Free Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII by Sarah Helm

letterboxes and put it on the Lysanders.
    The report Suttill sent on the last flight of the June moon was his bleakest yet. Dated June 19, it reached Baker Street five days later and said that Madeleine (Nora) had narrowly escaped arrest a few days previously. Suttill was blaming London for sending her to France with details of a “blown letterbox.” The letterbox was unsafe because the person who provided it had been in touch with another F Section circuit, known to have already been infiltrated by the Gestapo, as Suttill himself had warned London four months previously. “Had Madeleine gone there yesterday afternoon, she would have coincided with one of the Gestapo's periodical visits to the flat!” he wrote. In a fury with whoever was responsible, he accused London of breaking a cardinal rule by allowing one circuit to be contaminated by contact with another. He then demanded that HQ take disciplinary action immediately against everyone involved.
In this case it at once becomes superabundantly clear that similar circumstances can arise at any time and that therefore the whole system of giving to any agent a letterbox of another circuit is an obvious invitation to disaster for that circuit.
I hope I have made myself clear. I state, in parenthesis, that it is now 0100 hours 19 June and I have slept seven hours since 0500 hours 15 June
    Suttill went on to warn London that all his letterboxes and passwords now in force would be cancelled from midday June 19 until he receiveda message from London saying “The village postman has recovered,” which would mean his rule was taken on board.
    “If you are not prepared to accept my suggestion I will of, course, on your instruction, immediately reinstate the letterboxes unconditionally. In such case please file this report carefully for production on the inevitable eventual ‘post mortem' of the ‘feu' [‘late,' i.e., dead] Prosper organisation.”
    With this report Suttill had also sent a letter for his wife, Margaret, a GP near Plymouth, thanking London for allowing him to write home. Personal mail carried by Lysander was a privilege not all agents received. One of Vera's jobs was to pass on the mail, checking first for security breaches. “Dear Child” was how Francis Suttill always began letters to his wife. “It is nice to have the boys with me,” he wrote, referring to the fact that after his last home leave he had brought a photograph of his two baby boys with him back to France, which was against the rules.
    HQ had no chance to take action on Suttill's threat. The following day, June 25, a “flash” message came out of the teleprinter in the signals room. It was from an F Section local recruit in Paris. Extra carbon paper was placed in the teleprinters by FANY clerks, and the dispatch riders were put on standby.
    The message said that Suttill, along with his main radio man, Gilbert Norman (Archambaud), and his courier, Andrée Borrel (Denise), had “disappeared, believed arrested.”
    “To be confirmed” was stamped on the signal “flimsy,” which was duplicated and transported around the building in Baker Street, with copies going to F, F Ops, F Plans, F Recs, FV, and FN, and over the road to CD and his senior staff, who, already dealing with emergencies in Yugoslavia and the Middle East, had little time to intervene in F Section's crisis. An even greater catastrophe had hit the Free French. Jean Moulin, the leader of the Gaullist resistance, had been captured in France at almost exactly the same time.
    Although Vera knew nothing of signals telegraphy, her presence in the signals room was never irksome to the signals staff. On the contrary, shewas valued because she had a particular flair for reading mutilated messages: those that were hard to understand because letters were garbled or words were missing as a result of enemy jamming or poor transmission.
    Each agent had a unique fist, rather like a fingerprint in Morse. Tapping on the key of their