Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (3 page)

It was such a distracting sight that I failed to notice the sea, which was visible from the window on the landing. At night, Vera told me, she could see the glow of the Dungeness Lighthouse as it flicked around. As we sat, I noticed that her face was brushed with powder, her lips were touched with colour, and a floral scarf was folded on her shoulders. Vera Atkins was an immaculate composition, disturbed only by clusters of very large diamonds on three rings that flashed each time she plucked a cigarette from a silver cigarette box—which was often.

I have never seen anybody smoke quite like Vera. Her selection of a cigarette was very slow and very deliberate; the neck of the cigarette was handled for quite a few moments, then placed deep in the V of first and second fingers, before it was carefully inserted into the lips, which seemed to descend to take it in. The smoke was never inhaled but was taken into the mouth and then immediately exhaled so that she seemed to be permanently in a cloud of smoke. After a while—when she had made her judgement of me—she ceased to look at me at all and gazed straight in front, or over my head, through the window behind me and over the rooftops of Winchelsea.

I hadn't come to interview Vera about her own life but found myself doing so from the beginning. She didn't tell me much. She never told anybody much. She said before the war she had been living with her mother in Chelsea, when, in February 1941, an “anodyne little letter” had arrived out of the blue asking her for an interview at the War Office. This was how she came to join the London staff of Britain's newest secret service: the Special Operations Executive, or SOE.

SOE was created amid the panic of July 1940, when Hitler's advance through Europe seemed unstoppable. In April the Germans had invaded Denmark and Norway, and by May German troops had surged through the Low Countries and penetrated France, forcing British, French, and Belgian forces to retreat at Dunkirk. It was impossible to say how much time it would now take before Britain and its allies could amass a force with the strength to retake Europe. In the meantime, inspired by Churchill's own enthusiasm for guerrilla warfare, SOE was created to start an immediate fight-back. SOE was to develop a secret war: building up, organising, and arming a resistance army from the peoples of the Nazi-occupied countries.

SOE was opposed from the outset by many in government, who doubted that guerrilla tactics could achieve much against the mighty Nazi machine. Among rival intelligence services, particularly MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, there was rancour and jealousy about the creation of a new secret body, to be staffed by amateurs, over which they, the established professionals, would have no control.

With little support, no time, and only a handful of experienced staff, SOE set about recruiting, looking to the City and international business for its headquarters staff, who then organised SOE into country sections, covering Europe, the Middle East, the Balkans, and Yugoslavia. In turn the headquarters staff looked for agents—anyone who was, first, able to speak the language of the country where they would operate and, second, brave enough to follow Churchill's famous edict to “set Europe ablaze.”

When Vera was called for her interview in February 1941, SOE was still struggling to get properly started. It was nearly a year since the fall of France and nine months since SOE had been set up, yet its attempts to launch a secret war on French soil seemed to have stalled. Not a single British agent had yet been successfully infiltrated into France, from which Britain still seemed entirely cut off. There was not even any reliable information about the size or strength of any indigenous French resistance. General de Gaulle had set up his government-in-exile in London, and his Free French were now also largely isolated from their homeland.

So, in the spring of 1941, the overwhelming priority for SOE was still to get British agents on the ground. Only with trained men and women in place could the potential of a civilian insurgency be assessed, and only once those agents had begun to form workable guerrilla cells could arms and supplies be dropped to the French resistance fighters. Vera would, by the end of the war, be playing a vital role in getting those agents behind the lines, but when she first joined, in April of that year, neither she nor most of her colleagues had much idea of what their role would be or how exactly this secret war was to begin.

When I probed Vera further about why she thought she had been chosen for this clandestine work, she simply said: “One didn't know.” Then she was silent for a minute. Realising I was waiting for more, she added: “Let's leave it at that.”

I tried asking Vera about her family background as I had heard she was of Romanian origin. “This is of no interest,” she replied. “It is something on which I have closed the book. I have closed the book on many things in life.” Then she got up and offered me a drink.

But Vera had “closed the book” on her past with such finality that it only made me more intrigued. The details of her life that were on the record at that time were these: Vera Atkins was born on June 15, 1908, somewhere in Romania. She came to live in England sometime in the 1930s. In April 1941 she joined SOE and was soon appointed intelligence officer for F Section. By the end of the war she had become, in the words of a senior colleague, “really the most powerful personality in SOE.”

Vera never worked in the field but coordinated the preparation of more than four hundred secret agents who were to be dropped into France. She had knowledge of every secret mission, shared in the handling of each agent in the field, and had sole responsibility for the personal affairs of every one of her “friends,” as she called the agents. The majority of these she saw off personally on their missions. She was most intimately associated with the women agents, her “girls.”

When, after the war, more than a hundred of those agents had not returned, Vera launched and carried out almost single-handedly a search to establish what had become of them. On the first “missing” lists were sixteen women.

Across the chaos of bombed-out Germany she followed the agents' trails to the concentration camps and helped track down many of the Germans who had captured and killed them. She gave evidence at Nazi war crimes trials, and the French awarded her the Croix de Guerre in 1948 and the Légion d'Honneur in 1995. The British, by contrast, waited until 1997 to honour Vera Atkins, finally making her a Commander of the British Empire.

As I listened to her, however, I realised just how sparse the known facts about Vera Atkins were. Who was this woman? How could it be that she had reached the age of ninety without anyone knowing more than this about her? I looked around, but the room contained no clues. It seemed unremarkable, quite comfortable but colourless, with a pale-green carpet. At a glance I saw a few recent family photographs and lots of flowers—some in formal vases, some in little pots. The Daily Telegraph, open at the stocks and shares page, lay on a table in front of a very long sofa in faded pink. On the small table by Vera's chair were a magnifying glass, an open letter, a coaster, and an ashtray. But there was not a book to be seen, and only a few bland landscapes on the wall.

Vera returned with drinks, and I tried once more to probe her. She was extremely well spoken; she articulated her sentences so carefully and her accent was so precisely English that it had, paradoxically, a foreign ring. But for all its clarity, her voice was very hard to hear, because she spoke softly and in such deep tones.

I raised the question of SOE's most famous disaster, the collapse of the Prosper circuit, and we discussed the women agents. “What did they have in common?” I asked. She considered, and I wondered which of the women were coming to her mind.

“Bravery. Bravery was what they had in common,” she said. “You might find it in anyone. You just don't know where to look. Their motivations were all different. Many women made good couriers or had worked in coding and had fingers like pianists—they made good radio operators. They might be artists or fashion designers. Why not? They had to be self-reliant, of course. Physical appearance was important. They were all attractive women. It gave them self-confidence.”

“What about Madeleine?” I asked, mentioning the woman wireless operator whose story I had always found most compelling. Noor Inayat Khan, alias Madeleine, had worked with Prosper, the biggest F Section circuit. Noor, who took the English name Nora when she joined SOE, was the secret agent who played the harp and “could not lie.” “Do you believe today that it was right to have sent her?” I asked.

Vera thought for a moment. “There were questions about Nora, about her suitability. But she wanted very much to go.”

She was now twisting a matchbox round and round in her hands, and I strained to catch the words. “I drove with her down to the aerodrome. It was a perfect June day… the smell of the dog roses. Taking the agents to the aerodromes… was very tiring.”

I asked when she had realised that some of the agents were not coming back. Her thoughts seemed to be moving on, but she was hesitant about whether to give voice to them. She turned and looked me straight in the face. Her expression was now quite blank, almost cold. I was quite sure she wanted me to leave. “I'm really very tired, you know.”

After a few moments during which I fully expected her to rise and usher me out of the room, Vera suddenly turned and looked at me again. “I went to find them as a private enterprise. I wanted to know. I always thought ‘missing presumed dead' to be such a terrible verdict.” Time suddenly telescoped to nothing; her voice was raised at least an octave, and it was as if she were no longer peering into her past but setting off for Germany after the end of the war to follow the trail of her agents.

“I remember it was a bitterly cold day when I was collected by Staff Sergeant Fyffe, who drove from Berlin, through the Russian zone, to Bad Oeynhausen in the British zone. When we got there I said: ‘Who is in charge here?' I asked if he would have time to see Squadron Officer Atkins.

“Somerhough was his name. He had the quickest brain I have ever known. I just blew in that afternoon and told him I had arrived from Berlin by car. He received me, and I explained in a few sentences what I wanted to do. I said: ‘I believe you have the camp commandants of Sach-senhausen and Ravensbrück in your custody. I would like to see them.'

“He said: ‘They are tough nuts. One has escaped twice, and the other has not yet been interrogated.'

“I said: ‘I want to see them anyway' Next I had to persuade him to let me work from his HQ. He said there was no room for another officer—especially a woman officer. But I persuaded him. I stayed there until I had traced every agent we had lost.”

With these words Vera finished as suddenly as she had begun, and turned to indicate that now I really must leave. It was as if she had been waiting to see my interest awakened before calling a halt to our meeting.

It wasn't until after Vera Atkins's death on June 24, 2000, that I was able to start trying to find out more about her and her “private enterprise.” I began my search in a garden shed in Zennor, Cornwall, that belonged to Phoebe Atkins, her sister-in-law. The shed contained Vera's personal papers.

It must be said that this was a very classy kind of shed. Vera would have approved of it as a home for her papers. It had a heater, a kettle, and a sofabed, and I was not really alone there as I could see the back of Phoebe's cropped white hair across the lawn as she read at her conservatory table. It was nice to know Vera was with us too. For she hadn't quite gone to her grave: her ashes were sitting on the shelf in Phoebe's conservatory next to a potted plant and a pile of Cornish Liberal Party leaflets.

It was at Phoebe's invitation that I had gone down to Zennor. She was the widow of the younger of Vera's two brothers, Guy, who died in 1988. Phoebe and Vera were always close, and after Vera died Phoebe took charge of Vera's papers and had them carefully indexed. She wanted somebody to “do Vera's life,” as she put it, but she was unsure who the author should be. She had been advised by experts on SOE to select an established historian, somebody with “gravitas.” But Phoebe, aged sixty-nine, who had trained at Camberwell College of Arts before moving to Cornwall to work as a farm labourer, said she was not interested in gravitas. She wanted somebody who would write about “Vera—Vera the woman.”

I began to trawl through the shed. There were a number of tempting boxes with neat labels such as “Personal Correspondence,” “SOE,” “Female Agents A–Z,” “Male Agents A–Z,” “War Crimes.” Yet as I started to pull out the papers, I was disappointed. Many files were just a collection of newspaper articles. “War Crimes” seemed to be about the erection of memorials. Most of the photographs just showed Vera as an upper-crust Englishwoman, often presiding at dinners or being chummy with the queen mother. There was only one that interested me. It showed Vera as a very young woman, tall and handsome, almost beautiful, standing with another young woman by a newly planted sapling, but where it had been taken, the picture did not say.

I started looking around for other files, which perhaps had not been indexed and which, I liked to think, might be called “Romania,” “Childhood,” “Family,” “Education,” or even “Diaries.” They did not exist.