By Sarah Helm
From an award-winning journalist comes this real-life cloak-and-dagger story of Vera Atkins, one in every of Britain’s most efficient mystery brokers in the course of international struggle II.
As the pinnacle of the French element of the British precise Operations govt, Vera Atkins recruited, expert, and mentored unique operatives whose activity was once to arrange and arm the resistance in Nazi-occupied France. After the warfare, Atkins courageously dedicated herself to a perilous look for twelve of her such a lot loved girls spies who had long past lacking in motion. Drawing on formerly unavailable resources, Sarah Helm chronicles Atkins’s impressive lifestyles and her singular trip throughout the chaos of post-war Europe. Brimming with intrigue, heroics, honor, and the horrors of conflict, A lifestyles in Secrets is the tale of a grand, elusive lady and a travel de strength of investigative journalism.
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Additional resources for A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII
Sample text
He had written an instruction to Zenna on the envelope. ” What Phoebe and Zenna were able to tell me was this. Vera had two brothers, Guy and Ralph. D. at Prague in 1937. After the war Guy taught African languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He had a genius for languages. Ralph, Vera's elder brother, who died in 1964, was manager of an oil company in Istanbul before the war. Later he dabbled in business. Ralph had one son, Ronald, a journalist living in Lewes. Zenna and Phoebe passed on whatever tales they had overheard about Vera's parents and about a large house somewhere in Romania, but they didn't seem to know what to believe.
Then came parachute training at Ringway airfield, near Manchester. Throughout their early instruction the agents were told they were undergoing straightforward commando training, and many still had little concept of what lay ahead. Then at Beaulieu, in the New Forest, where the agents at last began to learn the craft of clandestinity—using cutouts (innocent intermediaries), boîtes-aux-lettres (“letterboxes,” places where messages could safely be left), and basic Morse code—the reality of their likely missions became clearer.
With no other secure means of communication on the ground, couriers carried messages between circuits and subcircuits, travelling long distances, often by bicycle or train, memorising their messages or writing them on silk paper or rice paper, which could easily be hidden or destroyed. Because they were constantly on the move, couriers ran the highest risk of being stopped and arrested. For male couriers that risk became greater with every day the war went on. From early 1942 all young men in France were liable to be picked off the street and, unless they were classified as essential workers, were sent to Germany as forced labourers.