Tommy Denton

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Probably the most compelling reason to read history is to examine and understand the misjudgments, moral lapses and offenses against reason and decency that so mar the human experience.

Ideally, such studies would cause subsequent generations to avoid committing the tragic array of those failures. One historical constant, however, remains evident: Widespread learning of history's lessons has not been an entirely successful venture.

Those writers with a talent for revealing historical ebbs and flows through the power of narrative offer a special blessing. Their art both instructs the mind and stirs the heart in the struggle to draw meaning from observing the often-turbulent currents of humankind's triumphs and transgressions.

One such writer is William Stevenson, whose latest work -- "Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, The Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II" -- presents a compelling examination of the courage and timidity, the brilliance and stupidity that competed in the confrontation against Nazism's rising specter and its sinister prospects for world domination.

Stevenson brings a special array of skills and experience that imbue his latest book with credibility and an energy arising not simply from a study of the historical record but also from having experienced the raw reality of espionage under duress.

The author of 16 books, including "A Man Called Intrepid," "Intrepid's Last Case," "90 Minutes at Entebbe" and "Kiss the Boys Goodbye," Stevenson is a respected historian who brings to the task of understanding his topic the rigors of training in aerial espionage as a young fighter pilot in World War II and subsequently as an expert in covert warfare.

Stevenson honored a vow of silence not to tell the story entrusted to him by his friend Vera Atkins, born Vera Maria Rosenberg in 1908 in Romania, until she had died, which occurred in 2000. In a sense, the delay was fortuitous, because the cult of secrecy that held such sway in Great Britain managed to conceal much of the wartime record until it was forced open only in recent years.

As biography, "Spymistress" presents a fascinating character study of a young Jewish woman born into a Europe riven by anti-Semitism. Her father sent her to the finest schools and exposed her to the intellectual rigors and cultural refinements that would prepare her, through grace and guile, to transcend the prevailing bigotry that marginalized so many European Jews.

Assuming a variation on her mother's maiden name, Atkins knew that her Jewishness was a hazard, especially amid the social forces that helped to influence Hitler's rise to power. She and her mother left her father -- a committed Zionist seeking to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine -- in Bucharest to move to the safer confines of England after World War I.

She moved easily into English society, concealing her Jewish identity but remaining passionately committed to "her people," against whom the ugly tides of recrimination turned almost as soon as World War I ended, in both Europe and in Russia.

Quietly, the brilliant Atkins began to cultivate a secret network of code-breakers and saboteurs operating in prewar Europe and later behind Nazi lines -- an endeavor that earned her the contempt and hostility of the "proper" British establishment that abhorred such brutally efficient, effective tactics.

Her sternest test, though, may have been enduring the indifference -- or official dismissal -- of the destruction of her people in the Nazi death camps until almost the end of the war.

Yet stiff opposition to her efforts -- at best merely bureaucratic jealousies, at worst resistance from either British appeasers or infiltrated Soviet spies -- was constant throughout the war. Stevenson's crisp, vigorous, detailed accounts -- scrupulously documented in comprehensive end notes -- flow with a rhetorical energy that not only richly informs the reader but also arouses a spirited engagement with characters and events.

Stevenson's splendid book -- pulsing in just the right places with measured, righteous rage -- would be especially instructive for readers whose lives have never personally been interrupted by the horrors and desperation of war. Vera Atkins' story is one of authentic heroism, in spite of so much official stupidity and betrayal, in the service of what is good and decent and right. Stevenson has honored well her memory, and her mission.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday edition of The Roanoke Times.