Codename TREASURE: The Life of D-Day Spy, Lily Sergueiew

By Peter Winnington

This is the first biography of an intrepid young French woman, Lily Sergueiew, who led an adventurous life and became famous as one of the five D-Day spies. In 1939, her bicycle ride from Paris to Saigon was interrupted by the outbreak of war. Disgusted by the Fall of France in 1940, she took the courageous decision to personally help the Allies drive the Nazis out of France: she would get the Abwehr to train her as a spy and have herself sent to England. Once there, she would betray the Nazis and place herself at the disposal of the Allies. It took three emotionally exhausting years to achieve this. She arrived in England just in time to become TREASURE, one of the five spies who misled the Nazis into believing that the Allies would land in the Pas de Calais. This disinformation operation saved countless lives. But Lily found the English cold and ungenerous towards her. They knew that she had a fatal medical condition. She had also risked her life – and her parents’ lives – every day she worked for the Nazis, yet the English would not let her bring the dog who was such a comfort to her. They told her that her work was vital to their cause, but for Lily their behavior meant that it was not worth a dog. So she hid from them that the Nazis had given her a control code to prove that her radio messages were genuine: it gave her a sense of power to know that she could destroy her work – and the whole D-Day deception – with a single keystroke. She did not intend to use it, but once she had revealed it, she was dismissed straight after D-Day. This meant that she could join the Free French Forces and be sent to France to care for Displaced Persons left in the wake of the retreating Nazis. Working with liberated prisoners from Buchenwald, she married the American Major in charge of the region who had fallen in love with her. He took her to America where he hoped that her condition could be cured. It could not, and she died (largely forgotten) with her husband at her side in 1950.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Oct 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781399045292

Peter Winnington

Although he was born in England, Peter Winnington spent his working life teaching English literature at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. As a hobby, he edited books and periodicals. This led him to write a biography of Mervyn Peake, which was published in 2000 to coincide with the BBC's screening of Gormenghast, an adaptation of the first two of Peake's novels about Titus Groan. Since then, Peter has been writing biographies, concentrating on the lives of women who have been undeservedly forgotten.

Book preview

To 1932

Leaving Russia

Origins

Lily Sergeev, the D-Day spy known to the British as T

REASURE

, and to the Nazis as T

RAMP

, was born in St Petersburg, the capital of Tsarist Russia, on 25 January 1912. Named Nathalia on her birth certificate, after her paternal great grandmother and her grandmother, she was always called Lily by her family and used that name on the books she wrote. Her parents were Sergei Sergeev (born 1887) and Maria née Miller (born 1890). (That surname looks English but was actually Prussian, from Latvia, originally spelled Müller and sometimes von Müller.) The family Gallicized their names when they settled in France in 1920, becoming Serge and Marie (familiarly Marisha) Serguéiew (a close approximation to Sergeev in Russian) and I shall call them by these names from now on. Lily remained Lily, of course, and her younger sister, who was always known as Mousse, retained her name too.

Both her parents came from relatively wealthy families, of the class that provided Imperial Russia with its administrators, bankers, doctors, diplomats, and army officers. Serge’s father for instance had ended his diplomatic career as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of the Russian Empire in Serbia (from 1906 to 1909). They belonged to the bourgeois that, after the Revolution, the Bolsheviks exterminated or dispatched to labour camps (later known collectively as the Gulag). Those who could, fled the Revolution forming diasporas in Europe, especially in Serbia and France, and other places throughout the world. During the two decades that followed the Revolution, it was largely the absence of these people, and their competence in running the country’s administration, industry and commerce, that quickly brought Soviet Russia down to levels of poverty and disease not seen in Europe since the early Middle Ages.

Lily’s parents had known each other since they were little children and Marisha was delighted when Serge proposed to her in November 1909, for she already loved him dearly. His parents and Marisha’s father approved of the match, but her mother (Leontina Tomaszevska, always known as Lonia) refused to accept it and remained against it for the rest of her life. Although her motives remain unclear, the story goes that Lonia and Serge’s mother, Tatia, were old friends who planned that their respective children should marry, but then fell out. Serge’s family went ahead and organized the wedding, even though Marisha was still too young to marry and her family was Lutheran, whereas the Sergeevs were Russian Orthodox. Following an appeal to the Tsarina, the young couple were married by imperial dispensation in the Orthodox church in St Petersburg on 17 February 1910. Lonia was not present; nor – for the sake of domestic harmony – was the bride’s father Louis Loginovich (familiarly known as Login), much to Marisha’s distress. Marisha’s sister, Eny (Evgenia, one year her junior), did attend, which did nothing to endear her to Lonia. Marisha also had a brother called Boris, three years younger than her; we hear of him only later.

Serge’s father, the diplomat Vassili Sergeev, died that same year. To ensure that his mother could continue to live in the style to which she was accustomed, Serge waived his inheritance in her favour. However, she gave him the family estate, Voskresenskoie, which was situated on good agricultural land near Kursk, almost a thousand kilometers (600 miles) to the south of St Petersburg. It was a large estate (but not exceptionally so by Russian standards) of about 25,000 acres (10,000 hectares), but it had been neglected and was running at a loss. An eminently practical man, Serge cleaned it all up by renovating the buildings, installing central heating in the main house and adding a nursery with a proper modern bathroom plus separate quarters for servants. He developed the orchards, planting cherry, apple, plum and pear, introduced Simmental cattle, sowed new varieties of grain, and so on, so that by the time of the Revolution it was making good money again. As was common practice among the landed gentry, Serge and Marisha spent their summers on the Voskresenskoie estate, and the winters – ‘the season’ – in St Petersburg, in flats loaned by relatives.

Voskresenskoie in about 1910.

Meanwhile, Serge wrote his doctoral dissertation on the economic policies of his maternal grandfather, Ivan Vyshnegradsky (1832–95), who had been a teacher in the technical schools of St Petersburg, specializing in mechanics. Somehow, Ivan became Alexander III’s Finance Minister and introduced sweeping reforms that achieved a balanced budget, strengthened the rouble and increased Russia’s gold reserves. He was the architect of a large loan to Russia from European countries, particularly France, which later ruined its private investors after the Bolsheviks refused to honour the debt. Marisha typed up Serge’s dissertation for him, there being no one with the requisite skill anywhere near Voskresenskoie. She had never typed before either, but the dissertation was accepted. After that, Serge received various appointments: secretary of Saint Rabotnik, the largest distributor of agricultural machines in Russia; director of two French firms that made agricultural machines in Russia; and member of the board of another firm called Lena (about which I have found no information, apart from the fact that Lena is the name of a Russian river alongside which much cotton was grown). He also – and this turned out to be the most fortunate of all – became a director of a company called Azerbaijan-Sheremetev that grew rice and cotton in Armenia. (The aristocratic Sheremetev family was one of the richest in St Petersburg, owning the vast palace now known as the Fountain House. Serge’s grandfather was a Sheremetev, but his sons did not inherit the name because their mother was a serf.) All these posts brought in more than enough for the Sergueiews to live on.

Marisha and Serge had two daughters: Lily, born in 1912 and Mousse, who arrived two years later. They had been hoping that their first child would be a son. Indeed, they were expecting it, and parental expectations, especially unconscious ones, are a powerful influence on children. As Marisha herself recognized, ‘it was perhaps for this reason that Lily was always a tomboy and never showed a particularly feminine character’ (Memoir), despite her blonde hair and blue eyes. So we should not be surprised to find her acting in ways that some people found unfeminine. On the other hand, Mousse was the archetypal little girl, with perfect features, round, rosy cheeks, blue eyes, and curly blonde hair; in some early photographs she looks like a large doll placed beside Lily. Predictably, she was her mother’s favourite. At Voskresenskoie, Lily loved all the animals; Mousse, on the other hand, confessed that she was afraid of them, ‘except for a dead butterfly’. Their mother used to take a long cross-country ride every morning; when she came back, Mousse never wanted to sit in front of her for a walk round the stable yard, whereas a ride on her horse was a treat for Lily (and she enjoyed horse-riding for the rest of her life).

As they grew up, Lily and Mousse became accustomed to the annual pilgrimage by train from St Petersburg to Kursk, where a smaller train took them to the little town of Marmisk (Marmyzhi), about 40km (25 miles) from Kursk. From there, a troika – a carriage drawn by three horses abreast – would carry them a further 32km (20 miles) to Voskresenskoie. It was a major expedition, lasting two or three days and nights, involving a retinue of maids, servants and nannies, plus a mountain of luggage. In preparation for Lily’s birth, Serge and Marisha had ordered a carry cot and a changing basket from London, a perambulator from Brussels, and baby clothes from Paris, and they surely bought more for Mousse. Like most children of their class at the time, they had a French nanny and spoke French almost as well as their native Russian. From the age of three, Lily started learning English from an English girl who came three afternoons a week.

Although Lily spent every summer of her first five years at Voskresenskoie, she never mentions it in the diaries and letters that I have read; it is likely that she retained only the vaguest of memories of this time. I owe the details of the estate to Marisha’s unpublished memoir, which she wrote for her granddaughters between July 1970 and August 1976, long after Lily and Mousse were dead. Before then, like most Russian exiles, neither she nor Serge had said hardly a word about their life in Russia, or their escape from it. Thanks to her, we know a good deal more about the family’s pre-Revolutionary life than Lily or Mousse ever did.

As the two little girls grew up, the contrast between them became more marked: Lily was quick, intelligent, and observant. Mousse was easy-going and compliant, whereas Lily was independent, mischievous and disobedient. Their mother tells of one occasion when, during their rest time, Lily called her little sister over, telling her to ‘come and make a puddle’ on the floor. Ever trusting and obliging, Mousse came and did as she was asked. But then she was too small to climb back onto her bed by herself and began to cry. Along came their nanny and discovered the scene, with Lily apparently fast asleep on her bed. This was but the first of her recorded pranks. Like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she played tricks for their entertainment value, with no intention of hurting anyone. Yet it was a game that doubtless gave Lily a sense of power over the adults around her, and she continued a prankster throughout her life.

During the First World War, Serge was not called up: in Russia, the only sons of widows were exempt from conscription. But he chose to do something useful and became the adjutant to the general in charge of food and medical supplies to troops in all the north-west of the country. Having two very small children – Mousse was only six months old when the war broke out – Marisha did not join the women rolling bandages or knitting socks and scarves. On the other hand, her sister Eny trained to be a nurse and, having qualified, volunteered to work just behind the front lines. (Their mother could very easily have arranged for her to be trained by the Red Cross and given genteel work organized by the Tsarina, but she did not; instead, she disapproved of Eny’s independent efforts and did not come to the station to see her off.)

Eny worked very hard until she caught typhus. Marisha and her father travelled to the hospital where she had been taken, brought her home, and nursed her until she was fully recovered. (She lived another forty years.) According to Marisha, Eny was awarded the Russian Cross of Saint George for ‘bravery under fire’, although she gave no details as to what she actually did to merit it. The Cross was an honour instituted in 1807 and reserved for soldiers. (Abolished after the Russian Revolution of 1917, it was replaced by the Order of Glory, and then re-established in 1992 after the Soviet era.) I have found records of just three women winning it prior to 1917. The only one in the nineteenth century went to a cavalry officer; the second was awarded posthumously to a women who had managed to pass as a soldier, and the third went to a nurse, Rimma Mikhailovna Ivanova (born 1895) who, after all the officers from her infantry regiment had been put out of action, led a successful attack on an enemy position on 9 September 1915. She died later that year. If Marisha’s account is to believed, Eny would bring the tally up to four. What a role model for Marisha to offer her daughters!

By 1916 the family had an apartment of their own in St Petersburg, which Serge modernized and equipped with his customary skill and good taste. But the following autumn, when they were about to head back to St Petersburg, the chambermaid they had left ‘house sitting’ for them let a team of thieves into the new flat. They took everything of value: the silver cutlery, with Marisha’s monogram on the handles; her furs; Serge’s pearl tie pins and his collections of old gold coins and stamps, and so on. They did leave some pearl buttons and Marisha’s sables, obviously thinking they were fake. Marisha and Serge were devastated: by the following year they came to see it as but a mild prelude to what happened in the Revolution.

Escape

The popular uprising in the February of 1917 marked the first stage of the Revolution. Marisha saw nothing of it as she was in bed with peritonitis. To escape the unrest – and the shortage of food that was already beginning to make itself felt – Marisha’s mother Lonia, her mother-in-law Tatia, and her sister Eny took Lily and Mousse (aged 5 and 3) to Voskresenskoie. Marisha joined them there as soon as she felt well enough to travel, and Serge went with her. On the estate, the agricultural workers – not called serfs since their emancipation in 1861 – who had been called up had been replaced by a team of Austrian prisoners of war; they caused no trouble at all for they knew they were far better off on a farm than in a PoW camp. So Voskresenskoie was running smoothly enough, with no shortage of food.

Once she had seen Marisha and the children safely installed, Lonia left Russia, never to return. Thereafter, she spent most of her time in France, as we shall see. Marisha’s brother Boris had already left, having stowed away on a British ship leaving St Petersburg. He joined the British Army, was moved to a Canadian regiment and sent to Canada . . . via Australia. On the ship, he met an Australian girl who was returning home, and in due course they married and settled in Australia. So Lily had an Australian uncle, called Bob (which went down better than Boris with his wife).

Had they known it, Marisha and Serge would have been wise to get out of Russia at this point: every day that passed made it harder for them to escape. At the end of the summer, they prepared to leave Voskresenskoie with heavy hearts, for they loved the estate. Although Marisha had a strong presentiment that she would never see it again, she left things like her summer clothes just as she had done every previous year. They said their usual goodbyes to all the staff, locked up, and left, with smiles for everyone. (Under the Bolsheviks’ agricultural reform, Voskresenskoie was turned into a kolkhoz, a collective farm.) Rather than take the children with them to St Petersburg, though, they left them with Serge’s mother (who was always referred to as ‘Aunt Tatia’ because it made her feel old to be called Granny) in a house she had just bought in Kursk. It was a wise move, for the second stage of the Revolution, the coup d’état by the Bolsheviks, took place on 7 November. Their St Petersburg flat was raided soon after by the new secret police, the Cheka. Serge was arrested, for he had been active in the Cadets, the Constitutional Democrats, a party founded in 1905 that advocated a radical change in Russia towards a constitutional monarchy like Great Britain’s. The Bolsheviks detested the Cadets and imprisoned many of them, and shot many others. Marisha immediately telephoned her father and he came to join her in her anxious wait. Late in the night, she could stand it no more and went to find out what had happened to Serge. The Bolsheviks seem to have been taken aback by her arrival, for he was released almost at once. Now they had been warned, he and Marisha left for Kursk the following day, taking a minimum of luggage; as it was, most of their trunks and suitcases had been locked up by the Cheka.

It was wonderful to be reunited with their daughters – but the Revolution soon caught up with them. They were discreetly advised that the Reds were coming to arrest Serge, and he made a desperate dash to the station, leaping over a barrier and climbing into a departing train. Thus he reached Kiev (called Kyiv in Ukrainian), and throughout 1918 he and Marisha lived separate lives, unable to contact each other. One day, while Marisha was at the dentist’s, Aunt Tatia’s house was taken over by the Bolsheviks and Marisha was arrested on her return home. Keeping her cool, she managed to get herself released without revealing where Serge had gone; she also quickly found where Aunt Tatia and the girls had taken refuge. This scare made her decide to join Serge in Kiev, cost what it might. She hid her remaining jewellery in the children’s dolls, concealed the few banknotes she had left in the soles of their sandals, and early in January 1919 she and the two girls boarded a train heading for Kiev, leaving Aunt Tatia behind. (She managed to leave shortly after and make her way to France, while her husband remained in St Petersburg.) It was the first time that Marisha had travelled without servants, not even a nanny for Lily and Mousse. Much to her surprise and relief, her little girls were as good as gold. She entertained them as best she could, telling them stories, and singing songs with them, in French as well as Russian. In the train, Marisha met a woman with a five-year-old daughter who was also making for Kiev, and they teamed up.

By this time, the Revolution had degenerated into a vicious civil war, with various White armies fighting the newly formed Red Army. At that moment, the Reds were advancing towards Kiev, and Marisha’s train stopped at what had been, only a few hours before, the front between the two armies, less than halfway to Kiev. The two women and the three children piled into sleighs with all their luggage, and headed over the deep snow towards the White army and Kiev. For three days and two nights, the Whites retreated before them almost as fast as they travelled. It was very cold, but they had good furs. In the end, they reached a village that the Whites had just vacated, with a station and a train that had steam up, ready to leave for Kiev! They were hauled up into one of the already overfilled trucks – there were no passenger carriages – by Austrian ex-prisoners of war who were heading home.

On reaching Kiev, the first thing Marisha did was to buy a hot meal for them all at the station. When they had eaten, she gathered their luggage together to go in search of Serge, and realized to her horror that during the meal their dirty-linen bag had been stolen – with the girls’ sandals and most of their money in them. To her great relief, Marisha found that Serge was still at the same address. However, they did not move on at once because she fell ill. They remained in Kiev for most of 1919, during which time the town fell to the Reds and was retaken by the Whites several times. Miraculously, they survived the shelling, although more than once it was a near thing.

As before, Serge went on ahead before the Reds took the town, for he could not risk being captured by them; he reached Rostov-on-Don, which was a monarchist stronghold. Marisha managed to wangle places for herself and the girls on General Kutepov’s train as far as Kharkiv, not quite halfway to Rostov. (Having been a colonel in the Tsarist Army during the First World War, Kutepov took command of the 1st Army Corps of the White Army after the Revolution. When it was defeated, he fled to Paris, where he became the head of the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS) of the Russian officers in exile. In this capacity, he organized sabotage and terrorist activities within the USSR, for which he was abducted in 1930 by Stalin’s agents. He is said to have died of a heart attack when he was chloroformed during his abduction.) All these trains were impossibly full: half of Russia was on the move. Often enough, after boarding a train through a window, the best Marisha could do was to sit on a couple of suitcases and balance one daughter on each knee.

Reaching Kharkhiv, she put up in an ice-cold hotel and resolved to sell one of her rings. The jeweller asked for her name, and when she gave it a voice behind her said, ‘You must be Serge’s wife! He’s looking for you.’ He was living in a flat nearby, having started back to look for his wife and daughters. Pocketing her ring, she joined him. Together they found places on a train to Rostov. Instead of lasting twelve hours, the journey took almost two weeks, for the train would be stopped every few kilometres by armed men demanding vodka rather than banknotes, which declined in value almost as fast as they changed hands. (The Bolsheviks were quite unable to halt inflation in Soviet Russia; it peaked in February 1924 at 88 per cent per month.)

Rostov was in a state of anarchic panic. Groups of people were liable to stop an unfamiliar face in the street, accuse them of being a spy, and hang them from the nearest lamppost without further ado. The Sergueiews’ train was in no hurry to leave, so they stayed in a railwayman’s cottage while they waited. One night they were disturbed by a commotion next door. Bourgeois refugees like Serge and Marisha were tempting targets for the lawless: they had valuables in their luggage and would be quite untraceable if they ‘disappeared’ in the night. Lily woke up to find her father sitting in a chair facing the door with a pistol in his hand. Always a practical-minded girl, she quietly asked him,

‘When you see the robber, what will you aim for?’

‘The belly,’ he answered with equal calm, going on to explain that this was because the barrel would jerk up the moment he fired. Such was Lily’s education at the age of seven.

Finally, Marisha and Serge managed to make another, painfully slow train journey to Novorossiysk, on the coast of the Black Sea. There, they eventually found