Spymistress by William Stevenson

Author:William Stevenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2006-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

23

“She Has to Believe in What She Is Doing or Go Mad”

“Say White Rabbit and Three Blind Mice to Vera and you need say no more,” recalled Leo Marks, SOE's boy coding genius. The White Rabbit was the nickname for a thirty-eight-year-old Englishman, F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas, general manager in 1939 of Molyneux, the great Paris fashion house. Three Blind Mice was the poem-code of a suburban London shopgirl, Violette Szabo, who left school at fourteen. Their lives, one genteel and privileged in origin, the other humble, brought them together with Virginia Hall and Rolande Colas, all recruited in Paris when Vera first went there scouting for agents, and all three were brilliant and brave in adversity.

France was still a great power. With a population of 105 million, France was the largest powerhouse to fuel the new German Reich. France had a revolutionary past that made it ripe for resistance against an oppressor, but it was also so highly individualistic that the Free French seemed always in disagreement. The White Rabbit, hopping in and out of this country haunted by local pride and ancient prejudices, negotiated agreements between guerrilla forces with a display of such nerve and moral integrity that he was able to push his way into Churchill's presence with a plea for greater material support. And the agent's reputation was such that Churchill had to listen.

Head and shoulders above the other exiled European government leaders stood General Charles de Gaulle of France. His authority bridged the divisions, but he had no experience in closework. Nick Bodington, a former Reuters news agency man in Paris, began by forming liaisons between resistance cells and moved back and forth to France with such nonchalance that internal security, MI5, with no experience of the realities of field operations, suspected he was working for both sides.1

Vera knew secrecy provided opportunities for character assassination. De Gaulle's Free French in London, competitive and divided among themselves, tried Churchill's patience to the breaking point. Vera understood the peculiarities of their secret-service people on Duke Street, and they in turn were more ready to confide in her than in the SIS, which was distrusted as an arm of the British Foreign Office when Halifax was associated with appeasement.

The French spymaster Jean Moulin advised her, “When tired or upset, or both, eat.” When in London, he started his day with ham, eggs, sausages, tomatoes, toast, marmalade, and tea. He would consume this un-French breakfast after a long night's work and then telephone a private number, Whitehall 4503, and walk to the Cavendish Hotel on Jermyn Street to be shown into a drawing room where, he claimed, Victorian chorus girls used to hang themselves in despair when pregnant. “Our war,” he told Vera, “gives the desperate a reason to live.”

Moulin was one of the tragic giants of the French resistance. He observed dryly that the purity of English womanhood was a nineteenth-century concept that influenced the War Office view that “women are ‘doing their bit’ in factories or noncombatant branches of the armed forces.

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