Hell Hath No Fury (46 page)

Neither the Krogers nor Lonsdale took the stand at their subsequent trial, but in a written statement the plausible Lonsdale took full responsibility for the charges of espionage, claiming that the Krogers were wholly innocent and that he had installed the spying equipment in their house while they were away. However, this did not explain the fake passports, bearing the couple's photographs and ready for a quick getaway.

All the defendants were found guilty. Houghton and Gee were sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment and married on their release in 1970. Lonsdale was sentenced to twenty-five years and in 1964 was exchanged for the British spy Greville Wynn. The Krogers received sentences of twenty years and in 1969 were exchanged for a British citizen, Gerald Brooke.

The Cohens returned to Moscow, where they were given jobs training Soviet spies. Lona was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and the Order of Friendship of Nations, a decoration in which she evidently saw no irony. In the Soviet intelligence traffic decrypted by the Americans in the so-called Venona Project, Lona Cohen's code name was “Lesley.”

In 1964, a downbeat British feature film,
Ring of Spies,
dramatized the Krogers' story. In 1983 the British playwright Hugh Whitemore revisited the tale of the Portland spy ring in
Pack of Lies,
which played in London's West End and starred Judi Dench and Michael Williams. In 1985 the play transferred to Broadway with Rosemary Harris starring as the neighbor whose house was used for surveillance by MI5. In 1987 it became a TV production, concentrating again on the neighbors, with Ellen Burstyn and Alan Bates in the leading roles.

Reference: Rebecca West,
The New Meaning of Treason,
1964.

DE JONGH, ANDRÉE

“Dédée” or “Little Cyclone,” Belgian Resistance Heroine (b. 1916, d. 2007)

In Nazi-occupied Europe the largest and most successful escape line transporting downed Allied airmen, escaped prisoners of war, and Resistance workers to safety was the “Comet” line running from Belgium. The mastermind of the Comet operation was a petite twenty-four-year-old nurse turned commercial artist, Andrée de Jongh, called Dédée or “Little Cyclone” by all who knew her.

The line made its debut in August 1941 when the demure de Jongh, wearing a simple blouse, skirt, and bobby socks, turned up at the British consulate in Bilbao on the northern coast of neutral Spain. She informed the consul that she had brought three fugitives with her from Brussels—two young Belgians and a British soldier who had been stranded after the Dunkirk evacuation in May 1940. She made only a modest request for financial assistance and promised that she would return with more British servicemen.

MI9, the secret British agency established to encourage escape and evasion in occupied Europe, provided financial assistance, but in all other respects de Jongh went her own way. She declined London's offer of radio operators, fearing that their transmissions would compromise security. She also insisted that the escape line be an all-Belgian operation. Furthermore, in contrast to the other escape line running from northern France and Belgium—the “Pat” line led by Albert Guérisse (whose nom de guerre was “Pat O'Leary”)—de Jongh was determined to avoid Vichy France and take a more dangerous route to Spain through German-occupied France.

Initially MI9 code-named de Jongh's escape line “Postman,” because she referred to her charges as “packages.” In 1942, however, the name was changed to Comet after she delivered the crew of a British bomber, downed over Belgium, in less than a week. Eventually the line ran from Brussels through German-occupied France, over the Pyrenees to the British consulate in Madrid, and then to Gibraltar. Security was paramount: the Comet line's safe houses always had two exits and were usually staffed by elderly, childless couples who lived scrupulously quiet lives. The line itself consisted of a series of self-contained boxes. The personnel in each box remained unaware of the identity of their counterparts in the adjacent boxes. As the “packages” passed from box to box, they were left at pickup points to await the arrival of a new courier. The couriers communicated in code from public telephone boxes or by prearranged signals—for example, a potted plant placed in a window to indicate the presence of a German patrol.

In spite of all these precautions, Dédée was arrested on January 15, 1943, on her nineteenth crossing into Spain. The Pat line was broken up a month later and Guérisse arrested. Dédée's father, Paul, went into prison in Paris on June 7, 1943, and was later executed. Many of their colleagues were executed, but in spite of the loss of their leaders, and the grievous damage they had suffered, both lines managed to survive. It was not until early 1944 that traffic along the Comet line was halted, ironically because of the severity of Allied bombing in the buildup to D-Day. To alleviate the situation, MI9 established a new escape route, the Shelburne line, to ferry downed airmen directly to the coast of Brittany and thence to England.

Dédée's German captors could not believe that she had organized Comet and, after a spell in the Fresnes prison, near Paris, she was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, from which she was released by advancing Allied troops in April 1945. Guérisse also survived the war. In all, the Comet line helped some 600 Allied servicemen, of whom 118 were personally accompanied on their journey by Dédée. Andrée de Jongh was awarded the American Medal of Freedom and made a Belgian countess. In the postwar years she worked with lepers in the Belgian Congo and Ethiopia.

Reference: Peter Eisner,
The Freedom Line: The Brave Men and Women Who Rescued Allied Airmen from the Nazis During World War II,
2004.

GRANVILLE, CHRISTINE,
see
SKARBEK, KRYSTYNA,

Chapter 11.

HALL, VIRGINIA

American SOE and OSS Agent, b. 1906, d. 1982

Virginia Hall had the rare distinction of serving with both the British intelligence agency
Special Operations Executive
(SOE, see Chapter 11), and later with its US equivalent, the
Office of Strategic Services
(OSS, see Chapter 11). On active service in the front line, she never allowed herself to be deterred by her artificial foot, variously described as made of wood or brass, the result of a shooting accident in Turkey in the 1930s.

Hall was educated at Radcliffe College, where she showed a flair for modern languages, and in 1931 she joined the staff of the US embassy in Poland. Appointments followed in Estonia, Austria, and Turkey. She was forced to resign after the accident in Turkey, as the State Department then had a rule barring the employment of anyone with an amputation “of any portion of a limb.”

On the outbreak of war in September 1939, Hall was working in France, where she joined an ambulance unit. When Germany launched its blitzkrieg in the West on May 10, 1940, she traveled to London, where she found work in the US embassy. In London, Hall joined the SOE, despite the fact that its rules expressly stipulated that anyone serving in the agency had to have been born British, “a subject of the Crown.” In fact there were many exceptions—some of the SOE staff and agents had dual nationality, and many volunteers came from foreign, even enemy, nations (see
Atkins, Vera,
Chapter 11). Reliability was the watchword, and Hall more than fulfilled this vital requirement.

Hall returned to mainland Europe in the summer of 1941 to operate in Vichy France, the unoccupied two-fifths of the country, whose seat of government was in the spa town of Vichy, some seventy-five miles northwest of Lyons. Hall went under her own name as an accredited correspondent of the
New York Post.
In early 1942 she moved her center of operations to Lyons, where she ran an extensive liaison network until a sudden setback saw her escaping over the Pyrenees with the Gestapo in hot pursuit.

Before she began the journey, Hall had signaled SOE headquarters on London's Baker Street that she hoped “Cuthbert” would not prove a problem. London flashed back, “If Cuthbert troublesome, eliminate him.” Baker Street had forgotten that “Cuthbert” was the code name for Hall's prosthetic foot. For her service in France, the British awarded Hall the MBE, the Member of the Order of the British Empire.

Hall returned to France in March 1944, this time code-named “Diane” and working as a wireless operator for the American Office of Strategic Services. After landing by boat on the coast of Brittany, she joined the Resistance in the Haute-Loire region with the cover of a farmworker. She had no training in sabotage, but the teams she recruited, with the help from August 1944 of a joint SOE/OSS three-man unit known as a “Jedburgh,” brought down four bridges, severed a key railway line, and derailed a number of freight trains. At the same time Hall and her Jedburgh team provided OSS with daily intelligence on local conditions and the movement of German troops. The Germans, who were well aware of Hall's identity, dubbed her “the lady with the limp.” In spite of her disability, which she tried to disguise with a swinging gait, Hall's drive and planning ability were more than equal to these demanding operations.

In 1945 President Truman awarded Hall the Distinguished Service Cross, making her the only female civilian of World War II to receive this military honor, second only to the Medal of Honor. In 1948, after a period of intelligence work in postwar Europe, she settled in New York, where she joined the National Committee for Free Europe, a front organization of the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency and an adjunct to Radio Free Europe. Three years later she joined the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington as an analyst on French political affairs. In 1952 she became one of the first women operations officers in the newly created Office of the Deputy Director of Plans responsible for countries in Western Europe. Here Hall prepared political-action projects, interviewed exiles from behind the Iron Curtain, and planned stay-behind resistance and sabotage networks to be activated in the event of a successful invasion by the Soviet Union.

In 1956 Hall was made a member of the agency's select career staff. A CIA colleague recalled Hall in her early days with the CIA as “a gung-ho lady left over from the OSS days” to whom young female CIA recruits would pay rapt attention. “She was elegant, her dark brown hair coiled on top of her head with a yellow pencil tucked into the bun. She was always jolly when she was around the old boys. She was a presence!” However, with the passage of time Hall became an increasingly isolated figure at the CIA, and in 1966 she retired at the mandatory age of sixty to live on a Maryland farm. In December 2006, her niece, Lorna Catling, was presented with a certificate signed by George VI, which should have accompanied Hall's 1943 MBE. The British government had mislaid it for sixty-three years.

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

HALLOWES, ODETTE,
see
SANSOM, ODETTE, Chapter 11.

KHAN, NOOR INAYAT

“Madeleine,” Indian Princess and British SOE Agent, 1914–1945

The beautiful and tragic heroine of the
Special Operations Executive
's (see Chapter 11) F (French) Section had an unusual and exotic background for a World War II spy. Her father, Hasra Inayat Khan, was descended from “the Tiger of Mysore,” the last Mogul emperor of southern India, making his daughter a princess by direct descent. He was also a follower of Sufism, a supremely mystical branch of Islam, and her mother was related to Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science.

Noor Inayat Khan was born in the Kremlin, in Moscow, where her father was teaching at the Conservatoire. She grew up in Paris, studied child psychology at the Sorbonne, and achieved some fame as a writer of children's stories and as a broadcaster on French radio. The year 1943 found her in London, where she was transferred from the
Women's Auxiliary Air Force
(see Chapter 6) to the Special Operations Executive to train as a wireless operator.

Petite, lovely, and almost desperately eager to please, Khan was the source of some concern to several of her SOE instructors, one of whom observed, “Tends to give far too much information. Came here without the foggiest notion what she was being trained for.” Another reported that she was “not overburdened with brains [and] it is very doubtful whether she is really suited to work in the field.”

Nevertheless, great confidence was placed in Noor Inayat Khan by
Vera Atkins
(see Chapter 11), and on June 16, 1943, she was landed in France by Lysander aircraft as F Section's first female wireless operator. Her mission was to work with the Cinema circuit, itself a component of the larger Prosper network based in Paris, to maintain Prosper's links with London and to send and receive messages about planned sabotage operations or the Resistance fighters' needs for arms. Her cover was that she was a children's nurse, Jeanne-Marie Renier, and her SOE code name was “Madeleine.”

She was not to know that in 1943 the life expectancy of an SOE wireless operator was six weeks. In addition, the security of Prosper had already been fatally compromised by a French double agent, Henri Déricourt, air-movements officer for F Section and the man responsible for the reception and return to England of agents in the field. Déricourt was also working for the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, the security element of the SS). Prosper was soon rolled up by the Germans, although “Madeleine” was allowed to remain at large until October 13, during which time she unwittingly implicated fellow members of Prosper. After her arrest her radio was also used by the Germans to communicate with SOE in London, who remained unsure about her fate, although other reliable agents in France had provided the head of F Section, Maurice Buckmaster, with clear indications that she was in German hands. These he chose to ignore.

Noor Inayat Khan was initially held at the Gestapo headquarters on Paris's Avenue Foch, from which she made two unsuccessful attempts to escape. Thereafter a succession of transfers brought her to the concentration camp at Dachau, where she was raped, appallingly beaten, and then shot. Her last word, faintly audible, was
“Liberté.”
Throughout her captivity the beautiful young woman “not overburdened with brains” had shown unflinching courage. After the war, Vera Atkins told Khan's biographer, Jean Overton Fuller, “Her motives were so pure—of such a high spiritual order—it was as if she was from another world.”