Vera Atkins was a Romanian-born British intelligence officer during the Second World War. Throughout the war, Atkins had recruited and trained hundreds of secret agents to fight the Nazis for Britain’s Special Operations Executive. Atkins was known for being tough and showed little emotion. She was also very caring about her recruits.
Atkins took up various responsibilities as a spy like recruiting, training, and planning secret operations in German-occupied France. She was also able to decipher coded German messages which nobody else could. Her acts were so daring that they inspired writer Ian Fleming who also worked in military intelligence during the war to base the characters like ‘M’ and Miss Moneypenny on Atkins in his novels about the fictional secret agent, James Bond. Atkins was known about the tenderness and respect which she showed to her agents. When 118 of her agents went missing during the war, Atkins worked very hard and located almost all of them and what had become of them.
How Vera Atkins Became A Spymaster
Vera Atkins was born in Romania in 1908 to a German-Jewish father and a British mother. She was raised on a large estate in Bucharest, the capital of Romania. Atkins attended school in Paris where she studied modern languages. She subsequently trained at a secretarial college in London. She never married and had no natural children of her own. In Bucharest, Atkins came in touch with many foreign diplomats including an anti-Nazi German ambassador to Romania, who launched her career in spying. The diplomats whom she met during this period also supported her when she applied for British citizenship.
Atkins stayed on in Romania and worked as a translator at an oil company until 1937 when she migrated to Britain as the political environment in Romania in the late 1930s had become virulently fascist and antisemitic. In 1940, when Germany invaded and occupied France, Atkins joined the fight against Nazism when she joined the French branch of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret resistance group that was a part of British intelligence. It had been formed by the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, and was also known as ‘Churchill’s Secret Army’.
It was involved in disruptive operations against the Germans behind enemy lines in occupied Europe using underground tactics and top-secret agents. Though Atkins had been employed as a secretary initially, she rose through the ranks and became the head intelligence officer for the French division, and was second-in-command to her boss, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster.
Work with the SOE
Atkins was given the task of recruiting and sending undercover agents, couriers, and wireless operators into occupied France. She interviewed prospective agents in empty and small hotel rooms, warned them of the dangers involved in the job, and informed them that the survival rates in the job were only 50% and that extreme torture followed by execution was the most probable result of their endeavors. She trained new agents for operations which included all aspects including spying, handling of explosives, and living in France without drawing suspicions.
The recruits for the SOE were from all classes of society including taxi drivers and writers. However, they all had in common fearlessness and fluency in French. Atkins took her role seriously and worked 18 hours each day in sharpening the skills of the recruits, giving them proper clothing and supplies, and confirming proper documentation for them. At the end of the training, Atkins invited the recruits to have ‘tea’ with her. There she gave them their mission and their identity papers. Each agent was taken by Atkins herself to the secret airfield where she watched them leave on their mission to occupied France, on many occasions, for the last time.
Atkins sent off more than 400 agents in this way. Of them, 25% never returned. She was proud of them and once commented that it was ordinary people who sometimes showed their extraordinary strengths and that her agents had no doubts about the importance of defeating Nazism. They had undertaken the risks all the while feeling that it was their duty to do the job which they considered a voluntary sacrifice on their part.
The End of the SOE and inspiration for James Bond’s Moneypenny
Atkins worked with the SOE until the end of the war. Though Churchill had supported the organization strongly, when he lost the post of the PM in elections in 1945, it was dissolved. Vera Atkins was haunted by the loss of 118 agents at the time of the dissolution of the SOE for many years. She was filled with guilt and ensured the families of the agents that the agents would receive official recognition from the British government and she managed to find out what had happened to all of them except one.
For this purpose, she followed many leads and eyewitness reports to help get information about her recruits who had been killed in action in the field. Atkins investigated concentration camps, interviewed survivors and war criminals. She also was part of war crimes tribunals. During her search, she came to know that at least four of her captured agents had been burned to death but she never spoke about the horrors she had come to know about.
In the early 1950s, author and former member of the British military intelligence, Ian Fleming began publishing his James Bond series, which featured a character named ‘M’ and his secretary, Miss Moneypenny. It was believed that the characters had been strongly inspired by Atkins and her boss, Maurice Buckmaster.
Fleming had worked as both a journalist and a British naval intelligence officer during the war. He came into contact with many people involved in military espionage who eventually became characters in his works of fiction, including Vera Atkins, whom he knew very well and admired for her strong character and her love for her agents. He gave these two attributes to Miss Moneypenny. Vera Atkins died on June 24, 2000, in Hastings in the UK, having led innumerable fearless agents in an epic battle against the evils of Nazism and inspiring many fans worldwide in the process.