Atkins, Vera

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Vera Atkins

British intelligence agent Vera Atkins (1908-2000), as principal assistant in Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) secret service, administered some of the most sensitive secret operations carried out by Allied forces during World War II.

Atkins's story is among the most striking illustrations of the collision between individual interpersonal ethics and the vast forces of worldwide conflict to be found in the annals of the entire World War II period. Atkins sent secret agents, drawn from all walks of life, into occupied France, to be dropped by parachute into an unknown fate. She knew, and they knew, that they faced a significant likelihood of being killed, yet that knowledge did not affect her precise implementation of a spy program that, at least until it was infiltrated, gave the Germans considerable trouble. After the war's end, Atkins embarked on a remarkable personal and professional odyssey, attempting to account for each and every one of the agents who had died in service to her mission, and she very nearly succeeded.

Concealed Jewish Background

Atkins was of Jewish descent, something she took pains to hide at various times in her life. She was born Vera-May Rosenberg on June 15, 1908, in Galatz, Romania. She later took her English mother's maiden name, which was Atkins, when she moved to England in the 1930s, and she replaced May with the more Christian-sounding Maria. (Obituaries reported her middle name as Maria but her biographer, Sarah Helm, unearthed and reproduced her original birth certificate, which reads as above.) Atkins's father, Maximilian Rosenberg, was a German-born Jew who moved from farming into the lucrative field of supplying lumber to industry, including South African diamond mines. Vera was born shortly after his return to Europe, by which time he had become a wealthy man. He purchased a substantial country estate.

The life of the young Vera Rosenberg gave few hints of the steel-willed spy runner to come. She was sent to Lausanne, Switzerland, and to Paris, to finishing schools, where she learned to speak faultless French, a skill that would later serve her well. These schools also required poetry and diction classes in English, and Rosenberg also learned to speak that language like a native, with an upper-class accent. Her life was a whirl of social events, aristocratic hunting parties, and numerous marital suitors. Some were highly placed landowners, sons of diplomats, and the like; her Jewish faith was sometimes an issue, sometimes not. Atkins took a job in London in the early 1930s, returned to Romania, perhaps because of a romance, and finally, as conditions deteriorated for Jews in central Europe, moved to London for good in 1937. As life for her family got worse, Atkins made a fateful compromise: in 1940, according to Helm, she paid a $150,000 bribe to a Nazi intelligence agent in Antwerp, Belgium, in order to help her cousin Fritz obtain a passport.

As with many other intelligence agents, Atkins had an ambiguous background. Other members of her family had trafficked in information across Europe during much of the period between the two world wars. That might have brought her to the attention of Britain's Secret Service as war loomed, and her linguistic competence—she spoke German well, in addition to English, French, and Romanian— would also have made her a candidate. She was recruited for the SOE, which she joined in the early stages of the war. She started as a secretary.

The SOE was a sabotage unit, set up at the direction of British prime minister Winston Churchill and told to set occupied Europe ablaze. The F section was the division assigned to France, which had been overrun by the Germans in 1940 and was under the control of a government at Vichy, administered by German military authorities and their French collaborators. Although she was an amateur in the business of intelligence operations, she first became an intelligence officer and then, in her early 30s, was made principal assistant to the SOE's director, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, at the SOE offices at 62-64 Baker Street in London. Buckmaster was reputedly the model for “M” in novelist Ian Fleming's series of James Bond novels, while Miss Moneypenny, somewhat incongruously, was modeled on Atkins. A large portion of the operations planning for F section was left to Atkins herself, and, as subsequent events showed, the successes the unit accomplished were likely due to her own efforts rather than those of the chief to whom Adolf Hitler assigned an equal place with Churchill on his enemies list.

Staged Tea Party

Atkins's networks began with recruitment, during which candidates were interviewed in a hotel room with a single light bulb, quizzed to determine their fluency in French, and sent away to think, after being told that their chances of survival were 50-50. Since French general Charles de Gaulle refused to allow French citizens to participate, the new spies were mostly English citizens who had a French parent. Beyond their common ability to speak French, they represented a vast cross section of English society, from taxi drivers to a playwright. At their training camp, a sixteenth-century country house, they were trained in explosives and in the tradecraft of the spy. Atkins, who reportedly worked 18-hour days, schooled them in the minutiae of French life and gave them realistic documents and other items such as ticket stubs, that could identify them as French.

Finally the candidate was summoned to have tea with a Miss Vivienne Thomas at 57 Wimpole Street. This was Atkins. She explained the agent's specific mission, handed over the appropriate identity papers, and sent him or her off with a shouted French expletive. She stood on the airfield runway to watch as each one departed. The agents she placed in the field became a remarkably cohesive and focused group. According to Julian Jackson, writing Atkins's London Guardian obituary, one agent who was distracted from his duties was chided by Atkins with the comment, “Oh the bloody English …. We never have this sort of bother with the French …. They copulate and that is that.” Atkins was described by associates as businesslike, with never a hair out of place on her head.

Her inner experiences, however, were a different story. As she later admitted, according to Jackson, “The burden of stress was probably on the person who was seeing them off. The realisation that they were going out on a very dangerous mission … while you remained quite safely at the end. There was a considerable strain on one at this time. I think I must have been extraordinarily tough—I was extremely exhausted by it.”

The exploits of some of Atkins's agents became part of Britain's World War II lore. Some were tortured and sent to German concentration camps. Accounts of those who survived told of extreme heroism under torture. Odette Sansom refused to tell Nazi interrogators her secrets even when her toenails were pulled out one by one. Most famous of all was the Indian-British Noor Inayat Khan, known as Nora, who was beaten to death by her captors and spoke only the single French word “liberté”—liberty. At the beginning of her training with Atkins she had been shy, childlike, and, according to her own testimony, incapable of lying.

Betrayed by French Pilot

The capture rate was as high as it was because a French pilot ferrying Atkins's agents into France had divulged the F section's secrets. The resulting problems were compounded when Buckmaster discounted mounting evidence that the operation had been compromised, at least until the Germans sent a thank-you note for the weapons and money they had seized. Of the 400 agents Atkins sent into the field, 118 were missing when France was liberated in the summer of 1944.

The next chapter in Atkins's story of secret service began after the war, when she applied for and, despite the misgivings of superiors who feared the malfeasance that might be exposed, was given the responsibility for interrogating defeated German soldiers and guards to find out what they might know about the disappearance of the 118 agents. She pointed out that she was the only person with the background knowledge to conduct the interviews most effectively. “I could not just abandon their memory,” she said, according to Douglas Martin, in Atkins's obituary in the New York Times. “I decided we must find out what happened to each one, and where.” In one of the most remarkable feats of investigation in military history, she discovered the fate of all 118 agents, 117 of whom had been killed. The last one had taken the Secret Service's money and fled to the casinos of Monaco. Captured Germans said that she was the most skilled interrogator they had ever faced, and she was also assigned to interrogate Auschwitz concentration camp commander Rudolf Höss. When Atkins asked him if it was true that he was responsible for the deaths of 1.5 million Jews, he corrected her with a figure of 2,345,000.

Atkins left the Secret Service in 1947 and, perhaps because of the Antwerp episode with her cousin, kept a low profile for many years, giving rise to rumors that she had spied for either Germany or the Soviet Union. She worked at the Special Forces Club. In 1987 she was named a commandant of the French Legion of Honor. Settling in a seacoast house in the town of Winchelsea in southeast England, she began to share her knowledge with historians late in her life, although even in 1998 the 90-year-old Atkins told her biographer Sarah Helm that “I have closed the book on many things in life.” (Helm's biography supplements what she learned from Atkins with interviews of her relatives and associates, and with extensive investigation of source documents.) Atkins died in Hastings, East Sussex, England, on June 24, 2000.