Societa' Italiana per lo Studio della Storia Contemporanea

A LIFE IN SECRETS: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE by Sarah Helm Little, Brown £20 pp463 Of all the secret second world war organisations created on Churchill’s orders to encourage resistance to the Nazis, the F (French) Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) remains the most controversial. Only now, 60 years on, is the tragic truth about its wartime operations emerging. The picture being revealed is very different from the romantic image portrayed in novels such as Charlotte Gray. As Staff Officer to the head of F Section, Vera Atkins was the keeper of SOE’s secrets, and nothing shook the vow of secrecy that she carried with her to her grave. When Sarah Helm, a former investigative reporter with The Sunday Times, tracked down the formidable nonagenarian in 1998, two years before her death, Atkins coolly deflected all attempts to penetrate the inner secrets of SOE. Asked about “her girls”, the female agents she dispatched into the night skies to help “set Europe ablaze”, Atkins seemed briefly transported back in time, remembering a “perfect June day” when she drove one of her operatives, the gentle, harp-playing Sufi mystic Noor Inayat Khan, to the aerodrome. But then, explains Helm, her expression became “quite blank, almost cold ”, and she abruptly terminated the interview. Helm sensed that her interviewee held the key to an appalling tragedy, one that had scarred the SOE survivors and left them with a gnawing sense of guilt. Gently drawing on the memories of other last members of this “Army of the Shadows”, as well as their families and former foes, she has now written a truly stunning first book — quite the best by a non-veteran of secret warfare. As Helm pursued a paper trail of clues across Europe, she came face to face with the appalling truth that Atkins had covered up an intelligence disaster that had possibly cost hundreds of lives, partly to protect her own very fragile status as an enemy alien holding down one of the most sensitive jobs in the secret war. One of two sensational revelations in the book is that Atkins had concealed her origins as a Jewish Rumanian refugee and had persuaded the incompetent Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, the head of F Section, to rubber-stamp her application for naturalisation; this established her position as his right-hand Staff Officer, controlling agent selection and a certain amount of operational movement, even though she only held a lowly WAAF officer rank. The other disclosure is that the disaster that more than any other overshadowed F Section’s record — the rounding-up of the important “Prosper” Resistance circuit around Paris — was due to betrayal, and not simply bad agent security, as the official version has it. Helm shows that Atkins was far too much in awe of Buckmaster’s Establishment background, and far too beholden to him; when the full extent of the disaster became known after the war, her loyalty to him, as well as to her agents, caused her to fall in with the glorification of F Section’s exploits. The cornerstone of Helm’s research has been the recent release of F section’s personal files, highly classified for the past 60 years, to which only M R D Foot had hitherto had access for his seminal study, SOE in France. Foot’s 1966 work covered part of the same ground as Helm, but his book had to be modified for a second edition after a threatened libel action by Nicholas Bodington, Buckmaster’s second-in-command, and complaints from Buckmaster himself over what a leading figure in the Economic Warfare bureau described as Foot’s “legitimate exposure of the colonel’s repeated incompetence”. Foot now finds himself completely vindicated in this book. Buckmaster’s failings and Panglossian fantasy life are clinically exposed by Helm. When, for instance, the first evidence of the betrayal of the Prosper circuit came through to Baker Street HQ in the form of a deliberately “mutilated” message by the SOE radio operator Gilbert Norman (codenamed Archambaud), the SOE records officer, Penelope Torr, sent Buckmaster a warning note. Tapping his Morse in an unfamiliar clipped style, Archambaud had tried to warn London of the betrayal, only to be told in reply, “You have forgotten your true security check. Take more care!” Archambaud’s German “controller” couldn’t believe his luck. Archambaud’s arrest by the Germans precipitated the downfall of the whole Paris network and totally compromised the vital radio link with London by which drops of agents and arms were arranged. The Germans initiated a “spiel” similar to the notorious “Englandspiel” which had practically annihilated the Dutch Resistance, and lured more and more agents, with their radio sets and codes, into their net. The subterfuge was run in conjunction with tip-offs from the SOE Air Movements officer, Henri Dericourt, a pre-war friend of the future Gestapo chief in Paris, Karl Boemelburg. According to Atkins’s post-war notes, Dericourt, a favourite of Buckmaster, passed on details of forthcoming “drops” to the Gestapo and had agents’ secret mail copied at secret police headquarters in the Avenue Foch. Helm hunted in vain among Atkins’s personal papers (to which her family had given access) for any hint of the views she might have formed on the suspect radio traffic. “Yet she had Buckmaster’s ear and was studying the messages as closely as anyone.” And when Dericourt faced a French military tribunal after the war, Atkins remained completely silent, even though she possessed damning prosecution evidence. By then, however, Atkins’s energies had turned to discovering what had happened to the 100 or so agents dispatched by her who were listed as “missing believed dead”. They included 12 of her “girls”, among them Noor Inayat Khan, who, refusing to tap out phoney messages for her captors, was kept permanently chained after an escape attempt and was subsequently deported to Dachau. There, far from meeting her end holding hands with her fellow victims (as relatives were informed), she was literally kicked to death. Archambaud, Francis Suttill, the handsome giant France Antelme and others were all slowly strangled on meat hooks. Working tirelessly for months, Atkins accumulated the evidence to put the murderers of her charges in the dock, only to see some of them walk free. If any younger reader wonders “why the bunting and the occasional tear” this VE Day, I recommend this book. MAN'S WORK The use by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster of female operatives such as Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan was frowned on by many in the military and Whitehall, who argued that it was illegal for women to go on active duty. But SOE officers insisted that female agents were much less likely to be stopped by the Germans or rigorously body-searched by them. Churchill, convinced of the logic of the SOE case, overruled all objections and, in 1942, secretly agreed to their employment as agents. Available at the Books First price of £16 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 READ ON... websites: www.mishalov.com/Atkins.html New York Times obituary