Product Description

From an award-winning journalist comes this real-life cloak-and-dagger tale of Vera Atkins, one of Britain’s premiere secret agents during World War II.

As the head of the French Section of the British Special Operations Executive, Vera Atkins recruited, trained, and mentored special operatives whose job was to organize and arm the resistance in Nazi-occupied France. After the war, Atkins courageously committed herself to a dangerous search for twelve of her most cherished women spies who had gone missing in action. Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Sarah Helm chronicles Atkins’s extraordinary life and her singular journey through the chaos of post-war Europe. Brimming with intrigue, heroics, honor, and the horrors of war, A Life in Secrets is the story of a grand, elusive woman and a tour de force of investigative journalism.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #225899 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-04
• Released on: 2007-12-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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.

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

Customer Reviews

Ambiguities and the Fog of War
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.

A brilliant account of SOE and one of its spies
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.

The incredible tale of a true heroine
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.