A Life in Secrets

Alternate Titles

• Vera Atkins and the missing agents of WWII

Description

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.

Description

Publisher description for A life in secrets : Vera Atkins and the missing agents of WWII / Sarah Helm. 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 the resistance efforts in the Nazi-occupied countries. Throughout the war, Atkins recruited and trained the agents for the SOE's French Section. By war's end, however, twelve of Atkins's most cherished female spies had not returned. Making it her personal mission to find out what happened to them and the other agents lost behind enemy lines, she rigorously traced their horrific final journeys. But while the woman who carried out this astonishing search appeared quintessentially English, she was nothing of the sort. As we follow Vera Atkins through the devastation of post-war 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 government files and unprecedented access to family papers, Helm vividly reconstructs a complex and extraordinary life.

Subjects

Genres

• Biography.

Other Editions

• A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWIIHardbackNan A. Talese2006-01-01
• A life in secretsLittle, Brown2005-01-01
• Life in SecretsLittle, Brown Book Group Limited2006-01-01
• A Life in SecretsPaperbackAnchor2007-12-04
• Life in SecretsLittle, Brown Book Group Limited2009-01-01