Hell Hath No Fury (45 page)

She was born in 1908 in Galat (now Galati), Romania, the daughter of a prosperous Jewish timber merchant, Max Rosenberg, and an English-born mother. She was intelligent, multilingual, and had attended a finishing school in Switzerland. In Romania, both father and daughter had informal links with British intelligence. In the mid-1930s Vera's work as a “foreign correspondent” in the strategically important Romanian oil industry, and her friendship with the German ambassador in Bucharest, Friedrich von der Schulenburg, placed her in an ideal position to supply undercover British intelligence agents in the Romanian capital with useful economic and diplomatic information.

Her father died bankrupt in 1932, and in 1937, as anti-Semitism grew in Romania, Vera moved with her mother to London, where she adopted the latter's maiden name of Atkins. In March 1941, she joined the Special Operations Executive, the agency established in July 1940 to gather intelligence in Nazi-occupied Europe, carry out sabotage, and support Resistance movements. Vera Atkins was still a Romanian citizen—she did not become a naturalized Briton until 1944. Thus from June 1941, when Romania joined the war on the German side, Vera Atkins was technically an enemy alien.

At SOE's headquarters on London's Baker Street, Atkins rapidly rose from her position as a secretary to become a key member of F Section. Her “special confidential work” included the preparation and briefing of agents before their dispatch to occupied France, maintaining contact while they were in the field, their subsequent debriefing on their return, and liaising on a guarded “need-to-know” basis with her charges' next of kin.

Of the four hundred agents dispatched by F Section, some one hundred failed to return after German intelligence successfully penetrated a number of the section's networks. Arguably the most serious setback suffered by F Section in the whole of the war was the disabling of the large Prosper network based in Paris, as a result of the treachery of its field air-transport officer, Henri Déricourt. For reasons never fully understood, Buckmaster stubbornly ignored all the warning signals and carried on as before (see
Noor Inayat Khan,
Chapter 11).

Although Atkins and Buckmaster worked hand in glove, and the former had the gravest doubts about Déricourt's reliability, she was unable or unwilling to challenge her boss and intervene to limit the damage to the Prosper network. Several factors played a part in this. First, there was a degree of unacknowledged anti-Semitism in SOE, of which Atkins was well aware. Second, her status as an enemy alien would place her in a vulnerable position within the organization, should this awkward fact become well known. Third, it seems likely that, before she joined SOE, Atkins had traveled to Nazi-occupied Belgium on a private mission to negotiate with German intelligence a safe passage to Istanbul for a Jewish cousin, Fritz Rosenberg. For these reasons, she might have been powerless to prevent the fate that overtook the Prosper network.

On March 24, 1944, Atkins was given her certificate of British nationality, and two weeks later she was promoted to F Section intelligence officer. Soon after the end of the war SOE was dissolved, but in January 1946, Atkins was dispatched to liberated Europe with the rank of squadron officer to assist Allied war-crimes investigators. She was armed with a list of fifty-two missing SOE agents, thirteen of whom were women.

Atkins proved a relentless and implacable interrogator of Nazi war criminals, displaying emotion only on the rarest of occasions. The traces left by one agent in particular, Noor Inayat Khan, a victim of the Prosper debacle, proved immensely difficult to follow, prompting Atkins to reach an initial mistaken conclusion that she had died at Natzweiler-Struthof, a small concentration camp in the Vosges Mountains. When Atkins determined that “Madeleine” had died at Dachau, she falsified the records to mask her initial error.

In the postwar years, Atkins became the unofficial guardian of the SOE flame, adviser to movie productions celebrating agents she had handled, such as
Violette Szabo
(see Chapter 11), and keeper of the agency's many awkward secrets. Pathologically reluctant to admit any error, she deployed a daunting reserve to deter unwelcome questions about SOE, periodically weeding the large collections of wartime files that she retained. Noor Inayat Khan's brother remembered Vera Atkins as “not charming, but remarkable in her own way.”

Reference: Sarah Helm,
A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE,
2005.

BENTOV, CHERYL

Israeli “Honey-Trap” Operative and Mossad Agent, b. 1960

In 1986, Bentov sprang the “honey trap,” the oldest trick in the armory of a female spy, when she accompanied the smitten Israeli nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu to Rome and delivered him into the hands of a Mossad snatch squad.

Born Cheryl Hanin in the United States, she emigrated to Israel in 1977, served in the
Israeli Defense Forces
(see Chapter 6), and was later recruited by Mossad (Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations). After two years of intensive training, she was chosen to work as a female escort in Mossad's operations worldwide. In 1985 she married Ofer Bentov, an officer in Israeli Army intelligence.

From the early 1960s, Israel has followed a policy of deliberate ambiguity about its nuclear-weapons program. In 1986, however, its ability to maintain this stance was threatened by Mordechai Vanunu, who between 1976 and 1985 had worked as a technician at the Dimona nuclear facility in the Negev desert. Vanunu was now in London, telling
The Sunday Times
all he knew about the top-secret programs at Dimona. Mossad was alerted when Vanunu, frustrated by the slow pace at which the
The Sunday Times
was developing his story, approached another newspaper,
The Sunday Mirror,
with the story. The
Mirror
's owner, Robert Maxwell, an old friend of Mossad, tipped off the intelligence agency.

In September 1986, Bentov flew to London under the name of Cynthia Hanin, her sister-in-law, and joined a Mossad team tasked with bringing Vanunu back to Israel to stand trial. She engineered a “chance encounter” with the impressionable Vanunu and, posing as an American beautician named Cindy, drew him into the trap. Vanunu was putty in her hands, and she persuaded him to travel with her to Rome to stay in a vacant apartment belonging to his sister. No sooner had they arrived at the apartment than Vanunu was rendered unconscious, heavily sedated, and spirited by ship to Israel. He stood trial and received an eighteen-year prison sentence.

In 1988 British journalists traced Bentov to a suburb of Ne-tanya in Israel, where she still has a home. However, she spends the greater part of her time with her family in Florida, where she works as a real estate agent under her maiden name and is a pillar of Orlando's Jewish community. Mordechai Vanunu was released from prison in 2004 and has subsequently insisted that Bentov was an agent of the CIA or the FBI.

Reference: Peter Hounam,
The Woman from Mossad: The Torment of Mordechai Vanunu,
2000.

BROUSSE, AMY ELIZABETH

“Cynthia,” American-Born British and US Agent in World War II Washington, b. 1910, d. 1963

Amy Elizabeth Brousse was part of a daring operation launched by the American
Office of Strategic Services
(OSS, see Chapter 11) to steal, photograph, and return naval codes held in the Vichy France embassy in Washington during the run-up to the November 1942 Allied landings in North Africa.

She was born Amy Elizabeth Thorpe in Minneapolis, the daughter of a much-decorated officer in the US Marine Corps and a mother who had studied in the United States and Europe. She herself studied in America and France before marrying, in 1930, Arthur Joseph Pack, a commercial secretary in the British embassy in Washington who was twenty years her senior. They led a globe-trotting life as she accompanied him to postings in Poland, Spain, and Chile, and entered the world of intelligence gathering.

In 1939 she left Pack and adopted her maiden name, Elizabeth Thorpe. After the outbreak of war in Europe, the former Mrs. Pack became an agent for British Security Coordination (BSC), an intelligence-gathering network based in New York and headed by William Stephenson. Stephenson found her an apartment in Washington and instructed her to use her feminine charms to obtain information about codes and ciphers from the Italian embassy. His new agent was well suited to the task; she had auburn hair and eyes “like a dash of green chartreuse in a pool of limpid brandy.”

After its formation in 1942, the chief of OSS, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, was instructed to cooperate with the BSC in a plan to remove and photograph the naval codes from the Vichy embassy. This mission involved a high degree of diplomatic risk, as the Vichy government in the unoccupied part of France was at the time recognized by the United States.

“Cynthia” was given an OSS controller, Colonel Ellery C. Huntington, chief of the agency's security branch and a personal friend of Donovan's, and provided with the services of a safecracker to gain access to the plans. She was in an ideal position to play a central role in the operation, as from May 1941 she had, on orders from the BSC, become the mistress of Charles Emmanuel Brousse, a former French naval pilot who was aide to the Vichy ambassador. With Brousse's help she had already supplied BSC with a stream of diplomatic cable traffic between the Vichy government and its Washington embassy.

The plan went ahead in June 1942. The codes were kept in a safe in the French naval attaché's office, to which Brousse, a married man, gained entry by persuading the embassy's guards to make it available to him as a late-night meeting place for love trysts with his mistress, “Cynthia.” Even so, it took three separate attempts to complete the operation—opening the safe undisturbed and removing the code books to have them photographed in a nearby hotel and then returning them within a matter of hours and without detection. On the third attempt, an inquisitive embassy guard had been forced to beat a hasty retreat upon discovering Cynthia and her lover naked in the naval attaché's office. The codes proved particularly helpful to OSS agents embedded in North Africa in the run-up to the Operation Torch landings in North Africa.

“Cynthia” was subsequently posted to the
Special Operations Executive
(SOE, see Chapter 11), but never went operational again. However, the break-in had a bonus, as it later provided indirect cover for the maintenance of the Ultra secret, the British cracking of the German Enigma code. Information about the Washington break-in was leaked to the Germans to allay suspicions that Enigma was being read.

“Cynthia” subsequently married Brousse, who had been interned in the United States, and retired with him to a hilltop château near his native Perpignan, in France. There she died of cancer at the age of fifty-three.

Reference: Elizabeth P. McIntosh,
Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS,
1998.

COHEN, LONA

aka Helen Kroger, American Soviet Master Spy, b. 1913, d. 1992

In the 1940s and the late 1950s, Lona Cohen and her husband, Morris, were among the Soviet Union's most productive intelligence assets, first in the United States and later in the United Kingdom.

Lona was born in Adams, Massachusetts, and in 1939 was recruited into Soviet espionage by her husband. After 1942, when Morris was drafted, Cohen ran a network in the New York area that included engineers and technicians at munitions and aviation plants. Simultaneously she worked at two defense plants. During this period Cohen also acted as a courier, collecting reports from the atomic-bomb project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Among her contacts at Los Alamos was Theodore Hall, a physicist and spy who provided Soviet intelligence with a detailed description of the plutonium bomb known as “Fat Man,” and the process for purifying plutonium.

After the defection in 1945 of Igor Gouzenko, a cypher clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, the Cohens abruptly severed their contacts with Soviet intelligence. They were resumed in 1949 when they began working with Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher (aka Rudolf Abel), who had entered the United States as an “illegal” in 1947, and posed as a retired artist while recruiting and controlling new and existing agents. However, after the 1950 arrest in the United Kingdom of the spy Klaus Fuchs, another Soviet agent at the heart of Los Alamos, the Cohens fled to Moscow, where Lona underwent training as a radio operator and cypher clerk. In 1954 the Cohens resurfaced in northwest London under the names Peter and Helen Kroger.

The Krogers' cover was an antiquarian book business. In the basement of their house in the nondescript suburb of Ruislip, near the military airfield at Northolt, they installed a high-speed radio transmitter on which to send Moscow messages of “special importance.” With their associate Gordon Lonsdale, a Russian posing as a Canadian businessman who sold jukeboxes, they then infiltrated the Royal Navy's Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland in Dorset. Lonsdale recruited Harrry Houghton, a civil servant at the weapons establishment, and his girlfriend, Ethel Gee, who worked there as a clerk and had access to classified information.

In 1960 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was informed by a Soviet mole, Michael Goleniewski, that Soviet agents were at work in Portland. The information was passed to MI5, who tailed Houghton and Gee to their regular meetings in London with Lonsdale and monitored Lonsdale's frequent trips to Ruislip to confer with the Krogers.

On January 7, 1961, Houghton, Gee, and Lonsdale were arrested in London by officers of the Special Branch. In Gee's shopping bag they found quantities of top-secret film and photographs, and details about HMS
Dreadnought,
the Royal Navy's first nuclear submarine. The Krogers were arrested immediately afterward, and their suburban home yielded up a treasure trove of intelligence material, including large sums of money, photographic equipment, code pads, the couple's long-range radio transmitter, and, after further searches, two forged Canadian passports.