A Life in Secrets: the story of Vera Atkins and the lost agents of SOE
Sarah Helm Little, Brown, 463pp, £20
ISBN 0316724971
This is not a typical story of daring subversion behind enemy lines. Vera Atkins never worked "in the field". Instead, she spent most of the Second World War at the headquar- ters of the Special Operations Executive on Baker Street, London, preparing the secret agents for their missions. As intelligence officer to Maurice Buckmaster, the head of SOE's French Section, Atkins - formidable and haughty - was known as "Buckmaster's brains", the one who really ran the show. It was her job to provide the operatives with cover stories, sort out their fake papers and complete their disguises with expert touches of verisimilitude - a used train ticket, a Paris concert programme, a crumpled pack of Gitanes. She worked especially closely with the 40 or so women - among them Violette Szabo, Odette Sansom and Noor Inayat Khan - who were sent to France as couriers and radio operators. These were the real Charlotte Grays.
Atkins's most notable achievements, however, came at the close of the war when, in the face of official recalcitrance, she made it her responsibility to find out what had happened to agents designated "missing presumed dead", paying particular attention to the fate of "her girls". She travelled to Germany and spent months collecting scraps of information which, pieced together, told of gruesome final journeys, from interrogation room to prison cell to concentration camp. "I was probably the one person who could do this," she said. "You had to know every detail of the agents - names, code names, every hair on their heads - to spot their tracks."
Atkins got herself attached to the War Crimes investigation unit and was a fearsome interrogator. The Abwehr's spycatcher Hugo Bleicher considered her questioning of him the most skilful to which he was subjected: "She boxed me in with astonishing ease," he admitted. When Hans Josef Kieffer, the senior Nazi intelligence officer in Paris, began to cry as Atkins described what had happened to some of the SOE women, she scolded him: "Kieffer, if one of us is going to cry it is going to be me. You will please stop this comedy."
One agent's trail was particularly difficult to follow. After capture, Noor Khan, a descendant of the last Moghul emperor of southern India, was taken to Kieffer's HQ on Avenue Foch in Paris, but tried to escape, removing the bars on her window and repairing the damage done to the walls with face cream and powder. The attempt failed and she was removed to Pforzheim Prison, where the guards kept her in chains and beat her. For some time, Atkins believed that Khan had been one of four SOE women executed at Natzweiler, a small concentration camp in the Vosges mountains (this became a celebrated case partly because one of the agents, having been injected with phenol, regained consciousness as she was being put into the crematorium oven, and scratched the executioner's face). Eventually, new testimony revealed that Khan had been shot at Dachau; Atkins altered the official records to cover up her earlier mistake.
She died five years ago, leaving a stash of personal records of her investigations, but little else: she was always frostily tight-lipped about her Jewish background and Romanian upbringing, and whole stretches of her life remained mysteri- ous. Sarah Helm's carefully researched and engaging biography doubles up as reportage, becoming a personal account of how she uncovered her subject's story. (This makes for accessibility - but do we really need to know the name of Helm's driver in Bucharest, or that she interviewed one army major "over mint-pea soup"?) The book details all the false trails and revelations of Atkins's dramatic search for the lost agents, at the same time gradually disclosing the reasons for her lifelong secretiveness.
It did not take long for Atkins to find out how easily many of the SOE operatives had been captured. Some, it seems, were even met on arrival in France by Nazi welcoming committees. This was a result of the disastrous penetration of the "Prosper circuit", which involved the capture and "turning" of radio operators, and ended with the Germans sending messages to SOE in London thanking it for the regular deliveries of arms and ammunition.
Helm is scathing about Buckmaster's role in all this, not least his blithe confidence that the omission of security codes from messages sent from France meant nothing. But why did Atkins not question Buckmaster's judgement? Some explanation is possible. For most of the war, she was still a Romanian citizen - an enemy alien - and could not afford to rock the boat at SOE. Helm also reveals a deeper family secret: early in the war, Atkins had paid the Abwehr to secure a passport for a cousin of hers who was in danger. She needed allies in case this ever came out.
It is possible that her failure to correct Buckmaster's errors quickened Atkins's resolution to discover what had happened to the missing agents, but her loyalty to her boss was enduring. After the war, she set herself up as a custodian of SOE's reputation, advising authors and screenplay writers, and encouraging former agents to appear on This Is Your Life. She remained briskly defensive about F Section's record and did her best to prevent the truth emerging about Prosper and the "radio game". She always hated to admit she was wrong, and chose never to lose her reserve or her air of mystery. Thanks to this book, however, her life now assumes a more definite shape. When Helm asked Noor Inayat Khan's brother what he remembered about Atkins, his response was terse but fitting: "not charming, but rather remarkable in her way".
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