Everyday, Atkins attended daily section heads meetings Buckmaster chaired. Later on, Overton Fuller had, however, come to believe Atkins was an agent for the Soviets. “I could not just abandon their memory,” she said, according to Douglas Martin, in Atkins's obituary in the New York Times. She usually stayed up late at night in the signals room to receive transmissions agents sent from the fields that had already been decoded. I think I must have been extraordinarily tough - I was extremely exhausted by it.". also with tragic failure. She was also nominated for an MBE (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), but did not receive it. Source for information on Atkins, Vera: Encyclopedia of World Biography dictionary. Another possibility is that she felt it was her duty to find out what happened to the agents, especially because she had known them all personally, who died for the F-Section. Independent (London, England), July 3, 2000. Some former SOE agents also thoughts her to be working for the Germans or being a Soviet spy, but Sarah Helm dismissed all these claims. I have the greatest admiration for these people (SOE agents) and they were people I liked, but I can't say they are more deserving of being remembered than - I feel that one mustn't turn them into anyone more heroic than, say, the young pilots of the RAF, going out and knowing perfectly well that of the group that was setting off from a particular aerodrome, some of them, perhaps as many as half, would not return. Like other COs, she nursed the agent through final briefings in a cozy apartment at Orchard Court, near Baker Street. Vera, who later took on the name of Atkins (her mother’s maiden name), had four brothers. She worked at the Special Forces Club. At one point, the Germans penetrated one of the F-Section’s primary spy networks, but nobody seemed to notice the clues. Atkins returned to England when France was invaded by the German Army in May 1940. For a brief period of time, Atkins studied modern languages in Paris at the Sorbonne along with a finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Some would go on to help her when she tried to move to Britain. Her work at the SOE included interviewing recruits, organizing their training and planning the reception in France. "Atkins, Vera SOE was such a broad-minded staff. She also made sure all of them were able to receive official recognition from the British Government, except for Sonya Olschanezky, as Atkins did not know of her until 1947. We never have this sort of bother with the French …. Instead of pulling out agents who were now at risk due to the situation, her and Buckmaster sent in more. But, she also refused to admit when she made a mistake and would do whatever possible to hide them. And so it happened that, to her surprise, a 33-year-old woman named Vera Atkins was recruited by a top-secret agency, the Special Operations Executive, where she ended up overseeing a … these twelve did: Yolande Beekman, Denise Bloch, Andrée Borrel, Madeleine Damerment, Noor Inayat Khan, Vera Leigh, Cecily Lefort, Sonya Olschanezky, Eliane Plewman, Lilian Rolfe, Diana Rowden, and Violette Szabo. i, Romania. She saw them all off in person, and as she recalled years later: "the burden of stress was probably on the person who was seeing them off. She, not long after, became the head of the section Colonel Maurice Buckmaster assistant and was therefore, a de facto intelligence officer. Men don't work alone, their lives tend to be always in company with other men. The present writer argued elsewhere, just before starting on the present subject, that 'there are plenty of women with marked talents for organization and operational command, for whom a distinguished future on the staff could be predicted if only the staff could be found broadminded enough to let them join it'. She was sent to Lausanne, Switzerland, and to Paris, to finishing schools, where she learned to speak faultless French, a skill that would later serve her well. Atkins also made sure to trace down nearly all of her missing agents when the war ended. The Netherlands were invaded by Germany on May 10, 1940 and she was stuck there, unable to return to Britain until later that year with help from a resistance network in Belgium. Hugo Bleicher of the Abwehr, for instance, considered her interrogation of him was the most skillful of any to which he was subjected. It also comes over as quite surprising what the Germans knew about us in WW2 and what we knew about them. The Secret Service is one of the most prestigious agencies in the world. Settling in a seacoast house in the town of Winchelsea in southeast England, she began to share her knowledge with historians late in her life, although even in 1998 the 90-year-old Atkins told her biographer Sarah Helm that “I have closed the book on many things in life.” (Helm's biography supplements what she learned from Atkins with interviews of her relatives and associates, and with extensive investigation of source documents.) She was recruited for the SOE, which she joined in the early stages of the war. She knew, and they knew, that they faced a significant likelihood of being killed, yet that knowledge did not affect her precise implementation of a spy program that, at least until it was infiltrated, gave the Germans considerable trouble. Peter Churchill, himself a former concentration camp inmate, wrote that, as a result of Vera Atkins's enquiries, the friends and relations of those who had died in concentration camps because of their associations with SOE could at least be assured that nothing was spared in trying to discover the full truth of what had taken place. She did the “housekeeping” for the agents, meaning Atkins made sure they were prepared for their missions by checking their clothes and papers and also acting as a liaison for their families by sending regular letters to them to make sure the agents were getting their part. As one of the world’s leading…, Jean-Baptiste Marchand In 1947, Atkins was demobilized. Beyond their common ability to speak French, they represented a vast cross section of English society, from taxi drivers to a playwright. She later took her English mother's maiden name, which was Atkins, when she moved to England in the 1930s, and she replaced May with the more Christian-sounding Maria. Encyclopedia of World Biography.

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