UK sheds light on Nazi ballerina spy's WWII exploits
A former ballerina, Marina Lee was said to have naturally light blonde hair, spoke several languages, and a page in her security service dossier made note of intelligence passed on by the French: Very nice legs.
The intelligence on Lee — or Maria Ley, plus other aliases she was believed to possess —are part of a cache of files from Britain’s MI5, Britain’s domestic spy agency, released on Thursday by the National Archives.
Lee may have been behind the defeat of an Anglo-French force fighting to retake Norway from the Germans during World War II.
The woman stole battle plans after infiltrating the headquarters of the allied taskforce sent to liberate Norway.
This batch of declassified files also include a dossier on Wolf Mankowitz, who wrote the screenplay for the first film incarnation of the James Bond classic Casino Royale.
Spy novel
The dossier on Lee reads like the outline of a spy novel. She was believed to have been born in St Petersburg, Russia, and then was trained as a ballerina. She fled Russia when her parents were killed by the Bolsheviks, eventually marrying a Norwegian. There’s no photograph of her, but her physical beauty is described in glowing terms.
One report details the debriefing by a captured German agent called Gerth Van Wijk. He told them a story another agent called “von Finckenstein” had passed on about Lee.
He said a German commander, Gen Eduard Dietl, was facing defeat and retreat near the Norwegian port of Norvik in 1940. But according to the dossier, Lee was able to infiltrate the headquarters of British Gen Sir Claude Auchinleck. The dossier says: “Finckenstein described her as blond, tall, with a beautiful figure, refined and languid in manner.”
But the file contains no further reports on Lee, and her file was closed in 1960.