The signal arrived at F Section headquarters on July 7, 1943. It came from Gilbert Norman, the wireless operator for the Prosper resistance network in occupied France, and a highly experienced agent. Every message Norman sent was supposed to carry two security checks—deliberate spelling mistakes agreed in advance with London. If a check was missing, it meant the operator was captured, compromised, that the hand on the key was not the agent’s own.
Norman’s message had no security check at all. Maurice Buckmaster, the head of F Section, received the signal. He noticed the missing check. And then he ignored procedure.
He sent back a curt reply: “You have forgotten your true check. Be more careful next time. ”
Beside him worked Vera Atkins, the meticulous woman who ran F Section’s female agents. She had built her reputation on detail, on noticing what others missed, on knowing every fact of her agents’ lives.
She went along with Buckmaster’s decision and said nothing. The consequences would be catastrophic. For four years of the Second World War, Britain had fought a secret campaign behind enemy lines in France, and at the heart of that struggle stood Vera Atkins. She ran a unique force of undercover fighters: Britain’s women secret agents.
Through sabotage and resistance they caused havoc across occupied territory. When many of them failed to return at war’s end, Atkins tracked them down and helped bring the Nazis who killed them to justice. She became a national heroine. But Vera Atkins was not all that she seemed.
The meticulous spy mistress had played a role in some of the worst bungling of the war. The question hung over everything that followed: was Atkins simply not as clever as she appeared, or had she knowingly sent agents to their deaths to hide a dark personal secret? In July 1940, less than a year into the war, Britain stood alone. France had capitulated after just six weeks of fighting.
German forces had overrun the country. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was determined to fight back, and he devised a plan to help Europe rise again. Vera Atkins was to become a vital part of it. At thirty-three, Atkins was a trainee secretary with no military experience, but she had been spotted by an unusual organization: the Special Operations Executive.
SOE was Churchill’s strike-back weapon, a new secret service built to run an underground war in enemy-occupied countries through sabotage, resistance, and subversion. Churchill declared that SOE would develop a reign of terror that would make the lives of German occupiers an eternal torment. At their headquarters on London’s Baker Street, SOE prided itself on a rigorous selection process. As one of its recruiters put it, “It wasn’t just haphazard.
We make extensive inquiries before we recruit our people. ”
Atkins seemed the perfect candidate. Sarah Helm, Atkins’ biographer, spent seven years researching her life. “She was obviously always an incredibly focused character and driven character… She tended to trust her own judgment, so she was always going to achieve a lot.
”
Atkins sailed through her interview, and in April 1941 she was recruited as a secretary to F Section, SOE’s largest and most important department, responsible for operations in France. At its head sat forty-one-year-old Maurice Buckmaster, a former businessman. Buckmaster was typical of many in SOE: no military background, but well born, schooled at Eton, and fluent in French picked up on a cycling tour around the country. He was charming and affable, but not everyone considered him suited to intelligence work.
“Charm alone is not enough for a great commander,” one observer noted. “But it was about all that he had. He was not overly laden with brains himself. He was nothing like as bright as the man he was combating on the French side.
”
Vera Atkins found she could make up for her boss’s shortcomings. She was extremely meticulous, while Buckmaster was the opposite, broad-brush and poor on detail—the detail that was essential, and where Vera came in. Her habits were precise down to the daily black cab to the office, the same cab and the same driver arriving at exactly the same time each morning while almost no one else at SOE arrived that way. No detail of F Section’s operations escaped her notice.
She made sure she knew exactly what was going on in the office so she could never be caught out. She was also the epitome of discretion, telling anyone who asked that she had a boring little job on Baker Street. Her own mother assumed she was having an affair with a married man and said over breakfast one morning, “All I can say, dear, is I hope when the war is over he makes an honest woman of you. ” It was not for Vera to contradict her.
By 1942, Atkins had become an integral part of F Section. Then came an opportunity for a larger role. In France, German occupation was playing havoc with operations. It was increasingly difficult for agents to travel; young men were often picked up and searched, making capture more likely.
SOE found a controversial solution: women would be sent behind enemy lines as wireless operators and couriers. Many in Whitehall were appalled. Women were barred from armed combat and were not protected by the conventions of war. Atkins saw it differently.
Vera would have thought it perfectly fine, Sarah Helm argued; she would have understood the logic, and she always thought women were just as capable as any man. Atkins quickly put herself forward to oversee F Section’s female agents, and Buckmaster agreed. F Section began a recruitment drive. Yvonne Baseden, then twenty, was serving in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force when she was approached.
“Well, I’d never heard of SOE, neither had anybody else,” she recalled. “But I was contacted one day by an officer in the Air Force who said, ‘I gather you are bilingual. Would you like to do other work including speaking French? ’ And I said, ‘Well, of course, that’d be wonderful.
’ And that’s how it all started. ”
Atkins was among those who interviewed Yvonne. “She was a very intellectual lady, quite senior to me. I didn’t really know why she was asking me these questions.
But I answered, of course…. And that’s the way we met, I suppose. ”
After initial selection, candidates began training in the secrets of undercover warfare: parachuting, hand-to-hand combat, explosives, marksmanship. Yvonne was swept up in it all.
“I was swept up in the things that one could do… Whatever was presented for us to do, we had to do. And that’s how it was in wartime. ”
Atkins’ task was to oversee every step of the women’s preparation. She made it her job to know everything about them: their backgrounds, where they lived, whether they needed more money.
The agents felt confident in her because they felt she was very much looking after them, and because she could assess whether they were up to the job. The success of a mission depended on the quality of an undercover identity, and although many helped create these identities, Atkins made the final checks. She would ensure no agent carried a packet of English cigarettes in a pocket or a giveaway label showing they had bought their shoes on St. James’s Street.
She made sure the French identity had been perfected. Atkins’ women left from airfields in the south of England, and she was always there to see them off. Her presence was enormously reassuring; she had a kind of confidence about her. They never described her as a classic mother figure, yet to some extent there was something motherly about her in the sense that she was taking care of them.
In 1987, Atkins was recorded in a rare audio interview for the Imperial War Museum. “The burden of stress probably was on the person who was seeing them off,” she said. “The realization that they were going out on a very dangerous mission. And this was quite possibly the last glimpse they had of the lovely countryside and you remained quite safely at this end.
Obviously, there was a considerable strain on one at that time. I always felt it very much. ”
After just one year, Atkins had eleven female agents behind enemy lines. They proved invaluable.
Andrée Borrel, a working-class girl from the suburbs of Paris, became one of the best couriers in the field. Yvonne Rudellat cycled hundreds of miles delivering vital messages and helped blow up a 300,000-volt electricity cable near Orléans. In London, Atkins followed every detail of their operations, spending long hours in the office watching over the agents who had become her girls. But in the spring of 1943, events in France began to draw Atkins into controversy.
Reports suggested F Section was in trouble. Agent Francis Suttill ran a resistance network known as Prosper, one of the biggest circuits operating in France. Suttill now voiced fears that it had been penetrated by the Germans: two of his best local agents had been captured. He complained that F Section headquarters were irresponsible in their methods, that safe houses in France—known as letter boxes—were being misused.
“Your conception of a letter box appears to be a place where an agent, usually covered in mud, carrying an obvious suitcase, can turn up at an unreasonable hour. ”
Buckmaster put the agents’ anxieties down to stress and exhaustion. He chose to ignore Suttill’s warnings. “Nobody really expected them in the early days to be caught in the numbers they were,” Helm observed.
“The whole operation was run in an atmosphere of extraordinary arrogance and to some extent ignorance and bravery, which was a lethal combination. ”
Atkins was privy to the same information and should have understood its implications, especially since among the hundreds of members of the Prosper network were several of her girls: Andrée Borrel, Cecily Lefort, Diana Rowden, Yvonne Rudellat. If the circuit was infiltrated, one might expect Atkins to request that the women be recalled to England. But both Atkins and Buckmaster did nothing.
For them, it was business as usual. It was a terrible mistake. The Prosper circuit had indeed been penetrated. Hundreds of its members were rounded up and imprisoned.
Two months after sending his first warning, Suttill himself was arrested. All of Vera’s girls who worked for the network were then captured by the Gestapo. And F Section’s errors would get even worse. On July 7, it received Gilbert Norman’s signal without its security check, and Buckmaster had replied with a scolding instead of treating it as the alarm it was.
More surprising still was Atkins’ reaction: she went along with Buckmaster’s decision. Why did the meticulous spy mistress not challenge his mistake? One possibility: Atkins hadn’t seen Norman’s signal. Thousands of messages arrived at F Section all the time.
But for Atkins to have missed this one seems unlikely. If she didn’t happen to be in the signals room that day, she would certainly have seen it soon after. Another possibility: she saw the message but failed to spot the missing check. For someone so meticulous, that seems even less probable.
She would have been suspicious and understood the likely implications. Or perhaps she simply followed her superiors; she was, after all, a woman in a man’s world holding a very junior rank. But Atkins had never been one to play by those rules. One superior had noted on her file that she was “somewhat disinclined to accept instructions without argument.
Requires handling. ”
So how could the spy mistress known for attention to detail have failed to act? Perhaps there was another explanation. Vera Atkins was not all that she seemed.
She wasn’t Vera Atkins at all. She was Vera May Rosenberg, a refugee from Romania, the daughter of a German Jew. She had been born in the Romanian town of Galați, where her father ran a lucrative shipping business. Her mother was Hilda Atkins, a British South African–born woman who had Vera raised by English nannies.
Vera had lived a luxurious life around Bucharest. In the 1930s, fascism took hold in Romania. The ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic Iron Guard began to take control. In 1937, at twenty-nine, Vera fled with her mother to England.
Two years later war broke out, and by the end of 1940 Romania became an ally of Nazi Germany. For all her impeccable English manners, Vera Atkins was a citizen from hostile territory. “You cannot underestimate the absolutely overwhelming importance to Vera of concealing the fact that she was a Romanian-born Jew working inside SOE,” Helm said. “She was effectively for certainly half the war an enemy alien working inside the most secret part of the British Secret Service.
” If Atkins had admitted that, she would almost certainly have been interned. There was another reason to keep her identity secret: being British was a crucial part of her relationship with her girls. If any of the agents under her care had known the truth, their faith and trust in their minder would have fallen apart—and Vera knew that. One of the few people who knew her true identity was Maurice Buckmaster.
So one possible reason Atkins did not challenge him is that she needed him to keep her secret safe. In SOE’s disastrous summer of 1943, Buckmaster’s protection mattered more than ever. Atkins was applying for British citizenship, and Buckmaster was supporting her application. Speaking out against him now was not an option.
“He had to continue to support her,” Helm explained. “If he had in any way lost faith in her or been angered by her or thought that she was stepping out of line, she might have lost Buckmaster’s support and if she’d lost Buckmaster’s support, she was finished. ”
And Helm believed there may have been an even more disturbing reason for Atkins to stay silent. “There are other suggestions… that Vera had even more personal motives for keeping her mouth shut at that stage.
”
While Atkins and her mother had escaped to London, relatives still in Europe were at risk. Her Jewish cousin Fritz Rosenberg and his wife Karen were trapped in Hungary. According to Helm’s contacts with the Rosenberg family, Atkins decided to intervene. “There is quite substantial evidence from a number of different sources that Vera made a rather extraordinary venture over to Holland at the very start of the war when she heard that her cousin Fritz Rosenberg was threatened with deportation to a concentration camp.
”
Before joining SOE, Atkins apparently made an incredibly dangerous journey through Nazi-occupied Holland and into Belgium, where she may have made contact with German authorities to bargain for her cousin’s freedom. There were suggestions that a large amount of money changed hands to buy off those threatening his deportation, and that Vera had performed this heroic act herself, going over in circumstances of real danger to hand over the money. Such contact with German authorities during the war would alone have put Atkins in deep trouble with the British and destroyed any chance of working at SOE. But some evidence suggested the deal involved more than money.
“The suggestion was that the family had possibly agreed to provide information over a period of time to the enemy,” Helm said. “Certainly there was evidence to that effect. ” Had Atkins’ contact with German intelligence been exposed, she may well have been viewed as a traitor. The idea that a secret service would employ someone with access to all its secrets who might have been compromised in this way would have been utterly anathema to anyone in SOE.
If any part of these stories is true, Vera Atkins had every reason to keep a low profile and not to challenge Maurice Buckmaster. “Vera would have been conscious of all of that in every single action she took while she was working for SOE. ”
Nobody can be exactly sure why Atkins kept her silence. Whether she misread the signal, dared not question her boss, or was covering her identity and knew she was compromised, she said nothing to challenge Buckmaster.
The consequences were catastrophic. As the missing security check indicated, Gilbert Norman was no longer operating his own radio. The Germans were. They were now playing what they called the Funkspiel—the radio game—one of the most devastating espionage tactics of the war.
German agents in control of British radios called in drops of supplies, weapons, and agents that fell directly into German hands. F Section’s blunders, which could so easily have been avoided, would cost hundreds of lives. F Section continued to send agents into the field. In February 1944, Atkins—unwittingly in communication with a radio operated by the Germans—organized the deployment of a talented new agent.
Madeleine Damerment was a remarkable young woman who had fled France after running an escape route for Allied prisoners. A devout Catholic, she was living in a convent in Hertfordshire when she volunteered for SOE. She was to be flown into central France, and Atkins was there to see her off. Madeleine had been told of the risks she faced, but not the most important one: that the network had been infiltrated and its radios compromised.
When Madeleine landed in a field near Chartres, she wouldn’t be heard from again. Three months later, the Allies prepared for D-Day. F Section was to be part of it. All over France, its surviving networks began a campaign of sabotage: telephone and railway lines cut, bridges demolished, German units attacked.
Yvonne Baseden had been dropped into France three months earlier, and now she helped organize one of the biggest supply drops in SOE history. “We had to choose grounds where the resistance could receive material from England or from the States or whatever,” she recalled. “One of our grounds was chosen for a big daylight operation by the Americans to drop materials and arms to members of the resistance. ”
By late August, France was liberated.
The Allies had triumphantly reached Paris. The French were free. For Atkins there was further reason to be happy: her application for British citizenship had succeeded. Immediately after the city’s liberation, she traveled on her British passport to Paris.
She was going to bring her agents home. The Hotel Cecil in Montmartre was the agreed meeting point. As agents returned, Atkins was the one to greet them. By day she arranged their repatriation; by night she celebrated with them in the bars of Montmartre.
But as weeks passed, she waited and waited. More than a hundred agents still hadn’t come back, among them fourteen of Atkins’ girls, including Yvonne Baseden. After three weeks, Atkins gave up her vigil and returned to England. In May 1945, nearly a year after D-Day, Yvonne Baseden finally made her way back to London, arriving at Euston Station.
“I got out and I stood around and the crowds were all around me and I didn’t know quite what to do. And so I just waited on the platform and eventually, as I couldn’t see anyone, I thought, ‘Oh, what can I do? ’ Then someone came out of the crowds. Someone called, ‘Hello, Yvonne, is that you?
’ And there was Vera…. I said, ‘Oh, Vera, how are you? Where am I going to go? ’ And she said, ‘Oh, I’ll take you to your father.
He’s just outside London. ’ And I couldn’t believe that was Vera. You know, there was no explanation. And she was just glad to pick me up.
”
But as they talked, Yvonne revealed disturbing news. After just three months in the field, she had been captured. “We were arrested on a Sunday. And it was a fine day.
I was found and pulled out and chucked on the floor. ” For most of the past year she had been held at the Nazi concentration camp Ravensbrück. Atkins now faced the reality that a similar fate may have befallen her other missing agents. “One has the impression reading the papers of that period that none of them really believed that anyone English would ever end up in a concentration camp,” Helm said.
“It wasn’t for us, certainly not for our boys or for our girls. The idea that women would end up in concentration camps was simply not, I don’t think, ever considered. ”
Other details were emerging that made matters worse. The consequences of the overlooked security checks became clear.
“All the details became apparent that they themselves had actually dropped agents straight into enemy hands,” Helm said. “It wasn’t just that they were going out to a risky situation, but she’d actually seen agents off who when they arrived at the other end were going to be received straight by the Gestapo. They were given no chance. And it was their own organization.
It was their own masters who had actually allowed them to fall into this lethal trap. ”
Faced with this, Atkins embarked on an extraordinary mission. In December 1945, she set off alone into the chaos of war-torn Germany, determined to find out what had happened to her girls. It was this mission that would one day make her name.
She was hailed for her selfless commitment and sense of duty—but was there more to it than that? If Atkins had, for whatever reason, covered up Buckmaster’s mistakes and knowingly sent agents to their possible deaths, then she was looking not only for her agents but also for atonement. Whatever her motivation, the task was difficult. Germany was flooded with millions of displaced people and refugees.
The British government had never admitted to sending women behind enemy lines, so Atkins’ girls weren’t even named on the lists of the missing. But slowly, Atkins traced them. She had last seen Madeleine Damerment at an airfield in West Sussex, one of dozens of agents dropped into France after the Prosper disaster of 1943. Now Atkins found out what had happened.
The radio that had called Madeleine in had indeed been in German hands. When she touched down in France, the Gestapo were there to meet her. She was taken to their Paris headquarters and kept for three months, interrogated by the secret police commander Hans Joseph Kiefer. From there Atkins traced her movements: first to a women’s prison in Karlsruhe, then to Dachau.
The Americans had fought their way into Dachau in April 1945. What they found there horrified the world. They liberated 33,000 surviving inmates. But it was too late for Madeleine.
Her story had ended there. At dawn on September 13, 1944, she had been dragged into the yard of the camp, made to kneel, and shot in the back of the neck. For Vera Atkins, this was the stuff of nightmares. She had traveled to Germany hoping to find some agents alive, but the chances were that they were all dead.
She continued the search for her other women, some of whom had worked for the Prosper network. Such had been the infiltration of the circuit that they had stood little chance. One by one they had been traced and captured, interrogated at Gestapo headquarters before being sent to prison. Nothing could prepare Atkins for what she uncovered next.
The girls’ final destination was Natzweiler concentration camp, a desolate place designed to fulfill the Nazi policy of Nacht und Nebel—night and fog—an initiative to obliterate all trace of certain special prisoners. Atkins painstakingly tracked down evidence to piece together what had happened there. On July 6, 1944, Atkins’ girls Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, and Diana Rowden were given an injection and told they were being vaccinated against typhoid. But the syringe contained carbolic acid, a toxin designed to kill them.
The women were then dragged to the crematorium, where a guard was waiting to burn their bodies. Atkins gathered the evidence in meticulous, distressing detail. “She herself heard everything down to the fact that their clothes were taken off before they were actually put in the flames. ”
Another Natzweiler guard, Franz Berg, had witnessed the deaths.
He revealed that the injections hadn’t worked on at least one of the women. “There was evidence from one of the people working in the crematorium at the time that she had scratched the faces of another of the Germans and screamed as she was being put into the flames, all of which Vera heard. ” It meant that one, or maybe even all, of the women had been burned alive. By January 1947, Vera Atkins had discovered the fates of all F Section’s missing agents but one.
One hundred and seventeen men and women had been killed by the Nazis. Eleven of those were Atkins’ girls. When the Allies began to bring the Nazis to justice, Atkins stood as a vital witness at two war crimes trials. Her evidence saw those who had harmed her girls sentenced to death and executed.
The case of the missing agents was closed. SOE was disbanded in January 1946, and the files on F Section were locked away. Maurice Buckmaster returned to his old job as a public relations officer for Ford. Atkins returned to civilian life as a British citizen and a respected member of British society.
But she couldn’t let SOE go. In the years after the war, she vigorously defended its work, becoming a sort of public representative for the SOE story. She became the conduit for families wanting information about missing relatives—their sons, daughters, fathers. They went to her, and she received their letters, wrote back, and followed up on their stories.
Vera Atkins never acknowledged that anything had gone wrong at F Section. She remained a highly secretive person. “She knew perfectly well this was something she would live with for the rest of her life,” Helm said, “and the only way that she would be able to live with it was by extraordinary self-control and mental control. ”
No one can be certain why Vera Atkins kept her silence in the summer of 1943 when the Prosper network was destroyed.
Maybe she hadn’t spotted the danger. Perhaps she really did have something to hide. Or maybe there was nothing she could have done. What isn’t in doubt is the extraordinary responsibility she felt for her girls.
“She was responsible for my going to France and my being in and my getting out and so on,” Yvonne Baseden said. “Indirectly, she was responsible for that and she knew that. From all the agents’ point of view, she had the responsibility. My goodness, what a responsibility.
”
The shadow of the F Section disaster stayed with Vera Atkins for life. “I remember absolutely everyone,” she said. “Andrée Borrel, Diana Rowden, Cecily Lefort, Noor Inayat Khan, Violette Szabo…”
