Vera Atkins

Vera May Atkins (15 June 1908 – 24 June 2000) was a Romanian-born British intelligence officer who worked in the France Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) from 1941 to 1945 during the Second World War.

Atkins was born Vera May Rosenberg in Galați, Kingdom of Romania, to Max Rosenberg (d. 1932), a German-Jewish father, and his British-Jewish wife, Zefra Hilda, known as Hilda (d. 1947).

She had two brothers.

Atkins briefly attended the Sorbonne in Paris to study modern languages and a finishing school at Lausanne, where she indulged her passion for skiing, before training at a secretarial college in London.

Atkins' father, a wealthy businessman on the Danube Delta, went bankrupt in 1932 and died a year after.

The Polish Cipher Bureau broke Germany's Enigma ciphers from 1932 on, using Enigma-machine reconstructions which they also gave to their British and French allies, following a July 1939 Warsaw conference at which they gave their French and British cryptologist opposite numbers information on the Poles' decrypting techniques and the special-purpose equipment they had invented.

Atkins remained with her mother in Romania until emigrating to Great Britain in 1937, a move made in response to the threatening political situation in mainland Europe.

In the spring of 1940, before joining SOE, Atkins travelled to the Low Countries to provide money for a bribe to an Abwehr officer, Hans Fillie, for a passport for her cousin, Fritz, to escape from Romania.

Atkins was stranded in the Netherlands when the Germans invaded on 10 May 1940, and, after going into hiding, was able to return to Britain late in 1940 with the assistance of a Belgian resistance network.

Atkins kept this episode secret all her life and it only came to light after her death when her biographer, Sarah Helm, tracked down some mourners at Atkins' funeral.

Atkins volunteered as an Air Raid Precautions warden in Chelsea in the period prior to working for SOE.

During this time she lived at Nell Gwynn House in Sloane Avenue in Chelsea.

He was killed in action in the Battle of Crete on 23 May 1941.

Though not a British national, in February 1941 Atkins joined the French section of the SOE as a secretary.

She was soon made assistant to section head Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, and became a de facto intelligence officer.

During her somewhat-gilded youth in Romania, where Atkins lived on the large estate bought by her father at Crasna (now in Ukraine), Atkins enjoyed the cosmopolitan society of Bucharest where she became close to the anti-Nazi German ambassador, Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg (executed after the July 1944 plot).

Later Atkins became involved with a young British pilot, Dick Ketton-Cremer, whom she had met in Egypt, and to whom she may have been briefly engaged.

Atkins served as a civilian until August 1944, when she was commissioned a Flight Officer in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF).

In February 1944, Atkins was naturalised as a British subject.

She was later appointed F Section's intelligence officer (F-Int).

Atkins' primary role at SOE was the recruitment and deployment of British agents in occupied France.

She also had responsibility for the 37 women SOE agents who worked as couriers and wireless operators for the various circuits established by SOE.

Atkins would take care of the "housekeeping" related to the agents, such as checking their clothing and papers to ensure they were appropriate for the mission, sending out pre-written anodyne letters at regular intervals, acting as SOE's liaison with their families, and ensuring they received their pay.

Atkins would often accompany agents to the airfields from which they would depart for France and carry out final security checks before waving them off.

Atkins always attended the daily section heads meeting chaired by Buckmaster, and would often stay late into the night at the signals room to await the decoded transmissions sent by agents in the field.

She would usually arrive at F Section's Baker Street office around 10.00 am.

Although not popular with many of her colleagues, Atkins was trusted by Buckmaster for her integrity, exceptional memory and good organisational skills.

Tall at 5 ft 9 in., she typically dressed in tailored skirt-suits.

She was a lifelong smoker, preferring the "Senior Service" brand.

Controversy has lasted in certain circles as to how and why clues that one of F section's main spy networks had been penetrated by the Germans were not picked up, and Buckmaster and Atkins failed to pull out agents at risk.

Instead, they sent in several more.

Atkins was never to marry, and lived in a flat with her mother while working for SOE and until 1947 when Hilda died.

While in Romania, Atkins came to know several diplomats who were members of British Intelligence, some of whom were later to support her application for British nationality, and to whom in view of her and her family's strong pro-British views, she may have provided information as a "stringer".

Atkins also worked as a translator and representative for an oil company.

The surname "Atkins" was her mother's maiden name and itself an Anglicised version of the original "Etkins", which she adopted as her own.

She was a cousin of Rudolf Vrba.

Atkins was recruited before the war by Canadian spymaster Sir William Stephenson of British Security Co-ordination.

He sent her on fact-finding missions across Europe to supply Winston Churchill (then in the 'political wilderness') with intelligence on the rising threat of Nazi Germany.

According to William Stevenson's The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II (Arcade Publishing, 2006), Atkins' first mission was to get Poland's cryptologists Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski out of the country, and she was a member of the British military mission (MM-4), alongside Colin Gubbins, which arrived in Poland posing as civilians, by way of Greece and Romania, six days before the outbreak of the war.

Atkins may have attempted to find the cryptologists and get them out of Poland, but as Rejewski describes (see "Marian Rejewski"), they were in fact evacuated to Romania by the Polish Cipher Bureau, and from Romania to France thanks to Gustave Bertrand of French intelligence; Rejewski makes no mention of ever having met or heard of Vera Atkins.