Washington. Over the course of the following nine years, Chuvakhin handed over some three million dollars to Ames. In return Ames betrayed dozens of agents recruited by the CIA, and revealed up to one hundred of the agency's clandestine operations. One of the men betrayed by Ames was Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, deputy head of the KGB at the Soviet embassy in London (see
Eliza Manningham-Buller
, Chapter 11), whom the British managed to extract from the Soviet Union.

In 1986 the CIA became aware that something was gravely amiss when twenty agents in the Soviet Union disappeared off their radar (at least ten were later executed). Back from her African tour, Vertefeuille was assigned to a small team, consisting of two women and two retired male CIA officers, which was tasked with closing the breach in security.

Worryingly for Vertefeuille, the CIA appeared most reluctant to countenance the possibility that the culprit came from within the agency. The agency's willful blindness to the threat stemmed in large part from the savaging it had received over the Iran-contra scandal that had broken in 1987, and the chaos caused in the 1970s by the brilliant but paranoid CIA employee James Jesus Angleton, who had become convinced that the organization had been penetrated at every level by Soviet double agents. A significant number of careers had been wrecked by Angleton's obsession.

One of the women on Vertefeuille's team, Sandy Grimes, had known Ames, with whom she had carpooled when they both lived in Reston, Virginia. At the time she had found him slobbish and disagreeable. Now he was elegantly clothed and coiffed and drove to work in a white Jaguar from his expensive home in Arlington. Ames attributed the change in his fortunes to money left to his second wife, the Colombian-born Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy, whom he had met while working in Mexico City. More detective work indicated that the “legacy” story could not be true.

The net began to close around Ames when Vertefeuille pressed the CIA to examine Ames's bank accounts and credit card records. The trawl revealed that Ames had systematically banked several hundred thousand dollars. Grimes then succeeded in correlating the dates of the deposits with regular lunches Ames had enjoyed with Chuvakhin, ostensibly to recruit him to the CIA.

The FBI was called in. The Ameses' house was bugged, their phone calls were monitored, and files were downloaded from Ames's computer. In February 1994 Ames was arrested by the FBI, on the day before he was scheduled to visit Moscow on agency business and, in all probability, defect.

At the meetings in which Ames was debriefed by the FBI, Vertefeuille represented the CIA. There she learned that Soviet intelligence had gotten cold feet in 1985–86, after they had arrested the agents betrayed by Ames. They were concerned that the CIA would draw the obvious conclusion that a mole was in their midst, and suggested to Ames that he give them the name of another CIA officer whom they could implicate. Ames obliged. As his chosen fall guy, Vertefeuille was only mildly surprised to hear that Ames had nominated none other than herself.

At his trial Ames received a life sentence; his wife received five years. He subsequently confessed that the reasons for his treachery were “personal, banal and amounted really to a kind of greed and folly.”

Reference: Mark Riebling,
Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and the CIA,
1994. Aldrich Ames was the subject of a 1998 TV movie,
Aldrich Ames: The Traitor Within.
Timothy Hutton starred in the title role, and Jeanne Vertefeuille was played by Joan Plowright. In the credits Ames is listed as a “technical adviser.” He also appears as a character in
Icon,
a 1997 novel by Frederick Forsyth.

WERNER, RUTH

“Sonya,” German Communist Spy, 1907–2000

Dubbed “the most successful female spy in history” and code-named “Sonya,” Ruth Werner always denied that she was a spy. Until the end of her long life she insisted that she was no more than “a member of the Red Army, in the reconnaissance service.”

She was born Ursula Ruth Kuczynski in Berlin, the daughter of Polish Jews who were supporters of the German Communist Party, and joined the Communist Youth League when she was seventeen. In 1929 she married her first husband, Rolf Hamburger, an architect and Soviet agent, and went with him to Shanghai, where he had taken a job with the British-administered municipal council.

In China, she was shocked by the extremes of wealth and poverty and was soon moving in revolutionary and Communist circles. She met the American journalist and triple agent Agnes Smedley and her lover and collaborator, the German journalist and Soviet spy Richard Sorge, who ran a network of agents in Japan and was privy to many international secrets. Sorge persuaded Werner to work for the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) and gave her the code name “Sonya.” She later described this as “one of the most decisive events of my life.”

At Sorge's suggestion, Sonya traveled to Moscow, where she underwent training in espionage and radio communications at the GRU's headquarters. She traveled widely as a GRU agent before returning to China, where she worked with revolutionary forces fighting the Japanese on the Manchurian border. In 1937 Sonya returned to Moscow for promotion to the rank of GRU major, advanced training, and the award of the Order of the Red Banner, the highest honor then available to a non-Soviet citizen.

In 1938 Sonya settled her children in England, where her father and brother Jürgen had been living since the mid-1930s, and was then ordered by the GRU to Switzerland. In the late 1930s and wartime years the neutral state was a happy hunting ground for espionage networks, among them the Soviet-controlled Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) and the so-called Lucy network, also controlled by Moscow, which in the war years was used by British intelligence to channel discreetly laundered information about German military intentions to the Soviet Union.

In Switzerland, Sonya met Allan Foote, a British member of the Lucy network, who in turn introduced her to her second husband, Len Beurton, an English veteran of the International Brigade who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. The GRU had ordered Sonya to divorce Rolf to marry Beurton, a move that conferred a British passport. She married Beurton in February 1940 and received a British passport in May.

In England, Sonya and her family moved into a large house in the village of Great Rollright, near Oxford. From 1941, this provided her with an ideal location for working as a courier with the German émigré scientist and atom spy Klaus Fuchs, a naturalized Briton, who was then employed at the atomic research establishment at Harwell. Sonya had been put in touch with the scientist by her brother Jürgen, who had known Fuchs in his Communist past. Jürgen was to finish the war as an officer with the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. In the war years, Jürgen's antifascist credentials and Communist sympathies proved no bar to working for US intelligence, indeed would have been considered an advantage.