7

Donovan’s Decision

IN WASHINGTON, DONOVAN’S SKILLS in persuasion and manipulation drove the OSS with the same acuity that he used in his days as lawyer, when he had insisted that every statement had to be proven. Now, in partnership with British intelligence, he went about building America’s first strategic intelligence service with a worldwide reach. His blue eyes gave every idea a close look, and his calm aura instilled confidence in anyone he wanted to persuade to do his bidding. William Stephenson would recall how Donovan would shake a person’s hand and say, “I am counting on you.”

By the end of 1941, the OSS had recruited almost six hundred people who had been told he was depending on them: women clerks, secretaries, administrative assistants, planning staff, and liaison officers. All had signed an oath of secrecy, a document shorter but just as important as Britain’s Official Secrets Act.

They included those Donovan called “our best and brightest” or “our league of gentlemen.” Some were members of a group committed to Anglo-American solidarity and met once a month at the New York mansion of Vincent Astor, the scion of a well-known and wealthy British family. Among them were Junius Morgan, a Wall Street banker; the author Stephen Vincent Benét; Rhode Island governor William H. Vanderbilt; and historian Arthur Schlesinger. With connections around the world, they shared their knowledge and insights with each other.

As the Second World War began with the fall of Poland, and the soprano voice of Kate Smith sang on every radio network her hit “God Bless America,” members of the group continued to meet in Vincent Astor’s mansion. With international business interests and seemingly infinite social connections, these men ran their lives by the bang of the stock exchange gavel that announced the morning’s start of trading on Wall Street. At the end of the day they would talk about Dow Jones stocks and their standing in other markets in the world. Among them was John Lord O’Brian, who had been Donovan’s law partner, who suggested that his colleagues would benefit from hearing about the OSS.

On a summer evening Donovan’s driver, James Freeman, drove him to Vincent Astor’s mansion in New York. A footman opened the door and took Donovan to the ballroom where he would speak.

After the audience settled into their rows of chairs on the dance floor, he stood before a lectern and opened his notes. His eyes swept the room as if to remember the faces. When he spoke his voice was deep, soft, patrician, with more than a touch of the Boston-Irish accent. His eyes flashed as he said Pearl Harbor had denied the isolationists their need to continue to attack him as a committed internationalist and accused him of dragging America into the war. He told them he had won the support of Churchill and King George. “For them the point of no return has been reached. Hitler and Nazism must be conquered, and they will remain at battle stations until Britain defeats them. They will not allow isolationism to separate us from helping them. That is why the OSS has been created.”

He explained how it was structured and talked about the British intelligence departments that had inspired it.

Britain’s SOE has not only men but women who are married and have children, yet are being trained to operate behind enemy lines. Their training is the same as that for its men. OSS also has no restriction on gender. But we want more volunteers. Some will be trained to obtain information as spies. They would be parachuted behind enemy lines or slipped ashore by a small boat to work with local Resistance fighters. I have one rule. I hire on the spot anyone who shows true ability. I’ll soon find out otherwise. Working in secret intelligence demands the upmost commitment.

Donovan stepped back from the lectern and said he would be ready to receive applications from those who were ready to join the OSS. As he walked toward the door, hands reached out to shake his. Applause followed him out of the ballroom.

When news of Donovan’s speech reached the US intelligence community—the State Department, army, navy, and FBI—General George Marshall, the chief of staff, wrote to Secretary of State Henry Stimson, “It is not clear what Colonel Donovan will do next.”

After the next cabinet meeting, President Roosevelt told his spokesman, Stephen Early, to brief his newspaper contacts that the OSS would conduct a range of operations: espionage, counterespionage, guerrilla warfare, psychological warfare, and marine operations bearing on national security.

Donovan arranged his day to begin at 6:00 AM, when he arrived in his office to read the overnight cables on his desk in the high-ceiling corner office on the first floor of OSS headquarters. Its tall windows provided a view of the Potomac River. His room number, 109, was his code number and was stamped on all his documents. Maps hung on the wall were marked SECRET and were updated daily to show the position of the war in Europe. There were two telephones on his desk: one linked him to the White House and the other was for incoming calls.

Before he arrived, the night duty officer, one of several Dartmouth College graduates working in the top-secret communications branch, had neatly stacked the overnight call-back messages on his desk.

Most of the messages were to do with the urgent need to recruit. Donovan had cast his net widely, asking close friends, clients of his law firm, and professors at elite colleges and military academies to recommend interviewees. Some were rejected after they admitted that while they were physically and mentally fit, they did not want to be posted to Europe to take part in a war many said they did not understand. Donovan called them “East Coast Faggots.” It cost him friends when he said he was also looking for safecrackers and men whose prison records showed they had a background of burgling.

Donovan had discussed with Stephenson how MI6 selected its agents. He explained the service had a team of psychologists to interview candidates who had either applied or had been recommended. The interviewer looked for signs a candidate was motivated by the essence of what MI6 wanted. Those who passed were sent to the training school on the south coast of England. Stephenson said, “The last thing MI6 needs are self-deluded heroes.”

Donovan contacted Dr. Henry Murray, a psychologist he had used in prewar law cases involving clients like Mary Pickford and many other Hollywood names who needed his services in contract disputes with studios. Murray, whose gray hair was carefully brushed back from a high forehead, chain-smoked, had a dark sense of humor, and collected antique porcelain objects from Europe.

Donovan chose a restaurant for their lunch where the food was served on century-old plates. He told Murray what Stephenson had said. Almost as if he were giving evidence in court, Murray responded with a statement. Smiling, showing all his teeth, he told Donovan: “From the medical standpoint Stephenson is right about deluded candidates. They are often driven by the thought of being part of a secret world. Careful questioning can reveal their personalities and whether they could work with their own intelligence. The ideal recruit will be honest, devious, audacious, quick, and always cool-headed.”

Donovan asked Murray if he was prepared to become the chief psychologist for the OSS.

“I thought you’d never ask,” came the response. A retainer fee was agreed, and Murray would have a consultant room in headquarters and have the status of a medical officer with a rank equal to an army major.

There were now over forty-six million foreign-born citizens in the country and a growing number of refugees from Europe, of whom, Murray said, he would expect a number would be suitable for clandestine work and could be trusted to keep secrets.

Allen Dulles, among the first key men Donovan recruited, used his office, room 3661, on the fifth floor of the OSS’s Fifth Avenue location, to interview émigrés and refugees who came from all parts of Nazi-occupied Europe. He continued to build up a staff of experts on German and European affairs. They included Baron Wolfgang zu Putlitz, a former Nazi diplomat who had worked in the Foreign Ministry in Berlin and had fled to New York on the eve of the war, and Gottfried Treviranus, a Prussian who had once served in the Reichstag.

Among others Dulles recruited were men and women from a wide range of occupations who gave an insight into who made up Hitler’s Germany, from the top rank of Nazi Party leaders to SS and Gestapo personalities and experts in the fields of economics, anthropology, and racial ideology. His interviewees told him of the extent of the German Resistance, which included Protestant Christians, Catholic priests, politicians, academics, and artists. Many had been imprisoned and executed; others had gone underground.

Dulles’s files contained documents, materials, press cuttings, and transcripts of interviewees’ life histories that had revealed the connection between the aesthetic and the barbaric, the homicide and the criminality of the Third Reich.

The files also included information from left-wingers who had escaped capture and moved to New York and had ended up in Dulles’s office with information. Inevitably they had also come to the unfavorable attention of the FBI, and J. Edgar Hoover had complained to the president that Dulles “is hiring a bunch of Bolsheviks.” President Roosevelt had discussed with Donovan Hoover’s claim, which Donovan dismissed as another instance of the FBI director’s obsession about suspects with Communist leanings.

The international career of Allen Dulles—a future director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—began on that summer day in 1942, when he told Donovan that Bern, the Swiss capital where he had once served as a State Department diplomat, had become a spy haven through which important information passed, to and from Nazi-occupied countries and Berlin. The news confirmed Donovan’s own belief that the most effective center from which the OSS would operate would be a neutral country like Switzerland on the enemy’s doorstep. Switzerland had continued to protect its neutrality since the outbreak of World War II. Knowing how close the country had come to becoming occupied since the quick collapse of France, which would have made it a stepping stone to supply the German armies in North Africa and Italy, the Swiss government had passed a law against any act of favoring the interests of belligerents.

A special force, the Fremdenpolizei, the foreign police, had been formed to monitor all foreign embassy staff, and the Swiss counterintelligence service was equipped with the latest surveillance equipment to spy on suspects.

Donovan decided Bern was where Dulles, graying and bespectacled with the disarming charm of a country lawyer, would use his instincts to operate at the back door to the Reich. There was one hurdle to overcome: his official post. The State Department had finally agreed he would have the title of legal assistant to the American minister, Leland Harrison. The Swiss newspapers published Dulles’s photograph under the caption, “Personal representation of President Roosevelt posted to Bern.”

Dulles’s final days in New York before going to Bern as the OSS station chief in Switzerland had been filled with the minutiae of spycraft. He had been given his own code number, 116; Donovan would be 108, and David Bruce, the London station chief would be 105. All cables from Bern station were to carry the prefix “Victor,” and all incoming messages would bear the word “Burns.”

He had hosted a farewell party for his staff and introduced them to his replacement. The next day, he flew to Lisbon to take a train across Spain and Vichy France to Geneva, and he reached Bern five days after leaving New York. He arrived in time to hear of the successful Allied landings, Operation Torch, in North Africa.

Dulles’s first cable to Donovan included his contact with the World Council of Churches organization in Geneva from which he had received the first reports of Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, including details of the volume of murders and locations of the death camps. Dulles also made contact with the Italian-Socialist Resistance fighting the SS in the North Alps of Italy and his connections with the Italian political and military hierarchy in Rome, which, in July 1943, had deposed Mussolini.

Every morning Dulles culled reports from Swiss newspaper correspondents in Berlin. Himmler, commander of the Home Army, was raising fifty new divisions—the Volksgrenadiere—to defend the Reich, which was being firebombed by the RAF and USAAF.

Another report contained news that a Wehrmacht force, called Brandenburger, was being posted to the Swiss Alps. Was it in readiness to cross the border into Switzerland? Dulles sent the story to David Bruce in London, knowing it could be of interest to the intelligence planners preparing a prelude for Operation Overlord, the invasion of occupied Europe. Updating pulsating gossip was a part of Dulles’s work.

Shortly after Dulles arrived in Bern his secretary showed a very tall woman in her midtwenties into his office. Her clothes were shabby but, despite the exhausted look on her face, she had the air of someone with a privileged background.

Without speaking he looked her over, studying the notes he had been handed by his team. “You claim to be an American?” he said.

“I am,” came the reply.

“I’m Allen Dulles,” he said. “In charge of everyone claiming to be an American.”

“My name is Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester,” she said proudly, allowing her Manhattan accent and a little of the haughtiness she had inherited from her English mother to come through. She could be herself now, after more than a year of passing herself as a Frenchwoman.

Rochester was twenty-six years old, tall, with a slim, long-legged athlete’s figure. She had been educated at an English public school and had been traveling in France when the Germans invaded. She spoke French with a confident tone. Her mother would be proud of the way she spoke and fit in to French life.

Like her mother, Rochester had grey eyes that she knew men found attractive; in Paris they called her très joli and sympathique with dark hair cascading to her shoulders and a jaw suggesting she did not suffer fools or pointless argument.

Her eyes had become forbidding at the sight of Paris buildings bedecked with swastikas and German soldiers marching in the streets to the sound of martial music. Their uniforms were everywhere, while in the background guttural, rasping voices shouted over loudspeakers. The sounds of occupation.

Her own father had been a soldier in the First World War and served in France. Her parents’ marriage broke up on his return from Europe. Elizabeth had been four when her parents divorced, and then her mother met and married Myron Reynolds, a rich American businessman; he had tacked his own surname on to Elizabeth’s. When she started school she had insisted her mother register her by her own father’s middle and surname, Devereaux Rochester.

The Reynolds family lived in a spacious apartment on Fifth Avenue, staffed by a cook, a maid, and a governess who taught French to Elizabeth. When she reached her teens her mother sent her as a boarder to Roedean, a private school in Sussex, England, overlooking the English Channel. She was one of several American pupils. After graduating with honors in French and history, her stepfather paid for her to travel around Europe while she decided her future. Vienna, Budapest, and Munich had all been on her itinerary by the time she arrived in Athens on September 4, 1939. Rochester had gone to the American embassy to register her name as an American passport holder and found the building to be bedlam, with American citizens waving their passports and seeking consular help to return home.

Three days earlier, Germany had invaded Poland and sparked World War II. Fifty-two Wehrmacht divisions, 1.5 million men, led the blitzkrieg, an aerial and ground tactical attack that swiftly destroyed the Polish defense.

Rochester cabled her mother and said she was going to head for Paris and stay there for a while to see what developed. Her stepfather wired her money and told her she should buy a car in case she had to drive to the coast and catch a ferry to England.

As she boarded a ship for Marseilles, the radio revealed the news that the previous day a British passenger liner Athenia had been sunk west of Scotland en route to Canada. No warning had been given by the U-boat commander. Of the 1,400 passengers, 118 were drowned, 28 of them Americans.

In the first week of war the belligerents had all stated they would observe the Geneva Convention and not use gas, as they had done in the Great War. In France, the population was ordered to collect their gas masks from the depots distributing them. Rochester carried hers in its canvas bag wherever she went. In her purse she had her American passport and French identity card, which she was required by law to carry.

Regular visits to the American embassy kept her updated on the war. When the United States had declared its neutrality on September 5, Canada had announced it was at war with Germany. Two days later Hitler broadcast that the German navy would not attack neutral ships, “especially those of the United States.”

As the months passed, Rochester continued to look for work. In her diary she wrote, “I continue to hammer on doors. I climb stairs and knock on doors. No one seems to want an American to help La Belle France. There are lots of Frenchmen and women ready to do this. They see me as an American in a French war against Germany with America looking on.”

Finally a clerk at the embassy told her that the American Hospital was looking for ambulance drivers. They needed to speak French and know their way around not only the city but the countryside beyond.

She went to the hospital for an interview. Its director was an elderly woman from Boston in a nurse’s uniform. She took Rochester to one of the ambulances and told her that if she passed her driving test she would be assigned to it. For an hour the nurse sat beside Rochester as she drove them through the streets. The job was hers.

There were eleven ambulances, each with two drivers, one of whom would serve as a paramedic. She had learned first aid at Roedean and in weeks was assigned to bring back the wounded in her ambulance from the badly mauled French army making its last stand on the banks of the Loire.

She was dressing wounds in the back of the ambulance when an old, broken voice came over the radio informing the people they had lost the war; Marshal Philippe Pétain announced the armistice. Within days the hospital was emptied of its lightly wounded soldiers, and some of the more seriously injured were driven south in trucks, along with doctors and nurses. Rochester found herself alone with her ambulance and its equipment.

The hospital director said she could use her ambulance to take food to French prisoners of war held in a compound in a Paris suburb. In between she could take one of the few doctors remaining for house calls now that the hospital emergency room had closed down. Their visits turned out to be to Jews.

The Milice, French men and women working with the Gestapo, were combing the Jewish quarter in the city to bring families to a holding camp in a suburb near the Gare du Nord, from where the trains left for the concentration camps in Germany and Poland.

She drove the doctor to a Jewish family, a mother and her sick children. A stranger introduced himself as the district Resistance leader. He thanked them for coming but said he would soon have to move the family as he feared they could be betrayed. He explained he had a relative, a farmer, outside the city. Could Rochester drive them there? She immediately agreed and soon learned the Resistance was helping Jews to get out of the country and into Switzerland. Rochester and her ambulance became its transport.

America was still neutral, and the Paris embassy regularly reminded those Americans still in the city that the State Department wanted its citizens to remain that way.

After another trip that had brought another Jewish family to safety, she stopped at a field on her way back. There were freshly dug graves with French helmets stuck on rough crosses, each with a number. She knelt in prayer as she had done in chapel at Roedean. Nearby she found a box filled with Croix de Guerre decorations. She brought the box back to the apartment and gave them to the Resistance leader. He said he would keep the ribbons to give to the relatives of the fallen.

Rochester also began to escort RAF pilots who had been shot down over France and hidden by the Resistance in the countryside.

Some were destined to be picked up from north Brittany beaches by Royal Navy high-speed motor gunboats or a submarine lying offshore in the Atlantic swell. More than once she found that a village priest would supply more than pastoral care. On one occasion a clergyman dressed two airmen in priest robes and gave her a nun’s habit and wimple to wear as she drove them to the next stage of the escape line. Before long she was making dangerous drives to the South of France and into the Pyrenees for the pilots to be escorted by British officials from the Madrid embassy. They were ultimately returned from Gibraltar to England.

In late 1942 Rochester had only narrowly escaped being interned as an enemy alien. She buried her American passport and fled to the South of France, before heading for the Swiss frontier.

She and a group of refugees paid a passeur to take them to an unguarded stretch of the border where they laid coats and blankets over the thick bundles of barbed wire and pulled themselves over.

Dulles listened to her story and noted how eager she was to return to France. He decided to use Rochester as a courier. She returned to France with messages for Resistance groups and to help refugees escape the police roundups, rafles, in southern France. On one occasion she smuggled three airmen across the border into Switzerland.

The Frenchmen she worked with complained about a lack of arms. She understood their desire to fight back hard against the Nazis; a trip to Berlin in her teens had turned her violently against all that Hitler stood for.

A Resistance leader in the Haute-Savoie urged her to travel to London to explain what they needed. She could plead their case, have armaments dropped. She agreed that her next mission would take her not back to Switzerland but to London as an envoy for the Resistance.

That summer Donovan had also established a permanent OSS headquarters in London. The five-story office block was at 70-72 Grosvenor Street in the center of Mayfair. But the cost of converting it into America’s first overseas spy organization had once more caused Harold Smith, Roosevelt’s budget chief, to blink furiously behind his wire-frame glasses.

Donovan had already spent several million dollars refurbishing his Washington headquarters, including salaries for over seven hundred staff and purchasing real estate in Maryland and Virginia to be converted into training schools. For OSS London, another million dollars was spent to purchase furniture, safes with special combination locks, and a range of equipment listed on invoices as “communication materials.”

On the first floor was Secret Intelligence (SI) and Special Operations (SO) together with Research and Analysis (R&A) including cryptographers and cartographers. On the second floor was Counter Intelligence (X-2) and Sabotage. The third floor was Communications and Propaganda. The fourth floor housed a small unit that worked with Charles de Gaulle’s Free French intelligence section in London. On the same floor were the Country Units, each assigned to collect geographic, economic, political, and military intelligence to support OSS missions into occupied Europe. All the departments had their quota of women.

In a memo Donovan circulated to his heads of departments, he wrote, “Our women are the invisible apron strings of our organization which will touch every theater of war. They are not just there to file reports, encode and decode messages, and keep the records. Much of what they do is essential for the success and security of our operations.”

Donovan brought a new idea each time he visited OSS London. One was to create a unit—the Labor Branch—that would identify potential agents from newly arrived immigrants in Britain who could be trained for missions. Arthur Goldberg would head it. Donovan had set up a clothing depot where agents would be fitted with clothes worn in the country where they were being sent. He decided to change how the OSS referred to agents. The men would be “Joes.” The women would be known as “Janes.”

Life in France for the general population, as well as for agents and résistants, was sharply affected by Operation Torch. Three days after the landing, the Germans responded by occupying the area previously controlled by the Vichy government. While the Vichy state officially continued to exist, there were now Wehrmacht soldiers in the streets and Gestapo men in the shadows.

In addition, after Torch, the threat of invasion always seemed near for the men and women of the occupying forces. The Milice and those French police officers who had sided with the Germans became ever more desperate and vicious, knowing that the Resistance had warned them that there would be no quarter given or mercy offered once the invasion had led to liberation.

Soon after the Gestapo arrived in Marseille it began to hear reports from informers about a female Resistance leader who ran an escape line for British prisoners of war, distributed subversive literature, and organized Resistance throughout Provence. The Gestapo opened a file on this elusive figure, whom they nicknamed the “White Mouse.”

Thirty-year-old Nancy Wake might have been running rings around them like a little white mouse, but she was anything but mouse-like in character. Wake was bawdy, adventurous, and known for her infectious high spirits. She drank, smoked, and partied.

Wake had been born in New Zealand to a journalist father, who deserted the family when she was a small child, and a strictly religious mother, against whom she quickly rebelled. At eighteen she lied about her age and obtained a passport. She traveled by ship to New York, where she spent her time drinking in speakeasies, and then used the last of her money to buy a ticket for England. In London she decided to study journalism and got a job as an overseas correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. She was posted to Paris, from where she was told she might be sent on assignment throughout Europe and the Middle East.

As well as enjoying the Paris café lifestyle, Wake traveled to Austria and Germany, witnessing the rise of the Nazis and the persecution of the Jews. “It was in Vienna that I formed my opinion of the Nazis,” she said. “I resolved there and then that if I ever had the chance I would do anything, however big or small, stupid or dangerous, to try and make things more difficult for their rotten party.”

Wake’s work and social life helped her develop excellent French—although she had little time for “all that bloody feminine/masculine stuff, all the le this and la that”—and brought her into contact with a wealthy industrialist named Henri Fiocca, who had fallen for her when he saw her dancing a tango with a boyfriend in a nightclub.

In November 1939 she and Fiocca were married. Wake resigned from her job and settled in Marseille, where the couple bought a penthouse apartment with a balcony with a view across the red rooftops of the old city and down to the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean.

Fiocca was called up to the French Army soon after and, when the Germans invaded France, Wake borrowed a truck from one of his factories and drove north. Converting the truck into a makeshift ambulance, Wake joined a voluntary ambulance corps and headed to the Belgian border. As she drove she was swamped by the thousands of refugees fleeing the German advance from the opposite direction. Wake’s knowledge of first aid was rudimentary, but she had purchased a good selection of medical supplies and was able to carry injured soldiers away from the front line.

After the French surrendered, Wake returned to Marseille and was joined soon after by her husband. The couple remained wealthy and continued to live a privileged life in the “free zone.” But Wake wanted more.

She realized that her husband’s wealth and status gave her opportunities to travel and fund various illegal activities. She discovered that British officers had been interned by the Vichy government inside the seventeenth-century Fort Saint-Jean, which stood at the entrance to the Old Port of Marseille, and she began to supply the prisoners with radios, cigarettes, and food. Then, teaming up with an escaped Scottish officer named Ian Garrow, she helped develop an escape line for some of the men. Fiocca’s factory and an Alpine holiday home were used as safe houses.

Garrow was arrested and Wake pledged to free him. When he was moved to Meauzac concentration camp, near Bergerac on the Dordogne River, Wake contacted a former prisoner there who said there was one guard who was open to bribery.

Wake rented a room in the little town of Meauzac and began visiting Garrow every day, telling the authorities she was his first cousin. After a couple of weeks the corruptible guard—seeing her devotion to her “cousin”—approached her in a bistro and wondered if she would like to do a deal. The price was half a million francs. Fiocca had already said he would pay.

A couple of days later Garrow was given a guard’s uniform and was allowed to join a line of guards as they walked out of camp. Wake organized his escape to Spain.

By the time of Garrow’s escape the Germans had moved into southern France. One day Wake stopped to buy cigarettes in a corner bistro near her home and was told by the owner that he thought she was being followed. She was not surprised. She and Fiocca had begun to suspect that the strange clicking sound on their phone indicated that it had been tapped, and they had discovered a man going through their mailbox.

She did not want to leave Fiocca but he insisted. He sent her away to a safe house in Toulouse. Soon after she followed Garrow across the Pyrenees and into Spain.

On July 18, 1942, William Phillips, a distinguished Foreign Service officer who had held several State Department postings in prewar Europe, was chosen by Donovan to oversee the settling-in of the London station. Sitting beside him on the Pan Am flying boat flight to London was a slim, attractive young woman, Evangeline Bell. A graduate from Radcliffe College, she had also been educated in Paris, Stockholm, and Rome. She had followed Donovan’s advice and packed in her luggage linen bed sheets—“not available in London,” he had said—and warm clothes.

Bell would be responsible for the OSS women assigned to the station. The first consignment would arrive onboard the Queen Mary, along with fifteen thousand American troops—a full division. Before they sailed for England, the women had gone to an army commissary at the dock and collected their prepacked box containing pajamas, toilet paper, soap, toothpaste, and candy bars. They were told these items would not be available with their ration books, which would be issued to them in England. They were each issued an American passport identifying them as a member of the OSS, which they must carry at all times.

Among the women was Lillian Traugott, a trim twenty-three-year-old Swede. She would be the only OSS woman agent assigned to work with Communist groups in Scandinavia. Her mission was to use the training she had received at Camp X in Canada to prepare agents to go to Germany and provide important intelligence that she would transmit to London. Sue Hannifin, a New Yorker, had been assigned to work in X-2 counterintelligence. The unit included Grace Tully and Aline Griffith, a striking runway model from Pearl River, New York. The three women would later run an OSS network from Madrid that provided significant information for the preparation of D-day.

On arrival in England the women earmarked as agents were sent to what Donovan called his “finishing school” north of London to be readied for their missions. They would later join OSS stations in Algiers and Rome.

After a five-day voyage across the Atlantic, the OSS women disembarked at Southampton in their Women’s Army Corps uniforms and had the first sight of bomb damage as they were taken by train to Paddington Station in London. They arrived as the all-clear siren sounded across the city.

Priscilla Symington, whose father worked in the State Department, recalled she was “impressed by the buoyant good mood of the station porters as they stacked our luggage in waiting trucks, and Red Cross women offered us tea and coffee.”

Waiting on the platform was Evangeline Bell, who had arrived earlier and had helped to set up OSS London. On her clipboard she checked off their names, next to which she had written the department to which they would be assigned. They included secretaries, filing clerks, interpreters, and translators.

From the list provided by Eleanor Grecay Weis in New York, in charge of vetting recruits for London, Bell had selected a number of them to work with her in the Document Branch of Counterintelligence. The department provided identification documents and suitable clothing from the countries where agents would work in Europe. Their lives would depend on the cover stories she would produce with the help of her staff.

Donovan described Evangeline Bell as “intelligent, beautiful, mysterious, and ethereal.” The daughter of an American career diplomat, who was posted to Peking, she and her nanny used to take walks along the Great Wall of China. She was still a child when her father died and her mother married the British diplomat Sir James Dodd in 1927.

Already word perfect in French, she went to Radcliffe in 1937. Her history teacher, Arthur Schlesinger, saw her as “charmingly seductive and quietly amusing; she knows what she wants.” In 1942 she met Donovan and was recruited into the OSS to work in London. She was given the demanding responsibility of ensuring there were no inconsistencies in the forged documents that retouch artists, photographers, and printers produced.

When finally checking the documents, Bell would pore over the French permits embossed on them. A permit was needed to own a bicycle, to possess a food ration book, or to purchase a rail ticket. Sometimes an engraving plate would be made for a hospital certificate to be attached to a cover story to explain why its holder was not at work. A forged letter from a friend would feature condolences for a death in a family and details of a funeral, and so could explain why someone needed to travel to a particular area.

She made regular visits to the clothes unit in the headquarters attic to complete cover stories. For an agent posing as a French farmer she would select patched blue work clothes, heavy hand-knit socks, and a beret. She checked that buttons had been sewn with parallel threading, not the usual British cross-stitch style. Teams of women did the sewing. Others crumpled French notes in small denominations, the way many workers carried their money.

At headquarters the OSS accommodation officer, Lieutenant Jane Tanner, handed out billets to the newly arrived recruits, using a wall map of Mayfair to point out the townhouses and saying they were all within walking distance from their workplaces. She issued bicycles for those who wanted them and informed agents they would be responsible for their own bikes, adding that having one stolen was part of day-to-day living. One recruit would recall she was billeted in an apartment behind Marble Arch, overlooking Hyde Park. It had a housekeeper who shopped and cooked for her and two colleagues.

Tanner told the women there was an OSS mess in the basement, as well as several restaurants in the area. “The British call them cafés, but don’t serve what we call coffee.”

Their work day would officially end at 6:00 PM, and they would have to wash their clothes and often bathe in cold water. They would live by army regulations, which included keeping their billets spotless and submitting to spot inspections. During an air raid they must wear their helmets in their offices.

Lieutenant Tanner ended with a warning. “You can expect when you go out at night you will attract wolf-calls and whistles, not so much from the British but our GIs. They will tell you that you were [sent] overseas to sleep with our men.”

David Bruce, the new OSS London chief, completed their briefing by stressing the importance of the relationship between the OSS, SOE, MI5, and MI6. Each had a liaison officer with the OSS.

“It will be vital from the beginning that you develop a good working relationship with all of them, if you are to have an effective role in helping win the war. You must derive the fullest benefit from what you have already been taught. You will be working under air raids on London that its citizens have come to live with. You will have night duty on the top of your headquarters to watch out for any fires that could threaten the building. The view will show you that the great church of St. Paul’s is still standing, its dome radiating defiance to the Luftwaffe. You will find that your sisters in SOE will welcome you as warmly as you should welcome them,” Bruce said.

When Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester arrived in England, she went straight to the War Office to plead for weapons for the Resistance fighters she knew across France. Officials heard her plea and listened to her own story.

A WAAF, dressed in air force blue and a cap, drove Rochester in a staff car through the dimly lit streets to a building near Baker Street. There she was handed over to a man in an army officer’s uniform. He explained this was a reception center, speaking English with a French accent. He led her to a kitchen, where a cold supper waited. The officer sat opposite her as she ate, explaining as she had recently arrived from France, she would spend the night here. He led her upstairs to a small bedroom.

After breakfast the officer brought her down a corridor to a door, knocked, and motioned Rochester to enter. Perched on a corner of a desk was a tall, slim man with a narrow face and fair hair. He came forward, smiling, shook her hand, and introduced himself in French. It was Maurice Buckmaster, the head of SOE’s F Section. He led Rochester to one of two armchairs facing the desk. On a table between the chairs was a tray with two cups and a coffee pot. He poured and handed one to Rochester.

Continuing to speak French, he explained that she had come highly recommended by a Resistance chief in Paris. He then began to inquire about her background, pausing to listen carefully as she described some of her adventures as an ambulance driver. He told her that her fluent French was good as it would be essential to speak and dress like a Frenchwoman. While she had shown exceptional skills in getting Jews and pilots out of France by pitting her wits against the Gestapo and the Milice, there would be nothing glamorous in what she would be taught, and a close watch would be kept on her during training, as it was with all agents. In her case, her American habits would be corrected, even how she used a knife and fork. There would be weekly reports about her progress, including if she still used the occasional American colloquialism.

Buckmaster told her she could still change her mind. But she said she wanted to help her friends in France. He went to his desk and handed her a copy of the Official Secrets Act. He waited while she read it, and explained that if she signed the document it would be binding her not to reveal anything she learned. She signed the paper where he indicated.

Rochester sensed the satisfaction in Buckmaster’s voice as he continued to describe the training she would undergo. Her body would be conditioned to withstand fatigue. There would be ten-mile walks, swimming in cold lakes, bicycling for thirty miles. In between she would learn how to avoid making herself conspicuous as a silhouette against the skyline, move silently through undergrowth, and use the natural background of rough country to travel unobserved from one point to another. She would learn to climb crags and cliffs and practice rifle, Sten gun, and Bren gun shooting. She would live the life of the Maquis, the Resistance in France.

Her instructors would also teach her to be a wireless operator and courier. She would learn to pass messages in a crowded place without being spotted, and to transmit and receive them without alerting the enemy. There would be secret codes to memorize and still more exercises to take part in. She would be sent for training exercises, such as penetrating a dock or a guarded factory. The chance of being arrested by police would be high, and her response if caught would indicate to her instructors her ability to resist interrogation.

Buckmaster finally told Rochester her clandestine experience working with the Resistance escape line in France had given her some direct knowledge of what would be required in the SOE.

He slowly nodded and smiled. He told her he had seen many men and women volunteers and was convinced she was among the best of them. He picked up the desk phone to summon a FANY officer to the room. Buckmaster told her to take Rochester to the clothes store and outfit her as a FANY. She would wear the uniform throughout her training.

During periods when the moon was full, the Tempsford pilots had started to fly every night. Those on pickup missions often returned to base with gifts of wine or perfume thrust into the cockpit by grateful Resistance fighters.

A Lysander was sent to pick up the pregnant wife of a Resistance leader who had been caught by the Gestapo and was awaiting execution. His one request to Baker Street was that his baby should be born in England. The child was delivered shortly after the mother arrived at Tempsford.

Another pilot was sent to collect a wireless operator who had been hidden by an undertaker in his mortuary. He had placed the agent in a coffin and driven his hearse to the pickup point.

A Resistance fighter asked the SOE for a replacement wooden leg after he lost his own stump while escaping from a German patrol. It was air-dropped to him.

Vera Atkins worked so incessantly with the departing agents that her mother, who knew nothing of her daughter’s secret role, wondered where she was at night. One morning, as Atkins arrived home from Tempsford for breakfast, her mother—who lived with her but knew little of her secret life—commented, “Well, I hope at the end of all this he makes an honest woman of you, dear.”

Increasingly in the moonlit nights of the war, Resistance fighters took up their positions in preselected fields in France. They included farm workers, shopkeepers, often the local pharmacist, and the church gravedigger. They made their way to the field by separate routes, breaking the 6:00 PM curfew enforced by the police patrols and German checkpoints. Some came on foot, others by bicycle. Usually they had young women with them who acted as lookouts around the field.

The local Resistance leader, Chef de terrain, often brought a secret agent with him to the field, a man or a woman being flown back to England after a mission, or a French political figure who was a comrade in arms of General de Gaulle, who had requested that the SOE pick him up as he had important intelligence secrets of value to the war effort.

In the dark of night or in slanting rain, the fighters in the field gathered protectively around the passengers while the women positioned in the hedgerows waited for the sound of an approaching engine. If it came from the nearest road it could be a German patrol. But if the sound came from the air it signified the message the Chef de terrain had received over the BBC coded transmission on the 9:00 nightly French news was arriving on its “deliver and collect mission.”

The Chef pointed his flashlight at the sky at the sound of the Lysander descending toward the field and flashed a coded signal that the broadcast had included. The pilot responded with a flash from his landing light. From the hedgerows came silence; there was no signal of a patrol from the women.

The fighters formed a makeshift runway with flashlights they switched on as the Lysander descended over a hedgerow where some of the women crouched, watching the wheels flick up grass in their wake as the plane landed on its rubber tires, taxied between the flashlights, turned, and stopped, its engine idling while facing into the wind.

The cockpit canopy slid open and a figure in civilian clothes climbed down the fixed ladder on the fuselage to the ground. The Chef de terrain ran forward, picked up the suitcase that had been thrown from the cockpit, and motioned for the passengers for England to climb the ladder. In moments the cockpit canopy closed and the aircraft was airborne on its dangerous flight over occupied France back to England.

Long before the Lysander touched down at Tempsford, the Chef and the new arrival had reached the safety of the hideout he had chosen for the passengers. The other fighters had gone home. Later the Chef tuned in to the next BBC transmission to listen for word of the next operation to transport agents to and from France to support the activities of the French Resistance.

The Air Liaison Section on the fourth floor of the SOE headquarters in Baker Street had been alerted that another “Joe” was ready. The section planned the clandestine flights of 138 and 161 squadrons. Operations took place between the eight nights of the full moon every month.

Vera Atkins drove to an SOE safe house in a north London suburb and was let in by a FANY housekeeper. She led Atkins into a lounge, where Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester waited, and served them tea and cake. Atkins told Rochester her departure for France would be soon and reminded her that what she would be doing was never easy, and she must never forget her own life depended on her training. Finally, shaking Rochester’s hand, Atkins left the house.

Two days later a Rolls-Royce pulled up outside the safe house. The driver was a young woman in a FANY uniform. Smiling at Rochester’s surprise she said, “The car used to belong to a big-wig in a bank who donated it to the war effort as his petrol ration made it not possible to keep on the road.” The car drove farther and farther away from London, and gardens gave way to fields as the traffic thinned out. It was late afternoon when the Rolls-Royce was stopped by a soldier at the tall iron gates set in high stone walls with the words GAYNES HALL carved above. He checked his clipboard, peered at Rochester, and opened the gates, motioning for the FANY driver to continue up the drive to a large mansion, its three-story yellow brick walls set in twenty acres of parkland.

For centuries the estate had been the home of the Duberly family, one of the wealthiest landowners in the area, until it was requisitioned by the government when RAF Tempsford airfield was built four miles away. The family was moved out, along with their collection of Chippendale chairs and other antiques. Gaynes Hall was assigned to the SOE and became Station 62, a staging post for agents that had the atmosphere of a country club. There were tennis and netball courts, a hockey field, and walks through the grounds.

Waiting at the steps before the front door was an elderly man in a black frock coat and bow tie. He stepped forward to open the car door and welcomed Rochester with a smile. She asked if this was a hotel. He explained it had thirteen en suite bedrooms, a ballroom, a dining room, a game room, and a library. And that the kitchen was the best in the county of Bedfordshire.

Standing in the doorway, he invited Rochester to look at the countryside. “It is a land that the Romans occupied over 1,000 years ago. When they left the Danes came. Then in the high summer of the year 916 the English rid the land of the upstart Danes. That big battle took place on the very ground you now stand on.”

He led her into the hall. “Our motto is that nothing can be too good for our special guests. One of them, of course, is you.”

A tall officer in an RAF uniform joined them and introduced himself as Michael, her conducting officer, who would take her to the airfield when the time came. In the meantime she should relax and enjoy the facilities. She could play cards and table tennis with some of the staff, listen to music, or read a book from the library. He asked if she was hungry.

She said that dinner would be fine. Michael told her that the chef was on loan from the Savoy Hotel in London. He turned to the elderly man and asked him to tell the chef to serve fresh eggs. The chef served Rochester two fried eggs. It became a ritual: from then on, every agent who stayed at Gaynes Hall was served two fried eggs before a mission.

The Operational Room in Gibraltar Farm had become the focus of the mission to fly Rochester into occupied France. Her pilot would be Johnnie Affleck, who was making his first flight with an agent in a Hudson.

That October afternoon he sat and studied the mission briefing folder. One Michelin map showed the route to the drop zone, DZ, and another marked German flak defenses close to the flight path. The details had been supplied by the RAF Reconnaissance Unit after one of its high-flying aircraft had also taken photos of the DZ and the surrounding area.

He turned to the next item in the briefing folder. The air movement officer had provided the Morse letters for the response signal he should give to allow him to reenter UK air space. Finally there was a sealed escape kit for an emergency landing. It contained a wad of French money, a map of France printed on silk, a compass, a fishing hook and line, and a tube of concentrated food tablets.

Near Tempsford was a field that had been allotted to the pilots to practice landing on grass. The night before, Affleck had made a number of what he called “circle and bumps” landings. He reckoned it did no harm to practice. His colleagues in the Moon Squadrons had warned him that landing in a field in enemy-occupied territory could test the nerves.

Rochester was flying to France with her new network leader Richard Heslop, a wireless operator named Owen Johnson, and a Resistance leader.

It was close to midnight when the Rolls-Royce, driven by the same FANY who had brought her to Gaynes Hall, stopped outside the barn beside Gibraltar Farm at RAF Tempsford. Michael, the conducting officer, stepped out of the car with Rochester’s suitcase and led her into a room. Waiting was a WAAF beside a table with cups and a tea pot. “I suppose you are glad not to be jumping,” Michael said, as he rubbed his hands together to keep off the cold.

“You’d get chilblains,” Johnson joked. They all laughed but there was nervousness in the air.

Out on the dark tarmac, Michael had held Rochester’s rucksack as she clambered up into the Hudson. “Have a good flight,” he said. “And remember we will all be thinking of you.”

The aircraft was loaded with crates of equipment, and Rochester looked for somewhere to tuck her long legs.

“Are you comfortable, miss?” asked the dispatcher.

“No,” she said.

They flew with escort planes as far as the French coast and then ducked below the flak over France.

Rochester stretched her cold legs and squeezed into the gun turret. The gunner shuffled aside to let her see the blue, black, and silver clouds that seemed to circle the moon.

“There may be a Jerry on the prowl,” the gunner said after a while. “You better go now.”

Slim, with dark hair and a sophisticated dress style, which Buckmaster later described as “typically Parisian,” Jacqueline Nearne had been a twenty-six-year-old former convent girl with an English father and a French mother when she received a letter from Selwyn Jepson in June 1942.

Jepson said that her name had been passed to him as that of someone “possessing qualifications which may be of value in a phase of the war effort.” Nearne, who had spent much of her life in France, was intrigued by the letter and wondered whether it had anything to do with a young army cadet she had recently befriended. Out of work and keen to help in any way she could, she went to meet Jepson.

After the end of his usual interview about her life, he asked her how she would feel about returning to France. He advised her to think about it and smiled when she told him, as she was leaving, that she had a younger sister, Eileen, who might be interested in going too.

A month later, after accepting Jacqueline into the SOE, Jepson interviewed Eileen. He found her to be intelligent and sincere, but he was concerned if the twenty-one-year-old would cope with the strains of a clandestine life. He said she could become a decoder in England. She accepted but made clear she would continue to press to become an agent.

Jacqueline was one of the first agents to be trained as part of a group made up entirely of women. Her fellow students were Odette Sansom, Lise de Baissac, and Mary Herbert. The group was sent directly to the finishing course at Beaulieu.

The nature of the group’s training, which missed out on some of the preliminary stages and a paramilitary course in Scotland, may be indicative of the SOE’s inexperience at training groups of women. Within Baker Street there had been an early fear that captured female agents might not face the same hardships as their male counterparts. It was a misconception that Gubbins quickly corrected in a memo on recruitment and training.

While enduring parachute training, which she hated, Nearne became close friends with de Baissac, who was thirty-seven and whose brother, Claude, was already an SOE agent. Born in Mauritius—then under British rule—she had lived in France from the age of fourteen. Like Nearne, she spoke fluent French and was intensely loyal to Britain.

The four women parted company after their time at the finishing school in the New Forest. De Baissac was the first into action, parachuting into the countryside to the north of Bordeaux. She dropped from a Whitley, seconds after Andrée Borrel, the agent whose file had so impressed Vera Atkins.

De Baissac’s mission was to establish a safe house in Poitiers where subsequent agents could be settled and to set up a new network, Artist. Borrel traveled to Paris to work for Francis Suttill’s Physician network as a courier. Both would become involved in the extended network, Prosper, which would spread across large parts of the occupied zone between autumn 1942 and summer 1943.

Mary Herbert and Odette Sansom landed by felucca on the south coast of France on October 30, 1942. Herbert headed to Bordeaux to act as a courier for Claude de Baissac, with whom she would have a relationship and a child, to whom she gave birth while living her double life. Sansom traveled to Cannes and would also become involved in a relationship with an agent, Peter Churchill.

Nearne was given a cover story as Josette Norville, a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company, and would work with Maurice Southgate, an Englishman born in Paris. He and Nearne would create a network, code-named Stationer, which would operate across almost half the area of France, from Châteauroux in central France to Tarbes, sixty miles from the Spanish border.

After a number of aborted attempts to get into France, Nearne and Southgate dropped from a Halifax of 161 Squadron into fields in the Auvergne on January 25, 1943.

Landing blind without a reception committee, they hurried to hide their parachutes and began to walk. Tired and slightly disorientated, they eventually saw a peasant woman cycling toward them and agreed to ask her if they were on the correct road for the small town of Brioude. What followed was a stark and sudden warning as to how easily things could go wrong.

Southgate stopped the lady and spoke to her. She looked bewildered: Southgate had asked the question in English. Nearne turned pale and hissed “Speak French!” before jumping in to ask the question in the right language. The woman smiled weakly and nodded, before moving on down the road. They realized by her slightly jumpy manner that she had thought they were Germans. Southgate, considered “one of the greats” by Vera Atkins, had made a simple but potentially fatal mistake within hours of arriving in France. His blood ran cold.

They headed to the railway station and caught a train for Clermont-Ferrand. Nearne avoided the attentions of a German soldier who shared a railway carriage with her by burying her face in a French newspaper.

One female SOE agent had already been living an undercover life for six months by the time Jacqueline Nearne arrived. She was Yvonne Rudellat, the French-born divorcée who had met Buckmaster when he visited the hotel she worked in and had told him she “wanted to do something to help France.”

Rudellat had landed by felucca on France’s Riviera coast under the moonlight on July 30, 1942. Vivacious and charming, Rudellat was one of the oldest female agents and, at forty-five, she was not only a mother but a grandmother.

However, her air of vulnerability was deceptive, and she was calm as she boarded a train and headed to Lyon, where she had collected forged papers from Virginia Hall. She now had to cross the demarcation line, which split the country in two. Crossing the line required an Ausweis, an official permit, but many résistants chose to smuggle themselves across. Only two months before, an agent, Henry Labit, had tried to cross by train. While being searched at the crossing checkpoint a spare, blank set of forged papers fell out of his pocket. The two German guards took him off the train and opened his suitcase, which contained his radio set. Labit took out a revolver and shot them both. Chased and surrounded by a large number of troops, he took out his cyanide pill and crunched it. He was dead in seconds.

Yvonne Rudellat decided not to risk her false papers at the checkpoint. Instead she snuggled down into the coal bunker of a steam train and crossed safely, eventually reaching Paris and then Tours, where she was to be a courier. Through August and September she worked with a local Resistance leader, Pierre Culioli, to pinpoint landing grounds and carry wirelesses and explosives, traveling mainly by bicycle.

After the arrival of Prosper—Francis Suttill’s code name in the field—Rudellat and Culioli met parachuted agents joining his network, including Andrée Borrel and Lise de Baissac.

One day she came to her rented room to find that someone had left a mass of incriminating evidence, including a radio set and code books, on her bed. Unsure if her landlord had seen them, Rudellat decided to move. She and Culioli went to a district of the Loire Valley known as the Sologne to create a subnetwork.

There, between November 1942 and the summer of 1943, they carried out a series of sabotage operations that caused chaos for the Germans over a 250-mile area between Caen in the north and Romorantin in the Sologne. Working with local Resistance groups, but sometimes alone, they destroyed trains, railway bridges, and a food store, as well as welcoming and supporting new SOE agents into the area.

On June 21, 1943, she and Culioli were driving in their Citroën toward the railway station at Beaugency. Using a car was often dangerous in occupied France, drawing unwanted attention. On this occasion there was an additional risk: in the back they were carrying two Canadians, a wireless operator and a courier, who had just arrived from England. As they passed through Dhuizon, about twenty minutes from their destination, they were stopped at a roadblock where the German on guard had some questions about the Canadians’ papers. Both were ordered to leave the car and walk to the town hall.

Rudellat and Culioli waited in the car, the engine still running. They looked at each other anxiously, knowing that any French official at the town hall would know immediately that the Canadians, whose French was heavily accented, were foreigners. After a few moments, a German at the roadblock ordered them to switch off the engine and walk to the town hall. Culioli hit the accelerator hard and the Citroën leaped forward, careering down the road. Three German cars set off in pursuit.

Determined to shake them off, they ran into another roadblock, where the Germans had laid a barricade across the road. Machine gun bullets peppered the car, and one hit Rudellat in the head. She fell across Culioli and, believing his friend dead, he accelerated the car into a wall, hoping to kill himself as well.

Instead, the car rebounded off the wall and spun back into the road. Culioli managed to fire on the advancing Germans but was shot in the leg and forced to give up. He was sent to a military hospital, given minimal care, and then taken to Paris for interrogation.

Rudellat was dragged from the car, still alive. She was treated sympathetically at a civil hospital, where it was decided it was safer to leave the bullet in her skull than to operate. Despite the German guard on her door, the nuns nursing her managed to sedate her unnecessarily every time interrogators arrived to question her. Eventually, though, the Germans saw through the ruse and Rudellat was transferred to Frèsnes prison in Paris, the Gestapo having been unable to get any information from her.