Thinking of how to describe the book brings to mind the small shops in Manhattan that one saw in the eighties, so crammed with beautiful things, standing out on the sidewalk looking at the window of one was quite like being in a museum.
An extraordinary wealth of vital information, usually pushed under rugs, is crammed in this book, in a way that not only keeps one alert while reading - or else one can miss a vital detail in a half sentence or so - but makes it not an easy read. Easy it's not, worthy of being read by everyone it definitely is, for the many intricate layers of truth veiled in the usual story told about the era.
By the end of it much that is for decades locked away in secrecy from public gaze or pushed under the rug is exposed, including Stalin's refusal to allow allies help for Poland and the Germans sinking British convoys for Russia due to USSR deliberately using codes known to be broken by nazis, Vichy officials following orders for extermination of Jews in thousands even after Normandy invasion, German forces burning alive whole villages of france and hundreds of people imcluding children of every age, and allies ignoring repeated messages about extermination camps throughout Europe that could have been easily forced to stop work, much of this because the British or French officials concerned were pro Nazi or antisemitic or agents working for Stalin.
What comes through above all, halfway through the book, is just how much of a lie is the talk about the Cliveden Set, even if all true - for, it wasn't a small set that was pro Nazi and looking for peace with them even through the battle of Britain, it was most, or at least much, of the aristocracy, including the royalty and not just the ex- king but the king too, and in all likelihood the Dowager queen as well. She is mentioned in context of a tea and a conversation that's between appeasing and pro Nazi.
But the detail that strikes one as the most prominent and pushed under rug everywhere else, is the mention of "Duke of Coburg who was pro nazi", which stops one in tracks and gets one searching for what they mean, since its in context of the British Royal family. Turns out, it was Charles Edward, the son of Prince Leopold who was the fourth son of Queen Victoria, whose sister Princess Alice was Duchess of Athlone and in Canada during WWII with her husband who was appointed the Cicero there, and they hosted the various conferences of allies including Churchill and FDR.
Charles Edward though was not just a sympathiser but an active Nazi, involved in S.A. and aware of the genocides at concentration camps; his sister and brother in law pleaded on his behalf with U.S. authorities, travelling to Germany post WWII from Canada for the purpose, but the request wasnt granted. However, he received an indictment and sentence on a lighter charge since his daughters son was set to inherit the Dutch throne eventually, was impoverished as a result, and saw the coronation of his first cousin's daughter Elizabeth only in a theatre in Germany where he lived, whether because uninvited or other reasons.
It wasn't the Cliveden Set that was exceptional, it was Churchill who stood up for truth and right and fought for it, with general public on his side.
What's worse, the officialdom was aware of the genocide, but carefully pushed it under the rug, and that makes one wonder, was that how Divine Justice brought it about that the sun did finally set on the empire - and how!
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The preface brings one awake.
"Vera Atkins was the brilliant, highly effective leader of a select group who fought in secrecy against the Nazis in occupied Europe after the fall of France in 1940. These brave young men and women had volunteered for Special Operations Executive (SOE), improvised at this time of greatest peril by Winston Churchill, the last hope of a country whose leaders he had tried for years to awaken to the growing danger of Nazi Germany. Long out of office, he suddenly—“almost too late,” he remarked—became prime minister on May 10, 1940, at which point he had to confront those in Whitehall who sought to appease Hitler and make a separate peace. Even loyal staff officers in the War Office of Churchill's government resented the secrecy surrounding SOE and feared that its agents’ violent actions against the enemy were incompatible with democratic traditions, “offending international law and the concept of habeas corpus.” To these niceties, the utterly pragmatic Churchill responded by instructing the British chiefs of staff “to develop a reign of terror to make the lives of German occupiers an eternal torment.” That message also gave Vera Atkins's SOE a license to conduct her campaign in occupied France as her extraordinary mind and steely resolve dictated.
"Churchill's hope after he became prime minister was that, sooner or later, America would join England in opposing the formidable Nazi war machine, for despite his indomitable public figure and ringing statements, he was far from sure England could win alone. His relations with President Roosevelt were good, but as the 1940 election neared, Roosevelt warned his friend that antiwar sentiment in the States was high, even overwhelming, which he could not ignore. In that election year Roosevelt—and the American people—were also far from convinced England would win the war. To get a better picture, FDR sent his trusted confidant William J. Donovan, the future head of OSS, to London to assess the situation. There Donovan was put in contact with Vera Atkins. She so impressed him that he reported back to the president his strong impression of her, and Britain's, courage and his conviction that the tide would be turned. Thus it is fair to say that, in addition to her accomplishments as Britain's Spymistress, she was also a key factor in convincing the Roosevelt administration of the Allies’ ultimate success.
"SOE was Churchill's desperate attempt to demonstrate that there was life in the old lion yet and, indeed, to make life “an eternal torment” for the Nazis, who after their blitzkrieg attacks across continental Europe were preparing to carry out Hitler's Directive 16 and invade England. SOE's mandate from the start was to sabotage, burn, harass, and kill the enemy, “to set the continent ablaze.” Its numbers were strikingly few. Of 480 agents in the French Section, 130 were tortured, and many were executed in shocking circumstances. Despite their heavy losses, these men and women, over the four long years of German occupation, wreaked havoc on the Nazis throughout the country. With the growing help of the French Resistance, they cut phone lines to force the Germans to communicate by wireless (so Bletchley could intercept), blew up bridges and tunnels, and derailed military trains. As this book shows, at the time of the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944, they were so effective in harassing the German divisions rushing from the south of France and the Eastern Front to reinforce Normandy that they slowed down their arrival long enough, perhaps, to have turned the tide of the war.
"In prewar Europe, Vera had already been working against this ruthless enemy. She was aided in this clandestine effort by William Stephenson (Intrepid), a Canadian businessman who, together with some other imported North Americans, had early sensed the dangers inherent in Hitler's rise to power, and formed in New York the British Security Coordination (BSC) office. Meeting Vera first in Bucharest and later in London, Stephenson was so impressed by her mind, her mastery of several languages, her dedication, and her fierce anti-Nazi stance that he sent her on fact-finding missions to several European countries, secretly reporting her findings to a few trusted souls in Britain. Together they supplied Churchill, then in his political wilderness, with facts about the growing Nazi threat and the sorry neglect of UK defenses. These facts were ignored by most members of Parliament before the outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939, when the first German blitz quickly subjugated Poland. A fierce Polish anti-Nazi resistance arose from the ashes to inspire similar resistance movements in other German-occupied countries. Vera immediately saw that France, just across the English Channel, would soon be fertile ground for her agents.
"Despite her very British name and demeanor, Vera was actually Romanian Jewish, born Vera Maria Rosenberg in Bucharest. In England, this put her at constant risk from the Alien Act of 1793 and the Official Secrets Act, which criminalizes the publication—even the republication—of certain kinds of information deemed to be a security risk. She took the name Vera Atkins, derived from her mother's maiden name, Etkin, to avoid detention as an enemy alien. Into her old age, she would dance and make merry with SOE survivors who knew her only as Miss Atkins, who honored her for superior qualities of intellect and loyalty, and who never talked of their wartime work until SOE came under attack by postwar critics.
"Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, who had worked alongside Vera, was thunderstruck when in October 1958 a book entitled Double Webs was published. Its author, Jean Overton Fuller, claimed that SOE's air movements officer in France, Henri Dericourt, had actually been a double agent and that SOE agents were deliberately sacrificed “to draw the Gestapo away from still more secret operations.” On November 13, 1958, Dame Irene Ward, a member of Parliament, proposed to table a motion calling for an Official Secrecy Act Inquiry into these and other allegations of SOE incompetence. She was persuaded not to proceed by then prime minister Harold Macmillan, who said an official history would be commissioned. This appeared eight years later, in 1966, written by M. R. D. Foot, with details approved by the government and published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
"Buckmaster released a public statement that said in part: “The events which took place more than twenty years ago have left their mark on many people who would be glad to have left the dead to sleep in peace (allowing the results of their bravery to speak for themselves). …We have been called amateurs. It is true that SOE was an ad hoc organization for which no blueprints existed before the war…. The most appalling accusation made against us is that we DELIBERATELY sent out agents into the hands of the Gestapo” to be tortured into disclosing misleading information. “I flatly deny such monstrous and intolerable accusations…. The French Resistance, in the words of General Eisenhower, ‘shortened the war by many months.’ The world owes to the men and women of the French Section [of SOE] a debt which can never be fully discharged.”
"All her life, Vera had fought running battles with bureaucrats and military chiefs who disapproved of SOE “skullduggery.” She had scuffled continuously with the SIS, whose European networks had been compromised by the German kidnapping of SIS agents. Some SIS mandarins were actually dedicated to the destruction of SOE. After the war Vera held her tongue, even more conscious of her vulnerability in the Cold War hunt for Soviet-run agents with Jewish and foreign backgrounds.
"During her lifetime Vera was publicly silent. She had bitter memories of the SIS effort from 1940 through 1945 to shut down SOE while her agents fought valiantly abroad. Immediately after World War II, SOE's domestic enemies finally succeeded in shutting it down. Then, early in 1946 a mysterious fire gutted the top floor of SOE's Baker Street headquarters, destroying most of its records. According to Angus Fyffe, a veteran of SOE and its record keeper, those records contained political time bombs waiting to explode. Vera and her colleagues had fought doggedly during the war to maintain their independence from the War Office and official bureaucracy. Once the war was over, Vera withdrew to her home in Winchelsea where she lived quietly—and silently—for the next half century.
"Vera lived long enough to see Churchill's foresight vindicated yet again. It justified her silence. Why give away secrets to satisfy short-term public curiosity, secrets about underground operations and improvised explosives and weapons that a new enemy could adopt? She still had reservations about the potential power of secrecy laws, but she never believed, as many did when the Cold War ended, that we had reached the end of history. Churchill's book The River War, published in 1899—and her own needless difficulties in fighting domestic enemies—convinced her that secrecy laws could be held in reserve to deal with exceptional danger. She knew that parliamentary procedures could go hand in hand with secrecy, as her hitherto untold story here reveals."
If the preface is as thrilling as this, the rest must be unimaginably vital.
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The introduction, plunging one in London in midst of the blitz, with a ten year old boy scout using his bicycle to carry messages to and from important people when phone lines aren't working due to bombing and he has to avoid craters on road, is far from disappointing after the preface - and this boy introduces us to Vera Atkins.
"The bombing of London was at its peak in the summer of 1940. I bicycled messages between East Ham police station and emergency posts if phone lines were cut. My Boy Scout uniform opened a way through cordoned streets where rescue workers dug for survivors. Hitler's war machine had destroyed France and was poised to cross the English Channel. I had seen from the sergeant's procommunist Daily Worker that the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Key Pittman, said Great Britain faced certain defeat and “must capitulate.” The sergeant never read the popular papers, insisting, “They're run by pro-Nazi press barons.”
"The address was in London's West End. Piccadilly, Marble Arch, and Buckingham Palace had been hit in the night, as well as the Park Lane mansion of the Marquess of Londonderry, a former air minister who wanted an alliance with the Nazis. Of this, I knew little. I was a last-resort means of communication: a small, bare-headed, bare-kneed boy, bicycling past overturned electric trams and their drooping power cables still spitting blue sparks between mangled metal tracks. Drivers of red double-deck buses bravely tried to keep to their peacetime schedules, and some nosedived into pits that yawned suddenly when time bombs exploded. In one crater, the bus to Ladbroke Grove creaked and groaned like a dying dinosaur."
The boy met Vera Atkins, and the man she took him up to meet, who sent a message to his mother through him to inform her that the boy's father was safe, returning home from France, and that neither of them should say any of it to anyone else.
"My reunited family moved to 109 Bletchley Road, Bletchley, home of the ULTRA code breakers who sat in cold wooden huts, struggling daily to solve the ever-changing conundrums in encrypted Enigma signals. The townsfolk never breathed a word. I had to wait until 2001 to be told by a cousin, Jacques Deleporte, how his family in France were shocked when Father returned before D-day. Germans surrounded the house, which sheltered a Jewish family. Father was in uniform as insurance against being shot as a spy. He never spoke of this. Nor did my mother. It was Jacques who finally told me how my mother taught raw agents to mangle their classroom French, if they wanted to survive in Occupied Europe.
"In the years leading up to World War II, Vera had provided Winston Churchill with information on Germany's secret preparations for a blitzkrieg when he was in the political wilderness, maligned as a drink-sodden warmonger. In mid-1940 he was suddenly in charge of a war that seemed already lost. In response, Churchill officially founded the Special Operations Executive (SOE), an intelligence agency that specialized in nontraditional methods. Vera became one of its most valuable assets, a spymistress. SOE's structure was so fluid that if she chose to wear the modest uniform of a pilot-officer, she could still give orders to a major general.
"With a deliberate lack of secrecy, Churchill proclaimed SOE's directives: Set Europe ablaze! Make Hitler's life an eternal torment! Hit and run! Butcher and bolt! The rhetoric was meant to make Hitler rethink his invasion plans and show Americans their help would not be wasted. After that, SOE became practically invisible, except when Vera was authorized to show an influential American, OSS director William J. Donovan, on his first secret mission for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the preparations for what she called “closework”: the close engagement of a physically superior foe by clandestine armies supplied with hurriedly invented weapons that could be quickly assembled in the field for sabotage, assassination, and hand-to-hand combat.
"Vera recruited her agents carefully, trained them until they dropped from exhaustion, constantly tested them, then personally packed them off on missions. Her clandestine army went deep behind enemy lines, linked up with resistance fighters, destroyed vital targets, helped Allied pilots escape capture, and radioed information back to London. Her agents and saboteurs were not armed with aerial fighting machines. If they chose to die to evade capture, they crunched on lethal cyanide pills. They were willing to do everything to liberate Europe from the Nazis.
"Before SOE's official birth, Vera worked with impoverished prewar secret agencies and the obscure Industrial Intelligence Centre of the Committee of Imperial Defence (IICCID), which had been formed “to discover and report plans for manufacture of armaments and war stores in foreign countries.” The IICCID languished during years of neglect, and its chief, Desmond Morton, conveyed information to Churchill from anti-Nazis like Vera and from active servicemen who risked prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. They disclosed information because they felt their armed forces were betrayed by poor leadership and a lack of vision, or worse. Lord Londonderry, the air minister who presided over the decline of the Royal Air Force (RAF), sent a letter on the eve of war to the German air force chief, Hermann Göring. It began: “Dear General der Flieger and Minister President (though I would prefer to call you ‘Siegfried’ as you are my conception of a Siegfried of modern times).” It was not only the British Union of Fascists who admired Hitler: the evidence was buried in secret files until now.
"Those of Hitler's admirers who were already known among the political and social elite of England in the false peace of the 1920s and 1930s were called Guilty Men, against whom an underground war was fought by a group of self-styled Mutual Friends who combined their special knowledge to warn of Britain's terrifying vulnerability before the open conflict with Germany began. Vera's ideas about covert warfare stemmed from her part in this underground war.
"When SOE was born, Vera Atkins's true identity as a Jew of Romanian extraction could have gotten her interned as a wartime “enemy alien.” She was uniquely vulnerable to the application of old secrecy laws. Later, as a naval fighter pilot who flew spy planes and was drawn into intelligence gathering, I was bound by the same oath of secrecy that sealed Vera's lips.
"Vera acquired a “sterile identity”; personal data would lead only to blank spaces in official registers. In the public domain are 1945–47 postwar reports on how she hunted down those who tortured and killed 118 of her agents who never returned from behind enemy lines, and pursued some of their tormentors into Stalinist territory. Other accounts of her heroic career come from Mutual Friends in the intelligence world, some of whom need to remain anonymous. Some SOE survivors took the risk of talking about the shabby reasons behind the pitiless termination of SOE and the destruction of its records after World War II. They told me their stories of the woman they had greatly admired until her death in 2000. I recorded the authoritative recollections of many who knew Vera, and read notes kept by Sir William Stephenson—the man called Intrepid, who ran British Security Coordination (BSC) out of New York—and his wife, Lady Mary. Stephenson was Canadian; Mary was from Tennessee. Neither had to swear a British oath of secrecy, and so they were valuable sources of information. Their discussions with Vera began in prewar Bucharest, and continued in Britain. Vera's close friend SOE agent Sonia “Tony” d'Artois provided or corroborated much of the personal information. She and her husband, Guy, parachuted behind the lines, fought with distinction, and said they always felt safe in the hands of the formidably efficient Miss Atkins. Sonia described Vera to me as the liveliest of fun-loving companions, when free from professional cares. Another source was SOE's director of operations, Major General Colin “Gubby” Gubbins, who was on a secret mission with Vera in Poland in 1939 when Hitler unleashed the first blitzkrieg. Her unique knowledge of the terrain enabled them to escape with Polish code breakers and copies of the German Enigma coding machines.
"In France, I found many records unavailable in London. Other foreign archives are far less restricted. The Swiss Intelligence Agency (SIA) keeps files that were readily opened for me; a director-general of the SIA pointed out that his small country survived on superb foreign intelligence. Americans, often accused of being obsessed with secrecy, gladly allowed me to examine the records of the wartime Office of Strategic Studies (OSS), precursor to the CIA. Bill Colby, a wartime agent and later a CIA chief, shared with me his memories of Vera. Bill Donovan, who launched the OSS, was first shown SOE's improvisations by Vera, before Pearl Harbor, when she convinced him that Britain was not as ramshackle as it looked and was worth U.S. support.
"Ian Fleming, who was himself a spy, used Vera as the model for Miss Moneypenny, the secretary to his fictional James Bond, and said, “In the real world of spies, Vera Atkins was the boss.” She received no public recognition until 1995, when French president François Mitterrand astounded everyone by making her a Commandant of the Légion d'Honneur. Pete Lee, one of her former agents, said, “Now that her gallantry has been recognized at last, a number of us take great pleasure in lobbying for Queen Elizabeth II to make her a Companion of the British Empire.” The Victoria Cross, the highest decoration for courage, was for men only."
One begins to feel fortunate to have stumbled upon this book at all, in getting to know of such people.
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"FTP Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. Resistance movement originating with pro-Soviet agents in France."
Did FTP serve occupying nazis, 1939-1941, before Hitler attacked Russia?
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"Rote Kappelle: Red Orchestra"
The first chapter, about family and ancestors and early years of Vera, very informative, especially regarding her interactions with Schulenberg, Stephenson and Mary, apart from the various international facts of the time. Stephenson advised her to leave Romania and go to England, where her mother had been living for a while, when Hitler came to power.
"He showed her White's Club, the haunt of the intelligence community, “where Jews are never welcome.” He said, “As a woman, you may look at these clubs from outside. Only men are allowed in. Women are for pushing tea trolleys and tapping typewriters. This is the Establishment, the ruling class. King George V denied refuge to his cousin, the Russian tsar, because it might bring the revolution here, and left the tsar to be executed by the Bolsheviks. Fear of Bolshies dominates the ruling class. The Prince of Wales sees a rearmed Germany as the barrier against Stalin, and Nazi racism akin to attitudes toward inferior breeds in British colonies.”"
"By 1934 Hitler had the power to open prison camps for the Gestapo to fill. In Hamburg, Red agents spoke on the phone with Hitler's Brownshirts to plan the next day's street fighting. Each side hoped to win power through the breakdown of civic order."
About Stephenson, the man called Intrepid:-
"He controlled twenty other companies throughout Europe, allowing him to dig out intelligence useful to Churchill. He was known in Germany for an aircraft made in one of his factories, which won the King's Cup air race in 1934. Berlin's curiosity showed itself in the friendliness of German aviators. Stephenson found this ironic, since the British air ministry displayed no interest at all."
Did Upton Sinclair use him for the two diverse personae of Lanny and Robbie Budd duo, or was Stephenson's father the model for Robbie?
"Vera learned a rule she would later instill in agents: “You may prepare for surprises in another country, but you'll still be taken by surprise when you get there.” At the British legation in Bucharest, she had scanned well-informed situation reports that never prepared her for the London newspaper proprietors, who ignored their own Berlin correspondents’ stories of the legalized murder of less-than-perfect babies, the tests for purebred white Aryans, and the labeling of the rest as “subhuman.” The growth of concentration camps was not worth a mention."
"“The leaders sit in the path of the monster and twiddle their thumbs,” he said, “like rabbits frozen in the headlights of a truck, flapping their ears instead of running.” There was nowhere to run for the poor in London's East End, who got their news through the migrant grapevines. Survivors of pogroms against Russian Jews speculated about the bombers assembled in Russia for the German air force that would later target the East End docklands: “the docks” handled overseas cargoes, without which Britain would starve. Underpaid East Enders were less easily deceived than City merchants. Handicapped veterans of the last war begged for food, their medals already sold. Trade unions were under scrutiny by the internal security service, MI5, on suspicion of communist sympathies. The Daily Worker called Soviet Russia the one ray of hope for workers living in East End squalor."
"The Workers’ Education Association in its East End evening classes taught how imperial lunacies led to conflict. One textbook began: “Austria declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914. Four days later, Germany declared war on Russia, and an Eastern Front stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. On August 4, Germany declared war on France and Britain. The Western Front became a stalemate of muddy trenches from the North Sea to the Alps. Nine and a half million men became battle casualties.” Vera came away admiring these tough East Enders. Some were burglars who took pride in using inventiveness rather than brutality. Others were humble inspectors of insurance claims, and knew the weak points in factories whose owners set fires to stave off bankruptcy. Many East Enders spoke Continental languages. Their communities were woven into the fabric of street life. They would make a reservoir of talent for any anti-Nazi resistance operations. They were natural street fighters, schooled in a world of the lower class.
"The West End was utterly upper class. Vera heard of its delayed reaction to the massacre in August 1929 of twenty-three Jews in Palestine by Arabs armed with axes. “I can't think why the Jews make such a fuss over a few dozen of their people,” Beatrice, the wife of the British colonial secretary, Sidney Webb, Lord Passfield, was quoted as saying by Chaim Weizmann, future first president of Israel. Living in England, he protested against “its insensitivity, its indifference and hostility.”"
"Rote Kappelle: Red Orchestra"
Kappelle is literally chapel, so the correct translation should be Red Chapel; this fits better with the rest of the explanation of the term, since communism is more comparable with church than with orchestra.
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The first chapter, about family and ancestors and early years of Vera, very informative, especially regarding her interactions with Schulenberg, Stephenson and Mary, apart from the various international facts of the time. Stephenson advised her to leave Romania and go to England, where her mother had been living for a while, when Hitler came to power.
"He showed her White's Club, the haunt of the intelligence community, “where Jews are never welcome.” He said, “As a woman, you may look at these clubs from outside. Only men are allowed in. Women are for pushing tea trolleys and tapping typewriters. This is the Establishment, the ruling class. King George V denied refuge to his cousin, the Russian tsar, because it might bring the revolution here, and left the tsar to be executed by the Bolsheviks. Fear of Bolshies dominates the ruling class. The Prince of Wales sees a rearmed Germany as the barrier against Stalin, and Nazi racism akin to attitudes toward inferior breeds in British colonies.”"
"By 1934 Hitler had the power to open prison camps for the Gestapo to fill. In Hamburg, Red agents spoke on the phone with Hitler's Brownshirts to plan the next day's street fighting. Each side hoped to win power through the breakdown of civic order."
About Stephenson, the man called Intrepid:-
"He controlled twenty other companies throughout Europe, allowing him to dig out intelligence useful to Churchill. He was known in Germany for an aircraft made in one of his factories, which won the King's Cup air race in 1934. Berlin's curiosity showed itself in the friendliness of German aviators. Stephenson found this ironic, since the British air ministry displayed no interest at all."
Did Upton Sinclair use him for the two diverse personae of Lanny and Robbie Budd duo, or was Stephenson's father the model for Robbie?
"Vera learned a rule she would later instill in agents: “You may prepare for surprises in another country, but you'll still be taken by surprise when you get there.” At the British legation in Bucharest, she had scanned well-informed situation reports that never prepared her for the London newspaper proprietors, who ignored their own Berlin correspondents’ stories of the legalized murder of less-than-perfect babies, the tests for purebred white Aryans, and the labeling of the rest as “subhuman.” The growth of concentration camps was not worth a mention."
"“The leaders sit in the path of the monster and twiddle their thumbs,” he said, “like rabbits frozen in the headlights of a truck, flapping their ears instead of running.” There was nowhere to run for the poor in London's East End, who got their news through the migrant grapevines. Survivors of pogroms against Russian Jews speculated about the bombers assembled in Russia for the German air force that would later target the East End docklands: “the docks” handled overseas cargoes, without which Britain would starve. Underpaid East Enders were less easily deceived than City merchants. Handicapped veterans of the last war begged for food, their medals already sold. Trade unions were under scrutiny by the internal security service, MI5, on suspicion of communist sympathies. The Daily Worker called Soviet Russia the one ray of hope for workers living in East End squalor."
"The Workers’ Education Association in its East End evening classes taught how imperial lunacies led to conflict. One textbook began: “Austria declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914. Four days later, Germany declared war on Russia, and an Eastern Front stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. On August 4, Germany declared war on France and Britain. The Western Front became a stalemate of muddy trenches from the North Sea to the Alps. Nine and a half million men became battle casualties.” Vera came away admiring these tough East Enders. Some were burglars who took pride in using inventiveness rather than brutality. Others were humble inspectors of insurance claims, and knew the weak points in factories whose owners set fires to stave off bankruptcy. Many East Enders spoke Continental languages. Their communities were woven into the fabric of street life. They would make a reservoir of talent for any anti-Nazi resistance operations. They were natural street fighters, schooled in a world of the lower class.
"The West End was utterly upper class. Vera heard of its delayed reaction to the massacre in August 1929 of twenty-three Jews in Palestine by Arabs armed with axes. “I can't think why the Jews make such a fuss over a few dozen of their people,” Beatrice, the wife of the British colonial secretary, Sidney Webb, Lord Passfield, was quoted as saying by Chaim Weizmann, future first president of Israel. Living in England, he protested against “its insensitivity, its indifference and hostility.”"
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Vera's introduction to British society here is strewn with thrilling tidbits for a reader not so mùch an insider to that society in that era. There are various people she came across, described here when relevant, and that includes a pilot who taught her to fly, an officer in military and a son in law of Marks, of Marks and Spencer, both relevant.
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Vera visited Berlin at the invitation of Schulenberg.
"Schulenburg had arranged for her to stay at the Tiergartenstrasse mansion of his wealthy colleague Friedrich “Freddie” Horstmann, head of the British desk at the German foreign ministry and one of the older diplomats who opposed Hitler. The parents of Horstmann's wife Lali were Jewish. Her father, an honorary British consul, was one of the few foreigners to wear Britain's Order of the Garter."
"Schulenburg said two million Nazi Party members could not tell seventy million Germans what to do. British diplomats listened to Nazi bigwigs at cocktail parties, instead of venturing into street bars where ordinary Germans asked openly when the British would help overthrow the Nazis."
"Wigram backed her opinion that British diplomats in Berlin were too busy entertaining English personages dazzled by “thrilling Nazi-land.” They raved about the blond blue-eyed young Nazis in “utterly smashing uniforms” who escorted them to Hitler's rallies. Vera said: “Great harm is done by visiting the Mayfair hostesses. These admirers of Hitler give an impression that pro-Nazi policy is fashioned in London drawing rooms, and discourage Berliners, afraid to act without British support.” Wigram was close to the permanent undersecretary at the British Foreign Office, Sir (later 1st Baron) Robert Vansittart, who was accused by his replacement, Sir Alexander Cadogan, of “dancing literary hornpipes” in assessing the fascist threat."
" ... Sam Edison Woods, acted as U.S. commercial attaché in Prague. Woods regularly traveled to Berlin on the personal instructions of President Roosevelt to report on German technology under cover of trade talks. He confirmed Vera's observation that the Berlin Cipher Office had reengineered the commercial coding machine first built in 1924 by Cipher Machines of Steglitzerstrasse 2, one of which Stephenson had purchased. Ralph Wigram's superiors refused to confirm Sam Woods's figures on German arms superiority. “Grave and terrible facts,” Wigram confided to Vera. He risked prosecution by disclosing these facts to Churchill.
"Then she heard that poor Horstmann, her generous Berlin host, the great diplomat and connoisseur of art, had been forced out of the foreign service and out of his mansion on Tiergartenstrasse. The price of integrity and of being Jewish was high, both in Berlin and in London."
Although Horstmann was a diplomat and Upton Sinclair's Johannes Robin was instead a wealthy trader who prospered by his own hard work and sharp mind, still, one wonders if Upton Sinclair knew Horstmann and based the description of the Robin's palace on the Horstmann mansion in Tiergartenstrasse.
King George V died, and Edward VIII promptly met Duke of Coburn, well known Nazi, same day. This would imply that Germans had no support against Nazi regime.
"Vera saw that the new English king's warm welcome for Hitler's henchmen would have a devastating impact on anti-Nazi Germans hoping for British backup. Without this, how many Germans, for the sake of a principle, would risk losing their wives and children or their jobs?"
" ... William Russell, who became a young U.S. diplomat in Berlin. Russell had been the first to tell Vera, “Go listen to what people in the streets of Germany really think about Nazism.” He was outspoken in his contempt for the diplomatic circuit in Berlin. Stanley Baldwin took absolutely no interest in foreign affairs and provided no guidelines to British diplomats in Berlin, who were thus happy to join in the Nazi-promoted merry-go-round of parties bountifully blessed with rich food and buckets of alcohol. Russell had, in common with other American correspondents, greater powers of independent observation. He later became an American-run agent, whose warm relationship with Vera worked to their mutual advantage. He persistently reminded American readers that Germans longed for outside help to overthrow Hitler."
" ... Wallace B. Phillips, who lived in London but was linked to a group of influential businessmen in New York who met regularly in a small apartment at 34 East 62nd Street, dubbed The Room. Phillips met Vera at one of the Stephensons’ private dinners that summer. Forewarned of Vera's passionate anti-Nazi stance, Phillips told her that he and his American friends were as appalled as she was by Hitler's ability to con foreign statesmen. They had constituted themselves as an informal, self-appointed intelligence mission, in the disturbing absence of any central American secret service. Most Americans shared the British sense of fair play, he said, which made them easy marks when Hitler turned on the charm. The Room was a sort of secret society of elitists. It counted among its members Kermit, son of Theodore Roosevelt, and Vincent Astor, the wealthy property developer and publisher, who treasured his links with England and was close to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR was in a political straitjacket. He sensed the inevitability of war, needed all the information he could get on the Nazi threat, but knew that any overt measures he took might lose him another election."
"Chaim Weizmann, himself a refugee, had perfected a new process for making acetone during a critical shortage of British explosives in World War I, contributing to the Allied victory. Now Hitler was driving out those who knew most about weaponry, a drain that would ultimately cost him dearly."
"Simon Marks's favorite historical character was King Alfred, who single-mindedly struggled for a national identity. “I'm proud to be British,” Simon told Vera, “but Nazi cowards destroyed the brave Jews who fought for Germany in their thousands during the Great War. We need a government to speak for us.” He arranged, through the Fund for German Jewry, to train young German-Jewish men at a camp in Kent. Edmund de Rothschild, a reserve officer in the Bucks Yeomanry, would prepare them for the only branch that recruited from “aliens” in the British armed forces, the Pioneer Corps."
Vera's introduction to British society here is strewn with thrilling tidbits for a reader not so mùch an insider to that society in that era. There are various people she came across, described here when relevant, and that includes a pilot who taught her to fly, an officer in military and a son in law of Marks, of Marks and Spencer, both relevant.
................................................................................................
Vera visited Berlin at the invitation of Schulenberg.
"Schulenburg had arranged for her to stay at the Tiergartenstrasse mansion of his wealthy colleague Friedrich “Freddie” Horstmann, head of the British desk at the German foreign ministry and one of the older diplomats who opposed Hitler. The parents of Horstmann's wife Lali were Jewish. Her father, an honorary British consul, was one of the few foreigners to wear Britain's Order of the Garter."
"Schulenburg said two million Nazi Party members could not tell seventy million Germans what to do. British diplomats listened to Nazi bigwigs at cocktail parties, instead of venturing into street bars where ordinary Germans asked openly when the British would help overthrow the Nazis."
"Wigram backed her opinion that British diplomats in Berlin were too busy entertaining English personages dazzled by “thrilling Nazi-land.” They raved about the blond blue-eyed young Nazis in “utterly smashing uniforms” who escorted them to Hitler's rallies. Vera said: “Great harm is done by visiting the Mayfair hostesses. These admirers of Hitler give an impression that pro-Nazi policy is fashioned in London drawing rooms, and discourage Berliners, afraid to act without British support.” Wigram was close to the permanent undersecretary at the British Foreign Office, Sir (later 1st Baron) Robert Vansittart, who was accused by his replacement, Sir Alexander Cadogan, of “dancing literary hornpipes” in assessing the fascist threat."
" ... Sam Edison Woods, acted as U.S. commercial attaché in Prague. Woods regularly traveled to Berlin on the personal instructions of President Roosevelt to report on German technology under cover of trade talks. He confirmed Vera's observation that the Berlin Cipher Office had reengineered the commercial coding machine first built in 1924 by Cipher Machines of Steglitzerstrasse 2, one of which Stephenson had purchased. Ralph Wigram's superiors refused to confirm Sam Woods's figures on German arms superiority. “Grave and terrible facts,” Wigram confided to Vera. He risked prosecution by disclosing these facts to Churchill.
"Then she heard that poor Horstmann, her generous Berlin host, the great diplomat and connoisseur of art, had been forced out of the foreign service and out of his mansion on Tiergartenstrasse. The price of integrity and of being Jewish was high, both in Berlin and in London."
Although Horstmann was a diplomat and Upton Sinclair's Johannes Robin was instead a wealthy trader who prospered by his own hard work and sharp mind, still, one wonders if Upton Sinclair knew Horstmann and based the description of the Robin's palace on the Horstmann mansion in Tiergartenstrasse.
King George V died, and Edward VIII promptly met Duke of Coburn, well known Nazi, same day. This would imply that Germans had no support against Nazi regime.
"Vera saw that the new English king's warm welcome for Hitler's henchmen would have a devastating impact on anti-Nazi Germans hoping for British backup. Without this, how many Germans, for the sake of a principle, would risk losing their wives and children or their jobs?"
" ... William Russell, who became a young U.S. diplomat in Berlin. Russell had been the first to tell Vera, “Go listen to what people in the streets of Germany really think about Nazism.” He was outspoken in his contempt for the diplomatic circuit in Berlin. Stanley Baldwin took absolutely no interest in foreign affairs and provided no guidelines to British diplomats in Berlin, who were thus happy to join in the Nazi-promoted merry-go-round of parties bountifully blessed with rich food and buckets of alcohol. Russell had, in common with other American correspondents, greater powers of independent observation. He later became an American-run agent, whose warm relationship with Vera worked to their mutual advantage. He persistently reminded American readers that Germans longed for outside help to overthrow Hitler."
" ... Wallace B. Phillips, who lived in London but was linked to a group of influential businessmen in New York who met regularly in a small apartment at 34 East 62nd Street, dubbed The Room. Phillips met Vera at one of the Stephensons’ private dinners that summer. Forewarned of Vera's passionate anti-Nazi stance, Phillips told her that he and his American friends were as appalled as she was by Hitler's ability to con foreign statesmen. They had constituted themselves as an informal, self-appointed intelligence mission, in the disturbing absence of any central American secret service. Most Americans shared the British sense of fair play, he said, which made them easy marks when Hitler turned on the charm. The Room was a sort of secret society of elitists. It counted among its members Kermit, son of Theodore Roosevelt, and Vincent Astor, the wealthy property developer and publisher, who treasured his links with England and was close to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR was in a political straitjacket. He sensed the inevitability of war, needed all the information he could get on the Nazi threat, but knew that any overt measures he took might lose him another election."
"Chaim Weizmann, himself a refugee, had perfected a new process for making acetone during a critical shortage of British explosives in World War I, contributing to the Allied victory. Now Hitler was driving out those who knew most about weaponry, a drain that would ultimately cost him dearly."
................................................................................................
"Simon Marks's favorite historical character was King Alfred, who single-mindedly struggled for a national identity. “I'm proud to be British,” Simon told Vera, “but Nazi cowards destroyed the brave Jews who fought for Germany in their thousands during the Great War. We need a government to speak for us.” He arranged, through the Fund for German Jewry, to train young German-Jewish men at a camp in Kent. Edmund de Rothschild, a reserve officer in the Bucks Yeomanry, would prepare them for the only branch that recruited from “aliens” in the British armed forces, the Pioneer Corps."
................................................................................................
"Major General Alan Brooke, later Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke, would help get badly needed “silent-killer” weapons for closework. Gubby, who had been his personal staff officer, told Vera that “Brookie” haunted an antique bookstore, later made famous by Helene Hanff of New York in her book 84, Charing Cross Road."
"By a most extraordinary coincidence, the Charing Cross Road bookshop was owned by one Benjamin Marks, who had invented a simple code that he penciled on the flyleaf to give assistants the lowest acceptable price in bargaining with buyers. His son Leo broke his dad's code at the age of ten, and would become the boyish chief cryptographer devoted to Vera in special operations. He was a baby-faced genius, first rejected as a Jew at the supersecret Bletchley center of ULTRA code breakers.
"For the sake of appearances at the anti-Semitic War Office, Gubby kept an arm's-length relationship with the Fund for German Jewry. One of the fund's five joint presidents was the Marquess of Reading, son of a former viceroy of India. ... At the N. M. Rothschild bank a Fixing Room displayed portraits of the many monarchs it had subsidized. One unlikely borrower was the king of Prussia. Another portrait, of the Empress of All the Russias, hung there because the tsar refused to have his own exhibited in a Jewish bank."
"Vera was advised to avoid any overt contacts with Churchill that might expose her to the curiosity of internal security officers. She never mentioned in her lifetime the occasions noted by others when she was later consulted by him."
"Major General Alan Brooke, later Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke, would help get badly needed “silent-killer” weapons for closework. Gubby, who had been his personal staff officer, told Vera that “Brookie” haunted an antique bookstore, later made famous by Helene Hanff of New York in her book 84, Charing Cross Road."
"By a most extraordinary coincidence, the Charing Cross Road bookshop was owned by one Benjamin Marks, who had invented a simple code that he penciled on the flyleaf to give assistants the lowest acceptable price in bargaining with buyers. His son Leo broke his dad's code at the age of ten, and would become the boyish chief cryptographer devoted to Vera in special operations. He was a baby-faced genius, first rejected as a Jew at the supersecret Bletchley center of ULTRA code breakers.
"For the sake of appearances at the anti-Semitic War Office, Gubby kept an arm's-length relationship with the Fund for German Jewry. One of the fund's five joint presidents was the Marquess of Reading, son of a former viceroy of India. ... At the N. M. Rothschild bank a Fixing Room displayed portraits of the many monarchs it had subsidized. One unlikely borrower was the king of Prussia. Another portrait, of the Empress of All the Russias, hung there because the tsar refused to have his own exhibited in a Jewish bank."
................................................................................................
"Vera was advised to avoid any overt contacts with Churchill that might expose her to the curiosity of internal security officers. She never mentioned in her lifetime the occasions noted by others when she was later consulted by him."
................................................................................................
"Cox felt that France, if occupied by Germany, was the most promising field for behind-the-lines operations. It was close to England, where coastal residents heard the sound of German guns that first told them of the outbreak of the 1914–18 war. Cox deplored France's reluctance to believe Hitler was a serious threat, but said it was a result of the trauma suffered after the country's emasculation in that war: a tenth of the entire male population killed; almost as many Frenchmen permanently disabled; 673,000 peasants slaughtered and another half million injured. France was eclipsed by the solid German block, producing far more than twice her number of military males each year, towering up grim and grisly. It was the vengeful women of France who would have to fill gaps in any resistance armies."
"A Jewish organization, small in numbers but of great complexity, was rescuing thousands of victims of Nazi persecution. Its name in the 1930s was kept secret, but it gave Vera news of fiercely anti-Nazi women working in Poland to bring out Jews and prepare for an expected German onslaught.
"Colonel Ellis saw Poland as the target for a first Nazi-run military invasion and shared his notes with Vera. “The seizure of power in Russia by Bolsheviks in October 1917,” Ellis wrote, “opened the way for German penetration of the Caucasus and an advance to Persia and Central Asia.” He later expanded his notes for a book, The Transcaspian Episode, which was kept from publication by British intelligence mandarins until 1963. Bill Stephenson made Ellis his deputy in wartime covert action, and later denounced “attempts to punish Ellis for airing matters that a government obsessed with secrecy wants to conceal for ever. There are many ways to punish free spirited secret servants of the Crown.”
................................................................................................
"But under the cloak of “toffee-nosed little darlings” and “gorgeous glamour boys” she detected a quality defined by the opponent of Count Lettow-Vorbeck in Africa, the notorious British intelligence officer Richard “Dirty Dick” Meinertzhagen, about whom Lawrence of Arabia said: “His hot immoral hatred of the enemy expressed itself in trickery as in violence. [He] took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy or his friend by some unscrupulous jest as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans with his African knobkerrie.”"
"Fleming was one of the City stockbrokers she had first dismissed as “Smug Pratts.” Her mind was changed when Admiral John Godfrey transferred from his battleship Repulse early in 1939 to become director of Naval Intelligence. Ian Fleming's recruitment began when Admiral Godfrey was lunching at the Carlton Grill with the governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, who made a seemingly offhand remark: “Good chap, Fleming. Old Etonian. Stockbroker, but bored. Covered the Russian show trials of those British engineers for some newspaper.” And so Fleming took up position in Room 39 of NID. Fleming's father, Valentine, was a close friend of Churchill's who in the last war had been killed in action. This created a powerful bond, and Ian could convey to Churchill further troubling naval realities. ... “A navy pilot is treated as a coxswain, his airplane just a version of the longboat. My navigator has command, and as the Observer. Commissioned observers cannot fly with noncommissioned pilots, who, as petty officers, also cannot sit in at flight briefings in the wardroom.”"
"Cox felt that France, if occupied by Germany, was the most promising field for behind-the-lines operations. It was close to England, where coastal residents heard the sound of German guns that first told them of the outbreak of the 1914–18 war. Cox deplored France's reluctance to believe Hitler was a serious threat, but said it was a result of the trauma suffered after the country's emasculation in that war: a tenth of the entire male population killed; almost as many Frenchmen permanently disabled; 673,000 peasants slaughtered and another half million injured. France was eclipsed by the solid German block, producing far more than twice her number of military males each year, towering up grim and grisly. It was the vengeful women of France who would have to fill gaps in any resistance armies."
................................................................................................
"A Jewish organization, small in numbers but of great complexity, was rescuing thousands of victims of Nazi persecution. Its name in the 1930s was kept secret, but it gave Vera news of fiercely anti-Nazi women working in Poland to bring out Jews and prepare for an expected German onslaught.
"Colonel Ellis saw Poland as the target for a first Nazi-run military invasion and shared his notes with Vera. “The seizure of power in Russia by Bolsheviks in October 1917,” Ellis wrote, “opened the way for German penetration of the Caucasus and an advance to Persia and Central Asia.” He later expanded his notes for a book, The Transcaspian Episode, which was kept from publication by British intelligence mandarins until 1963. Bill Stephenson made Ellis his deputy in wartime covert action, and later denounced “attempts to punish Ellis for airing matters that a government obsessed with secrecy wants to conceal for ever. There are many ways to punish free spirited secret servants of the Crown.”
................................................................................................
"But under the cloak of “toffee-nosed little darlings” and “gorgeous glamour boys” she detected a quality defined by the opponent of Count Lettow-Vorbeck in Africa, the notorious British intelligence officer Richard “Dirty Dick” Meinertzhagen, about whom Lawrence of Arabia said: “His hot immoral hatred of the enemy expressed itself in trickery as in violence. [He] took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy or his friend by some unscrupulous jest as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans with his African knobkerrie.”"
"Fleming was one of the City stockbrokers she had first dismissed as “Smug Pratts.” Her mind was changed when Admiral John Godfrey transferred from his battleship Repulse early in 1939 to become director of Naval Intelligence. Ian Fleming's recruitment began when Admiral Godfrey was lunching at the Carlton Grill with the governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, who made a seemingly offhand remark: “Good chap, Fleming. Old Etonian. Stockbroker, but bored. Covered the Russian show trials of those British engineers for some newspaper.” And so Fleming took up position in Room 39 of NID. Fleming's father, Valentine, was a close friend of Churchill's who in the last war had been killed in action. This created a powerful bond, and Ian could convey to Churchill further troubling naval realities. ... “A navy pilot is treated as a coxswain, his airplane just a version of the longboat. My navigator has command, and as the Observer. Commissioned observers cannot fly with noncommissioned pilots, who, as petty officers, also cannot sit in at flight briefings in the wardroom.”"
................................................................................................
" ... a conference of thirty-two nations in July 1938 that dashed all hopes for the rescue of Jews. It assembled at the French resort of Évian-les-Bains near the Swiss border. The American Federation of Labor stipulated that entry to the United States be barred to Jews who might compete for jobs. Hitler rejoiced: “The world agrees that Jews are parasites.”
"“Évian,” said Ruth Klueger, who later served with Vera, “gave the official signal from the civilized world, telling Hitler to go ahead and kill the Jews.”
"Earlier in 1938, on Friday, March 11, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave a farewell lunch for Ribbentrop, who had finally gotten what he wanted from Hitler: appointment as Nazi Germany's foreign minister. Ribbentrop had spent two years in London as ambassador. The Churchills were uncomfortable guests at the lunch. News was discreetly conveyed to Chamberlain that German troops were moving into Austria to make it part of the Greater German Reich. Chamberlain said nothing. Frau Ribbentrop lectured Churchill for being “so naughty” in opposing Anglo-Germany unity. Joseph P. Kennedy said Chamberlain was “the greatest man after the Pope.”
"Kennedy was U.S. ambassador to London. President Roosevelt had concluded that Kennedy in Washington was “too dangerous to have around here.” Cordell Hull, U.S. secretary of state, and assistant secretary Sumner Welles opposed any British toughening of policy that could reignite world war and approved Ambassador Kennedy's dispatches, in which he portrayed himself as standing at the heart of the decision-making process leading Chamberlain to appease Hitler."
"Colonel Hans Oster, deputy to Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Ab-wehr intelligence section of the military high command, opposed Hitler's plans to seize the German Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, and sought British support. But everyone knew about Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's promise to Kennedy that neither Britain nor France would come to Czechoslovakia's aid."
"Schulenburg wanted Churchill to say publicly that Britain would certainly go to war in support of the Czechs. Vera reminded Schulenburg that Churchill had no power. “Well,” said Old Fritz, “Churchill is the only man who terrifies Hitler. There must be some way to strengthen his hand through our friends in Berlin.”
"Our Mutual Friends were active among such Berlin personalities as the German spy chief Canaris, who said Hitler planned the invasion of Czechoslovakia for the end of September. Canaris had sent a note to a British military attaché: “By firm action abroad, Hitler can be forced at the eleventh hour to renounce his present intentions. If it comes to war, immediate intervention by France and England will bring about the downfall of the regime.” Oster, Canaris's deputy, asked Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, a scion of Prussian nobility and one of the Nazis’ fiercest opponents, to fly to London. He arrived on August 18, 1938, with a simple message: “If England is willing to fight, we shall end this regime.” Cold-shouldered by the Foreign Office, von Kleist-Schmenzin went to Churchill, who gave him the letter that Prime Minister Chamberlain should have written: “The crossing of the frontier of Czechoslovakia by German armies or aviation in force will bring about renewal of the World War. Do not, I pray you, be misled upon this point.”"
"Vera sat in the public gallery when Churchill protested in Parliament: “We have sustained a total, unmitigated defeat.” The rest was lost in jeers. She stopped at Bill Stephenson's office. “Winston just stood there, head bowed, while the boos shook the rafters,” she said. “The German army will back any leader who gets all these gifts without a fight: Czech coal, textile, iron, steel, electric power, timber. Five years ago, Germany was bankrupt.”"
"Vera made one hurried journey to Poland earlier in that 1939 summer. On her own, as a mild office worker, she could travel directly through Germany. She made a quick reconnaissance of Lithuania, where Hitler annexed the Memel region.
"Vera went on to Warsaw. She had been told she could trust a gorgeous young part-Jewish Polish aristocrat, Countess Krystyna Gyziska Skarbek, who was home on leave from her East African plantation in Kenya. She was already thinking ahead about underground resistance, and introduced Vera to an engineer who was also a Polish air force pilot, Jan “Zura” Zurakowski, reputed to be among the best Polish pilots and engaged to marry a seventeen-year-old student friend of Krystyna."
"Vera confirmed that a brilliant Jewish mathematician had worked with other code breakers on an Enigma machine shipped to the German embassy in Warsaw. Before it was delivered, they had taken it apart overnight. Since then they had worked out Enigma settings that constantly changed in a highly secret version, and constructed a cyclometer that linked two Enigmas, and another device they called a bombe to handle six interconnected Enigmas. They were willing to part with replicas if the worst happened. ... Hans-Thilo had offered manuals for a coding machine. He was then in his midforties and had financial worries. The later risks he took in supplying updates on Enigma's changing procedures suggested that money was not the motive. His grandmother was English, his mother a baroness, his father a professor of history. His brother Rudolf, a general who headed the panzer parade in Berlin, had been chief executive at the Cipher Office from 1925 to 1928, and brought in Hans-Thilo, who soon had access to ciphers for the armed forces and the complex coding machine Enigma. Hans-Thilo had been a relatively young businessman when Germany suffered the raging inflation that saw the value of money sink daily. He had abandoned the illusion, shared by millions, that Hitler was a genius who could solve the country's penury. His initial contact used the alias Rodolphe Lemoine and served the French secret service under the code name Rex."
"German financial secretary, Schwerin von Krosigk, had told British diplomats that Churchill must be given a ministerial post because there was no other way to convince Hitler that Britain really would fight if pushed too hard."
"At meetings with Poland's military chiefs, Gubby promised, “If the Germans overrun you, I will take responsibility for providing every possible aid to a Polish guerrilla army.” Gubby staked his personal honor upon support for what they spoke of as the Home Army.
"Others in London would break Gubby's heart by betraying the promise. “The betrayal haunted him all his life,” said Vera."
"Vera had to look ahead. The accrued experience of the Poles was almost impossible to pass along through a third party. It would be necessary to smuggle into England the best Polish cryptanalyst at the University of Poznan, Marian Rejewski. His small team had been breaking codes, only to have to start again when the Germans modified their machines. The German defense ministry's Berlin Cipher Office thought the system defied penetration. But the Polish bombes offered a way into orders sent by wireless to Germany's armed forces.
"If breaking Enigma codes was essential to Britain's survival, none of the code breakers, nor Hans-Thilo Schmidt, must be caught. He was a member of the Nazi Party, #738736, which made her uneasy. His history unraveled at a meeting outside Warsaw with code breakers and representatives of Britain's Government Code and Cipher School. Now Vera knew who AGD was: Commander Alastair G. Denniston, acting head of GCCS. And for the first time she understood why Louis Rivet in Paris had been so cagey. The Poles had pulled off a coup, and Rivet's French secret service chiefs had issued strict instructions to disclose nothing."
................................................
" ... a conference of thirty-two nations in July 1938 that dashed all hopes for the rescue of Jews. It assembled at the French resort of Évian-les-Bains near the Swiss border. The American Federation of Labor stipulated that entry to the United States be barred to Jews who might compete for jobs. Hitler rejoiced: “The world agrees that Jews are parasites.”
"“Évian,” said Ruth Klueger, who later served with Vera, “gave the official signal from the civilized world, telling Hitler to go ahead and kill the Jews.”
"Earlier in 1938, on Friday, March 11, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave a farewell lunch for Ribbentrop, who had finally gotten what he wanted from Hitler: appointment as Nazi Germany's foreign minister. Ribbentrop had spent two years in London as ambassador. The Churchills were uncomfortable guests at the lunch. News was discreetly conveyed to Chamberlain that German troops were moving into Austria to make it part of the Greater German Reich. Chamberlain said nothing. Frau Ribbentrop lectured Churchill for being “so naughty” in opposing Anglo-Germany unity. Joseph P. Kennedy said Chamberlain was “the greatest man after the Pope.”
"Kennedy was U.S. ambassador to London. President Roosevelt had concluded that Kennedy in Washington was “too dangerous to have around here.” Cordell Hull, U.S. secretary of state, and assistant secretary Sumner Welles opposed any British toughening of policy that could reignite world war and approved Ambassador Kennedy's dispatches, in which he portrayed himself as standing at the heart of the decision-making process leading Chamberlain to appease Hitler."
"Colonel Hans Oster, deputy to Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Ab-wehr intelligence section of the military high command, opposed Hitler's plans to seize the German Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, and sought British support. But everyone knew about Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's promise to Kennedy that neither Britain nor France would come to Czechoslovakia's aid."
"Schulenburg wanted Churchill to say publicly that Britain would certainly go to war in support of the Czechs. Vera reminded Schulenburg that Churchill had no power. “Well,” said Old Fritz, “Churchill is the only man who terrifies Hitler. There must be some way to strengthen his hand through our friends in Berlin.”
"Our Mutual Friends were active among such Berlin personalities as the German spy chief Canaris, who said Hitler planned the invasion of Czechoslovakia for the end of September. Canaris had sent a note to a British military attaché: “By firm action abroad, Hitler can be forced at the eleventh hour to renounce his present intentions. If it comes to war, immediate intervention by France and England will bring about the downfall of the regime.” Oster, Canaris's deputy, asked Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, a scion of Prussian nobility and one of the Nazis’ fiercest opponents, to fly to London. He arrived on August 18, 1938, with a simple message: “If England is willing to fight, we shall end this regime.” Cold-shouldered by the Foreign Office, von Kleist-Schmenzin went to Churchill, who gave him the letter that Prime Minister Chamberlain should have written: “The crossing of the frontier of Czechoslovakia by German armies or aviation in force will bring about renewal of the World War. Do not, I pray you, be misled upon this point.”"
"Vera sat in the public gallery when Churchill protested in Parliament: “We have sustained a total, unmitigated defeat.” The rest was lost in jeers. She stopped at Bill Stephenson's office. “Winston just stood there, head bowed, while the boos shook the rafters,” she said. “The German army will back any leader who gets all these gifts without a fight: Czech coal, textile, iron, steel, electric power, timber. Five years ago, Germany was bankrupt.”"
................................................................................................
"Vera made one hurried journey to Poland earlier in that 1939 summer. On her own, as a mild office worker, she could travel directly through Germany. She made a quick reconnaissance of Lithuania, where Hitler annexed the Memel region.
"Vera went on to Warsaw. She had been told she could trust a gorgeous young part-Jewish Polish aristocrat, Countess Krystyna Gyziska Skarbek, who was home on leave from her East African plantation in Kenya. She was already thinking ahead about underground resistance, and introduced Vera to an engineer who was also a Polish air force pilot, Jan “Zura” Zurakowski, reputed to be among the best Polish pilots and engaged to marry a seventeen-year-old student friend of Krystyna."
"Vera confirmed that a brilliant Jewish mathematician had worked with other code breakers on an Enigma machine shipped to the German embassy in Warsaw. Before it was delivered, they had taken it apart overnight. Since then they had worked out Enigma settings that constantly changed in a highly secret version, and constructed a cyclometer that linked two Enigmas, and another device they called a bombe to handle six interconnected Enigmas. They were willing to part with replicas if the worst happened. ... Hans-Thilo had offered manuals for a coding machine. He was then in his midforties and had financial worries. The later risks he took in supplying updates on Enigma's changing procedures suggested that money was not the motive. His grandmother was English, his mother a baroness, his father a professor of history. His brother Rudolf, a general who headed the panzer parade in Berlin, had been chief executive at the Cipher Office from 1925 to 1928, and brought in Hans-Thilo, who soon had access to ciphers for the armed forces and the complex coding machine Enigma. Hans-Thilo had been a relatively young businessman when Germany suffered the raging inflation that saw the value of money sink daily. He had abandoned the illusion, shared by millions, that Hitler was a genius who could solve the country's penury. His initial contact used the alias Rodolphe Lemoine and served the French secret service under the code name Rex."
"German financial secretary, Schwerin von Krosigk, had told British diplomats that Churchill must be given a ministerial post because there was no other way to convince Hitler that Britain really would fight if pushed too hard."
"At meetings with Poland's military chiefs, Gubby promised, “If the Germans overrun you, I will take responsibility for providing every possible aid to a Polish guerrilla army.” Gubby staked his personal honor upon support for what they spoke of as the Home Army.
"Others in London would break Gubby's heart by betraying the promise. “The betrayal haunted him all his life,” said Vera."
"Vera had to look ahead. The accrued experience of the Poles was almost impossible to pass along through a third party. It would be necessary to smuggle into England the best Polish cryptanalyst at the University of Poznan, Marian Rejewski. His small team had been breaking codes, only to have to start again when the Germans modified their machines. The German defense ministry's Berlin Cipher Office thought the system defied penetration. But the Polish bombes offered a way into orders sent by wireless to Germany's armed forces.
"If breaking Enigma codes was essential to Britain's survival, none of the code breakers, nor Hans-Thilo Schmidt, must be caught. He was a member of the Nazi Party, #738736, which made her uneasy. His history unraveled at a meeting outside Warsaw with code breakers and representatives of Britain's Government Code and Cipher School. Now Vera knew who AGD was: Commander Alastair G. Denniston, acting head of GCCS. And for the first time she understood why Louis Rivet in Paris had been so cagey. The Poles had pulled off a coup, and Rivet's French secret service chiefs had issued strict instructions to disclose nothing."
................................................................................................
"Stalin had reversed his scheme. Why? Vera learned that at the time of Churchill's inflammatory broadcast, Admiral Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax had sailed on a slow cargo-ship from England to negotiate a pact with the Soviet Union. He disembarked in Leningrad, stretching out his journey, and reached Moscow on August 11, 1939. Then he announced that he had forgotten to bring along his written authority. Irate Russian generals broke off the talks. Stalin believed England's priority was to start a war between the Nazis and Russia and that Sir Reginald's amnesia was a hoax."
"SIS officers in Moscow had given London no warning of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Vera recalled that “a former Rhodes scholar, Baron Adam von Trott zu Solz, a dedicated anti-Nazi, got around London a lot and told me about upper-class English families whose pro-Nazi stance discouraged those in Berlin who needed support against Hitler. One fascist-minded family regularly entertained Queen Mary to tea, and had a son, Anthony Blunt, in our secret services, who reinforced Germany's impression we'd stay neutral.” Mary Stephenson commented, when Blunt was finally exposed as a Soviet spy, that Blunt had been given his postwar sinecure as Keeper of the Queen's Pictures only to guarantee his silence on the incriminating letters written by British royals to Hitler that Blunt had rescued from a castle in the American zone soon after Nazi Germany collapsed."
"Sidney Cotton flew for the bogus company set up in Paris, and waited on the runway at Berlin's Tempelhof airport, the two engines of his Lockheed Electra running. He had been told that Air Marshal Hermann Göring was joining him to fly to London and discuss peace with Chamberlain. Suddenly a car screamed alongside and Luftwaffe officers jumped out and waggled the plane's wing flaps to catch the pilot's attention. Cotton opened a side door. A Luftwaffe pilot, who knew that Cotton, though in civilian clothes, was also in the RAF, shouted a fraternal warning. Göring was not coming. The secret police were. Cotton took straight off without bothering to turn into the wind. Göring had never intended to fly to London. His peace mission was another trick to deceive the British. Dirty tricks set the tone of Hitler's foreign policy, and dirty tricks were to launch the war with a deception the Nazis code-named Canned Goods. It was anticipated by Elizabeth Wiskemann, a British journalist in Berlin, but her warning was not taken seriously in London. She would later serve as an agent in Switzerland."
................................................................................................
Vera and her team, on a mission to rescue the codebreakeing team in Poland with their equipment, had been travelling via Paris, Marseille and Cairo, and arrived in Romania via Greece, with much use of ingenuity in procuring transport from Cairo on, after Poland was invaded.
"Vera learned from Mossad agents that Adolf Eichmann's Reich Central Office for Jewish Immigration in Prague was forcing Jews to flee through Romania to Palestine as part of a plan to deepen Arab hostility toward the mandate exercised by Britain, so its army divisions would be pinned down by Arab guerrillas. She also learned that in Poland the German SS had started to kill Jews, and the Gestapo was rounding up other Jews to be sent to Dachau."
The team arrived in Warsaw, having donned uniforms after Britain declared war and been showered by Poles with flowers and kisses thereafter, only to find that Britain wasn't doing anything to help Poland for now. They managed to procure vehicles for transporting the codebreakers and equipment.
"Ten days after London declared war, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish quarter of Warsaw was targeted by Stuka dive-bombers."
"The remaining gold sovereigns were entrusted to Count Stephan Zamoyski, a friend of General Carton de Wiart. On the count's lawn, for a brief afternoon, Vera took tea while hearing that fifty-five thousand Jews in Vilnius had been rounded up by the Russian Red Army, claiming its half of Poland under the secret protocol with Hitler."
"Krystyna's other young friend, Jan Zurakowski, piloting the venerable P.11 fighter, was among Warsaw's defenders who shot down 125 of the immensely superior German Bf 109s and Bf 110s at the cost of 114 Polish aircraft. Some Polish pilots ran out of ammunition. They flew until, fuel exhausted, they crash-landed in Romania. From there they would find their way to join the RAF in time for the Battle of Britain, flying Hurricanes. As late as August 28, 1939, on the very eve of war, such fighter aircraft were still held up in Denmark while Whitehall argued over who should pay for onward carriage to Poland."
"Some sabotage was already being carried out by Polish regulars. It was hard to convince them of any aid coming from London. Gubbins asked an elderly reserve major commanding an artillery battery where his guns were. “Still in England!” was the wry reply."
"Nine months was how long it would take Churchill to override those in Whitehall to whom Hitler appealed in another, oddly arrogant peace offer on October 6, 1939."
"Two months after the fall of Poland, the artist Paul Maze wrote that “the German propaganda spread about is most harmful, especially within Mayfair society.”"
"Vera might yet be pounced upon as subversive by Stewart Menzies, who as the acting SIS chief was now in secret contact with Hitler. This partly explained Churchill's resolve to replace him. There was a colossal SIS intelligence failure caused by attempts to pacify Hitler, who was encouraged to think Britain would call off the war tomorrow."
"Stalin had reversed his scheme. Why? Vera learned that at the time of Churchill's inflammatory broadcast, Admiral Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax had sailed on a slow cargo-ship from England to negotiate a pact with the Soviet Union. He disembarked in Leningrad, stretching out his journey, and reached Moscow on August 11, 1939. Then he announced that he had forgotten to bring along his written authority. Irate Russian generals broke off the talks. Stalin believed England's priority was to start a war between the Nazis and Russia and that Sir Reginald's amnesia was a hoax."
"SIS officers in Moscow had given London no warning of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Vera recalled that “a former Rhodes scholar, Baron Adam von Trott zu Solz, a dedicated anti-Nazi, got around London a lot and told me about upper-class English families whose pro-Nazi stance discouraged those in Berlin who needed support against Hitler. One fascist-minded family regularly entertained Queen Mary to tea, and had a son, Anthony Blunt, in our secret services, who reinforced Germany's impression we'd stay neutral.” Mary Stephenson commented, when Blunt was finally exposed as a Soviet spy, that Blunt had been given his postwar sinecure as Keeper of the Queen's Pictures only to guarantee his silence on the incriminating letters written by British royals to Hitler that Blunt had rescued from a castle in the American zone soon after Nazi Germany collapsed."
"Sidney Cotton flew for the bogus company set up in Paris, and waited on the runway at Berlin's Tempelhof airport, the two engines of his Lockheed Electra running. He had been told that Air Marshal Hermann Göring was joining him to fly to London and discuss peace with Chamberlain. Suddenly a car screamed alongside and Luftwaffe officers jumped out and waggled the plane's wing flaps to catch the pilot's attention. Cotton opened a side door. A Luftwaffe pilot, who knew that Cotton, though in civilian clothes, was also in the RAF, shouted a fraternal warning. Göring was not coming. The secret police were. Cotton took straight off without bothering to turn into the wind. Göring had never intended to fly to London. His peace mission was another trick to deceive the British. Dirty tricks set the tone of Hitler's foreign policy, and dirty tricks were to launch the war with a deception the Nazis code-named Canned Goods. It was anticipated by Elizabeth Wiskemann, a British journalist in Berlin, but her warning was not taken seriously in London. She would later serve as an agent in Switzerland."
................................................................................................
Vera and her team, on a mission to rescue the codebreakeing team in Poland with their equipment, had been travelling via Paris, Marseille and Cairo, and arrived in Romania via Greece, with much use of ingenuity in procuring transport from Cairo on, after Poland was invaded.
"Vera learned from Mossad agents that Adolf Eichmann's Reich Central Office for Jewish Immigration in Prague was forcing Jews to flee through Romania to Palestine as part of a plan to deepen Arab hostility toward the mandate exercised by Britain, so its army divisions would be pinned down by Arab guerrillas. She also learned that in Poland the German SS had started to kill Jews, and the Gestapo was rounding up other Jews to be sent to Dachau."
The team arrived in Warsaw, having donned uniforms after Britain declared war and been showered by Poles with flowers and kisses thereafter, only to find that Britain wasn't doing anything to help Poland for now. They managed to procure vehicles for transporting the codebreakers and equipment.
"Ten days after London declared war, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish quarter of Warsaw was targeted by Stuka dive-bombers."
"The remaining gold sovereigns were entrusted to Count Stephan Zamoyski, a friend of General Carton de Wiart. On the count's lawn, for a brief afternoon, Vera took tea while hearing that fifty-five thousand Jews in Vilnius had been rounded up by the Russian Red Army, claiming its half of Poland under the secret protocol with Hitler."
"Krystyna's other young friend, Jan Zurakowski, piloting the venerable P.11 fighter, was among Warsaw's defenders who shot down 125 of the immensely superior German Bf 109s and Bf 110s at the cost of 114 Polish aircraft. Some Polish pilots ran out of ammunition. They flew until, fuel exhausted, they crash-landed in Romania. From there they would find their way to join the RAF in time for the Battle of Britain, flying Hurricanes. As late as August 28, 1939, on the very eve of war, such fighter aircraft were still held up in Denmark while Whitehall argued over who should pay for onward carriage to Poland."
"Some sabotage was already being carried out by Polish regulars. It was hard to convince them of any aid coming from London. Gubbins asked an elderly reserve major commanding an artillery battery where his guns were. “Still in England!” was the wry reply."
"Nine months was how long it would take Churchill to override those in Whitehall to whom Hitler appealed in another, oddly arrogant peace offer on October 6, 1939."
"Two months after the fall of Poland, the artist Paul Maze wrote that “the German propaganda spread about is most harmful, especially within Mayfair society.”"
"Vera might yet be pounced upon as subversive by Stewart Menzies, who as the acting SIS chief was now in secret contact with Hitler. This partly explained Churchill's resolve to replace him. There was a colossal SIS intelligence failure caused by attempts to pacify Hitler, who was encouraged to think Britain would call off the war tomorrow."
................................................................................................
"She would have to break the law so long as Lord Halifax sat in judgment: Churchill called him the Holy Fox for using his High Anglican Church connections. The Holy Fox had an odd sense of ethics: it was he who had approved the decision to deprive Poland of Hurricane fighter planes because it could not pay the cost of shipping them."
Vera travelled to France in December 1939 to meet Gubby, and connected with various operatives including Countess Krystyna Skarbek, who didn't know about fate of her Jewish mother, Stephanie Goldfeder.
"Vera also reconnected with Rodolphe Lemoine, the French secret service officer code-named Rex, who gave her disturbing news. The key Polish code breakers Gwido Langer and Maksymilian Ciezki were still held in the Romanian refugee camp. The French needed them, but if France were to meet the same fate as Poland, some way must be found to stop these Poles from falling into German hands. Lemoine had a transcript from a German propaganda broadcast on Saturday, November 18, 1939, alleging that a Max Rosenberg had taken part in a British-Zionist conspiracy to assassinate the Romanian prime minister. Vera recalled the scene on the British legation lawn. Perhaps the Germans had merely stumbled across someone called Rosenberg? Her father was dead. That same day, nine Czech students had been shot for anti-German activities. “Prague is paralyzed, silent with awe,” Gobbels boasted. The so-called conspiracy in Romania was, she decided, an expression of Nazi fear of popular uprisings. The Rosenberg name had been pulled out of a hat to justify brutality by the Iron Guard. As Vera Atkins, she had surely escaped the attention of German security services."
"Krystyna Skarbek, flitting through this frustrating Paris episode, told Vera of the astonishing ingenuity of Poles in escaping to places like British-run Gibraltar. Churchill broadcast a tribute to them: “The soul of Poland is indestructible.” Germany and Russia had held it “in bondage for a hundred and fifty years, unable to quench its spirit.” The words were regarded as Churchill's promise of help for the Poles if he gained power. To shake off the myth of a phony war, he said Germany still meant to plant itself on the shores of the Black Sea, overrun the Baltic States, and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of southeastern Europe.
"Krystyna began work as an agent in the Balkans. She was a self-starter like Vera, and normally would not have taken orders from another woman. Krystyna loved men, and under her spell they would do anything for her. She was very much like Vera, keeping eyes fixed on dangerous objectives. She trekked over mountains through deep snow with messages, arms, and supplies for Poland. She based herself in Budapest. In Prague, Czech underground fighters were already organized. They had lived under Nazi rule, and had no reason to trust British promises. They were smuggling in weapons and equipment on their own."
Walter Schellenberg, using identity of another man and pretending to be anti Nazi, contacted two British agents, who were lured to Venlo and kidnapped violently and taken to Berlin.
"The names of British, French, Belgian, and Dutch intelligence officers were announced by Berlin radio. Churchill, infuriated, wrote another powerful plea to have his man, Admiral Godfrey, put in charge of the SIS. Cadogan called it “a tiresome letter” in his diary and expressed the appeasers’ widely held opinion that “Churchill ought to have enough to do without butting into other people's business.” The confirmation of Stewart Menzies as C was supported by Lord Halifax. The Holy Fox was exploring another “peace channel” through the Italian dictator Mussolini. Opposition to Churchill was orchestrated by that éminence grise of Imperial Defence, Sir Maurice Hankey. Menzies won the day.
"She would have to break the law so long as Lord Halifax sat in judgment: Churchill called him the Holy Fox for using his High Anglican Church connections. The Holy Fox had an odd sense of ethics: it was he who had approved the decision to deprive Poland of Hurricane fighter planes because it could not pay the cost of shipping them."
Vera travelled to France in December 1939 to meet Gubby, and connected with various operatives including Countess Krystyna Skarbek, who didn't know about fate of her Jewish mother, Stephanie Goldfeder.
"Vera also reconnected with Rodolphe Lemoine, the French secret service officer code-named Rex, who gave her disturbing news. The key Polish code breakers Gwido Langer and Maksymilian Ciezki were still held in the Romanian refugee camp. The French needed them, but if France were to meet the same fate as Poland, some way must be found to stop these Poles from falling into German hands. Lemoine had a transcript from a German propaganda broadcast on Saturday, November 18, 1939, alleging that a Max Rosenberg had taken part in a British-Zionist conspiracy to assassinate the Romanian prime minister. Vera recalled the scene on the British legation lawn. Perhaps the Germans had merely stumbled across someone called Rosenberg? Her father was dead. That same day, nine Czech students had been shot for anti-German activities. “Prague is paralyzed, silent with awe,” Gobbels boasted. The so-called conspiracy in Romania was, she decided, an expression of Nazi fear of popular uprisings. The Rosenberg name had been pulled out of a hat to justify brutality by the Iron Guard. As Vera Atkins, she had surely escaped the attention of German security services."
"Krystyna Skarbek, flitting through this frustrating Paris episode, told Vera of the astonishing ingenuity of Poles in escaping to places like British-run Gibraltar. Churchill broadcast a tribute to them: “The soul of Poland is indestructible.” Germany and Russia had held it “in bondage for a hundred and fifty years, unable to quench its spirit.” The words were regarded as Churchill's promise of help for the Poles if he gained power. To shake off the myth of a phony war, he said Germany still meant to plant itself on the shores of the Black Sea, overrun the Baltic States, and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of southeastern Europe.
"Krystyna began work as an agent in the Balkans. She was a self-starter like Vera, and normally would not have taken orders from another woman. Krystyna loved men, and under her spell they would do anything for her. She was very much like Vera, keeping eyes fixed on dangerous objectives. She trekked over mountains through deep snow with messages, arms, and supplies for Poland. She based herself in Budapest. In Prague, Czech underground fighters were already organized. They had lived under Nazi rule, and had no reason to trust British promises. They were smuggling in weapons and equipment on their own."
................................................................................................
Walter Schellenberg, using identity of another man and pretending to be anti Nazi, contacted two British agents, who were lured to Venlo and kidnapped violently and taken to Berlin.
"The names of British, French, Belgian, and Dutch intelligence officers were announced by Berlin radio. Churchill, infuriated, wrote another powerful plea to have his man, Admiral Godfrey, put in charge of the SIS. Cadogan called it “a tiresome letter” in his diary and expressed the appeasers’ widely held opinion that “Churchill ought to have enough to do without butting into other people's business.” The confirmation of Stewart Menzies as C was supported by Lord Halifax. The Holy Fox was exploring another “peace channel” through the Italian dictator Mussolini. Opposition to Churchill was orchestrated by that éminence grise of Imperial Defence, Sir Maurice Hankey. Menzies won the day.
................................................................................................
"Enigma messages began to be broken at Bletchley on January 17, 1940, and this could not be disclosed. Alan Turing, Bletchley's code-breaking genius, had to come to Paris. He had built his own electromagnetic improvement on the Polish bombe, which was limited to recognizing the fingerprint of the German sender of an enciphered message. Turing had a pretty good idea of the extreme danger to Britain if Polish code breakers fell into German hands."
"Gubby returned to London, expecting a lightning German attack that would seize some unsuspecting neutral—probably Norway, because Churchill had used his naval authority to bottle up the Skagerrak as a passage from the Baltic Sea for German warships and to lay mines around Norway. Berlin denounced this as a provocation."
Neville Chamberlain was forced to resign.
"A week earlier, Colin Gubbins had joined a special group hurriedly put together to fight by any means in Norway. With him was Kermit Roosevelt, a son of President Theodore Roosevelt. Kermit was a long-standing member of The Room at 34 East 62nd Street in New York and its first observer of closework in action. His impressions were tremendously important if Britain was to win support from President Roosevelt."
"Vera's informants reported, accurately as it turned out, that King George VI wanted Halifax as prime minister, not Churchill.
"Churchill warned Roosevelt, “You may have a completely subjugated Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear.” Such messages went through the U.S. embassy and were leaking to Berlin. On May 17, 1940, a Mutual Friend, Major Jack Dermot O'Reilly, trapped an American code clerk, Tyler Gatewood Kent. He had been passing copies of the secret exchanges to Captain A. H. M. Ramsey, who was distantly related to the royal family. Ramsey confided the material to Anna Wolkoff, a White Russian who blamed the Jews for her family's exile in London. She gave copies to the Italian embassy, which radioed everything to Rome where it was passed through the German ambassador, Hans von Mackensen, to Berlin. “The messages went direct daily to Hitler—priceless information that he read word for word,” testified the German spy chief Walter Schellenberg at his postwar trial.
"Early one morning, O'Reilly's men burst into a flat at 47 Gloucester Place in central London, arrested Tyler Kent, and retrieved 1,929 U.S. embassy documents from a cabinet plastered with this is a jew's war."
"The mole, Tyler Kent, was the twenty-nine-year old son of an American diplomat. A clerk in the U.S. embassy code room, he felt FDR and Churchill were betraying Americans. At the time, only 3 percent of Americans wanted to enter the war, according to polls. In January 1940 Anna Wolkoff, whose father had been an admiral in the Russian czarist navy, told Kent that Jews had deposed their family. The mischief began. “A terrible blow!” Breckinridge Long, a U.S. assistant secretary of state, wrote in his diary: “Our every diplomatic maneuver exposed.” Ambassador Kennedy prudently phoned President Roosevelt to say that, if the United States had been at war, Kent would have been shot. For once, FDR did not disagree with Kennedy.5 If the intercepted FDR-Churchill exchanges had been publicized in the United States, they could have destroyed Roosevelt. Laws enacted by Congress were designed to keep America out of European disputes. Churchill needed him to win an unprecedented third term in the 1940 presidential elections. Ambassador Kennedy “came under electronic surveillance,” noted Winston's son Randolph Churchill. “We had reached the point of bugging potential traitors and enemies.” Randolph later parachuted into Yugoslavia to join Tito's clandestine armies."
Gubby escaped and returned to England.
"He brought back Norwegians whose work as SOE agents would later destroy material that German scientists regarded as the means for making an atomic bomb. Gubby had proved primitive methods could undermine the most advanced technology, and Kermit Roosevelt admiringly reported this to FDR."
................................................................................................
"The Daily Mail promoted the Isle of Wight as “peaceful, carefree” until France fell and the “carefree” Isle of Wight requisitioned its holidaymakers’ steamers to rescue Allied armies at Dunkirk. In the week ending June 4, 1940, some 861 ships of all shapes and sizes crossed the English Channel to snatch 224,586 British and 112,546 French troops out of the jaws of the enemy. “I feel happier now that we have no more allies to be polite to and pamper,” said King George VI. News vendors echoed this new sentiment by scribbling on billboards: alone at last!"
"In a prison camp in France, Vera's old friend the Earl of Cardigan wrote in his diary that his German captors boasted of driving the British into the sea. He recalled a Punch magazine cartoon from the 1914–18 war: “The Turkish Sultan told the German Kaiser that the British at Gallipoli had been pushed into the sea. Replied the Kaiser: ‘You fool! That's their element!’”"
"But when France sued for peace, there was a silence in Whitehall that Vera described to Bill Stephenson as “sinister.” He noted, “Powerful Whitehall influences say it's only Churchill's hatred of Hitler stops us making peace with Germany.” To counter this, Stephenson moved to New York to form an organization to reinforce Churchill's reign of terror from that neutral base. Churchill took Lord Halifax's contaminating presence out of Whitehall and parked his “Holy Fox” in Washington as ambassador. Churchill was making the best use of the worst appeasers.
"“Bring in the United States, I don't care how,” Churchill demanded. The short way was to prove SOE's value. On June 18, he broadcast to Americans: “If Hitler wins and we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a New Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science.”
"This was a reference to secret German work on an atomic bomb, using heavy water available only in Norway. The French secret service had brought out an existing stock of 185 kilograms in twenty-six cans. Colonel Louis Rivet, who was in England to run French secret armies, said he needed somewhere to hide the cans. Vera looked for space at Wormwood Scrubs, but the old prison was starting to burst with secret agencies. The only totally secure storage site, said Vera, was beneath the throne.
"She was remembering the cheeky remark “The safest place to keep a secret is under His Majesty's bottom” uttered by a Dr. Whynant of the Uncommon Languages Group at Wormwood Scrubs, who dealt with intercepted correspondence and came from the Ancient Guild of British Museum Curators.
"“What did Dr. Whynant mean?” Vera asked Tony Samuel, the Jewish banker who had met her as a military intelligence corps officer studying the sabotage of Romanian supplies to Germany.
"“Windsor Castle!” he replied.
"Sure enough, Windsor Castle was the repository of the world's entire stock of heavy water, later used by Tube Alloys, the cover name for British nuclear research, shared with the U.S. to produce the first atomic bomb.
"On July 16, 1940, Hitler ordered the invasion of Britain."
................................................................................................
William B. Donovan was sent by FDR, and was impressed by Vera more than by the "stuffed shirts" of the empire he'd met and detested. She was recruiting, largely from downed airmen in France.
"What made Vera a woman “bitter as wormwood” were not these past follies, but the news that Stringbag was lost at sea. She blamed senior intelligence officers for ignoring warnings from a twenty-one-year-old Bletchley analyst, Harry Hinsley, who regularly sent information to the Admiralty's Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) in the Citadel near Trafalgar Square. His disembodied lower-class accents fell upon the deaf ears of pukka naval officers. During the Norwegian campaign, he deduced that German warships were breaking out of the Baltic into the North Sea from listening to enemy wireless instructions that were repeated on other frequencies never before used. The Citadel failed to pass along his conclusions to warships at sea. The German battle cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst ambushed the British aircraft carrier Glorious on the evening of June 8, and quickly sank it. There was not even time to launch its planes."
"Tommy Davies had snatched platinum worth a fortune from under German noses during the rush out of France, and this generated some funds. In and around Bletchley, university undergraduates were paid a pittance while they sweated over German codes.
"She sensed that these humble measures impressed Donovan more than the Whitehall grandees who tried to “duchess” him while the wine flowed at private dinners. His legal career had taught him the artfulness of con men. Britain was in a mess now as a result of leaders like Lord Halifax, who, as recently as July 1938, had told Hitler's adjutant, Fritz Wiedemann, that the foreign secretary “would like to see the Führer entering London at the side of the King amid the acclamations of the English people.”"
"Donovan suspected that SOE would take years to be up and running properly, especially in the face of Whitehall opposition. “Delay is the last weapon in the bureaucratic armory,” he observed from his own experience in interdepartmental wars. Churchill was half American. Perhaps this accounted for the miracles of improvisation revealed by Vera. She took initiatives that exceeded her apparently low-level authority. Donovan wondered if the name Vera Atkins was a cover, it was so commonplace."
Vera took Donovan to Bletchley Park.
"Donovan was entrusted with an overview of work that revolved more and more around Enigma. It was clear that U.S. industrial capacity was needed. Even machines as elementary as teletypes, which shift increasingly heavy loads of text at high speed between outlying signal stations and analysts, were unobtainable in sufficient quantity. For starters, GCCS and a network of secret departments required four seven-line and two twelve-line Hellschreiber machines from America. The threat to shipping increased or decreased according to how speedily Bletchley deciphered orders to U-boats. On April 26, 1940, for instance, a German trawler had been targeted so that up-to-date Enigma documents could be seized. A prolonged period in which U-boat signals were not read could be disastrous. U-boats were built and launched faster than the British could sink them. U-boat torpedoes caused a near-fatal drop in supplies to the United Kingdom.
"Vera showed Donovan the contrast to the extravagances of his own country, which was far more advanced in the efficient management of production lines. BPers, cloaked in wooden sheds by heavy blackout curtains, made their calculations with pencil stubs and stumbled around in apparent disorder. Ian Fleming devised a scheme to capture a German rescue boat with another naval Enigma on board. A German bomber, gently forced down onto an English field, was restored for flight with a crew of British closework experts disguised in the gear of captured German fliers. The commandos were to crash it in the English Channel. When a German air-sea rescue boat arrived, the operatives were to board it, remove everything to do with the latest Enigma, kill the German rescuers, and make sure Berlin did not detect a ruse. Ian's code name for this was Ruthless. Vera feared even someone nicknamed Wild Bill might see Ruthless as the brainstorm of a crackpot. She redirected Donovan away from Ian Fleming to the less flamboyant Colin McVean Gubbins."
"The day before his departure, Cadogan, now Churchill's chief adviser, coolly noted, “Quite a good air battle over Dover. C has news that invasion will come. Hope so.”
"This defiant spirit reinforced Donovan's endorsement of collaboration with SOE when he joined President Roosevelt in the New England countryside on August 10, 1940."
"Enigma messages began to be broken at Bletchley on January 17, 1940, and this could not be disclosed. Alan Turing, Bletchley's code-breaking genius, had to come to Paris. He had built his own electromagnetic improvement on the Polish bombe, which was limited to recognizing the fingerprint of the German sender of an enciphered message. Turing had a pretty good idea of the extreme danger to Britain if Polish code breakers fell into German hands."
"Gubby returned to London, expecting a lightning German attack that would seize some unsuspecting neutral—probably Norway, because Churchill had used his naval authority to bottle up the Skagerrak as a passage from the Baltic Sea for German warships and to lay mines around Norway. Berlin denounced this as a provocation."
Neville Chamberlain was forced to resign.
"A week earlier, Colin Gubbins had joined a special group hurriedly put together to fight by any means in Norway. With him was Kermit Roosevelt, a son of President Theodore Roosevelt. Kermit was a long-standing member of The Room at 34 East 62nd Street in New York and its first observer of closework in action. His impressions were tremendously important if Britain was to win support from President Roosevelt."
"Vera's informants reported, accurately as it turned out, that King George VI wanted Halifax as prime minister, not Churchill.
"Churchill warned Roosevelt, “You may have a completely subjugated Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear.” Such messages went through the U.S. embassy and were leaking to Berlin. On May 17, 1940, a Mutual Friend, Major Jack Dermot O'Reilly, trapped an American code clerk, Tyler Gatewood Kent. He had been passing copies of the secret exchanges to Captain A. H. M. Ramsey, who was distantly related to the royal family. Ramsey confided the material to Anna Wolkoff, a White Russian who blamed the Jews for her family's exile in London. She gave copies to the Italian embassy, which radioed everything to Rome where it was passed through the German ambassador, Hans von Mackensen, to Berlin. “The messages went direct daily to Hitler—priceless information that he read word for word,” testified the German spy chief Walter Schellenberg at his postwar trial.
"Early one morning, O'Reilly's men burst into a flat at 47 Gloucester Place in central London, arrested Tyler Kent, and retrieved 1,929 U.S. embassy documents from a cabinet plastered with this is a jew's war."
"The mole, Tyler Kent, was the twenty-nine-year old son of an American diplomat. A clerk in the U.S. embassy code room, he felt FDR and Churchill were betraying Americans. At the time, only 3 percent of Americans wanted to enter the war, according to polls. In January 1940 Anna Wolkoff, whose father had been an admiral in the Russian czarist navy, told Kent that Jews had deposed their family. The mischief began. “A terrible blow!” Breckinridge Long, a U.S. assistant secretary of state, wrote in his diary: “Our every diplomatic maneuver exposed.” Ambassador Kennedy prudently phoned President Roosevelt to say that, if the United States had been at war, Kent would have been shot. For once, FDR did not disagree with Kennedy.5 If the intercepted FDR-Churchill exchanges had been publicized in the United States, they could have destroyed Roosevelt. Laws enacted by Congress were designed to keep America out of European disputes. Churchill needed him to win an unprecedented third term in the 1940 presidential elections. Ambassador Kennedy “came under electronic surveillance,” noted Winston's son Randolph Churchill. “We had reached the point of bugging potential traitors and enemies.” Randolph later parachuted into Yugoslavia to join Tito's clandestine armies."
Gubby escaped and returned to England.
"He brought back Norwegians whose work as SOE agents would later destroy material that German scientists regarded as the means for making an atomic bomb. Gubby had proved primitive methods could undermine the most advanced technology, and Kermit Roosevelt admiringly reported this to FDR."
................................................................................................
"The Daily Mail promoted the Isle of Wight as “peaceful, carefree” until France fell and the “carefree” Isle of Wight requisitioned its holidaymakers’ steamers to rescue Allied armies at Dunkirk. In the week ending June 4, 1940, some 861 ships of all shapes and sizes crossed the English Channel to snatch 224,586 British and 112,546 French troops out of the jaws of the enemy. “I feel happier now that we have no more allies to be polite to and pamper,” said King George VI. News vendors echoed this new sentiment by scribbling on billboards: alone at last!"
"In a prison camp in France, Vera's old friend the Earl of Cardigan wrote in his diary that his German captors boasted of driving the British into the sea. He recalled a Punch magazine cartoon from the 1914–18 war: “The Turkish Sultan told the German Kaiser that the British at Gallipoli had been pushed into the sea. Replied the Kaiser: ‘You fool! That's their element!’”"
"But when France sued for peace, there was a silence in Whitehall that Vera described to Bill Stephenson as “sinister.” He noted, “Powerful Whitehall influences say it's only Churchill's hatred of Hitler stops us making peace with Germany.” To counter this, Stephenson moved to New York to form an organization to reinforce Churchill's reign of terror from that neutral base. Churchill took Lord Halifax's contaminating presence out of Whitehall and parked his “Holy Fox” in Washington as ambassador. Churchill was making the best use of the worst appeasers.
"“Bring in the United States, I don't care how,” Churchill demanded. The short way was to prove SOE's value. On June 18, he broadcast to Americans: “If Hitler wins and we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a New Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science.”
"This was a reference to secret German work on an atomic bomb, using heavy water available only in Norway. The French secret service had brought out an existing stock of 185 kilograms in twenty-six cans. Colonel Louis Rivet, who was in England to run French secret armies, said he needed somewhere to hide the cans. Vera looked for space at Wormwood Scrubs, but the old prison was starting to burst with secret agencies. The only totally secure storage site, said Vera, was beneath the throne.
"She was remembering the cheeky remark “The safest place to keep a secret is under His Majesty's bottom” uttered by a Dr. Whynant of the Uncommon Languages Group at Wormwood Scrubs, who dealt with intercepted correspondence and came from the Ancient Guild of British Museum Curators.
"“What did Dr. Whynant mean?” Vera asked Tony Samuel, the Jewish banker who had met her as a military intelligence corps officer studying the sabotage of Romanian supplies to Germany.
"“Windsor Castle!” he replied.
"Sure enough, Windsor Castle was the repository of the world's entire stock of heavy water, later used by Tube Alloys, the cover name for British nuclear research, shared with the U.S. to produce the first atomic bomb.
"On July 16, 1940, Hitler ordered the invasion of Britain."
................................................................................................
William B. Donovan was sent by FDR, and was impressed by Vera more than by the "stuffed shirts" of the empire he'd met and detested. She was recruiting, largely from downed airmen in France.
"What made Vera a woman “bitter as wormwood” were not these past follies, but the news that Stringbag was lost at sea. She blamed senior intelligence officers for ignoring warnings from a twenty-one-year-old Bletchley analyst, Harry Hinsley, who regularly sent information to the Admiralty's Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) in the Citadel near Trafalgar Square. His disembodied lower-class accents fell upon the deaf ears of pukka naval officers. During the Norwegian campaign, he deduced that German warships were breaking out of the Baltic into the North Sea from listening to enemy wireless instructions that were repeated on other frequencies never before used. The Citadel failed to pass along his conclusions to warships at sea. The German battle cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst ambushed the British aircraft carrier Glorious on the evening of June 8, and quickly sank it. There was not even time to launch its planes."
"Tommy Davies had snatched platinum worth a fortune from under German noses during the rush out of France, and this generated some funds. In and around Bletchley, university undergraduates were paid a pittance while they sweated over German codes.
"She sensed that these humble measures impressed Donovan more than the Whitehall grandees who tried to “duchess” him while the wine flowed at private dinners. His legal career had taught him the artfulness of con men. Britain was in a mess now as a result of leaders like Lord Halifax, who, as recently as July 1938, had told Hitler's adjutant, Fritz Wiedemann, that the foreign secretary “would like to see the Führer entering London at the side of the King amid the acclamations of the English people.”"
"Donovan suspected that SOE would take years to be up and running properly, especially in the face of Whitehall opposition. “Delay is the last weapon in the bureaucratic armory,” he observed from his own experience in interdepartmental wars. Churchill was half American. Perhaps this accounted for the miracles of improvisation revealed by Vera. She took initiatives that exceeded her apparently low-level authority. Donovan wondered if the name Vera Atkins was a cover, it was so commonplace."
................................................................................................
Vera took Donovan to Bletchley Park.
"Donovan was entrusted with an overview of work that revolved more and more around Enigma. It was clear that U.S. industrial capacity was needed. Even machines as elementary as teletypes, which shift increasingly heavy loads of text at high speed between outlying signal stations and analysts, were unobtainable in sufficient quantity. For starters, GCCS and a network of secret departments required four seven-line and two twelve-line Hellschreiber machines from America. The threat to shipping increased or decreased according to how speedily Bletchley deciphered orders to U-boats. On April 26, 1940, for instance, a German trawler had been targeted so that up-to-date Enigma documents could be seized. A prolonged period in which U-boat signals were not read could be disastrous. U-boats were built and launched faster than the British could sink them. U-boat torpedoes caused a near-fatal drop in supplies to the United Kingdom.
"Vera showed Donovan the contrast to the extravagances of his own country, which was far more advanced in the efficient management of production lines. BPers, cloaked in wooden sheds by heavy blackout curtains, made their calculations with pencil stubs and stumbled around in apparent disorder. Ian Fleming devised a scheme to capture a German rescue boat with another naval Enigma on board. A German bomber, gently forced down onto an English field, was restored for flight with a crew of British closework experts disguised in the gear of captured German fliers. The commandos were to crash it in the English Channel. When a German air-sea rescue boat arrived, the operatives were to board it, remove everything to do with the latest Enigma, kill the German rescuers, and make sure Berlin did not detect a ruse. Ian's code name for this was Ruthless. Vera feared even someone nicknamed Wild Bill might see Ruthless as the brainstorm of a crackpot. She redirected Donovan away from Ian Fleming to the less flamboyant Colin McVean Gubbins."
"The day before his departure, Cadogan, now Churchill's chief adviser, coolly noted, “Quite a good air battle over Dover. C has news that invasion will come. Hope so.”
"This defiant spirit reinforced Donovan's endorsement of collaboration with SOE when he joined President Roosevelt in the New England countryside on August 10, 1940."
................................................................................................
"It was the middle of what was later called the Year Alone by the islanders, who felt isolated by the enemy. Stephenson, busy with operational plans to undermine the enemy in the Western Hemisphere, was also worried by Britain's detention of enemy aliens. It would be a disaster if Vera were scooped up along with Jewish refugees, to be shipped to detention camps in Canada. Even if SOE spoke to the right people, it still had powerful enemies at home.
"“Document her as your permanent secretary,” joked Ian Fleming.
"Stephenson wondered later if this marked the moment when Fleming dreamed up James Bond and a secretary named Moneypenny. Bond's alias, 007, was used by British intelligence to denote Germany's diplomatic code in the 1914–18 war."
"Rolande Colas, on her first mission, brought the communist organizer Henri Tanguy, “Colonel Rol,” into contact with Vera. “Communist networks grew in Europe after Stalin set up the Comintern,” Rolande explained. “The best are in France. They're trained in sabotage. It's more efficient than assassination. And covert action is more humane than mass bombing, don't you think?”"
"Getting supplies from the bureaucracy was like squeezing blood from a stone, so Gubby visited police stations to collect weapons taken out of private hands, as required under war emergency powers. He found that other such weapons had been tossed into village duck ponds or dumped in the sea. An interim title was found that impressed the police but meant nothing to the listening enemy: Auxiliary Units."
"In charge of auxiliaries was an officer from the Sixth Rajputana Rifles of India. Veterans were hauled out of retirement and blossomed as instructors and inventors of devices that would fool the enemy. Small units had to communicate without wireless sets and telephones, so “bunny runs” were reamed out between two-man underground posts. Messages in gutted golf balls were rolled through these artificial rabbit channels. Pitchforks and shotguns were shared out among elderly town clerks, lords of the manor, poachers, retired chief constables, and anyone else able to stand on two legs and swear without blushing an oath under the Official Secrets Act that he or she had a clean record."
"From America came pistols and ammunition. Friends there had asked what would help. Anything, replied Gubby, that goes bang."
"Gubby was called a loose cannon by the hard-boiled General Bernard Montgomery, who was to become the leading British soldier of World War II. Having got his men out of France, Monty was trying to replace lost equipment while positioning his tattered 3rd Division to block the expected German invasion. Austere, crabby, and puritanical, he was outraged when an Auxiliary Unit, consisting of one elderly ex-poacher, broke into his headquarters. Monty had boasted to Churchill that the headquarters were impregnable. The old poacher penetrated the impregnable, worked his way around Monty's bedroom in a tumbledown farmhouse, and tossed a homemade Molotov cocktail—gasoline in a beer bottle—at the general's precious peach tree, incinerating it. The poacher vanished into the undergrowth. He could have been a German saboteur. Monty's coastal defenses had just been inspected by Churchill, who saw, despite Monty's claims of efficiency, a lack of troop transport but “large numbers of buses plying for pleasure traffic, up and down the seafront at Brighton.” Churchill ordered Monty to commandeer the buses, in the tone of a schoolmaster telling a lazy boy to pull up his socks.
"None of this endeared to Monty the concept of “dirty tricks.” His opposition could cause problems if, as Donovan hoped, an Anglo-American alliance was to confront Germany. Vera decided she had better tell Donovan all he needed to know. Later she was judged to be worth a score of formal briefing sessions. As U.S. supreme commander, General Dwight Eisenhower was so offended by Montgomery as a field marshal that Ike seriously wondered if he could tell any of his American generals to take orders from him."
"Some twenty-five hundred RAF pilots had prevented the invasion. Zura and his fellow Poles accounted for 5 percent of these, and were credited with inflicting 15 percent of German losses."
"When Gubby became Vera's director of operations, he moved into quarters provided by her good relations with the owners of Marks & Spencer. SOE became known as the Baker Street Irregulars, after the street urchins who spied for Sherlock Holmes. They were lodged on Baker Street, along with the headquarters of the large retail store chain whose chairman, Simon Marks, was SOE's undisclosed patron. Donovan had strong sympathies for the Jewish victims of Nazism and agreed with Vera that they should long ago have been supported in rebellion against Hitler. The Joint Palestine Appeal became the United Jewish Appeal, whose future deputy chairman, Sir Isidore “Jack” Lyons, came from a family long established in York. An ancestral Isidore Lyons and other Jews had been executed, their heads displayed on spikes along the city of York's encircling walls, after refusing to convert to Christianity. Donovan discussed with the current Lyons family the need to get so-called enemy exiles out of the detention camps. Their knowledge of Europe should be exploited. The help expatriate Jews gave SOE was never openly discussed. They were well aware of the anti-Semitism lurking under brass hats. Hugh Dalton told the chiefs of staff, “Covert action is too serious a matter to be left to soldiers. Whenever I try to destroy anything anywhere, I am caught in some diplomatic trip wire.”
"Informality was SOE's grim necessity. “Grim” was not a word Donovan would have used as an old hand at impulsive action, but he understood grim necessity during a visit with Churchill that Christmas. Grim necessity sent secretaries fluttering, scooping up papers. They scuttled to where Churchill was to settle in for a night's work. He had several choices: the old tube station at Down Street in Piccadilly, which Vera called The Burrow, or the former typists’ basement room at No. 10 Downing Street, which she called The Barn, or under a corner of the Board of Trade building facing St. James's Park at Storey's Gate in a subterranean War Cabinet room. Few knew beforehand Churchill's imminent whereabouts. He was a moving target. The House of Commons on the Thames was easily spotted by bombers, so Parliament sat in Church House, the Anglican Church headquarters facing Westminster Abbey. And so it seemed to Donovan that perhaps some of the ambiguities, the formlessness of SOE, the disorder and hodgepodge and anarchy surrounding Vera, were well justified."
"It was the middle of what was later called the Year Alone by the islanders, who felt isolated by the enemy. Stephenson, busy with operational plans to undermine the enemy in the Western Hemisphere, was also worried by Britain's detention of enemy aliens. It would be a disaster if Vera were scooped up along with Jewish refugees, to be shipped to detention camps in Canada. Even if SOE spoke to the right people, it still had powerful enemies at home.
"“Document her as your permanent secretary,” joked Ian Fleming.
"Stephenson wondered later if this marked the moment when Fleming dreamed up James Bond and a secretary named Moneypenny. Bond's alias, 007, was used by British intelligence to denote Germany's diplomatic code in the 1914–18 war."
"Rolande Colas, on her first mission, brought the communist organizer Henri Tanguy, “Colonel Rol,” into contact with Vera. “Communist networks grew in Europe after Stalin set up the Comintern,” Rolande explained. “The best are in France. They're trained in sabotage. It's more efficient than assassination. And covert action is more humane than mass bombing, don't you think?”"
"Getting supplies from the bureaucracy was like squeezing blood from a stone, so Gubby visited police stations to collect weapons taken out of private hands, as required under war emergency powers. He found that other such weapons had been tossed into village duck ponds or dumped in the sea. An interim title was found that impressed the police but meant nothing to the listening enemy: Auxiliary Units."
"In charge of auxiliaries was an officer from the Sixth Rajputana Rifles of India. Veterans were hauled out of retirement and blossomed as instructors and inventors of devices that would fool the enemy. Small units had to communicate without wireless sets and telephones, so “bunny runs” were reamed out between two-man underground posts. Messages in gutted golf balls were rolled through these artificial rabbit channels. Pitchforks and shotguns were shared out among elderly town clerks, lords of the manor, poachers, retired chief constables, and anyone else able to stand on two legs and swear without blushing an oath under the Official Secrets Act that he or she had a clean record."
"From America came pistols and ammunition. Friends there had asked what would help. Anything, replied Gubby, that goes bang."
"Gubby was called a loose cannon by the hard-boiled General Bernard Montgomery, who was to become the leading British soldier of World War II. Having got his men out of France, Monty was trying to replace lost equipment while positioning his tattered 3rd Division to block the expected German invasion. Austere, crabby, and puritanical, he was outraged when an Auxiliary Unit, consisting of one elderly ex-poacher, broke into his headquarters. Monty had boasted to Churchill that the headquarters were impregnable. The old poacher penetrated the impregnable, worked his way around Monty's bedroom in a tumbledown farmhouse, and tossed a homemade Molotov cocktail—gasoline in a beer bottle—at the general's precious peach tree, incinerating it. The poacher vanished into the undergrowth. He could have been a German saboteur. Monty's coastal defenses had just been inspected by Churchill, who saw, despite Monty's claims of efficiency, a lack of troop transport but “large numbers of buses plying for pleasure traffic, up and down the seafront at Brighton.” Churchill ordered Monty to commandeer the buses, in the tone of a schoolmaster telling a lazy boy to pull up his socks.
"None of this endeared to Monty the concept of “dirty tricks.” His opposition could cause problems if, as Donovan hoped, an Anglo-American alliance was to confront Germany. Vera decided she had better tell Donovan all he needed to know. Later she was judged to be worth a score of formal briefing sessions. As U.S. supreme commander, General Dwight Eisenhower was so offended by Montgomery as a field marshal that Ike seriously wondered if he could tell any of his American generals to take orders from him."
"Some twenty-five hundred RAF pilots had prevented the invasion. Zura and his fellow Poles accounted for 5 percent of these, and were credited with inflicting 15 percent of German losses."
................................................................................................
"When Gubby became Vera's director of operations, he moved into quarters provided by her good relations with the owners of Marks & Spencer. SOE became known as the Baker Street Irregulars, after the street urchins who spied for Sherlock Holmes. They were lodged on Baker Street, along with the headquarters of the large retail store chain whose chairman, Simon Marks, was SOE's undisclosed patron. Donovan had strong sympathies for the Jewish victims of Nazism and agreed with Vera that they should long ago have been supported in rebellion against Hitler. The Joint Palestine Appeal became the United Jewish Appeal, whose future deputy chairman, Sir Isidore “Jack” Lyons, came from a family long established in York. An ancestral Isidore Lyons and other Jews had been executed, their heads displayed on spikes along the city of York's encircling walls, after refusing to convert to Christianity. Donovan discussed with the current Lyons family the need to get so-called enemy exiles out of the detention camps. Their knowledge of Europe should be exploited. The help expatriate Jews gave SOE was never openly discussed. They were well aware of the anti-Semitism lurking under brass hats. Hugh Dalton told the chiefs of staff, “Covert action is too serious a matter to be left to soldiers. Whenever I try to destroy anything anywhere, I am caught in some diplomatic trip wire.”
"Informality was SOE's grim necessity. “Grim” was not a word Donovan would have used as an old hand at impulsive action, but he understood grim necessity during a visit with Churchill that Christmas. Grim necessity sent secretaries fluttering, scooping up papers. They scuttled to where Churchill was to settle in for a night's work. He had several choices: the old tube station at Down Street in Piccadilly, which Vera called The Burrow, or the former typists’ basement room at No. 10 Downing Street, which she called The Barn, or under a corner of the Board of Trade building facing St. James's Park at Storey's Gate in a subterranean War Cabinet room. Few knew beforehand Churchill's imminent whereabouts. He was a moving target. The House of Commons on the Thames was easily spotted by bombers, so Parliament sat in Church House, the Anglican Church headquarters facing Westminster Abbey. And so it seemed to Donovan that perhaps some of the ambiguities, the formlessness of SOE, the disorder and hodgepodge and anarchy surrounding Vera, were well justified."
................................................................................................
"Vera obtained Hitler's directive for Operation Barbarossa, dated December 18, 1940, “to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign before the end of the war against England.” One version came through her U.S. consulate friend in Berlin, the former Associated Press correspondent William Russell. This was repeated by the U.S. commercial counselor, Sam Woods, who regularly met informants in a Berlin moviehouse. Woods had been in Rome when Mussolini boasted that his mighty navy made the Mediterranean “an Italian lake.” British ships would be expelled from the sea lanes to vital Mideast bases.
"On the day Churchill honored Chamberlain's memory, twenty Swordfish biplanes crippled Mussolini's battle fleet at its Taranto base."
"The Japanese embassy in Berlin dispatched naval experts to study the operation. Six weeks later, U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew in Tokyo reported rumors of plans for a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor."
"Yet there was growing American goodwill as Londoners were seen to emerge from the 1940–41 aerial bombings with heads unbowed. Money and arms could have been raised by Mrs. Miniver, a stiff-upper-lip English-woman venerated by Americans since the release of a popular movie whose propaganda value, said Churchill, was worth a battle fleet. ... There was no real Mrs. Miniver. She was played by a columnist, Jan Struthers, who before the war wrote in the Times about the simple joys of London life, of a country home in Kent, and nothing more worrisome than flighty parlormaids and a hubby who fell asleep behind his newspaper after dinner. In wartime, Americans believed her to be Mrs. Miniver, plucky housewife, gallant mom, holding up against the Hun. The Roosevelts had her stay at the White House, and Hollywood turned Mrs. Miniver into Greer Garson."
"Vera obtained Hitler's directive for Operation Barbarossa, dated December 18, 1940, “to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign before the end of the war against England.” One version came through her U.S. consulate friend in Berlin, the former Associated Press correspondent William Russell. This was repeated by the U.S. commercial counselor, Sam Woods, who regularly met informants in a Berlin moviehouse. Woods had been in Rome when Mussolini boasted that his mighty navy made the Mediterranean “an Italian lake.” British ships would be expelled from the sea lanes to vital Mideast bases.
"On the day Churchill honored Chamberlain's memory, twenty Swordfish biplanes crippled Mussolini's battle fleet at its Taranto base."
"The Japanese embassy in Berlin dispatched naval experts to study the operation. Six weeks later, U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew in Tokyo reported rumors of plans for a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor."
................................................................................................
"Yet there was growing American goodwill as Londoners were seen to emerge from the 1940–41 aerial bombings with heads unbowed. Money and arms could have been raised by Mrs. Miniver, a stiff-upper-lip English-woman venerated by Americans since the release of a popular movie whose propaganda value, said Churchill, was worth a battle fleet. ... There was no real Mrs. Miniver. She was played by a columnist, Jan Struthers, who before the war wrote in the Times about the simple joys of London life, of a country home in Kent, and nothing more worrisome than flighty parlormaids and a hubby who fell asleep behind his newspaper after dinner. In wartime, Americans believed her to be Mrs. Miniver, plucky housewife, gallant mom, holding up against the Hun. The Roosevelts had her stay at the White House, and Hollywood turned Mrs. Miniver into Greer Garson."
................................................................................................
"Krystyna wanted to install a mobile radio news station in Budapest that broadcast in Polish. ... She first returned on skis, and gathered details of disorder within the German ranks during five weeks of constant travel. ... She reported: the German army and the Gestapo detested one another; there had been a massacre of some ten thousand German soldiers from Bavaria when they had tried to rebel against Berlin's High Command; about one hundred Poles were shot dead every night in Warsaw. The Polish people only needed weapons to rise up against their German oppressors. There existed an estimated 100,000 armed men in eighteen militant resistance groups. Their few arms were either stolen from German depots or gathered from massacred Polish officers. She identified German army units moving eastward to what she had heard called “the Russian front.” But the countess failed in the one thing dearest to her heart: she could not persuade her Jewish mother to leave Warsaw."
"Krystyna made six crossings from Hungary over the mountains to Poland, and another eight crossings through Slovak frontiers. She gave a comprehensive picture of munitions moving eastward on the German rail systems. She described a wagon that appeared to carry a “gassing chamber.” She reported on U-boats under construction in Danzig. On January 24, 1941, the Hungarian police arrested her and delivered her into the hands of the Gestapo. She denied the accusation that she had British friends, and insisted she was a writer and broadcaster. She chewed her own tongue until blood spilled over her clothing when the Gestapo seemed ready to move from rough questioning to torture. Between bouts of coughing, she said she suffered from tuberculosis. A sympathetic Hungarian doctor confirmed this. She was released and, thumbing her nose at the Gestapo thugs who thought she had furtive reasons for knowing the British, went straight to the British legation. The minister, Sir Owen O'Malley, told her to get out of Hungary before worse things happened, and issued her a British passport in the name of Christina Granville. Then he hid her in the trunk of his official car and drove her over the border into Yugoslavia. In Belgrade, she delivered to the British legation the last of the microfilm she regularly collected from Poland, hidden in her ski gloves.
"O'Malley said that Krystyna was the bravest person he had ever known. “She could do anything with dynamite except eat it.”
"Later she was awarded the George Cross, the highest recognition for bravery given to civilians. In her final large-scale action, she led her French maquisards in a spectacular military battle. When the French maquis entangled German reinforcements sent to help repulse the Allies on D-day, other enemy forces were trapped in the Falaise Gap by armed Poles. She called that “a nice poetic touch.” This, Vera said later, was uncharacteristically wordy. Krystyna customarily used terse language in her written intelligence summaries."
"Arthur Koestler escaped French detention only to be told in Lisbon that London refused to issue him a visa. The British consul general, Sir Henry King, slipped Koestler onto a KLM flight to Bristol. But there he was arrested and sent to Pentonville Prison. He was moved to discover that in England, putting a man to death was still treated as a solemn and exceptional event: guards walked on tiptoe and a mighty hush fell over Pentonville whenever a German spy was hanged. Koestler was finally released. He summarized English attitudes as “Be kind to the foreigner, the poor chap can't help it.” When he said this to the locals, they nodded in modest agreement. “So few saw the joke that I began to wonder whether it was a joke after all.”"
"Vera introduced him" ( Bill Donovan) "to John Godley, later Lord Kilbracken, who hid experience behind an absentminded air. Known as “God-Save-Us” Godley, he piloted Swordfish biplanes catapulted from grain ships and oil tankers in the North Atlantic to look for U-boats. ... It was impossible to land the Swordfish back on the ship, which had rockets on rails to launch the aircraft but no deck for their return. Pilots ditched in the sea or bailed out, hoping the convoy would see them. Godley became the youngest commander of a navy squadron, covering convoys crossing near the Arctic Circle to supply the Soviet Union after Hitler invaded. He still flew Swordfish with cockpits open to icy blasts."
"When Arthur Koestler did get out, he was full of hard-won advice: “Without a carte d'identité,” he said, “any agent will be outside the law.” His own French identity card went to SOE's counterfeiters to be doctored and used by another agent. Koestler was one of many Jews with the scientific expertise to help modernize Britain's ramshackle defenses. In 1931, as a science editor in Germany, he had looked into the future by contemplating splitting the atom. He had speculated about the chain reactions. German scientists ridiculed him because they had discovered the hydrogen isotope 2H, deuterium, and its oxygen compound, called heavy water. This meant, Koestler predicted accurately when he finally got anyone in London to listen, that German atomic bomb research was heading in the wrong direction."
At this point the book has photographs, and one in particular, captioned Violette Szabo who rescued White Rabbit but was executed at Dachau on eve of allied victory, makes one wonder if Upton Sinclair knew and used this in the Marceline warning Lanny and risking her own life in saving his thereby, ending up at Dachau herself, tortured, finally found by Lanny's friend in a horrible condition.
"Krystyna wanted to install a mobile radio news station in Budapest that broadcast in Polish. ... She first returned on skis, and gathered details of disorder within the German ranks during five weeks of constant travel. ... She reported: the German army and the Gestapo detested one another; there had been a massacre of some ten thousand German soldiers from Bavaria when they had tried to rebel against Berlin's High Command; about one hundred Poles were shot dead every night in Warsaw. The Polish people only needed weapons to rise up against their German oppressors. There existed an estimated 100,000 armed men in eighteen militant resistance groups. Their few arms were either stolen from German depots or gathered from massacred Polish officers. She identified German army units moving eastward to what she had heard called “the Russian front.” But the countess failed in the one thing dearest to her heart: she could not persuade her Jewish mother to leave Warsaw."
"Krystyna made six crossings from Hungary over the mountains to Poland, and another eight crossings through Slovak frontiers. She gave a comprehensive picture of munitions moving eastward on the German rail systems. She described a wagon that appeared to carry a “gassing chamber.” She reported on U-boats under construction in Danzig. On January 24, 1941, the Hungarian police arrested her and delivered her into the hands of the Gestapo. She denied the accusation that she had British friends, and insisted she was a writer and broadcaster. She chewed her own tongue until blood spilled over her clothing when the Gestapo seemed ready to move from rough questioning to torture. Between bouts of coughing, she said she suffered from tuberculosis. A sympathetic Hungarian doctor confirmed this. She was released and, thumbing her nose at the Gestapo thugs who thought she had furtive reasons for knowing the British, went straight to the British legation. The minister, Sir Owen O'Malley, told her to get out of Hungary before worse things happened, and issued her a British passport in the name of Christina Granville. Then he hid her in the trunk of his official car and drove her over the border into Yugoslavia. In Belgrade, she delivered to the British legation the last of the microfilm she regularly collected from Poland, hidden in her ski gloves.
"O'Malley said that Krystyna was the bravest person he had ever known. “She could do anything with dynamite except eat it.”
"Later she was awarded the George Cross, the highest recognition for bravery given to civilians. In her final large-scale action, she led her French maquisards in a spectacular military battle. When the French maquis entangled German reinforcements sent to help repulse the Allies on D-day, other enemy forces were trapped in the Falaise Gap by armed Poles. She called that “a nice poetic touch.” This, Vera said later, was uncharacteristically wordy. Krystyna customarily used terse language in her written intelligence summaries."
"Arthur Koestler escaped French detention only to be told in Lisbon that London refused to issue him a visa. The British consul general, Sir Henry King, slipped Koestler onto a KLM flight to Bristol. But there he was arrested and sent to Pentonville Prison. He was moved to discover that in England, putting a man to death was still treated as a solemn and exceptional event: guards walked on tiptoe and a mighty hush fell over Pentonville whenever a German spy was hanged. Koestler was finally released. He summarized English attitudes as “Be kind to the foreigner, the poor chap can't help it.” When he said this to the locals, they nodded in modest agreement. “So few saw the joke that I began to wonder whether it was a joke after all.”"
"Vera introduced him" ( Bill Donovan) "to John Godley, later Lord Kilbracken, who hid experience behind an absentminded air. Known as “God-Save-Us” Godley, he piloted Swordfish biplanes catapulted from grain ships and oil tankers in the North Atlantic to look for U-boats. ... It was impossible to land the Swordfish back on the ship, which had rockets on rails to launch the aircraft but no deck for their return. Pilots ditched in the sea or bailed out, hoping the convoy would see them. Godley became the youngest commander of a navy squadron, covering convoys crossing near the Arctic Circle to supply the Soviet Union after Hitler invaded. He still flew Swordfish with cockpits open to icy blasts."
"When Arthur Koestler did get out, he was full of hard-won advice: “Without a carte d'identité,” he said, “any agent will be outside the law.” His own French identity card went to SOE's counterfeiters to be doctored and used by another agent. Koestler was one of many Jews with the scientific expertise to help modernize Britain's ramshackle defenses. In 1931, as a science editor in Germany, he had looked into the future by contemplating splitting the atom. He had speculated about the chain reactions. German scientists ridiculed him because they had discovered the hydrogen isotope 2H, deuterium, and its oxygen compound, called heavy water. This meant, Koestler predicted accurately when he finally got anyone in London to listen, that German atomic bomb research was heading in the wrong direction."
................................................................................................
At this point the book has photographs, and one in particular, captioned Violette Szabo who rescued White Rabbit but was executed at Dachau on eve of allied victory, makes one wonder if Upton Sinclair knew and used this in the Marceline warning Lanny and risking her own life in saving his thereby, ending up at Dachau herself, tortured, finally found by Lanny's friend in a horrible condition.
................................................................................................
"Vera avoided card files. She kept in cardboard boxes the bare essentials, and memorized the rest in what she had called her Black Chamber ever since Mary Stephenson got her a bootleg copy of The American Black Chamber by Herbert O. Yardley. The book upheld Bruce Lockhart's argument that energy that should be directed against an enemy was dissipated in interdepartmental strife and jealousies. Yardley's memoir was published in 1931 and was hastily banned. Before the outbreak of the 1914–18 war he was a young telegraph operator and, through his own brilliance, rose to become chief of the code room, which he named the Black Chamber, in the White House. In 1929 Henry Stimson, as secretary of state, saw deciphered Japanese messages and said, “Gentlemen do not read each other's mail!” He stopped the decoding of foreign embassy cables. “Thousands of documents were destroyed for domestic political reasons to do with internal rivalries,” wrote Yardley.
"Vera recognized his description of diplomats arguing so loudly about policy in the code room that it was impossible to get any work done. “Jolly, good-natured, smartly dressed pigmies,” he called them. One jeered at a warning that codes in use were not safe. Yardley showed how the codes were easily stolen from the vault. Its combination numbers were taken from the phone book on a daily rotation that any fool could work out. He said cipher brains and originality were all that was needed. He demonstrated how America was cheated of “the most tremendous victory in the annals of warfare” through blind trust in old ciphers used in the great offensive of September 12, 1918. Plans were telegraphed across the Atlantic by cable. The contents were recovered through induction by German submarines using wire laid alongside a stretch of the oceanbed cables. The Germans were prepared and broke the offensive. The Black Chamber had relied on a code easily broken by the submariners."
"The American's visits to measure SOE's progress gave her an opportunity to relax and amuse him with gossip. She told him the story of Douglas “Tin Legs” Bader, who had lost both legs but was allowed to continue fighting in air battles over England and “collected a gong” from King George VI. The king, who had a stutter, recalled that the German raiders used Fokker aircraft. As he pinned on the medal, he asked, “How many have you shot down of the F-F-Fokkers?” Bader dutifully replied: “Well, sir, five Messerschmitts, two Heinkels, and a Junker, sir.”"
................................................................................................
Donovan asked how German fliers had courage. Vera told him it's easy to look brave when things go your way.
"“Civilians display true courage by getting on with their daily lives between nights of terror bombing. They do it from a sense of duty. Duty is the mother of courage. Real courage is in facing impossible odds”"
"Vera avoided card files. She kept in cardboard boxes the bare essentials, and memorized the rest in what she had called her Black Chamber ever since Mary Stephenson got her a bootleg copy of The American Black Chamber by Herbert O. Yardley. The book upheld Bruce Lockhart's argument that energy that should be directed against an enemy was dissipated in interdepartmental strife and jealousies. Yardley's memoir was published in 1931 and was hastily banned. Before the outbreak of the 1914–18 war he was a young telegraph operator and, through his own brilliance, rose to become chief of the code room, which he named the Black Chamber, in the White House. In 1929 Henry Stimson, as secretary of state, saw deciphered Japanese messages and said, “Gentlemen do not read each other's mail!” He stopped the decoding of foreign embassy cables. “Thousands of documents were destroyed for domestic political reasons to do with internal rivalries,” wrote Yardley.
"Vera recognized his description of diplomats arguing so loudly about policy in the code room that it was impossible to get any work done. “Jolly, good-natured, smartly dressed pigmies,” he called them. One jeered at a warning that codes in use were not safe. Yardley showed how the codes were easily stolen from the vault. Its combination numbers were taken from the phone book on a daily rotation that any fool could work out. He said cipher brains and originality were all that was needed. He demonstrated how America was cheated of “the most tremendous victory in the annals of warfare” through blind trust in old ciphers used in the great offensive of September 12, 1918. Plans were telegraphed across the Atlantic by cable. The contents were recovered through induction by German submarines using wire laid alongside a stretch of the oceanbed cables. The Germans were prepared and broke the offensive. The Black Chamber had relied on a code easily broken by the submariners."
"The American's visits to measure SOE's progress gave her an opportunity to relax and amuse him with gossip. She told him the story of Douglas “Tin Legs” Bader, who had lost both legs but was allowed to continue fighting in air battles over England and “collected a gong” from King George VI. The king, who had a stutter, recalled that the German raiders used Fokker aircraft. As he pinned on the medal, he asked, “How many have you shot down of the F-F-Fokkers?” Bader dutifully replied: “Well, sir, five Messerschmitts, two Heinkels, and a Junker, sir.”"
................................................................................................
Donovan asked how German fliers had courage. Vera told him it's easy to look brave when things go your way.
"“Civilians display true courage by getting on with their daily lives between nights of terror bombing. They do it from a sense of duty. Duty is the mother of courage. Real courage is in facing impossible odds”"
................................................................................................
In the last quarter are the details of how the French resistance, where British and other agents helped French civilians, was the real force defeating German military, before and during the allied invasion and until much later. It couldn't have been done without the determination of the civilians of France who suffered, along with the SOLE agents, the vicious backlash unleashed by the S.S. and the nazi occupying forces and from the German military, but this further strengthened their determination to fight back. Their credit was not given, chiefly due to secrecy of the operation, and partly due to fear of imitation.
"“Hitler's new space age weapons were foiled by the ingenuity of RAF pilots who invented a way to slide their wings under the fins of missiles and tip them away from their targets.”"
OSS made a point about not a tool of British secret services by withdrawing from an operation; as one of the senior officers of theirs had said
"“If the OSS believes in its own propaganda, it should declare war on the British, for they have set themselves up as the master race in India.”"
Well, this needs to be examined in light of the later revelations about U.S. policy, as practiced by some of the presidents and officials in power during early decades post WWII, and has since come into open after some papers were declassified, where the explicit instructions were to "let India go, and save paki, if it comes to that"; which translates to, let India starve to death. (This policy was before JFK, and he turned the relationship positive - as did Carter and Clinton subsequently.)
This can only be comprehended when one understands just how inhuman is the abrahmic view of cultures with a wider scope of knowledge; it isn't that different from the Stalin era policies or general communist philosophy regarding democracy, or for that matter, jihadist view regarding cultures that do not imprison women physically in black with covered faces and legally in ways far more effective than Chinese bound feet of yore.
Leo had reworked a poem, written for Ruth, a woman he loved, who had died in a plane crash. It reminds one that all these agents, resistance workers, and generally the vast populations affected by the mayhem let loose by the power crazed despot, had had love in their lives, often extinguished by the agents of terror.
"The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have is yours.
The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause.
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours."
And the one he wrote for Noor:-
"Want to say so,
Don't know how,
Want to hug you,
Don't know if I should,
Hope you understand,
I'd take your place if I could."
In the last quarter are the details of how the French resistance, where British and other agents helped French civilians, was the real force defeating German military, before and during the allied invasion and until much later. It couldn't have been done without the determination of the civilians of France who suffered, along with the SOLE agents, the vicious backlash unleashed by the S.S. and the nazi occupying forces and from the German military, but this further strengthened their determination to fight back. Their credit was not given, chiefly due to secrecy of the operation, and partly due to fear of imitation.
"“Hitler's new space age weapons were foiled by the ingenuity of RAF pilots who invented a way to slide their wings under the fins of missiles and tip them away from their targets.”"
................................................................................................
OSS made a point about not a tool of British secret services by withdrawing from an operation; as one of the senior officers of theirs had said
"“If the OSS believes in its own propaganda, it should declare war on the British, for they have set themselves up as the master race in India.”"
Well, this needs to be examined in light of the later revelations about U.S. policy, as practiced by some of the presidents and officials in power during early decades post WWII, and has since come into open after some papers were declassified, where the explicit instructions were to "let India go, and save paki, if it comes to that"; which translates to, let India starve to death. (This policy was before JFK, and he turned the relationship positive - as did Carter and Clinton subsequently.)
This can only be comprehended when one understands just how inhuman is the abrahmic view of cultures with a wider scope of knowledge; it isn't that different from the Stalin era policies or general communist philosophy regarding democracy, or for that matter, jihadist view regarding cultures that do not imprison women physically in black with covered faces and legally in ways far more effective than Chinese bound feet of yore.
................................................................................................
Leo had reworked a poem, written for Ruth, a woman he loved, who had died in a plane crash. It reminds one that all these agents, resistance workers, and generally the vast populations affected by the mayhem let loose by the power crazed despot, had had love in their lives, often extinguished by the agents of terror.
"The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have is yours.
The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause.
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours."
And the one he wrote for Noor:-
"Want to say so,
Don't know how,
Want to hug you,
Don't know if I should,
Hope you understand,
I'd take your place if I could."
................................................................................................
................................................
November 19, 2019 - November 24, 2019..
ISBN: 978-1-61145-231-0
November 19, 2019 - November 24, 2019..
ISBN: 978-1-61145-231-0
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