A Life In Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Sarah Helm (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 22, 2006

Once rumored to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Miss Moneypenny, Vera Atkins climbed her way to the top in the Special Operations Executive, or SOE: Britain’s secret service created to help build up, organize, and arm the resistance in the Nazi-occupied countries. Throughout the war, Atkins recruited, trained, and mentored the agents for the SOE’s French Section, which sent more than four hundred young men and women into occupied France—at least one hundred of whom never returned and were reported “Missing Presumed Dead” after the war. Twelve of these were women and among Atkins’s most cherished spies. When the war ended in 1945, she made it her personal mission to find out what happened to them and the other agents lost behind enemy lines, tracing rigorously their horrific final journeys. But as the woman who carried out this astonishing search appeared quintessentially English, Atkins was nothing of the sort. As we follow her through the devastation of postwar Germany, we learn Atkins herself covered her life in mystery so that even her closest family knew almost nothing of her past.

In A Life in Secrets Sarah Helm has stripped away Vera Atkins’s many veils. Drawing on recently released sixty-year-old government files and her unprecedented access to the private papers of the Atkins family, Helm vividly reconstructs a complex and extraordinary life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Vera Atkins (1908–2000) was the highest-ranking female official in the French section of a WWII British intelligence unit that aided the resistance. Atkins sent 400 agents into France, including 39 women she'd personally recruited and supervised. Many were caught by the Gestapo and subsequently disappeared and presumed dead. In 1945, after the war, Atkins, fiercely loyal to the memory of her missing agents, took it upon herself to spend a year interviewing concentration camp officials and survivors in order to piece together her agents' fates. Helm, a founding member of London's Independent, brilliantly reconstructs Atkins's harrowing detective work, shedding light in particular on the fate of missing agent Noor Inayat Khan, whose suitability for the job had been widely doubted. Helm's portrait of Atkins is acute, dwelling evocatively on her Romanian-Jewish origins and their social significance for Atkins within upper-crust British circles, and on Atkins's mysterious personal life. Drawing on interviews with relatives and friends of both Atkins and her agents, and on full access to Atkins's private papers, Helm has produced a memorable portrait of a woman who knowingly sent other women to their deaths and a searing history of female courage and suffering during WWII. (On sale Aug. 22)
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From Booklist

The Special Operations Executive (SOE), Winston Churchill's personal creation to subvert Nazidom, occupies a legendary but controversial place in World War II annals. This original investigative history by a British journalist allays none of the criticism of the SOE--it was a failure that cost hundreds of agents their lives--but vindicates the valor of SOE agents. Centering attention on a high-ranking SOE officer named Vera Atkins (1908-2000), Helm recounts a war-crimes inquiry Atkins conducted in the immediate aftermath of the war: Atkins sought information about the fates of about 100 agents she had sent into France. Atkins knew during the war that SOE's French operations had been compromised but not whether it was through treachery or lax security. Solid on the spycraft aspects of Atkins' quest, which identified a Nazi mole in SOE, Helm engrossingly narrates Atkins' hunt for the truth in furtive traces about her agents gleaned from Germans who had shunted them from capture to concentration camp. Carried off with consummate skill, Helm's report is also an inveigling portrait of Atkins' own secretive life. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese; 1st Ed. (U.S.) edition (August 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 038550845X
• ISBN-13: 978-0385508452
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.8 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #136,364 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ambiguities and the Fog of War, September 29, 2006

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Life In Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII (Hardcover)

After the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940, Britain knew that it would be fighting again within Europe, but until an invasion could be made by regular forces, a secret war had to be waged. For this purpose the Special Operations Executive was formed, with the object of clandestine insertion of agents to oppose the advancement of the Nazis. It was a perilous assignment, and agents were told to expect a fifty-fifty chance of dying; as it turned out, they fared better, a 75% survival rate. The section of the SOE devoted to activities within France was the assignment of Vera Atkins, where she was staff officer to the head of the section. Atkins was devoted to the highly secret operation, and only recently have the truths about the work of the SOE (including its many failings) emerged. Atkins took many of the secrets to her grave when she died in 2000. Sarah Helm, an investigative reporter, was able to interview her two years before her death. "She didn't tell me much," Helm says. "She never told anybody much." There was, however, quite a story, and it involved Atkins's personal secrets as well as military ones. In _A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII_ (Nan A. Talese / Doubleday), Helm has described her efforts to understand the secrets in a long and frustrating search for what made the brilliant and wary Atkins averse, beyond all callings of duty, to letting some secrets go.

Part of the reason for Atkins's continuing secrecy is that much of what SOE did in the war was disastrous. These were amateurs, and they were playing a dangerous game within the confusion of war. There is no doubt that many of the agents dropped into France did exceptional duty that paid off (as Eisenhower acknowledged) when invasion by the allies started. There is also no doubt that there was cloak-and-dagger bungling seized upon by clever plays by the Germans that resulted in the capture of many of the agents. SOE was also betrayed by its Air Movements Officer, Henri Dericourt, a pre-war friend of the man who was to become the future Gestapo chief in Paris. Atkins was supposed to be the brains of the SOE operation, and Helm is scathing about her boss's continually overoptimistic assessments of mission security. Why did she not take action to make the mission more secure and successful? Helm's remarkable investigations have led to real answers. For instance, Atkins had successfully insinuated herself into England, but she was, through the first part of the war, a citizen of Romania, which is to say an enemy alien (she was also Jewish); she would not have wanted to draw a focus on herself as she worked in SOE. It might seem that Atkins's life has little to redeem it, but she did prove herself immediately after the war, when she spent the months after the capitulation of Germany tirelessly touring the continent and turning up any traces she could of what had happened to the lost agents, with special attention to the women. The Germans had a special term for disposition of captives that they wanted never to be found, _Nacht und Nebel_. Atkins pierced this Night and Fog to find, among other ends, that her agents had been deported to Dachau, strangled, kicked to death, inserted alive into crematoria, or had met other gruesome deaths which she alone had the tenacity to document. She was an intimidating interrogator for the War Crimes investigation unit, and got grudging admiration even from the Abwehr intelligence officer Hugo Bleicher: "She boxed me in with astonishing ease."

Atkins did real service for Britain, and was eventually appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, after she had received the French Legion of Honor. Hers is an ambiguous life, though, and Helm has dug through private, political, and military secrets to present all the contradictions. She has also explained the radio game as played by both sides. There have been many books that explained, for instance, the signal-breaking successes by boffins at Bletchley Park, but the hall-of-mirrors distortions and confusions of the game in the chaos of war were astonishingly complex, and any tally would show that the Germans won the game. Helm has given us a deeply researched portrait of a flawed and sphinx-like heroine, an imperfect but vital effort against the Nazis, and the sad outrages of war.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The incredible tale of a true heroine, August 29, 2006

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: A Life In Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII (Hardcover)

Both the NY Times (William Grimes) and the Washington Post highly praise this book. It tells the story of two great searches . The first is of the heroine of the book, Vera Atkins who after the War searches in Europe to learn of the fates of the 117 of 400 agents she had helped prepare for their missions of gathering Intelligence for Great Britain against the Nazis. The second is the search of the author Sarah Helm to get the details of the story of her subject, a research which also involved extraordinary effort.
Vera Atkins was the legendary second - in - command of the British Intelligence's F section . Her aplomb, courage and enormous intelligence were a key element in the unit's operation. Her caring for the fates of each and every one of those she discharged on their missions( Including thirty- nine women) was another distinctive element of her character.
A number of her operatives in their memoirs wrote of her, but the major part of her story was unknown until Helm took the job upon herself. She traced Vera Atkins , family background(She was born in Romania as Vera Maria Rosenberg ,and her mother's family ,Etkins, were South African Jews residing in Britain) h and contacts, her network of friendships and connections, and in doing so weaves a fascinating portrait of a true heroine. Atkins lived to be ninety- two but never revealed her story in a full way. Helm who met her only once in 1999 was untiring in her search to get the details of her story , and the key to the mystery of her extraordinary courage and heroism.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant account of SOE and one of its spies, September 17, 2006

By 

Steven R. Farley (Harrisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Life In Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII (Hardcover)

I've read a lot about World War II and SOE, and this outshines most books. Ms. Helm puts human faces on the dead and betrayed agents, and doesn't mince words when it comes to skewering those who sent them to their deaths. This is brilliantly researched and written, provoking outrageous anger at the novice spy handlers who ignored numerous warnings that networks had been penetrated and who continued sending agents to horrible deaths in concentration camps. Further, it shows their callous nature in covering up their stupidity and never admitting mistakes. There are many lessons here for today's times. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It will stay with me for a long time.