Sarah Helm - A Life in Secrets. Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII [2005][A]

Book Description
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

Reviews
"It is a testament to Helm's detective skills that she has marshalled evidence to refute the various suppositions about Atkins, presenting a truth more surprising and more compelling than the numerous fictions constructed about this dedicated, if flawed, intelligence officer." WATERSTONE'S BOOKS QUARTERLY

"What makes the book as fascinating as the best of thrillers is that at every stage we know as much as she does, tracking Vera down clue by clue, contact by contact ... It makes compulsive reading." Peter Lewis, DAILY MAIL

"She has now written a truly stunning book - quite the best by a non-veteran of secret warfare ... If any young reader wonders 'why the bunting and the occasional tear this VE Day, I recommend this book'. John Crossland, SUNDAY TIMES 'Carefully researched and engaging biography' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author
Sarah Helm has been a journalist for more than twenty years. She was a reporter and feature writer on the Sunday Times before becoming a founding member of the Independent in 1986. A LIFE IN SECRETS is her first book. She lives in London, England.

From The Washington Post
Vera Atkins, a legendary figure of British wartime intelligence, died in 2000 at the age of 92, but her secrets did not die with her, thanks to the brilliant investigative reporting of Sarah Helm, a noted British journalist and editor.
Her book, A Life in Secrets, combines the history of a pivotal era with the nail-biting drama of the heroic operatives who were dropped into Nazi-occupied territories to contact and help form a resistance army.
Atkins worked for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was formed in the dark days of 1940 after the British retreat at Dunkirk. Its mission was to wage a secret war until regular forces could be amassed to retake the continent. Her responsibilities were to recruit and train agents for SOE's French section. Some 400 men and women were dispatched, and of these about 100 ended up "missing presumed dead." Of special concern to Atkins were 12 female agents whom she could not account for after the war. Much of the book details her dogged pursuit of clues to their fates, leading to revelations of their incredible bravery when they were captured, sent to concentration camps and put to death.
The author faced a formidable task in researching and writing this book: Not only did she have to unravel covert SOE operations, but she found that Atkins had personal secrets of her own. Tall, fair and strikingly good-looking, Atkins was admired and feared but not particularly loved. Time and again, she was described as distant and cold. She never married, and she was very discreet about any romantic affairs. According to Helm, behind her exterior was much she wanted to conceal. Hers was a story worthy of a Hollywood movie -- and, indeed, it has been rumored that Atkins was the inspiration for Ian Fleming's Miss Moneypenny.
Atkins's first secret was that she had been born in Romania, making her technically an enemy alien, since Romania sided with Germany during the war. She managed to keep this from almost everyone -- except, of course, her employers, who had her vetted by MI5. She was, in fact, Vera Rosenberg, daughter of a Jewish businessman who had made and lost several fortunes. Her mother, Hilda, came from a family of English Jews named Etkins who prospered in South Africa and eventually changed their name to Atkins. (Some of her uncles and their families kept the Rosenberg name, and most managed to flee from the Nazis and survive the Holocaust.) Because of this exotic background, she faced accusations in one era of being a fascist and in another of being a communist -- neither of which Helm found to be true.
In pursuit of this story, Helm journeyed all over Europe tracking Atkins's postwar efforts to learn the fate of the missing female agents. In addition, this determined and tireless reporter went to remote parts of Romania and Ukraine to uncover and chronicle Atkins's early years. (The description of her pampered and fashionable life in Bucharest in the 1920s and '30s is especially fascinating.) In general, Atkins avoided the press, and Helm met her only once, shortly before her death. The eyewitnesses, the people with firsthand knowledge, were either dead or in their late eighties or nineties when she finally contacted them. Atkins did leave a great many papers, but when Helm came to examine them, she found some rather selective editing and destruction.
One can only admire the way Helm put together all the pieces of the puzzle, particularly the way she brought these brave women agents to life. But at times it can be confusing when Helm's first-person account of her pursuit of the facts is interspersed with Atkins's efforts to learn the fate of her charges. Given the large number of characters in the book, it would have been helpful to include chronological summaries and perhaps a genealogical chart of Atkins's family.
This slice of history is not so well-known in the United States. But in Britain, there was a considerable hue and cry when it was revealed that Atkins and her associates had sent young women into such dangerous terrain, where traitors sometimes compromised their missions.
"Until the very end of her life Vera found herself defending the decision to send women behind the lines," writes Helm. In a 1996 letter to the Daily Telegraph, for example, Atkins described how one agent sent to France "had evaded capture, made two escape attempts, given nothing away, and was kept in chains as an exceptionally dangerous prisoner."
Many of Atkins's close friends felt sympathy for her, Helm found. "Behind that controlled facade they sensed she was all the time suppressing her own emotion and her own guilt." And her niece, Zenna Atkins, who was very close to Vera, told the author, "I think when she discovered all that awful horror [of the fate of the agents], it was like a series of body blows. . . . She spent the rest of her life recovering from those blows." But Vera, along with her colleagues, was determined that SOE should be valued and remembered. "The sense of deep betrayal at the end of the war, when SOE was closed down, to be forgotten, cannot be overstated," Helm writes. " 'They all just wanted us scrubbed off the face of the earth,' one F Section staff member told me, referring to MI6, the Foreign Office, and other Whitehall antagonists."
It took a while, but in the end recognition finally came. Helm writes about visiting a "spectacular" memorial to the heroic agents erected in 1991 in the small town of Valencay in the Loire Valley; the survivors make a pilgrimage there every May. And in 1997, Atkins finally was made a CBE -- Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She also received the French Legion of Honor.
Perhaps the most welcome tribute came from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, who wrote in May 1945 that resistance action on D-Day "played a considerable part in our complete and final victory."
Reviewed by Selwa Roosevelt
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.