Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (4 page)

Instead there was a vast amount of material on the various media projects in which Vera had been involved over the years, including a large file called “Controversial Books” that contained letters to and from authors about how they had got the SOE story wrong.

I came across a promising folder labelled “Vera's Letters.” These were in fact mainly postcards, most of them sent to her mother, so there was no room for Vera to say much, and they were in illegible, tiny, spiky handwriting. Here was one from Munich in February 1946, when, I knew, she had just arrived in the ruins of Allied-occupied Germany to start interrogating war criminals. But when I had patiently deciphered every word, I found the card filled with a bland list of places and no information at all: “Dearest Ma, I've been on the move since last Sat: Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Baden Baden (via Heidelberg) then on to Munich. Off to Nuremberg tomorrow. Fondest Love. V.”

When Vera did write at any length, the result was almost more frustrating than when she kept it short. Her longer pieces of prose—such as a synopsis I found for an autobiography—were so polished, so full of clichés, that I began to suspect that Vera herself would not have been the best person to tell her own story.

In another bulging box I found nothing but a pile of videos showing Vera's appearances in TV documentaries, and alongside were film scripts for various movies that she had advised on.

But I didn't want to read others' scripts. By now Vera's personality was fading in front of my eyes, amid a pile of synopses and countless posed photographs. I was beginning to wonder if her life was really of any interest. Worse, I was beginning to wonder how much I liked her.

Phoebe's little dog, Zilla, was barking at the door to come in. It was raining. I shuffled around a little and looked through some drawers that I had not yet inspected. Here was a whole row of as-yet-unopened files with titles such as “Correspondence on Tracing.” The files contained the original documents relating to Vera's investigation into the disappeared agents.

I pulled out a flimsy piece of brown paper. It was a statement made by Franz Berg, a crematorium stoker, who had witnessed the killing of women agents in the Natzweiler concentration camp. I knelt on the floor to read. At the end of the statement, I saw that Berg had been interrogated by Squadron Officer Vera Atkins in April 1946.

There was a tapping on the door. Phoebe was standing there, pointing at her watch. “We're off to the Tinners for lunch,” she said. Her daughter Zenna, aged thirty-six, and her two children had just arrived for a visit.

I hoped that in the pub Phoebe and Zenna would be able to tell me more about Vera's past than I had so far learned in the shed, but they said they didn't know much at all. “We never talked about the past. With Vera one just didn't,” said Phoebe.

Zenna said she knew only “the answers to the questions a child might ask” because she had talked to her aunt Vera most when she was growing up. “And Dad was paranoid—he didn't want anyone to know about his past.” As if to illustrate the point, Zenna put a packet of her father's papers on the table. He had written an instruction to Zenna on the envelope. “Deposit these documents in your bank with instructions to be destroyed unopened on your death.”

What Phoebe and Zenna were able to tell me was this. Vera had two brothers, Guy and Ralph. Guy, the younger, who married Phoebe in 1964, was educated at Oxford and then took a Ph.D. at Prague in 1937. After the war Guy taught African languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He had a genius for languages. Ralph, Vera's elder brother, who died in 1964, was manager of an oil company in Istanbul before the war. Later he dabbled in business. Ralph had one son, Ronald, a journalist living in Lewes.

Zenna and Phoebe passed on whatever tales they had overheard about Vera's parents and about a large house somewhere in Romania, but they didn't seem to know what to believe. The children had a pony and trap and a sleigh in winter “with those curly bits on.” Vera had a boat named after her on an ornamental lake.

Although Phoebe and Zenna couldn't tell me much, they suggested who might be able to and gave me Vera's address book. They also gave me advice: I should not expect to find information, as such, in the shed. Vera stored most of the information she valued in her head, and even this information she regularly erased. “She could close things down because she had a mental filing system,” said Zenna. “I am the same. Once I have dealt with a problem, I erase it from my mind, then I can't open it up again unless somebody hits the right trigger.”

But the two of them said I would find clues. For example, Zenna had discovered photographs hidden behind other photographs in Vera's frames. I should watch for “little habits like that.” And she said that although she had few facts to give me, she had heard a mass of stories from Vera as a child. If I ever had a question about Vera, she might be able to help as long as I “pressed the right trigger.” It would be a matter of luck.

Back in the shed that afternoon I stopped looking for answers and found that this most secretive of women had indeed left clues of a sort. I found love letters. They were more like snippets of love letters; snippets of great happiness. Here was a champagne bottle label in an envelope with a letter, in blue ink on blue notepaper, that said: “My Sweet, My Lovely, My Darling—cross out the possessives if you like, but you are—My Darling, My Sweet.” The top of the notepaper had been carefully cut off.

There was no signature at the bottom, except for what looked like a dollar sign.

Even those things that had been so disappointing that morning were now not so. Vera's postcards and letters to her mother seemed more interesting, precisely because they said so very little. And the posed pictures of Vera were more interesting now, when I put them together with other Veras I had begun to find. If I put the picture of her with permed hair, twinset, and pearls next to the one of her in Paris—stylish suit, nipped in at the waist—she was simply not the same woman. And tucked at random in a long, brown envelope, I found Vera on a mountain pony with a line of others on ponies, on the edge of a forest. A distinguished-looking man was having difficulty controlling his horse, and close to him was Vera, with bobbed hair and riding jacket, clearly in control of her mount. I turned the picture to find a date, 1932, and a list of names, including “Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg. German Ambassador to Bucharest and negotiator of Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Executed in the anti-Hitler plot 1944.”

The more I pulled out files and envelopes, the more snipped letters or parts of papers or unidentified photographs would fall out. Books had notes or cuttings tucked in them. It began to feel as if Vera had left a deliberate paper trail for me to find. Rather than write anything down, she preferred what the SOE training schools called the “flotsam” method of information dissemination. The flotsam looked like nothing on first examination but in fact had been deliberately placed to lead the interested party down a particular route—in this case, the biographer. For Vera must have known somebody would be “doing her life.”

So the torn letters, the single page of a diary of her hunt for the missing, the carefully laid photographs that tumbled out before me were not the casual remnants of a life left behind but a series of carefully considered signposts.

Then as I packed things away, I noticed a card that had fallen to the ground. It had a photograph on the front, of a young woman whom I recognised as Nora Inayat Khan. This was a particularly beautiful picture of Nora. Faded and brown round the edges, it captured her unusual aura of gentleness and strength. It was all in her large, dark eyes.

Opening up the card, I saw there was writing inside: “To Vera Atkins. With gratitude—a feeling I know Nora would have shared for your enterprise in following in her tracks in the German wilderness of the aftermath.”

The note was signed by Nora's eldest brother, Vilayat Inayat Khan, and dated 1948. I stared at the picture for some moments. Just lying there as it was on the floor, I could so easily have missed it.

PART I

ENGLAND

1.
Nora

V
era Atkins did not, as a rule, take too much notice of the opinions of others. When it was a question of judging the character of a particular agent, especially a woman agent, she liked to make up her own mind in her own time—which was usually within a few moments of their entering the room where she first met them, at Orchard Court.

The flat in Orchard Court, just off Baker Street in London's West End, was a base used by SOE's French Section, or F Section, where headquarters staff could meet new recruits and also brief those departing on missions. Agents were never allowed into SOE's HQ in Baker Street in case they heard or saw something they did not need to know.

By the spring of 1943, when recruitment to F Section was fast picking up, a steady stream of young men and women would arrive at Orchard Court. The drill for new arrivals was by now well established. First, Park the doorman, in dark suit and tie, would lead the way (never asking names but always knowing exactly who a new arrival was) through the gilded gates of the lift and on up to the second floor. In perfect English or French, whichever they preferred, Park would then usher them into the flat and straight into a bathroom, because there was no space for a waiting room. “Back in the bathroom, please, sir [or madam],” he would say if they wandered out, and here the agents sat on the side of a deep, jet-black bath, or on the onyx bidet, surrounded
by black and white tiles, while they waited to see what would happen next.

Park would then lead the agent to meet Maurice Buckmaster, the head of F Section. A tall, slender, athletic figure (he once captained Eton at soccer) with angular facial features and fair, thinning hair, Buckmaster would shake the agent's hand vigourously, then, perching momentarily on his desk, legs swinging, make a few warm welcoming remarks. To any recruit who seemed inquisitive he would say, “We don't ask questions,” firmly stressing the need for secrecy at all times. He would then stride off with the recruit down the hallway and, opening another door, say, “And this is Miss Atkins.”

Nodding towards Vera, Buckmaster would then explain, “Miss Atkins will be looking after you from now on,” and as the door closed the new arrival's eyes would fall on a woman seated at a table, who produced a smile—remote but welcoming. Vera then rose, tall and trim, in twin-set or tweed suit, her fair hair rolled up at the nape of her neck. This mature woman in her midthirties, most recruits assumed, must be a woman of senior rank, though exactly what rank was not at all clear as there was no uniform and she was only ever called “Madam” or “Miss Atkins.”

After proffering a hand, Vera settled herself again behind a small table, showing off nicely turned ankles and smart court shoes that looked expensive but probably were not. She then slowly lit a cigarette, and her blue-grey eyes fixed upon the new recruit.

Vera appeared to know everything about the new arrival, and without referring to any piece of paper she could talk to them about their country of origin, about their family, and about their special knowledge in any field—for example, she knew if they could fire a gun, fly an aeroplane, read a map, or ski.

And Vera knew exactly where the new recruit was living, and if they needed accommodation, she would offer to arrange it. She knew of their financial circumstances as well and could offer cash advances on request up to a limited amount each month. All this was very reassuring, because until they met Miss Atkins many of these men and women had felt somewhat disoriented by the experience of “special employment,” as their new work was called.

Some of the women had, just days earlier, been mopping floors at Royal Air Force (RAF) stations. Many recruits were civilians, spotted by SOE scouts, while some had just escaped across the Channel from France and had never been to England before. Few knew exactly why they had been picked out for this secret work, though it was almost certainly for little other reason than that they spoke native, or near native, French. Some were French, many had at least one French parent, and most had a cosmopolitan background.

They had been invited first for a selection interview, perhaps with a Mr. Potter, in a small, bare room numbered 055a, in the basement of the War Office. But Mr. Potter would have said little about what exactly they would be doing. Once the MI5 search into their background had safely come back indicating “no trace,” they had been whisked off to sign the Official Secrets Act. But still they had no idea what it was they would be keeping secret.

Then the women went to Lilywhites to be measured for stiff new khaki serge uniforms and found themselves transformed into members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. The FANY, as it was known, was an organisation of ladies of a certain social standing (and in many cases with fathers or husbands in the officer corps) who volunteered for military work, driving perhaps or packing parachutes. All women agents joining SOE were obliged to join the FANY to give them “cover” while in secret training, but none yet knew anything of what that training would be.

So when the door had closed behind them and they were alone, and when Miss Atkins began to talk a little about why they had been chosen from so many others for this special work, things started to make more sense. Those recruits who had clandestine experience, such as working on resistance escape lines in France, felt that Vera had some direct knowledge of what they had been through. The less experienced felt flattered that somebody as impressive and courteous as Miss Atkins was now taking time with them. It helped, for example, to be told exactly how they should explain their new position to friends and family.