Sisters, Secrets and Sacrifice: The True Story of WWII Special Agents Eileen and Jacqueline Nearne. Susan Ottaway

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СКАЧАТЬ She was known in the area as Irene Brisse. Borrel’s destination was Paris, where she was to be the courier for the Physician circuit and its leader Francis Suttill.

      Mary Herbert and Odette Sansom managed to reach France without the use of parachutes but theirs was a difficult and lengthy journey, undertaken at the beginning of November. They were originally due to be taken by flying boat, but their flight was cancelled at the last minute and they were transferred to a submarine for a very uncomfortable trip to Gibraltar, from where they continued their journey by felucca to Port Miou near Cassis, south-east of Marseilles. Mary was to become the courier for Claude de Baissac (David), Lise’s brother, in the Scientist circuit, while Odette headed for Cannes, where she met Peter Churchill (Michel), head of the Spindle circuit. Although it was intended that she would eventually work for a circuit in Auxerre, Churchill persuaded the SOE in London to let him keep Odette with the Spindle circuit as its courier.

      Although Jacqueline had done everything that was asked of her on the course to the best of her ability, her final training report, written and signed by Lieutenant Colonel Woolrych on 25 August 1942, said of her:

      Mentally slow and not very intelligent. Has a certain amount of determination but is inclined to waver in the face of problems.

      A reserved personality and somewhat shy. Little depth of character – in fact, she is a very simple person.

      She is lacking in self-confidence, which might be entirely due to inexperience.

      She might very well develop after long and careful training, but at present she could not be recommended.¹⁰

      After all her good intentions and hard work, it seemed that Jacqueline had failed. She was inconsolable, knowing that she would never have a chance like this again.

CHAPTER 3

       A Shaky Start

      What Jacqueline did not know, when she learnt of Lieutenant Colonel Woolrych’s damning report, was that the final decision about her suitability as an agent was left to Colonel Buckmaster in his role as head of F Section.

      Maurice James Buckmaster, born in 1902, had been too young for military service in the First World War, and by the time the Second World War started he was almost too old. The son of a wealthy businessman, he had been educated at Eton and awarded an exhibition at Oxford to study Classics. He was on the point of taking it up when his father was declared bankrupt and there was no longer any money to spare for a full-time education. Abandoning Oxford, he decided to go instead to France, where he remained for several years, first working as a reporter in Paris for Le Matin and eventually becoming a manager for the Ford Motor Company, promoting the company’s image to French car buyers. He returned to England in 1936 and two years later joined the Army Officers’ Emergency Reserve. He received his call-up papers in the first month of the Second World War, serving with the 50th Division as an intelligence officer. He was soon back in France as part of the British Expeditionary Force and remained there until he was evacuated from Dunkirk during the last few days of Operation Dynamo. When he learnt sometime later that his division was going to be posted to North Africa, he contacted his divisional commander and asked him to intervene on his behalf and obtain a position for him where his knowledge of France, French business practice and the French language would be of use. In the spring of 1941, at the age of 39, he found himself in Baker Street, working as an information officer for the SOE.

      In July 1941 Buckmaster was made the temporary head of T Section, looking after the agents operating in Belgium, and later that year was appointed head of F Section, in which position he remained for the rest of the war. His appointment was surprising given that his real forte was public relations, but times were hard and people with his knowledge of France were in short supply. He was not, however, agent material. Although he was not frightened of hard work, his personality was not suited to the life of an agent. Whereas public relations was not a profession in which one kept quiet about what was happening, the work of an agent relied almost entirely on secrecy. In addition, Buckmaster could be short-tempered and irritable at times, was too trusting of people and disliked difficult situations, finding them hard to handle. There were many who believed he was offered the job as F Section head not because he possessed any particular talent for the work but simply because there was no one else.

      Buckmaster tackled his new role with gusto, however, and worked very long hours, often going home at the end of a working day and then returning to the office after dinner. Many of those with whom he worked in London and those he sent to France thought of him as an avuncular figure, the guardian of those who faced danger every day in Nazi-occupied territory. They liked him tremendously – one of the staff members at SOE headquarters declared him to be ‘an absolute sweetie’ – and many referred to him affectionately as ‘Buck’.¹ But not everyone shared this opinion. There were those who thought of him as an anti-social, unapproachable man in an ivory tower.² They believed him to be a well-meaning but ineffectual man whose understanding of his agents, and the lives they led in France after the German occupation, was unsound and, in some cases, badly flawed. He could be stubborn and often dismissed the opinions of others, preferring to rely on his own instincts about people and situations. Sometimes these instincts served him well but he made some serious errors of judgement that he failed to acknowledge.

      Vera Atkins, who helped Buckmaster, was an intelligence officer who had been with the SOE since April 1941, when she had been employed as a secretary to Major Bourne-Paterson, Head of Planning. She pushed for Buckmaster’s appointment as F Section head when his predecessor was sacked for ineptitude and no one could think of anyone suitable to replace him. At face value it was difficult to see Atkins’s motivation for promoting Buckmaster for this role but there were at least two reasons for her support. Extremely intelligent and capable, much more so than Buckmaster, she would herself have been a highly effective head but, as a woman, would never have been given the chance to show her enormous talent in this role. He, on the other hand, had far less aptitude but was grateful for the support she had given him in obtaining the position he coveted and never forgot that he was in her debt. Having made herself indispensable to him, she was able to exert her influence in many ways that would not have been open to her had she not ensured his appointment.³

      However, perhaps the most significant reason for her championing of Buckmaster was that she needed someone on whose loyalty she could rely, as she should not have been working for the SOE at all. The organization’s regulations stated that its London headquarters’ staff should be British by birth. Vera was not British-born; nor did she have British nationality. She was Romanian, having been born in Galatz, Romania, in 1908, the daughter of Max Rosenberg, a German Jew, and his British-born wife, Hilda Atkins. Vera had not even lived in Britain until her arrival with her mother in the autumn of 1937, when she adopted the latter’s maiden name and obtained an Aliens Registration Certificate. After the Allies declared war on Romania in 1941, she was regarded as an enemy alien and, as such, could have been sent to an aliens’ internment camp, but somehow she managed to avoid this indignity. She applied for naturalization the following year but was refused, and she didn’t manage to secure her British nationality until 24 March 1944.⁴ Her success in obtaining the Certificate of Naturalization was due, in no small part, to the lengthy letter supporting her application that was written on her behalf by Maurice Buckmaster. Whilst there was never a suggestion that Vera Atkins was anything but loyal to her adopted homeland, her appointment to the SOE in contravention of its own security regulations, and the support she received from the head of СКАЧАТЬ