Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (17 page)

Vera was therefore pulling every string she could to secure a commission, in order to bolster her authority to continue her search. As she also pointed out to those she lobbied, her lack of status was already badly hampering her ability to operate. Early in January she had been on an abortive trip to France. On the invitation of the French Sécurité Mili-taire, which was investigating treachery against members of the resistance, she travelled with another SOE officer to discuss French investigations into penetration of SOE circuits. It was a gruelling trip that involved taking another gunboat—this time across a rough winter sea—followed by several hours in the back of an army lorry to reach Paris. Vera had hoped to hear what the French were finding out, particularly about the Prosper case and about Henri Déricourt. She was disappointed. No sooner had she and her colleague arrived than the French police made it clear that they had nothing to say to the British after all. General de Gaulle himself had apparently heard of their arrival and declared the SOE personnel “persona non grata in France.” Vera returned home angered by the snub but determined that next time she went to Paris she would go with more authority.

Her main frustrations, though, were much closer to home. Even as the first POW and concentration camps were being liberated in the east by Russian forces, one of Vera's own SOE colleagues was trying to put a stop to her search. In a lengthy memorandum Vera had argued that, given the speed of the Allied advance, it was now essential that the names of missing agents be distributed widely. She suggested that the names be supplied to other branches of the military, to the International Committee of the Red Cross, to the Russians and other Allies, and to any forces or bodies likely to be crossing German frontiers or contacting prisoners held in camps. On sight of Vera's memo, John Senter, head of SOE's security directorate, commissioned as a commander in the Royal Navy Voluteer Reserve, immediately pulled rank, saying her search should, in effect, be stopped.

“Top Secret and Confidential. Strictly Addressee only,” wrote Senter in a memorandum on Vera's proposals. “I think the set-up suggested in Vera Atkins's note, and the annotations, is frankly unworkable,” he stated, adding that she should confine herself to “welfare work.”

A barrister, noted for his gleaming white hair, Senter had begun his working life as legal adviser to the Scottish Boot and Shoe Company and was a stickler for the rules. He had always disliked Vera—or “Rosenberg,” as he called her—precisely because she broke his rules.

Senter wanted total control of investigations into missing SOE agents. As security director, his interest in their personal fate was slight: rather, he wanted to know who had survived in order to be first to interrogate them and to find out how the Germans had penetrated so many circuits. Given the sensitivity of the investigation, in which both MI6 and signals intelligence would take an interest, only personnel with the highest security clearance could be involved. Vera had no such special clearance and no need to know.

Not only was Senter angered by Vera's attempt to take over his interrogations, he was also opposed on principle to her methods of tracing the missing. To circulate names of agents, he argued, broke all the rules of a secret service by alerting others—possibly the enemy—to the fact that secret missions had taken place. Vera, however, argued that rules had been broken to get agents out there, particularly in the case of the women. Now rules had to be broken to get them back.

The anomalous status of the female secret agents was becoming Vera's prime concern. It was not clear, for example, which department of government would maintain contact with them or their dependents after the war, or who would “carry” them if disability benefits were ever necessary or in the case of future welfare payments. Now Vera was also having to grapple with how the women's limbo status could affect their very chances of survival.

Male agents either carried commissions or honorary commissions in the regular services, so they could correctly tell their captors they were officers, albeit not in uniform. This gave them at least a slim chance of claiming prisoner-of-war status, which was automatically denied to civilians or irregular combatants.

But even this feeble hope of decent treatment did not apply to the women who were commissioned in the voluntary FANY corps, a civilian organisation. Those women who had been in the WAAF before joining SOE, or who more recently had been accepted as honorary WAAFs,
carried some possible claim to treatment as POWs, but those who were mere “cap badge” FANYs were the most vulnerable secret agents of all.

Vera's anxiety, however, also had a more immediate cause. The reality was, whatever Mrs. Rowden and other next of kin had been told, that SOE agents were, by any legal definition, spies. Once identified as such, they were liable to be shot rather than treated as POWs.

The only way agents were likely to survive German captivity would be by disguising their true role in some way, perhaps by claiming to be ordinary French resistance members, or by escaping, or by sheer luck. The question was: how could those agents who survived be identified in the chaotic aftermath? By early 1945 no name—neither male nor female—of any missing SOE agent had been passed to a single organisation outside Baker Street. No SOE name, real or alias, had been placed on any military casualty list or any missing lists designated “secret” or otherwise. The idea, in particular, that women's names should be circulated was anathema to the authorities, as this would be to admit that women had been deployed. SOE names had certainly not been passed to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the British Red Cross, or the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. No organisation that might be responsible for looking for the missing, whether it was liberating camps or repatriating prisoners, had a single SOE name on its lists.

Under international law the Germans had a duty to notify the Red Cross if any names on its missing lists were found in their hands—dead or alive. But as no SOE name had been posted, none would be notified, even if they had managed to get into a POW camp.

If, after liberation, Allied forces found British agents alive among the mass of displaced people who would by then be flooding across Europe, they would have every reason not to believe their stories, as they would not be on their lists. And the agents would not be entitled to repatriation or welfare of any kind. Once again the FANYs would have the greatest difficulty of all in convincing British or Allied military of their bona fides. Despite this, Senter was still refusing publication of their names because “security” might be jeopardised.

By early February 1945 Vera's case for publishing names became daily more urgent. Russian forces were advancing fast, and vast numbers
of prisoners who had been held in eastern camps were being marched west by the Germans before the Russians' arrival. Meanwhile Allied prisoners in camps liberated by the Russians, fearful of heading west into German lines, were reportedly making their way east and turning up in places such as Lublin in liberated Poland and Odessa on the Black Sea. Vera hoped her people might be among them. The fortress of Ravitsch, near Breslau, was liberated by the Russians in mid-January. Vera knew that several SOE agents were prisoners there, among them France An-telme and Gilbert Norman.

The Ravitsch prisoners might even now be making their way home. “Given the Russian advance… special attention should be given to the problem of ensuring that our prisoners shall be identified and released as quickly as possible following the liberation of their area,” she wrote, requesting that the British embassy in Moscow and British diplomats in Lublin and at a military mission in Odessa be given the agents' names.

In February the entire government bureaucracy seemed paralysed by the enormity of the POW catastrophe now unfolding in mainland Europe. Perhaps as many as two hundred thousand British and Commonwealth prisoners were among more than two million Allied nationals (including Russians) now believed to be held in more than two hundred German POW camps, and rumours were rife that all might perish on Hitler's orders.

In these circumstances nobody had time to pay attention to the fate of a few missing secret agents. But Vera was asserting, more forcefully than ever, that they should be given special attention. The Red Cross was pushing hard for access to concentration camps and trying to negotiate prisoner exchanges. Vera argued that it should keep “a special look out” for SOE prisoners and should give them priority on release and repatriation, but it must be given lists of names. “This is not an unreasonable request given the special hardships they have undergone and the special risks they have taken in preparing for an Allied landing,” she wrote.

Then, just as agreement neared on publishing names, the bureaucrats started quibbling over what to call them. “Which of the secret agents' many names—real and false—should be published?” asked one. Buck-master, at last back from his celebratory tour of France, opined at length
on how to classify an F Section casualty, only to conclude that in any event “we have every reason to believe that they will be recovered at the cessation of hostilities.”

By early March, Vera had new cause to worry that her men and women might never be recovered. The French had found an inscription on prison charts kept by the Germans at Fresnes, and it was passed to her. The inscription referred to a man named John Hopper, who had been captured as a spy and imprisoned in Fresnes before being transferred to Germany. “Hopper. John. Cell No. 288,” it said, and in a remarks column were the notes “N+N” and “Ständig gefesselt” (permanently chained). Hopper, it seemed, had been singled out for special treatment. He had been chained, and when Vera asked her sources about the meaning of N+N, she discovered that it referred to a category of prisoner to be dealt with under the Nacht und Nebel order. Issued by the Reich towards the end of 1942, this order ruled that resisters and spies should be categorised “N+N” Nobody—family, fellow resisters, or anybody else— should ever know what became of them. It would be as if they had disappeared in the “night and fog.”

Another inscription had also been found in Fresnes prison: “Frank Pickersgill, Canadian Army Officer 26.6.43.” Pickersgill's little scratches confirmed that he was taken there soon after his arrest. But what Vera so desperately needed was a clue as to where he was now. She knew Pickers-gill had once been in Ravitsch. Perhaps he was marching east.

Even more tantalising were letters from her agent Ange Defendini. The letters had been written by the Corsican while he too was held at Fresnes and were apparently smuggled out to a friend, who had passed them to the French police, but the French could make neither head nor tail of them.

Written in a complex code based on a film of the novel Le Fantôme de
I'
Opéra, the letters had flummoxed everyone except Vera, who succeeded in deciphering them and found they contained a daring plan for escape: “Get for me two small revolvers with ammunition, some cyanide or mercury poison, and four small metal saws.” But the letters contained no clues about where Defendini was eventually taken. The only clue they did contain was a warning about Déricourt. “I have confirmation here
from my mistress that Gilbert is a swine.” The word “mistress” was code for Defendini's Gestapo captors.

By March families of the missing were clamouring for news. The destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers had exacerbated fears that Hitler would take revenge at the eleventh hour by slaughtering all prisoners held in the camps.

Vera invited those relatives who requested meetings to see her in a hotel just off Trafalgar Square. The Victoria Hotel, in Northumberland Avenue, had been requisitioned by the War Office at the outbreak of war. SOE candidates were sometimes interviewed in Room 238, and it was here that Vera now met their next of kin. Sitting at a small wooden table in what was once a single bedroom, she tried to assure the relatives, as she had in letters, that when hostilities were over, there was every reason to hope the missing would be found. But few who came here believed the reassurances of the elegant officer in her brand-new powder-blue uniform. Vera had at last secured her commission. She was now a flight officer in the WAAF; the higher rank of squadron officer had been refused.

“There may have been a basin in the room. I think there was a gas fire. It was a horrible little room,” said Helen Oliver, sister of Lilian Rolfe. Lilian had been landed by Lysander near Bléré in May 1944, and her family had heard almost nothing from the War Office since.

“What did Vera say?” I asked Helen.

“I can't remember. I think she may have told me about how Lilian had been captured—how brave she had been. She could tell me nothing about what had happened to Lilian—that's all I remember. But I already knew Lilian was dead.”

“How?”

“I had had a dream about her,” said Helen, who explained that she and Lilian were mirror twins and often had premonitions about each other. “My crown went one way and Lilian's the other. She played the piano beautifully, and I played the violin. We were very similar. But Lilian was not as strong as me. She nearly died of rheumatic fever before the war. Our mother nursed her back to health.”