Her life as a spy

Vera Atkins was a sphinx to those who knew her, but as a superb new biography reveals, the gallant spymistress of World War II was driven by personal secrets and loyalties.

By Laura Miller

Read more: Books, Laura Miller, World War II, Nazis, Reviews, Spies, Book reviews

Jan. 4, 2007 | If modern spycraft reached its zenith in the Cold War, it was born during World War II -- well, in literary mythology at least. Novels like William Boyd's recent, gripping "Restless" describe the meticulous training of British undercover agents, in particular a Russian imigri named Eva Delectorskaya, in the proper methods of following a mark, evading a shadow, setting up a letter drop or a safe house and, most important of all, ditching any operation the minute it starts to look a teensy bit off. As a result, Eva survives not only a rigged rendezvous (based on a real incident on the Dutch-German border in 1939) with a pair of Nazi generals pretending to be up for betraying Hitler, but she even manages to evade her own spymaster when he turns out to be a double agent. A contemporary story line about Eva's daughter, who learns her mother's true history only as an adult, conveys that the cost of the spy's life is an eternal, itchy paranoia that turns out to be contagious; pretty soon the daughter is wondering if everyone she knows has a secret identity.

The life of Vera Atkins, a woman who helped run Britain's Special Operations Executive during the war, is every bit as fascinating and shot through with ambiguity as a spy novel. The version of it told by journalist Sarah Helm in "A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII" is, on top of that, also a detective yarn in which the author treks to remote Carpathian villages and nibbles beet salad with ancient, decommissioned Romanian princesses in crumbling Soviet apartment blocks as she tries to nail down some of the more elusive facts. But Atkins' story has less in common with an intricate John Le Carré or Alan Furst novel than it does with the latest newspaper report about CIA screw-ups.

Atkins worked her way up from secretary to deputy and finally to head of Special Operations Executive F, the division of SOE in charge of developing, coordinating and arming the resistance movement in France. She recruited and oversaw the training of agents -- some of them women -- who were parachuted into Nazi-occupied France to that end. Perhaps the most spectacularly successful of these was Pearl Witherington, a courier who reorganized her circuit (a small, cell-like group of agents) when its leader was captured and led 1,500 Maquis guerrilla fighters against the German army on D-Day. Legend has it that the Nazis put a million-franc bounty on Witherington's head.

Not all of SOE's record was glorious, though, and that is the story that Helm prefers to tell. It's one of the factors that sets her book far above another recent treatment of Atkins' life, "Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II" by William Stevenson. Stevenson has made a profession of peddling old-school stories of espionage derring-do in which comparisons and connections to James Bond fly thick and fast -- he also wrote "A Man Called Intrepid" about the British intelligence head who (confusingly) almost shares his name, Sir William Stephenson. "Spymistress" insinuates that Ian Fleming, the creator of Bond, was one of Atkins' agents (in fact, he worked for naval intelligence) and provides frequent quotations from the author, despite the fact that he appears to have had no significant role in Atkins' life. Helm, by contrast, never even mentions Fleming.

Stevenson knew Atkins (Helm met her once) and several other figures in the British espionage scene, but this does not work to his advantage. "Spymistress" is mostly just clubby, name-dropping palaver about politics, power brokers and celebrities in mid-20th-century Britain and Europe, with Atkins' own name parachuted in every now and then to make it seem as if Stevenson is actually writing a book about her instead of showing off his "insider" dish. Stevenson also writes espionage fiction, and wanting to seem up-to-date on all the backstage gossip is a fatal weakness of spy groupies. In this case, a veteran journalist like Helm -- who has written for British newspapers for 20 years -- tells a much more enthralling story than the thriller writer.

That story involves two familiar, if depressing, recurring themes from real-life espionage history: blunders and turf wars. SOE -- set up by Winston Churchill on the eve of the war -- was always regarded by Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, but better known as MI6) as a rival. The organization was, as more than one observer and participant characterized it, staffed by amateurs. Some, like Atkins, were remarkably talented individuals who because of their outsider status might not have otherwise found a way to contribute to the "secret war." Others, like Atkins' immediate superior, Maurice Buckmaster, a former public-relations head for the Ford Motor Co. in France, were socially acceptable to British elites but disastrously ill-equipped to run agents into the most perilous parts of occupied Europe.

What interests Helm most about Atkins was what she did after the war, in the confusion that prevailed in Europe once the Nazi regime collapsed. Atkins committed herself, with indefatigable determination, to finding out what happened to 118 SOE agents who had not returned to Britain. In a few cases, as with the much-celebrated Odette Sansome, an SOE courier, those agents survived horrendous ordeals, and turned up sans passports and other identification, after escaping from their German captors. Many, however, died in Nazi prisons and concentration camps, and Atkins made it her cause to track down as much hard information as possible about their fates and to make sure that their service was properly honored.

Hers was a surprisingly unpopular mission. Charles de Gaulle didn't like the idea because he wanted his own people, the Free French Forces, to get sole credit for resisting the Nazi occupation. The head of SOE's security directorate thought that the investigation was too sensitive to be conducted by someone with a relatively low security clearance and not firmly under his own control. Various British authorities objected to Atkins' suggestion that the names of missing agents be circulated among the Allies, the Red Cross and other entities operating in the area because to do so would be to publicly admit that they had sent young British women on such dangerous missions. Unlike the male secret agents, few of the women carried military commissions, and were therefore not entitled to the protections guaranteed to prisoners of war.

Perhaps there were other reasons, too, namely the role of SOE bungling in allowing the agents to be caught in the first place. While Atkins was beginning her investigation, her former boss, Buckmaster, was taking a victory lap through liberated France, a bit of self-aggrandizement that would eventually backfire. Already, uncomfortable facts about F Section operations were circulating. One former agent dragged an SOE staff captain to a room in Paris that had been used as a Gestapo interrogation chamber and pointed to blood stains on the wall. He berated her about "how stupid everyone at HQ had been; how they had risked agents' lives. He said he had done everything to warn London that he was captured, but nobody had noticed."

At issue were wireless transmissions, the main vehicle by which SOE circuits in occupied territory communicated with the agency's London office. The messages were supposed to include both a false or "bluff" security check and a "true check" as a way to guarantee that the wireless operator had not been arrested and forced to send them by his or her German captors. London, however, didn't seem to take its own system seriously, and on more than one occasion, when a captured agent sent what ought to have been a tip-off message including only the bluff check, they got responses along the lines of "My dear fellow, you only left us a week ago. On your first message you go and forget to put your true check."

Again and again, irregular and suspicious wireless transmissions were dismissed as ordinary mistakes by Buckmaster, who apparently partook of the typical P.R. man's chronic optimism and belief that if you ignore bad things they might just go away. As a result, SOE continued to drop supplies and personnel directly into the waiting hands of the Germans. "I was amazed," said one captive agent, "at HQ Gestapo to see the quantities of British food, guns, ammunition, explosives that they had at their disposal." When SOE parachuted in a pair of new circuit heads, the Germans were able to replace them with impersonators (since none of the operatives in country had met the men yet) and use them to round up even more agents.

Next page: Atkins' own secret past