A Life in Secrets (review)

When Britain's Special Operations Executive was closed down at the end of World War II, there were many questions left unanswered. The organization, created by Churchill and famously charged to "set Europe ablaze," had infiltrated agents into the Nazi-occupied countries of Europe to organize, arm, and train resistance groups to rise up when the anticipated cross-Channel invasion took place. In the end, it left an ambiguous record, particularly in France. Some effective leaders in the French Section succeeded in holding up German reinforcements to the Normandy D-Day beachhead. Less well-organized or less careful agents were captured and sent to the infamous camps as Nacht und Nebel prisoners—meant to disappear without trace.

The haste with which officials put an end to the existence of SOE at war's end kept the degree and nature of its failures from the public until well into the 1950s, when it became known that women had been sent into the field as couriers and radio operators, and that some had not returned. There were heroines like Odette, celebrated in biographies and films, but investigations began to uncover uglier stories about some of the other thirteen who, out of the thirty-nine women who had been landed or parachuted into France, never returned.

Their fates had in fact been established immediately after the war, although not made public until later, by the woman who had worked most closely with them in preparing them for their missions and seeing them off when they boarded the planes that would take them into the unknown darkness of Fortress Europe.

It was generally acknowledged that Vera Atkins, the intelligence officer of French Section, was more astute than her immediate superior, the head of F Section, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, and that her loyalty to him, as to "her" agents, was boundless. But almost nothing was known during her lifetime about Vera Atkins's past. When she died in 2000 her family commissioned journalist Sarah Helm to write a biography, making available letters and other documents hidden away for years. Helm put her background as an investigative reporter to good use as she traced Vera Atkins's journey from an assimilated German Jewish family living a privileged life in Romania to her highly sensitive position in the London headquarters of the French section of SOE, where she impressed colleagues as "English to the bone" with her dignified demeanor and Mayfair accent.

Her foreign roots were not the only surprise. Following the trail established by Vera Atkins's letters and extensive interviews with those who had known her in years gone by, her biographer uncovered the answer to the mystery that had intrigued historians, journalists, former SOE agents and authors of a stream of books since the war's end. How could it have happened that despite repeated messages from radio operators indicating they had been caught, French Section went on sending agents directly into waiting German hands? How could they have responded to an agent omitting his security check with a nanny-like tut-tut ("You have forgotten your security check. Be more careful next time." As one infuriated agent put it, "What did they think the security check was for?") Over the years, authors of the growing number of books about F Section put forth answers ranging from the inevitable muddle of wartime pressure to various byzantine conspiracy theories.

The answer revealed by Sarah Helms's researches has to do in part with Vera Atkins's unsuspected background. She would never have been allowed to secure or continue in a position involving such secret activities of the government had it been known that she was not a British subject but technically an enemy alien. Her hopes rested on Buckmaster's support of her petition to become a British subject, and she was consequently reluctant to cross him or question his judgment. And it was Buckmaster's decision to send some unsuitable young women into the field as...