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As Staff Officer to the head of F Section, Vera Atkins was the keeper of SOEhrs"s secrets, and nothing shook the vow of secrecy that she carried with her to her grave. When Sarah Helm, a former investigative reporter with The Sunday Times, tracked down the formidable nonagenarian in 1998, two years before her death, Atkins coolly deflected all attempts to penetrate the inner secrets of SOE. Asked about hld"her girlsrrd", the female agents she dispatched into the night skies to help uld"set Europe ablazeord", Atkins seemed briefly transported back in time, remembering a ild"perfect June dayerd" when she drove one of her operatives, the gentle, harp-playing Sufi mystic Noor Inayat Khan, to the aerodrome. But then, explains Helm, her expression became ld"quite blank, almost cold erd", and she abruptly terminated the interview.
A Life in Secrets Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII By Sarah Helm Illustrated. 493 pages. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $27.50. In 1941, with its back against the wall, Britain was ready to try just about anything to avoid defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany. And so it happened that, to her surprise, a 33-year-old woman named Vera Atkins was ...
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