My hairdresser is based near London’s Marble Arch, so before my last cut I dived behind Selfridges to visit Orchard Court. Today, it’s a luxury mansion block, and you’re not allowed past the entrance colonnades – ‘NO THOROUGHFARE’. There’s no indication that, during the Second World War, the building was one of the bases for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) F (French) Section, which on moonlit nights flew spies trained in espionage and silent killing over the Channel and dropped them behind enemy lines in France. Of roughly 470, 118 never came home.
Maurice Buckmaster, who headed up F Section, was a tall, athletic figure who had once captained Eton at soccer. He did The Times crossword on the bus to work to sharpen his wits. But they were not so sharp as they might have been, and he was repeatedly fooled by radio messages sent to London by the Gestapo pretending to be his agents. Again and again, he batted messages straight back to the enemy. His compromised agents then had forty-eight hours to try to hold out under torture while the other members of their circuits ran for cover. So effective was this for the Germans that, on D-Day, Hitler himself suggested sending a message thanking London for playing the Funkspiel, or radio game, thereby delivering him so many agents and arms.
There had to be overwhelming proof before Buckmaster could believe that anything had gone seriously wrong. One colleague remembered being in the office with him one summer Sunday in 1944 when news came through that, in the tiny French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, SS troops had slaughtered 642 people, including 190 children. Buckmaster was devastated. ‘He could not believe the Germans would do anything so awful as that.’
Working under Buckmaster, but considered by many to be his ‘brains’, was
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Subscribe now or Sign inMy hairdresser is based near London’s Marble Arch, so before my last cut I dived behind Selfridges to visit Orchard Court. Today, it’s a luxury mansion block, and you’re not allowed past the entrance colonnades – ‘NO THOROUGHFARE’. There’s no indication that, during the Second World War, the building was one of the bases for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) F (French) Section, which on moonlit nights flew spies trained in espionage and silent killing over the Channel and dropped them behind enemy lines in France. Of roughly 470, 118 never came home.
Maurice Buckmaster, who headed up F Section, was a tall, athletic figure who had once captained Eton at soccer. He did The Times crossword on the bus to work to sharpen his wits. But they were not so sharp as they might have been, and he was repeatedly fooled by radio messages sent to London by the Gestapo pretending to be his agents. Again and again, he batted messages straight back to the enemy. His compromised agents then had forty-eight hours to try to hold out under torture while the other members of their circuits ran for cover. So effective was this for the Germans that, on D-Day, Hitler himself suggested sending a message thanking London for playing the Funkspiel, or radio game, thereby delivering him so many agents and arms. There had to be overwhelming proof before Buckmaster could believe that anything had gone seriously wrong. One colleague remembered being in the office with him one summer Sunday in 1944 when news came through that, in the tiny French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, SS troops had slaughtered 642 people, including 190 children. Buckmaster was devastated. ‘He could not believe the Germans would do anything so awful as that.’ Working under Buckmaster, but considered by many to be his ‘brains’, was Vera Atkins. A formidable bridge player, who could commit to memory all necessary intelligence about life on the ground in France – what papers an agent would need, the hours of curfew, even the latest trend in hats in the Rue Royale – she was especially intimate with the women agents, preferring them to be attractive, like Violette Szabo (played by Virginia McKenna in the film Carve Her Name with Pride): she believed good looks gave them confidence. She watched for tell tale signs of nerves – trembling cigarettes, for example – before deciding a young woman had the necessary steeliness for the job. And as they were weaned from their families during training, she became their closest companion. It was she who took charge of their last worldly possessions – coats, powder compacts, earrings – and she who issued each of them with a cyanide pill, in case of capture. It was Atkins, also, who kept in touch with the girls’ families, telling them that the news was good – even when this wasn’t true. Some had dreams and premonitions and knew in their guts when their loved ones had died. The writer Sarah Helm met Atkins just once. By then she was elderly and resolutely unforthcoming, and there didn’t seem to be much by way of written evidence to help piece together her story. Yet this is what Helm decided to do, and twenty years after its publication I still think A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (2005) the most tenacious piece of research and the most devastating story I have ever read. ‘There were two Veras,’ one acquaintance of Atkins told Sarah Helm. There were many more than that. Atkins was a psychological shapeshifter, variously described as cold, controlled, generous, imperturbable, haughty, callous, traitorous, loyal. Generally swathed in smoke from her Senior Service cigarettes, she was also shrouded in mystery: who was she, really? And why, as someone naturally disinclined to accept orders without argument, did she knowingly allow Maurice Buckmaster to make blunder after blunder? After the war, there were those who alleged that Atkins was a Soviet spy, a German agent, an employee of the CIA. But the truth Helm uncovers is simpler, and more intriguing. While one colleague described her as ‘Benenden and Kensington’, another spotted that Atkins spoke such precisely perfect English that it actually had a foreign ring. She was, in fact, a Romanian Jew, born Vera May Rosenberg, and Buckmaster was her main support as she applied, desperately, to be naturalized. She dared not cross him. Even more perilous, she had, early in the war, travelled in dangerous circumstances through Holland and Belgium to pass money to the German Abwehr to buy a young relation, Fritz Rosenberg, a new passport, to save his life. If this truth had ever emerged, she’d have been finished. You might have thought that having lived on her nerves through the war, Atkins would have slipped happily back into civilian life at the end of it. F Section was disbanded shortly after D-Day in 1944 and, though more than a hundred agents were still missing, Buckmaster returned without hesitation to his job as PR manager at the Ford Motor Company. But, for Vera Atkins, ‘missing, presumed dead’ was a terrible verdict, and one she was not prepared to deliver to her agents’ families. By now a British citizen, but still without a passport, she set off across bombed-out Germany – and fifty years later Sarah Helm set off in her wake. It’s hard to comprehend the task Atkins set herself. Navigating Germany’s cities was almost impossible, as most streets were now piles of rubble, and hundreds of thousands of displaced people were streaming over European borders, as news of the horrors of German concentration camps gradually emerged. These did not cease with the German defeat: in Belsen, 15,000 inmates died, most of starvation and typhoid, within days of liberation. Their bodies were impossible to identify: they’d been thrown into mass graves. Meantime, while there was a longing to embrace a new future, it seemed important to commemorate the Nazi past. In a macabre enterprise, Dachau was swiftly converted by the Americans into a museum, complete with waxwork figures of the SS. Vera Atkins was concerned to discover the fate of all her agents – but especially the women. Men carried either commissions or honorary commissions in the regular services so could correctly tell their captors they were officers and should be given prisoner-of-war status. The same did not apply to women. In order to give them cover, most had been commissioned into the FANY (the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) – a voluntary organization offering them no protection at all. Nacht und Nebel, or ‘Night and Fog’, a Nazi decree from 1941, allowed for the secret arrest and disappearance of political opponents and resistance members. Who more likely than women agents to vanish without trace? Step by step, clue by clue, Atkins uncovered the horrors to which her agents had been subjected. Some had parachuted straight into enemy hands and been sent to the Gestapo HQ in the Avenue Foch in Paris, where a number were immediately shot; others were transferred to prisons or concentration camps. Odette Sansom, who ultimately escaped from Ravensbrück, told how, in prison in Fresnes, her toenails were extracted and she was burned on the back with an iron bar, but gave nothing away. With astonishing persistence, Atkins not only discovered the places to which her agents had been taken but also managed to track down and interview many of the people responsible for their deaths: Hans Josef Kieffer, head of the intelligence agency of the SS; Fritz Suhren, kommandant at Ravens- brück; and Peter Straub and Franz Berg, respectively executioner and stoker in the camp crematorium at Natzweiler. She learned from other prisoners who had, at great personal risk, strained to look through the shutters, how on 6 July 1944 at Natzweiler four women agents arrived in a car which was taken on a curious ‘lap of honour’ round the camp: they were clearly important. Later, they were injected and pushed into the ovens. One reached out before she died, scratched Straub’s face, and shouted ‘Vive la France!’ That night there was a party at Natzweiler, at which all the prison operatives got drunk. Noor Inayat Khan ‘Until the end they were cheerful and of good faith,’ Atkins wrote to girls’ parents, when she knew for sure that they were dead. But one young woman seemed to have completely disappeared, and the search for her keeps you turning the pages almost till the end of the book. Noor Inayat Khan, alias Madeleine, had been recruited to Prosper, the biggest F Section circuit. Descended from the last Mogul emperor of India – so by lineage a princess – she worried her instructors at training school because of her gentleness and ‘lack of ruse’. But she had one unusual strength: as a harpist, with deft fingers, she was a natural signaller, and she became the first wireless operator to be sent to France. Hers was the most dangerous job of all: life expectancy six weeks. No spoilers here as to Noor’s fate. Suffice it to say that her file had been closed for years before the truth emerged. She had been one of the bravest women in the SOE, silent to the end – and the end was gruesome. When, eventually, a plaque was raised in Noor’s memory, Maurice Buckmaster attended the ceremony and wept. But Vera Atkins seemed icily unmoved. Cold-blooded? Uncaring? Or simply adept at masking her feelings? She remains, to the end of Helm’s book, a mystery. You like her, yet you don’t. You are consumed with questions. The photographs, for example, include one of Vera Atkins and Maurice Buckmaster in old age, strolling through the garden of his retirement home, smiling. And you wonder, how could anyone, having sent so many people to their deaths, ever have smiled again?Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 91 © Maggie Fergusson 2026
About the contributor
Maggie Fergusson is the deputy and literary editor of The Tablet. This is her twenty-first piece for Slightly Foxed.
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