Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II (review)

The best description of this problematic book is the old saw "What is true is not new and what is new is not true."

Ever since the first disclosures in the 1950s that the British had sent women into occupied France during World War II as participants in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), there has been an unending flood of books about the secret organization which recruited resisters, armed and trained them in anticipation of the cross-channel invasion, and the women who served in it in every capacity from delivering messages and sending wireless messages to carrying out sabotage actions. Many books by historians as well as journalists have told of the woman who, as second-in-command of SOE's French Section, saw these agents off, wished them luck, and after the war took it upon herself to follow the trail of those who did not return in order to discover their fate. Vera Atkins devoted much of her life after the war to helping others—writers, scholars, and students—to record the lives of the luckless agents and honoring their memories. (In the interests of disclosure, I was one of those writers.)

When Vera Atkins died in 2000, her family made all of her papers available to Sarah Helm, an investigative journalist who in 2005 produced an exhaustively researched biography which also benefited from the release of hitherto classified documents. It left little for scholars to discover although much for them to discuss.

Now William Stevenson has produced what purports to be a biography of Vera Atkins but falls far short of the requisites of scholarship while exhibiting many of the characteristics of fiction. He claims to have encountered Atkins in his youth and describes her and the impression she made on him in terms worthy of a bodice-ripper ("she unbuttoned her tunic. . . . I became aware of her breasts pressing against a lavender silk shirt. . . . She bent closer and I sensed her warm body and smelled her bare skin.")

If the account Stevenson gives of her life after their supposed meeting is right, everything else ever written about her and about French Section is wrong. Like Woody Allen's character Zelig, she is placed at the center of every important event that took place and every important decision made during the war years, many of which she could hardly have known about at the time, let alone participated in. He falls into the would-be biographer's morass of possibilities and probabilities. (One example: "He surmised that . . . Vera's polite avoidance concealed a burning rage" [pp. 130–31] is attributed to William Donovan, thus compounding the inner thoughts of two dead people unable to corroborate or deny his description of their thoughts.) Such descriptions of the secret motives, the unspoken thoughts, the personal impressions of Vera Atkins (example: "Vera imagined," on p. 302) and others who have already passed from the scene lead the reader to suppose that the author is either a psychic medium or a novelist manqué.

Nowhere in the memory of any living person who knew Vera Atkins or in the recorded words of those no longer alive is there any evidence that Stevenson was close to her, let alone a singular confidante. Yet his entire narrative, often unclear (entire paragraphs consisting of strings of nonsequiturs) and confusing (on one page we are in 1943, a few pages later in 1941), rests on the assumption that he was privy to her every thought and action.

The book suffers from a lack of editing, both in terms of fact-checking and copy-editing. On page 301 the author names Maurice Southgate as the artist who sketched women prisoners; it was in fact Brian Stonehouse, whose story has been repeatedly told in print and on film. The code-breaker Leo Marks is said to have...