Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (11 page)

Sinking into a chair under a picture of the queen mother, Nancy explained: “You see, Vera was very ambitious. It was she who recruited me for F Section very early on, before Buck was even head.” People were perching on green leather stools while a barman squirted spirits from upturned bottles.

“How did she recruit you?” I asked.

“In the ladies' in Norgeby House.”

“To do what?”

“To take over her job as secretary to BP [Major R. A. Bourne-Paterson].”

“Why?”

“So she could move on, I suppose.” Vera had never let anyone know that she had started out at F Section as secretary to BP.

Before joining F Section, Nancy was with the Air Liaison section on the first floor. “There was no mixing between sections,” said Nancy, “but of course we powdered noses together in the ladies' and picked up the gossip.” The women's cloakroom was on the half landing, and it was here that Vera came to take an interest in Nancy. Even at this time Nancy was aware of Vera's reputation and was flattered that she should pay attention to her, although Nancy too had a reputation—as an auburn beauty with a mind of her own. In those days, as Nancy Fraser-Campbell, she also had an impeccable upper-crust name and a Scottish pedigree to match.

Nancy didn't like working for BP. A City accountant before the war,
he was “a snide man,” said Nancy, laughing as she described how he used to swing back on his War Office wooden chair while dictating. “One day he lost his balance, fell in a heap to the floor, rolled under his desk, climbed back on to his chair, and never for a moment stopped talking.”

At the time that Vera was trying to secure Nancy a job as BP's new secretary, F Section was deeply divided over who should be its new head, after a recruit from Courtaulds was sacked for getting nothing done. Buckmaster was eager for the job, and Vera backed him early on. It was when Buckmaster took over as F, towards the end of 1941, that Nancy took Vera's job and Vera was given officer status by Buckmaster, no doubt partly as a reward for her loyalty.

Nancy and Vera always remained close friends. “I know she admired me, and it touched me a great deal. I was quite useful to her, I know that. And she used to imitate me. She used to try to dress like me. I was even invited to meet her mother and to have dinner at their flat. It had a rather eastern European feel. It was dark, with rugs on the wall.”

Given that Vera was “always right,” what view did Nancy think she would have taken about the confused radio messages? I asked again.

Sometimes, she told me, she would see Vera enter “Buck's” office and the door did not always fully close behind her. Through the crack she would hear them talking, in quite insistent, though never heated, terms.

Might she have told him she thought an agent had been captured?

“She would not have said anything as direct as that,” said Nancy. “But she might have simply said something like ‘Perhaps we should look again at a message' or ‘Perhaps we should reconsider' or something to that effect. She would have taken a much more practical view than Buck, who was somewhat up in the clouds.”

“And what would Buckmaster have done?”

“He would have shrugged, gone silent, and turned to look out of the window.”

It was not until August 7 that Buckmaster finally accepted that Gilbert Norman was caught or, as he put it, “Butcher is a goner,” but his realisation did not come in time to save Jack Agazarian.

Amid the continuing confusion of mid-July 1943, Nicholas Boding-ton, then Buckmaster's deputy, was pressing to go out to Paris in person to investigate the collapse of Prosper. Sending such a senior London staff officer to the field was highly controversial; staff officers knew so much that it could be catastrophic if they were caught. But Bodington, a former Reuters man in Paris, had always been a law unto himself. At the outbreak of war he had applied for “anti fifth column work” with MI6 but was rejected as unsuitable and taken on by SOE instead. A loner, considered by colleagues to have a high opinion of himself, Bodington was unpopular with everyone except Buckmaster, who admired him as a hustler who could get things done.

So with Buckmaster's authority, Bodington planned to fly to France, first contacting Norman by radio, asking for a rendezvous in Paris with Archambaud and giving the BBC message that would be broadcast when he arrived: “N'oubliez pas de renvoyer I'ascenseur” (Don't forget to send the lift back). Norman's message came back, giving an address for the meeting at rue de Rome.

Bodington then insisted on taking his own wireless man with him for the trip, and he chose Jack Agazarian, even though Agazarian was just back from the field on leave.

On the night of July 22 Bodington and Agazarian flew out and were received by Déricourt. Just over a week later a message reached London that Agazarian was captured. Agazarian, not Bodington, had gone to the prearranged meeting with Norman, and the Gestapo were waiting.

When Bodington returned to London, his report was anxiously awaited in Baker Street. “The entire Prosper organisation is destroyed,” it said. “No element of it should be touched.” Arms dumps had been seized, and arrests were still ongoing. “Prosper should be considered dead.” Referring to the new Archdeacon circuit, which was to have been set up by the Canadians Pickersgill and Macalister in the Ardennes, Bodington wrote: “No one has the slightest knowledge of the Ardennes group, which must be considered lost.”

Bodington also told HQ on his return of other “alarming” stories he had heard in Paris, passed on to him by one of F Section's most experienced
agents, Henri Frager, who ran the important Donkeyman circuit in northwestern France. Frager claimed to have been told that the Gestapo knew of Bodington's presence in Paris but had not arrested him because they wanted him to “run for a while.” Frager's story was a strange and complicated one, as it had come direct from a German who introduced himself to him only as Colonel Heinrich. Frager claimed to have met the German by chance at the Monte Carlo café in Paris. Heinrich worked for the Abwehr, the German armed forces intelligence, which loathed the Gestapo. For reasons of his own—possibly jealousy of his Gestapo rivals—he passed on to the British agent what he had heard about the Gestapo's “nationwide drive.” He also warned Frager that “I'homme qui fait le pick-up”—the head of the British Lysander operations, who was obviously Henri Déricourt—had been “infiltrated.”

These allegations were “obviously not true,” commented Bodington, who then mentioned another claim Frager had made. Frager had also alleged that his reports back to London, sent in SOE mailbags, were being copied before they left France and given to the Gestapo. He appeared to have some evidence for this and accused Déricourt of somehow passing the reports to the Germans. Nevertheless, Bodington concluded that these allegations also were “obviously untrue.”

Bodington's report on the lost circuits evidently painted an unsettling picture for Baker Street, but Buckmaster saw no reason to take further action over the reports on Déricourt, which he dismissed.

One action Buckmaster had taken, however, even before he had read Bodington's report, was to recall several agents who might have been contaminated by the Prosper debacle. Some were told to return by the August moon and others to escape across the Pyrenees. But one agent who was not ordered back at this time of acute danger was Nora Inayat Khan. Probably the most contaminated agent of all, she was nevertheless now considered F Section's most important remaining radio link between Paris and London. Nora had become overnight one of Buckmaster s foremost agents in France.

Vera, watching in the signals room, could tell that Nora was now operating under the greatest stress. Her communication had become erratic
and often did not occur at her regular sched time. She appeared to be constantly on the move, and Home Station had been instructed to set up an emergency listening watch for her each day at 1500 hours.

Yet Buckmaster knew that if F Section was to have any chance of recovering from the disaster, Nora's continued presence in Paris was vital. And on August 15, as other agents were heading back, Buckmaster instructed signals staff: “If Nurse does not take the message no. 6 on her QRX [schedule] at 17.30 today will you please ensure that it is sent on the first possible occasion as it is extremely urgent. I particularly want to get it to her before 1500 hours tomorrow 16 August.”

Buckmaster's “message no. 6” was an instruction to Nora to meet up with Frank Pickersgill and John Macalister, who were working to form the Archdeacon circuit in the Ardennes. Contrary to what Bodington concluded in his report, Buckmaster did not believe the Ardennes circuit was “lost.” He saw the meeting between Nora and the two Canadians, which was to take place in Paris at the Café Colisée in the Champs-Elysées, as a first move to reconstitute the Prosper circuit. Reports later reached London that the meeting was successful. Nora passed on useful contacts to Pickersgill and Macalister, and further meetings were arranged.

When mail from Nora arrived with the August and September moons, Baker Street had cause to be cheered by her high morale—as well as unnerved by her glaring lack of security. In one long letter in her own girlish, looped writing, she requested a series of new scheds and crystals, setting out precisely that they were to be en clair and thereby breaking the security rule that required all sensitive information to be encoded. She wrote: “From Madeleine—Ops—Please arrange everyday scheds also using 3407—if sched is missed possible recontact at 1800 GMT same day—Please send another 3408 crystal.” The letter also asked: “Someday, if possible please send white mac FANY style. Thanks a lot. It's grand working with you. The best moments I have had yet.”

Also with the mail came a letter from Nora to her mother and one to Vera:

Dear Miss Atkins, (excuse pencil) your bird has brought me luck. I remember you so often. You cheered me up so sweetly before I left—lots of things have happened and I haven't been able to settle down properly. Still my contacts have started to be regular and I am awfully happy. The news is marvellous and I hope we shall soon be celebrating. In fact, I owe you a date. Lots of love, Yours Nora.

The “marvellous” news was the Allied invasion of Sicily and the fall of Mussolini.

3.
Thanks from the Gestapo

T
here was a large empty hangar. The planes were out over on the tarmac. It was night, and we were lit up only by the moonlight.” Yvonne Baseden was describing flying off to France from Tempsford airbase, near Cambridge, in March 1944. Just twenty-one, she was one of the youngest SOE women to be dropped by parachute. As we spoke in her flat in Putney, a purple balloon bobbing above her said, “Happy Eightieth Birthday.” On the wall was a photograph of a female silhouette descending by parachute against a night sky.

“Who was in the hangar?” I asked Yvonne.

“When I think back, I can see only the two of us: Vera and me. I can see Vera sitting at the desk and I was standing in front. I was in my jumping suit. I can just picture her in the gloom. I think she was smoking. Checking things off on the list. She wasn't saying anything exactly, but one was conscious that if there was anything one wanted to ask or say, she was there. I remember being told how much money to put in my jumping suit so I didn't have anything to carry in my hands—things like that. And I had a feeling that she was thinking; that she wanted to say something. It was as if she didn't want to miss a single thing. You felt she was involved.

“She was the link, you see. It was Vera we would turn to in those last few weeks. She was the last link, you might say. Because we had cut off
from our own families—I mean, automatically, during our training, we had cut off from the outer world.

“And one was physically extremely fit, and all one could think of was the mission. Because you had only just heard about your mission. In a sense, you see, your life had been taken apart and rebuilt.”

She paused. “And Vera was in control of things. As a mother might be, I suppose. But I wouldn't have called her exactly motherly. She had a lot of responsibilities. And she was already in the picture as to who your mother was and who your father was. I knew she would remain in contact with my parents in a sort of distant way.”

“In the hangar, to what extent do you think Vera was feeling the stress?”

“I am sure she was, quite a lot. I think she was trying to put us at ease by looking herself at ease, as if it was something which a lot of people were doing and that it was nothing out of the ordinary. I think she was trying to shoulder the stress that everyone might be feeling. She knew that she had to keep everything moving along, under control. And for us, you see, she was the remaining link as we walked out too. And well, for me as well, she was the first person I saw when I came back.”

Yvonne talked for some time longer, each word carefully chosen from memories that were deeply scarred. At the end her eyes welled up with tears.