‘I had scarcely finished when she said with the same simplicity of manner which had characterised her from the outset of our talk, that she would like to undertake it,’ recalled Jepson.14 He said that he would normally be uneasy and reluctant to recruit someone who accepted the situation immediately, because it meant that it was being accepted without proper thought, or for a motive other than the pure sense of patriotic duty. In Noor’s case, however, he had no such misgivings, since he felt instinctively that she had thought about it deeply and would not change her mind.
As a writer himself, Jepson felt a natural affinity with Noor, as she had told him that she was a children’s writer and broadcaster. He even told her that she might be of more value to society if she continued as a writer who would be able to communicate with children after the war was over and heal the young minds who had lived through the destruction. But Noor shook her head and refused the offer to get away. ‘She was sure and confident. She would like to train and become an agent for us, if I thought she could make it,’ said Jepson. ‘I had not the slightest doubt that she could, and said so, and with rather more of the bleak distress which I never failed to feel at this point of these interviews, I agreed to take her on.’
Jepson saw Noor several times during her training and often had conversations with her about what she was going to do and the nature of the job, but he would never forget his first meeting with her and the impact it made on him:
I see her very clearly as she was that first afternoon, sitting in front of me in that dingy little room, in a hard kitchen chair on the other side of a bare wooden table. Indeed of them all, and they were many, who did not return, I find myself constantly remembering her with a curious and very personal vividness which outshines the rest … the small, still features, the dark quiet eyes, the soft voice, and the fine spirit glowing in her.
Noor was now told that she would be discharged from the WAAF and enrolled in the First Aid and Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), also known as the Women’s Transport Service. This department was the usual cover for women agents as it provided them with an excuse to train in the use of firearms (which, as WAAF, they were not allowed to do). It also gave them a uniform (which was useful during training) and gave them a reason to be away from home for long periods. It also served as a plausible cover story for family and friends and was used effectively by Noor. FANYs were employed in many positions, from drivers and telephone operators to wireless operators, canteen workers and prison guards. Since many female agents were both FANY and WAAF there was always a slight confusion as to where they actually belonged. Noor’s George Cross citation refers to her as a WAAF officer while a memorial to thirteen women SOE agents in Knightsbridge refers to her as FANY. Again the recommendation for the citation of her George Medal (which was later upgraded to the George Cross) was made out in the name of ‘Ensign N. Inayat Khan, a volunteer FANY’.
When she joined the SOE on 8 February, Noor was in the WAAF. On 12 February she was enrolled in FANY. Noor was later given an honorary commission by the WAAF. This is why her WAAF records show her as being discharged from the WAAF on 15 June 1943 and being given an honorary commission on 16 June as Assistant Section Officer in the WAAF.15
Noor was made an officer because the SOE felt that the rank would provide her some degree of security, as a German officer might hesitate to shoot her if she was an officer. Promotion to officer’s rank also meant an increase in allowance and Noor discovered that her mother would be eligible for a further allowance as a ‘displaced person’. She was now told to return to Abingdon and await her orders.
The meeting with Jepson had transported Noor into a different world, but there was a calmness about her as she absorbed the implications. She had been determined to help in any way to fight Hitler’s forces of occupation. She had also wanted to return to France, a country that she loved and felt most at home in. Despite the dangers of the job, Noor felt she was perfectly suited for it because of her language skills, understanding of French culture and her familiarity with Paris. She had no doubt in her mind that she wanted to take the challenge. Once she had made up her mind, the stubborn streak in her kept her going through the days ahead.
There was only one thing that troubled her. Noor was apprehensive about how her mother, still extremely frail and dependent on her, would take the news of her going away on service work. On 11 November Noor wrote to Jepson from Abingdon, having given some thought to the interview. Her formal letter of acceptance showed the courage and forthrightness that Jepson had noticed in her. She told Jepson that winning the war was more important than family ties.16
Signals
RAF
Abingdon
Berks
11/10
Capt Jepson
Dear Sir,
After the interview I had at your office (Tues 10th) I have spoken with my mother and my worries in this connection are more or less wiped out. Firstly, I realise that in time my mother will get used to the idea of my going overseas. Secondly, I may be able to provide her with more efficient financial help which would relieve me tremendously, as my war time writing income is quite inadequate.
Besides, I realise how petty our family ties are when something in the way of winning this war is at stake. I shall therefore accept gratefully the privilege of carrying out the work you suggested. I feel I may be of some use as long as the work is purely operational.
Thanking you sir, for asking me
Yours faithfully
N. Inayat Khan
P.S: If there was a question of choice, I should prefer to remain RAF if possible. I have grown more or less attached to the service.
Jepson replied on 13 November that he appreciated her anxiety about the ‘kind of work about which we spoke’ and promised to do all he could to arrange everything.
Noor’s personal files have the following note dated 18 November 1942. ‘To be engaged as an agent after training – date not yet arranged.’
Noor wrote to Vilayat that she had been accepted as an Air Force officer and would be working in the combined Navy, Army and Air Force Intelligence Service. She told Vilayat delightedly about her officer’s allowance and said that they would probably be able to manage a flat in London sometime in the future. Back at Abingdon, she waited eagerly for her orders.
By the time Noor was recruited to the SOE, it had been in existence for two years. In May 1941 the first SOE agent, George Bégué, had parachuted into France and gone into a large house owned by a man sympathetic to the Resistance. The man was a friend of F-section officer, Maurice Buckmaster.
In November 1941 Maurice Buckmaster took over as head of F-section. Buckmaster had studied at Eton and worked as a reporter for Le Matin and Paris Soir in France. He had dabbled in banking and then joined the Ford Motor Company as manager of the Paris branch. He spoke fluent French and knew the towns and countryside of France well. When the war broke out he joined the British Expeditionary Force in France and returned to Britain, where he was recruited to the SOE. He was committed to his agents, often trusting his own instincts about them rather than their training reports. The ultimate decision to send someone into the field lay with him.
Buckmaster’s assistant was Vera Atkins, a formidable woman of thirty-three who had been to school in France and graduated from the Sorbonne. She, too, spoke fluent French and was well acquainted with French manners and customs. It was she who accompanied each agent to the airfield before they left and kept in touch with their families afterwards. After the war, Atkins set out to investigate the fate of some of the agents who had not returned and painstakingly uncovered their stories.
From 1943 the SOE was led by Brigadier Colin Gubbins, a professional soldier, who became its Executive Director. Gubbins had joined the SOE in November 1940 as Director of Operations and Training and had made an immediate impact. He was a proud Scotsman whose mother’s family had come from the Highlands. He was an energetic man who would work till midnight and make merry till the early hours of the mornin
g. He was once seen at five in the morning doing handstands surrounded by cheering colleagues.17 Gubbins brought a new drive to the SOE. He was a great believer in guerrilla movements and wanted to ensure that agents were well trained in arms and explosives and had a complete idea of the ethnology, politics and religion of the place they would be working in. He secured remote country houses in the Highlands of Scotland to train his agents in arms.
Gubbins’ hard work in the formative years of the SOE started paying results by the time he took over as chief of the organisation. An internal report of 24 March 1941 said that the SOE had despatched explosive material and devices into most countries in Europe in large quantities, provided money to subsidise opposition parties and wireless sets and established courier services to facilitate communication.18
SOE agents in France had brought back details of factories where the British would find sympathisers and lists of French Resistance supporters who would help against the Germans. They had drawn up names of petrol stations and oil dumps all along the French coast from Marseilles and up to Bordeaux, Le Havre and Dunkirk. They had done their homework on living in an occupied country, securing ration books, permits, controls and details of train services: everything to help the agent in the field. They had also got the crucial feedback that many Frenchmen were willing to help the SOE in sabotaging the Germans in the occupied areas. They learnt that after the initial shock of occupation, resistance to the enemy was growing. Much of SOE’s work was dependent on chains of communication with locals who were crucial in providing safe houses for agents, letter boxes for couriers and the numerous farmers and villagers who agreed to have arms and armaments dropped in their fields and hide them in their barns till they were collected by the agents. Among the biggest supporters of the SOE were French railway workers, postal workers and factory workers who took great risks for the cause.
The SOE had a large number of establishments and workshops operating round the clock to provide equipment for its agents. The most innovative gadgets were used: dead rats fitted with explosives, secret wireless transmitters concealed in bundles of logs and sticks or petrol cans, exploding animal droppings (horse droppings were collected from Hyde Park), TNT painted to look like coal lumps, exploding nuts and bolts, exploding fountain pens and milk bottles and improved plastic explosives. There were even some exploding Buddhas which SOE agents, disguised as hawkers, could sell to Japanese troops. All these were manufactured in laboratories at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Thatched Barn Roadhouse at Barnet. The tiniest of spy devices too were produced: microfilm dots on spectacles, button compasses, miniature escape saws, silk-scarf maps, forged papers, clandestine radios, invisible ink and much more.
To say it was the stuff of spy fiction was not far from the truth. Ian Fleming’s creation of Q, the gadget man for the James Bond novels, was inspired by the ‘toy shop’ at the Natural History Museum and the inventors who produced these devices. In April 2004, a plaque was unveiled at the site at the Natural History Museum where the SOE had its secret ‘toy shop’.
By October 1941, French section had 33 men in France. By the time Noor joined the ranks in 1942 this had reached 50. By June 1943 there were 120 recruits and more ambitious operations were planned. In all 480 active agents were employed by the French section. Of the 39 women sent to France by F-section, 13 never returned. It was in 1943 that the French section of the SOE really took off operationally, yielding results.
Noor was yet to learn about the establishment she had unhesitatingly agreed to join. She was impatient to get started, but had been asked to go back to Abingdon and await orders. The few months spent waiting were torture for her. By now her mother had secured a job at the Red Cross and was living at 4 Taviton Street, London, a few houses along from her friend Jean Overton Fuller. Noor came frequently to London to visit her mother and sometimes went to the British Museum or the Library. Sometimes she would stay with Jean. Her friend had a spare room in her flat in Gordon Square and Noor loved spending the night in the cosy room. Jean had a collection of oriental and Middle Eastern artefacts that Noor loved, and she also liked to browse through her friend’s book collection. The women would stay up till late at night discussing art and philosophy.
‘She sought solace in my house,’ recalled Jean. ‘My room was a refuge for her from the war. Here she could talk about books, spirituality, art, culture and matters of the soul.’19 Noor often talked about life after the war. She told Jean about her plans for the future: to learn Sanskrit, to continue writing, to play the harp, get married and have children.
Though they were both only in their twenties, Noor and Jean were more serious and philosophically inclined than most women of their age. ‘We were certainly not carefree,’ said Jean.20 Their common interest in oriental philosophy and spirituality also drew them close. Noor loved a Tibetan prayer wheel that Jean had in her flat and said holding it gave her a sense of peace. She had a premonition that she would not live long as she had a short lifeline and often spoke to Jean about it. At the same time, she talked about her life after the war. Jean got the feeling that she always wanted to go back to France and had felt that way ever since they had left the country in 1940.21
Noor thought of herself as an international person who did not belong to any one place. She was born in Moscow to American and Indian parents and brought up in a Sufi tradition in London and Paris. She had visited India, which she loved. But she felt her natural home was France. After the war she wanted to write and play music, both of which she missed greatly. The struggle for Indian independence was also on her mind and the imprisonment of freedom fighters like Gandhi and Nehru affected her.
Noor hoped that her international background could be used by the Allies after the war. She visualised the Allied forces of Britain, USA, France and the Soviet Union converging in Berlin at the end of the war and felt she could be useful as a liaison agent between the western world and the Soviet Union, because she had been born there and had an understanding of oriental culture.
The conflict between Noor’s own Sufi faith of non-violence and the path she had chosen in the war would sometimes arise, but she had thought about it deeply. She would say it was possible for a spiritual person to take up the sword if they were not motivated by hate. Though a Muslim, she took solace in the Hindu spiritual text, the Bhagavad Gita (as her father had done before her) and its teaching that action was superior to inaction. She was influenced by the lines from the Bhagavad Gita where Lord Krishna tells the warrior prince Arjuna – who is hesitant to go to war against his own cousins – that he must do his duty without thinking about the results. She felt it was her duty to resist Hitler’s occupying forces and all other considerations of family and faith were secondary.
Noor herself had chosen the violent option in the war. Not satisfied with working with trainee pilots in Abingdon, she had wanted to be in active service on the front line, knowing it could entail the use of weapons and firearms. Yet she never hated the German soldiers. It was the Gestapo and the secret police at whom she aimed her wrath.22
Meanwhile, Noor carried on with her work. Over the next few months she formed a friendship with a young WAAF meteorologist, Joan Marais. Joan was born in India and brought up in Bombay where her father was a civil engineer and lectured at the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute. Joan’s family left India when she was eleven. She retained a deep attachment to the land of her birth. Noor and Joan were drawn together by their common background and bonded immediately. They shared quarters in a house in Abingdon called Defiant, and Joan recalled Noor as being ‘beautiful … with a luminous smile’ and having ‘a lively intelligence and sense of fun’. In temperament they were poles apart – Joan was a socialist and atheist and Noor was deeply spiritual – but they shared a common sensitivity and humanity. Over cups of tea in Defiant, they discussed religion and spirituality, Gandhi, Nehru, and the philosophy of loving one’s fellow men. Joan recalled later: ‘Two WAAFs, in blue-penguin greatc
oats, pedalling through the silver straws of rain … on black-enamelled service issue bikes. Noor di-di-dahed with the wireless operators, while I floated hydrogen weather balloons to 20,000ft …’23
Unknown to Joan, Noor was already entering a secret world. On 25 January 1943 the personnel form at the SOE entered Noor as Norah Inayat Khan, WAAF no: 424598. Age 29. It requested a month’s attachment and called her once again to Hotel Victoria, on 8 February at 1000 hours. The short memo said, ‘If satisfactory after training will be used in important operational role for which she has special linguistic and geographical qualifications.’ The note also said that ‘she should have her kit … with her in London but should not bring it with her when she reports’.
On 10 February, Noor was attached to the Air Ministry Unit for service under Air Intelligence (A.I 10) for a period of one month. Air Intelligence was another cover used by the SOE, useful since Noor had been recruited from the WAAF. Her field salary was fixed at £350 a year paid quarterly into her Lloyd’s Bank account.24 On 15 February, Noor signed the Official Secrets Act. Her formal initiation into the SOE was complete.
In Abingdon, one day in February 1943, Joan discovered that Noor had simply ‘disappeared. Just like that. No word, no sign, no letter to explain a sudden posting. Just her blankets stacked neatly on the bedspring.’ Noor had left for her secret world in the SOE. Her colleagues would not hear of her again till the war was over and she was awarded the George Cross.
FIVE
Codes and Cover Stories
As the train pulled out of Waterloo, Noor felt nervous at the thought of her first assignment with the SOE. She had exchanged her blue Air Force uniform for the khaki FANY dress which flattered her slight figure and oriental features. Life had changed dramatically for Noor in the last two years. The house in Suresnes seemed to belong to a distant past. She longed to play her harp and go to a concert or write a story, but her head reeled instead with Morse and the sound of aircraft engines.
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