Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (14 page)

The implications for Buckmaster were unthinkable. Just as he was about to realise Colonel Gubbins's command by getting a maximum number of agents into the field ahead of D-Day, he was being told by his two most senior lieutenants that several of his most valued circuits had been penetrated.

It was not until the following month that Buckmaster finally accepted
some of the evidence of penetration. Even then, in a memorandum on the matter to his superior officer, he pleaded that since the collapse of Prosper “there had been no reason to believe that Nurse was captured.” He failed to mention the many earlier warnings. And against the typed letters of her call sign Nurse, Buckmaster wrote carefully, in his own handwriting, Nora's official name, “Princess Inayat Khan.”

Buckmaster still rejected Morel's conclusion that Archdeacon was also blown. Morel, fearing that Pickersgill and Macalister's subcircuits had contact with other groups dangerously close to areas where the landings might take place, was determined to convince Buckmaster before it was too late. The fear was that Germans, posing as SOE agents and fully armed by SOE, might now be taking up positions near the landing beaches in the guise of French resistance fighters. By now senior figures in MI5 knew of these dangers and were urgently voicing precisely these concerns.

Morel's recourse was to test Archdeacon's integrity conclusively by speaking with Pickersgill in person by means of an “S phone,” a directional microwave transceiver that allowed air-to-ground communication. On May 8 the contact was arranged, and flying overhead at an agreed location, he began to ask Pickersgill questions. The person on the ground spoke English with a heavy guttural accent, Morel reported. It was not Pickersgill. Buckmaster, however, was still not convinced, maintaining that the voice must have been distorted by “atmospheric conditions,” and he ordered that drops to Pickersgill and Macalister should continue even now.

On the evening of June 5, 1944, as the first vessels of the D-Day invasion fleet were almost in sight of the French shore, hundreds of SOE action messages were broadcast to circuits, and within hours messages came back to the signals room in Baker Street from wireless operators reporting that sabotage operations had begun. Overnight Tony Brooks, organiser of the Pimento circuit, had seen to it that all railway lines between Toulouse and Montauban in the southwest were cut. Francis Cammaerts of the Jockey circuit had been equally efficient in the Marseilles area.

Pearl Witherington, who had taken over from her organiser, Maurice Southgate (Hector), after his capture by the Gestapo, had taken charge of a thousand resistance fighters who were cutting railway lines throughout the Indre region in west-central France.

On June 6, amid the chaotic surge of messages about resistance activity now pouring in from the field, came a stream of peculiar messages from the agents identified by Gerry Morel as definitely captured. On that day Marcel Rousset's call sign came up on the board. The message tapped off by the teleprinter was soon in the hands of Buckmaster and Vera. “Many thanks large deliveries arms and ammunition have greatly appreciated good tips concerning intentions and plans.” The sender signed off “Geheime Staatspolizei”—the Gestapo.

Soon afterwards the call sign for Pickersgill's radio operator, Macalis-ter, came up. This message thanked London for the stores that had recently been delivered, stating that unfortunately “certain of the agents had had to be shot” but that others had proved more willing to do what the Germans asked them to do. Again the signature was that of the Gestapo.

Buckmaster, apparently disoriented by the Gestapo's macabre little game, spent some time composing jovial responses, such as: “Sorry to see your patience is exhausted and your nerves not so good as ours.”

Vera, however, was impatient to be at the airfields where the next dispatch of SOE agents was about to begin, along with a wave of SAS men now being parachuted behind the lines as the invasion got under way. On June 7 she said goodbye to Violette Szabo, who was being parachuted into France for a second time to play her part in keeping advancing German Panzer divisions from reaching the Normandy beaches.

“Did Vera ever question whether it was right to send out Violette—a woman with a baby?” I asked Nancy Roberts when I met her again.

“I think Vera admired strong women,” she said. “She was not a feminist in the modern way, but she always stood up for women and believed in their abilities. I saw her take the younger girls into her office and sit down with them as they wrote letters to their parents, which she would
post for them when they had gone. I think it made it easier for some to leave, knowing that their families would get their very own handwritten letters.”

“What would they write?”

“Oh, just something vague and general: ‘All is well. Keeping busy' Vera was good at thinking of things like that.”

“Which of the agents was she closest to?”

“She certainly admired Nora tremendously. Everyone loved Nora. And there was no doubt that Violette held a fascination for Vera. All of them did, you know. They were intriguing. I thought so too. We all did.”

What did she mean by intriguing?

“Just that they were fascinating creatures. To be prepared to do what it was they went to do.”

Nancy considered a moment and then revealed: “I have never said this before, but I think that Vera was sometimes jealous of me. I think she was jealous of me over Violette. Vera guarded the women agents very closely. And she was jealous that it was me who took Violette to the field and not her. Vera was only able to come down later to take over, after the flight had been delayed.”

How had it come about that Vera didn't go with Violette at first? I asked.

“It was very close to D-Day, and Vera had many responsibilities. I think she just was elsewhere. So I was asked to drive up to Tempsford with Violette.” Nancy described how they arrived at Hasell's Hall, the country house where the departing agents were attended to by FANY women. Violette had to wait for three days as the first two attempts to fly her out were aborted because of poor weather, but she remained calm throughout. “The first two attempts I had to take her out and get her ready in the hangar and make sure she had everything and say goodbye, and then it didn't happen. And then we just had to wait. I will never forget it. Ever. Where we were, it was beautifully sunny and there was Violette sitting on the lawn with this young Polish man who was going too. They were laughing and chatting, and Violette was playing a gramophone record over and over and over again. I can still hear it: ‘I want to buy a paper doll I can call my own.'

“I can see her now. She was wearing a pretty summery dress with blue and white flowers and shoes she said she had bought in Paris, and she had a rose in her hair. I can still hear that damn song going round and round in my head.”

“Did she talk about what she was going to do?”

“No, not at all. She just chatted to that Polish boy about film stars. I was overawed by it more than anything. I was so young, and here was this other young woman and a mother going to do this. Why was this young woman who was so attractive going to do this? She had so many advantages. I was intrigued by what made them brave enough to do it, when I knew I never could.

“And she slept at night like a baby,” said Nancy, who explained that escorting officers even shared a room with departing agents, should they suddenly need support or help of any sort during their last night. I slept in the bed next to her. But she never wanted anything. She slept through the night without stirring.”

On the third day Vera appeared to take over, said Nancy, and so it was Vera who spent the last night and day with Violette, while Nancy was sent back to London. “Vera always wanted to do it all herself. I knew that. To be there when they left was the most exhilarating thing. This was what we were all there for after all—to send these brave people off— particularly with a girl like Violette.”

“Why?”

“Well, she was really very pretty. She was an entrancing creature, to men and women alike. Everyone had wanted to see Violette off; she had bewitched the whole of Baker Street.”

“Why do you say that Vera was jealous of you over this?”

“I just know she was. Because of the way she never spoke about it. Because of the way she behaved. She never mentioned that anyone had been with Violette during those last days except her.”

Nancy appeared uncomfortable.

“And because Violette was very attractive,” she added.

“Are you saying that Vera was attracted to Violette?”

Nancy considered.

“Was Vera attracted to you, Nancy?”

It was evidently a question she had considered before.

“I never felt that Vera was attracted to me in that way. She never made a pass at me in that way, but in those days nobody would. But I do know that she admired me greatly. She had a very manly brain. I don't know if that made her in any way bisexual. I think, like me, she was just intrigued by these young women. She was always very protective of them. You see, she didn't want anyone else to know about the agents. She saw the care of them as her personal role. And that was why she saw it as her personal role to go and look for them later. And then they tried to stop her.”

“Who tried to stop her? Was it Buckmaster?”

“No, it was higher up they tried to stop her.”

“Why?”

“Because she was a woman.”

“You mean, because they thought she wasn't capable as a woman?”

“Because they didn't think she had the authority to do such a thing. And because she was doing these things they knew they ought to be doing but had not thought of doing themselves. They just thought if they waited the agents would all turn up.”

When I asked if Buckmaster would have gone to trace the missing, Nancy said he did not have the strength, and she paused again, thinking back. “I was in the office when the news of Oradour-sur-Glane came in,” she said. On June 10, 1944, just after D-Day, in the tiny French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, SS troops murdered 642 people, including 190 schoolchildren. The attack was in reprisal for resistance attacks on German troops moving towards the Normandy beachhead.

“Maurice read the telegram, and he just couldn't believe it. I remember he was very shocked. It was a Sunday morning, and only he and I were in the office. He was wandering around, very angry. He was a very emotional person, in a way that Vera was not. He could not believe the Germans would do anything so awful as that.”

4.
Traces

I
n mid-September 1944 Vera was at her desk in Baker Street scrutinising documents, underlining a word from time to time with a black fountain pen or correcting a spelling. The building was almost deserted. The Ops room was still, and only the occasional clatter of a teleprinter could be heard in the signals room. At her side Vera had a row of flipflop card indexes, an inventory of names, addresses, and aliases of every F Section agent, each with a small photograph attached. Almost all the information here was already in her head, but even so she liked to keep the cards close to her. If she wanted to confirm a detail of an agent, she could run a fingernail along the top, and a mass of little faces would appear, flipping over on the roller.

Vera was scanning the documents for names of missing agents. And if she made a note on a card, it meant she had found another “trace.” Occasionally a messenger would appear and pass to Vera another file from a trolley. Nobody else from F Section was here. Buckmaster was in France starting his victory tour of F Section circuits, code-named the Judex Mission, and with him was Bourne-Paterson. In early 1944 Bodington had been dispatched to lecture Allied forces on conditions in France and had not been seen since. Gerry Morel had been recruited to work with a new intelligence body that was planning for the liberation of Germany.

Vera, however, had chosen to stay—or rather, she had insisted most
forcefully on staying—on in Baker Street. To move office or accept a different assignment would be to desert the men and woman pictured on these cards. It was three months since the Normandy landings, yet of the four hundred F Section agents sent to the field, more than a hundred were still missing, sixteen of them women. Her responsibility, as she saw it, was to remain in place until every one of them was accounted for.

In the turmoil after D-Day there had been little time to consider where everybody was, who was captured, and who was not. Gradually snippets of news began to come though, perhaps from those who had escaped or from Allied troops, who were by then pushing through the areas where SOE's circuits were active.

In mid-June Violette Szabo—alias Corinne Le Roy, Seamstress, or Vicky Tailor—was reported to have been arrested on June 9, 10, or 11 and taken to the German part of Limoges. What had happened to Violette next, nobody knew; she had been moved to a “destination unknown.” Buckmaster wrote on her casualty report that she had fought off elements of an SS Panzer Division using a Sten gun before collapsing exhausted. A report had also arrived soon after D-Day giving news of Yvonne Baseden, stating that she was captured and last seen in prison in Dijon. She and her organiser had been cornered in a barn stacked high with cheeses. Yvonne's organiser had taken his suicide pill, and others had been arrested. The source of the news was a member of her circuit who had been able to avoid detection and escape to Switzerland. Another woman agent, Muriel Byck, died of meningitis after just six weeks of fearless work in the field.