[4] Atkins briefly attended the Sorbonne in Paris to study modern languages and a finishing school at Lausanne, where she indulged her passion for skiing, before training at a secretarial college in London.

Atkins remained with her mother in Romania until emigrating to Great Britain in 1937, a move made in response to the threatening political situation in mainland Europe.

[11] According to William Stevenson's The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II (Arcade Publishing, 2006), Atkins' first mission was to get Poland's cryptologists Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski out of the country, and she was a member of the British military mission (MM-4), alongside Colin Gubbins, which arrived in Poland posing as civilians, by way of Greece and Romania, six days before the outbreak of the war.

[12] In the spring of 1940, before joining SOE, Atkins travelled to the Low Countries to provide money for a bribe to an Abwehr officer, Hans Fillie, for a passport for her cousin, Fritz, to escape from Romania.

Atkins always attended the daily section heads meeting chaired by Buckmaster, and would often stay late into the night at the signals room to await the decoded transmissions sent by agents in the field.

Controversy has lasted in certain circles[a] as to how and why clues that one of F section's main spy networks had been penetrated by the Germans were not picked up, and Buckmaster and Atkins failed to pull out agents at risk.

[16] Atkins, it is alleged,[b] was negligent in letting Buckmaster repeat his errors at the expense of agents' lives, including 27 arrested on landing whom the Germans later killed.

[17] Sarah Helm suggests that Atkins, who still had relatives in Nazi-occupied Europe, may have been defensive about her involvement with the Abwehr in the 1940 rescue of her cousin Fritz Rosenberg, something she kept secret from SOE.

[19] Whatever the truth, Buckmaster was Atkins' superior officer, and thus ultimately responsible for running SOE's French agents, and she remained a civilian and not even a British national until February 1944.

On 1 October 1943, F-Section received a message from "Jacques", an agent in Berne, passing on information from "Sonja" that "Madeleine" and two others had had "a serious accident and were in hospital" – code for captured by the German authorities.

This accurate information was not acted upon by Buckmaster, probably because "Sonja" was a locally recruited agent unknown to him, and F-Section continued to regard "Madeleine's" messages as genuine for several months after Noor's arrest.

[20] It was not until after the end of the war that Atkins learnt of the almost total success the Germans had had by 1943 in destroying SOE networks in the Low Countries by playing the Englandspiel ("England game"), by which radio operators were captured and forced to give up their codes and "bluffs", so that German intelligence (Abwehr in the Netherlands; Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in France) officers could impersonate the agents and play them back against HQ in London.

[21] Notice should also be taken of the well-organised and skillful counter-espionage work of the SD at 84 Avenue Foch in Paris under Hans Josef Kieffer, who built up a deep understanding of how F Section operated in both London and France.

In the end, what caused the complete collapse of the Prosper circuit of Francis Suttill and its extensive network of sub-circuits, were not errors in London, but the actions of Henri Déricourt ("Gilbert"), F Section's air-landing officer in France, who was at the heart of its operations, and who was literally giving SOE's secrets to the SD in Paris.

What is not completely clear is whether Déricourt was, as is most likely, simply a traitor, or, as he was to claim, was working for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) (unknown to SOE) as part of a complex deception plan in the run-up to D-Day.

Foot in his official history of F Section are that the errors made by Atkins, Buckmaster and other London officers were the products of the "fog of war", that there were no conspiracies behind these failings, and that few individuals were culpable.

Atkins was attached to the war crimes unit of the Judge Advocate-General's department of the British Army HQ at Bad Oeynhausen, which was under the command of Group Captain Tony Somerhaugh.

[citation needed] Atkins had also persuaded the War Office that the twelve women, technically regarded as civilians, who had been executed, were not treated as having died in prison, as had been originally intended, but were recorded as killed in action.

[citation needed] She remained to her death a strong defender of F Section's wartime record, and ensured that each of the 12 women who had died in the three Nazi concentration camps of Natzweiler-Struthof, Dachau and Ravensbrück are commemorated by memorial plaques close to where they were killed.

An attempt by AJEX Archivist (Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women of the UK) and author, Martin Sugarman, who interviewed Vera in Winchelsea for his chapters on Jews in SOE in his book 'Fighting Back', on 24 April 1998, to have a Star of David metal peg placed at her memorial at Zennor on a visit in 2012, was refused by the family via the vicar of the church when Sugarman visited the church and plaque.