A Life In Secrets
A Life In Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII Sarah Helm,
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
ISBN: 038550845X
DDC: 940.548641092
Edition: Hardcover; 2006-08-22
Summary:
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.
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