Hell Hath No Fury (48 page)

In 1992 Rimington became director-general of MI5 and was the first head of the agency to have her photograph published in the British newspapers—a fuzzy long-lens shot of the spy mistress carrying her shopping bags (the government had been unwilling to release her picture). Nevertheless, she had come a long way since her first job as an archivist in the Worcestershire County Records Office, a trajectory that might not have occurred either to Ian Fleming or to John Le Carré.

In 1993 Rimington presided over the publication of a booklet,
The Security Service,
this time complete with her photograph, as part of a campaign of public transparency about the role of MI5. Unsurprisingly, the booklet contained little or no revealing information beyond the fact that the staff canteen served a particularly appetizing chicken curry. As director-general, Rimington approached the running of MI5 with the tone of a briskly competent suburban housewife. In her memoirs, she recalled with satisfaction that her management style was based on the same principles as she “used on the nannies and au pairs.”

Rimington's selective and elliptical autobiography,
Open Secret,
was published in 2001, five years after she left MI5. It was a move that was strongly opposed by her former MI5 colleague and successor Sir Stephen Lander and the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, both of whom mounted a campaign to deter her from going into print. The colonel-commandant of the elite Special Air Service, David Lyon, warned Rimington that she could expect a “long period of being
persona non grata,
both to many she has worked with and with many she has yet to meet in the general public.”

A principle was at stake, particularly as during her time as director-general, Rimington herself had threatened employees with the Official Secrets Act. However, her critics need not have worried. When it appeared, the book was blandness itself, in which Rimington painted a self-portrait of a feminist who had long fought prejudice in a male-dominated world. This came as a surprise to former colleagues, who recalled her behavior in a notorious episode of the 1980s, when she ignored explicit warnings about the reliability of an MI5 employee, Michael Bettaney (see
Manningham-Buller, Eliza,
Chapter 11), an alcoholic controller of agents in Northern Ireland, who had sold secrets to the Soviet Union. After Bettaney was arrested, he continued to supply the Soviets with information while awaiting trial. Rimington managed to avoid censure, an indication perhaps of her political skills, although it has been alleged that she attempted to shift the blame for the debacle onto two junior colleagues, both of them women.

Those who have met her have commented on Rimington's abundant personal charm and puzzling lack of depth. In her retirement she has published two novels as unexceptionable as her memoirs and taken a remunerative directorship with the retailers Marks & Spencer.

Reference: Stella Rimington,
Open Secret,
2001.

SANSOM, ODETTE

“Lise,” French SOE Agent, 1912–1995

Odette Sansom was born Odette Marie Celine Brailly in France and married an Englishman, Roy Sansom, with whom she made her home in England in 1932. The couple had three daughters. On the outbreak of World War II she joined the
First Aid Nursing Yeomanry
(FANY, see Chapter 6) before being recruited into the
Special Operations Executive
's F (French) Section, where she trained as a radio operator.

In October 1942, with the code name “Lise,” she was landed on the French Riviera by felucca, a small sailing boat, to join Peter Churchill, who acted as the liaison officer between F Section and the Carte network that was based in Antibes, in Vichy France.

Carte was run by an artist, André Girard, who was in touch with senior officers in the Vichy army and promised much but delivered little. Girard's sloppy security, the German occupation of Vichy France in November 1942, and the dissolution of the Vichy army led to the winding up of Carte and the arrest near Annecy in April 1943 of Churchill and his courier, Sansom. They were seized by Sergeant Hugo Bleicher of the Abwehr, the counterintelligence arm of the German high command. Bleicher found them in bed, which led to later accusations by the French Resistance that they were more interested in making love than in fighting the Germans.

Sansom was initially imprisoned at Fresnes, near Paris. The SOE had marked her out in training as a “shrewd cookie,” and on her capture Sansom had the presence of mind to call herself “Mrs. Churchill,” believing that this entirely fictitious connection with Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill might help her. At first, however, she received no favors. At Fresnes her toenails were ripped off and her back was burned with an iron bar. Nevertheless, she gave nothing away.

With a number of SOE prisoners, Sansom was sent to a holding prison in Germany at Karlsruhe. After two months she was separated from her comrades, and in July 1944 she was taken to the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück, where she was placed in solitary confinement and kept alive by the camp's kommandant, Fritz Suhren. He believed the story Sansom had spun on her arrest and, with the war going against Germany, intended to use her as a bargaining chip with the Allies.

In April 1945, with the Red Army approaching Ravensbrück, Suhren personally drove Sansom toward the American lines. He was to be disappointed. Sansom told the Americans precisely who Suhren was and had the satisfaction of watching him being led into captivity and the additional pleasure of retaining his bag, which contained his pajamas, writing case, and pistol. Sansom subsequently made a gift of these trophies to
Vera Atkins
(see Chapter 11).

On August 20, 1946, Odette Sansom was awarded the George Cross by King George VI and received the Légion d'Honneur from France. After the death of her first husband, she married Peter Churchill in 1956, and when that marriage was dissolved she married Geoffrey Hallowes, another veteran of the SOE's F Section. In 1994, a year before she died, Sansom made an emotional return to Ravensbrück, which is now a memorial site.
Odette,
a sanitized but successful film celebrating her wartime career and starring Anna Neagle, was released in 1956.

Reference: Jerrard Tickell,
Odette: The Story of a British Agent,
1952.

SENDLEROWA, IRENA

Polish Resistance Heroine, b. 1910

Until 1995, when a plaque was unveiled near the site of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, few of Sendlerowa's fellow Poles were aware of her heroic role in saving 2,500 children from the Nazis in 1942–43.

Sendlerowa, a welfare officer in Warsaw's health administration, was a member of Zegota, a secret organization set up by the Polish government-in-exile in London to rescue Polish Jews. By virtue of her job, she was permitted to enter the ghetto, which had been established by the Germans in the autumn of 1940 and by 1942 contained some 430,000 Jews. Wearing a Star of David, used by the Germans to mark Jews, she handed out money, clothes, and medicines and smuggled children to safety through the sewers or hidden in workmen's bags before placing them with friendly families, convents, or orphanages.

Sendlerowa noted the names of the children on cigarette papers, which she then sealed in glass bottles and buried in a colleague's garden. In the summer of 1943 the Warsaw Ghetto was liquidated, and the following October Sendlerowa was arrested. She was taken to Gestapo headquarters, where she was badly beaten. Her legs and feet were broken, but she refused to betray her comrades. She was driven away to be executed, but Zegota used a sackful of dollars to secure her release. She was left by the roadside, crippled and unconscious.

After the war, the bottles Sendlerowa had buried were dug up and a list of names handed to Jewish representatives. Attempts were made to reunite the children with their families, but most of their relations had perished in the death camps. One of the children saved by Sendlerowa, Elzbieta Foicowska, had been smuggled out of the ghetto in a toolbox on a truck when she was five months old. In 2007 she told journalists, “Irena Sendlerowa is like a third mother to me.”

For many years Sendlerowa's story went unremarked both inside and outside Poland, but interest in her was revived when a group of schoolchildren in Kansas wrote a play about her wartime exploits,
Life in a Jar.
In April 2007, Sendlerowa was honored by the Polish parliament for “rescuing the most defenceless victims of Nazi ideology—the Jewish children,” and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Sendlerowa, crippled but serene, was insistent that she had done nothing out of the ordinary, observing, “I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion or nationality.”

Reference: R. Lukas,
Did the Children Cry? Hitler's War Against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939–1945,
1994.

SKARBEK, KRYSTYNA

“Christine Granville,” Polish SOE Agent, 1915–52

A Polish-born
Special Operations Executive
(SOE, see Chapter 11) agent of outstanding resource and iron nerve, Countess Krystyna Skarbeck operated under the nom de guerre Christine Granville. She survived a remarkable secret career in World War II only to die at the hands of a disappointed suitor in postwar London.

Her father was Count Jerzy Skarbek, a member of one of Poland's oldest noble families, and her mother, Stefania Gold-feder, was the daughter of a wealthy assimilated Jewish banker. Granville's early childhood was spent under German occupation, which left her with little love for Germany. On the outbreak of World War II, when Germany invaded Poland for a second time, Granville was living in British East Africa with her husband, the writer Jerzy Gizycki. The couple made their way to London, where the British authorities showed little interest in employing Granville until the intervention of friends secured her a mission to Hungary, whose dictator, Admiral Horthy, was not only a German sympathizer but also a distant relation.

Granville had been a keen skier and knew many of the ski instructors on Hungary's mountainous northern border with Poland. Working with a Polish army officer, Andrzej Kowerski, she ex-filtrated Polish and Allied personnel and, armed with much intelligence, escaped with Kowerski to Egypt via the Balkans and Turkey. Her mother refused to accompany them and later died in a concentration camp. It was during this episode that Skarbek became Christine Granville, traveling on a British passport bearing a name that was supplied by the British ambassador to Hungary, Sir Owen O' Malley, a personal friend. Kowerski, who was now her lover, traveled under the name Andrew Kennedy.

In Cairo, Granville and Kowerski were unable to convince the Poles in exile that they had not made their escape with the connivance of the enemy. Their passage through Syria, then controlled by Vichy France, excited the Poles' suspicion. Had they known her better, they would have readily understood that it was Granville's remarkable charm and coolness that had extracted visas from a pro-Vichy consul.

After a long hiatus, Granville, who was a fluent French-speaker, joined the F (French) Section of SOE. She was parachuted into the Vercors region of southeastern France on July 6, 1944, to work with the Anglo-Belgian Francis Cammaerts, who ran SOE's Jockey network.

On August 13, two days before the Allied Dragoon landings in southern France, Cammaerts, fellow-SOE agent Xan Fielding, and a French officer were captured at a roadblock by the Gestapo. Granville's reaction was swift and decisive. She called at the prison where Cammaerts and his comrades were held and, armed with three million francs dropped specially for the purpose, secured their release after making a series of decidedly unladylike threats about the fate that awaited the Gestapo men if they chose not to cooperate.

But in 1945, the war and its excitements ended. The British gave Granville a George Medal, an OBE (Order of the British Empire), one hundred pounds, and a handshake. She was left stateless, penniless, and husbandless after she divorced Gizycki in 1946. She found employment as a stewardess on an ocean liner, and there she met her fate. In 1952 she was stabbed to death in the lobby of a shabby London hotel by George Muldowney, a besotted fellow steward, a tragic end for a woman of such courage, strength, and flair. Granville's wartime companion, Andrzej Kowerski, died in 1988 and is buried alongside her in the Roman Catholic cemetery in Kensal Green. “Christine Granville” lives on in popular fiction in the shape of Vesper Lynd, the beautiful spy created by Ian Fleming in
Casino Royale,
for whom Granville provided the real-life model.

Reference: Madeleine Masson,
Christine: SOE Agent and Churchill's Favourite Spy,
2005.

SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE

SOE, British Intelligence Agency, World War II

SOE was the brainchild of Britain's wartime premier, Winston Churchill, formed at his behest in July 1940. Its purpose was to gather intelligence, undertake sabotage, and support Resistance movements in the countries of Europe and the Far East occupied by Germany and her allies. By the summer of 1944, SOE employed some fourteen thousand personnel, of whom about 3,200 were women. Of these, about 5,000 were agents in the field or awaiting dispatch.

Although the majority in the field were men, women played a significant role in SOE. The agency's F Section, which was responsible for operations in occupied France, sent 470 agents into the field, 39 of them women. In all, 118 failed to return, among them 13 women. This represented an overall casualty rate in the F Section of one in four, or 25 percent, severe but not unsustainable losses in conditions of world war. In contrast, the British engineers who went ashore at low tide on D-Day to remove mines from the beaches suffered a casualty rate three times greater, at 75 percent.

Until 1943, the man principally responsible for recruiting men and women for fieldwork in SOE was Selwyn Jepson, who in peacetime had been an author. Jepson accorded women a perfect equality with men, although in this he initially encountered stiff opposition within the agency. He later defended his decision: