A Life in Secrets - Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII

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 build up, organize, and arm the resistance in the Nazi-occupied countries. Throughout the war, Atkins recruited, trained, and mentored the agents for the SOE’s French Section, which sent more than four hundred young men and women into occupied France—at least one hundred of whom never returned and were reported “Missing Presumed Dead” after the war. Twelve of these were women and among Atkins’s most cherished spies. When the war ended in 1945, she made it her personal mission to find out what happened to them and the other agents lost behind enemy lines, tracing rigorously their horrific final journeys. But as the woman who carried out this astonishing search appeared quintessentially English, Atkins was nothing of the sort. As we follow her through the devastation of postwar 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 sixty-year-old government files and her unprecedented access to the private papers of the Atkins family, Helm vividly reconstructs a complex and extraordinary life. 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 From an award-winning journalist comes this real-life cloak-and-dagger tale of Vera Atkins, one of Britain's premiere secret agents during World War II. As the head of the French Section of the British Special Operations Executive, Vera Atkins recruited, trained, and mentored special operatives whose job was to organize and arm the resistance in Nazi-occupied France. After the war, Atkins courageously committed herself to a dangerous search for twelve of her most cherished women spies who had gone missing in action. Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Sarah Helm chronicles Atkins's extraordinary life and her singular journey through the chaos of post-war Europe. Brimming with intrigue, heroics, honor, and the horrors of war, A Life in Secrets is the story of a grand, elusive woman and a tour de force of investigative journalism. From the Trade Paperback edition