by Ann Kramer
First published in Great Britain in 2011
by Pen & Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Barnsley
South Yorkshire
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Copyright © Ann Kramer 2011
ISBN 978 1 844680 58 0
eISBN 978 1 844683 82 6
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Contents
List of Plates
Acknowledgments
Timeline
Introduction
Chapter 1 Women and War
Chapter 2 Spy Paranoia and The First World War
Chapter 3 Spying Under Occupation
Chapter 4 Backroom Women
Chapter 5 Special Operations Executive
Chapter 6 Behind Enemy Lines
Chapter 7 Missing
Chapter 8 Setting the Record Straight
Appendix
References
Bibliography
Edith Cavell.
Propaganda poster which exploited the execution of Nurse Edith Cavell by the Germans.
Detail from the memorial statue showing Edith Cavell’s last words.
Edith Cavell’s memorial statue, St Martin’s Lane, London.
Mata Hari: 1906 image, wearing only breast covering and jewellery.
Mata Hari (1906 postcard).
Mata Hari: execution 1917 – probably a reconstruction, maybe around 1920.
‘Kill that File’ – chasing after a recalcitrant file in the Registry, 1919. The cartoon appeared in the programme for the Hush Hush Review, an MI5 review show, 1919.
Eager Girl Guides who worked as messengers for MI5 during the First World War. The image is taken from Outbursts from Waterloo(se) House, book of caricatures printed and privately circulated towards end of WWI. The original caption reads: ‘The Electric Bells having broke, the G.G.’s (not Grenadier Guards) sit outside Maj. D.’s door in case he wants them.’
Violette Szabo. Imperial War Museum
Blue plaque on Violette Szabo’s home, Burnley Road, London. Thanks to Simon Adams
Stockwell children painted this mural of Violette Szabo in 2001. Thanks to Simon Adams
Violette Szabo, bronze bust, Albert Embankment, London. Author’s photo
In memory of SOE: detail from Violette Szabo memorial, London. Author’s photo
Odette Sansom. Imperial War Museum
Yvonne Cormeau. Imperial War Museum
Noor Inayat Khan. Imperial War Museum
Noor Inayat Khan. Personal file HS 9/836/5 The National Archives
Madeleine Damerment. With thanks to Madeleine Brooke for permission to use
Croix de Guerre, Légion d’honneur & Médaille de la Résistance awarded to Madeleine Damerment. Thanks to Madeleine Brooke for permission to use
Letter from Vera Atkins to Madeleine Damerment’s mother informing her that despite their ongoing efforts there was still no news of her daughter. Thanks to Madeleine Brooke for permission to use
WTS (FANY) Memorial, St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge. With thanks to St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge.
In 1976 this memorial was unveiled at Dachau in memory of the SOE women killed there: Yolande Beekman, Noor Inayat Khan, Eliane Plewman, Madeleine Damerment.
Vera Atkins, intelligence officer SOE French section. From personal files, The National Archives HS 9/59/2
Every attempt has been made to contact the copyright owners of quoted materials. Should any references have been omitted, please supply details to the publisher, who will endeavour to correct the information in subsequent editions.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to the following:
Helen Currie for permission to quote from her experiences of working with Tunny machines at Bletchley Park.
Cynthia Waterhouse for permission to quote extracts from her private papers held in the Imperial War Museum, Documents Department.
Madeleine Brooke for permission to quote from an interview with her about her aunt, Madeleine Damerment, and for permission to photograph memorabilia belonging to her family.
The History Press for permission to quote ‘The Life that I have’ from Between Silk and Cyanide, Leo Marks, The History Press, 2009.
Random House Group for permission to quote from Open Secret, Stella Rimington, published by Hutchinson, 2001. Reproduced by permission of the Random House Group.
The Imperial War Museum for permission to reproduce photographs of Violette Szabo, Odette Sansom, Yvonne Cormeau and Noor Inayat Khan.
Timeline
1903
Erskine Chalder’s The Riddle of the Sands is published.
1909
Britain’s first Secret Service Bureau set up.
1907
First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) formed.
1911
Official Secrets Act passed, Britain.
1914-1918
First World War.
1914
4 August: First World War begins.
8 August: The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) passed.
9 August: Aliens Restriction Act (ARA) passed.
1915
Hamil Grant publishes Spies and Secret Service, a history of espionage.
William Le Queux’s Spies of the Kaiser is published; helps to stimulate spy paranoia in Britain.
September: German-born Louise ‘Lizzie’ Wertheim arrested, charged with spying for Germany and imprisoned.
12 October: British nurse Edith Cavell is charged with espionage and executed by firing squad in Belgium. Leads to international outrage.
1916
1 April: Belgian patriot Gabrielle Petit charged with espionage and executed, Belgium.
June: La Dame Blanche resistance and espionage network formed, Belgium and France.
1917
January: Belgian patriot Elise Grandprez charged with espionage and executed, Belgium.
July: Dutch-born Mata Hari is charged with being a German spy.
12 September: Emilie Schattermann and Leonie Rameloo shot for spying, Belgium.
15 October: Mata Hari shot by firing squad, Paris, France.
1919-38 Inter-war years
1939-45 Second World War
1939
1 September: Germany invades Poland.
3 September: Britain, the Commonwealth and France declare war on Germany.
1940
17 June: Fall of France; Pétain declares Armistice.<
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18 June: General de Gaulle broadcasts to France from London.
16 July: Special Operations Executive (SOE) is set up, Britain, with orders to ‘set Europe ablaze’.
1941
May: Frenchman Georges Bégué is the first SOE agent to be parachuted into occupied France. In July, SOE agent Brian Stonehouse is parachuted in.
December: British government introduces conscription for women.
1942
First women SOE agents are sent into France.
24 September: Andrée Borrel and Lise de Baissac are parachuted into France.
31 October: Odette Sansom and George Starr arrive near Cannes, France, by boat.
1943
16 April: Odette Sansom and Peter Churchill arrested.
13 May: Vera Leigh and three other SOE agents arrive by Lysander near Tours, France.
16 June: Diana Rowden, Noor Inayat Khan and Cecily Lafort arrive by air near Angers, France.
20 June: Yvonne Rudellat meets SOE agents parachuted into France, all captured after skirmish with Germans.
23 June: Andrée Borrell, Francis Suttill and Gilbert Norman arrested.
15 September: Cecily Lefort arrested by Gestapo.
18 September: Yolande Beekman, and agents Harry Peulevé and Harry Despaigne arrive in France by Lysander.
13 October: Noor Inayat Khan arrested, Paris.
30 October: Vera Leigh arrested, Paris. Taken to Fresnes Prison.
18 November: Diana Rowden arrested and taken to 84 Avenue Foch. Interrogated for two weeks then taken to Fresnes.
25 November: Noor Inayat Khan, with John Starr and Leon Faye, escape but are recaptured. Noor Inayat Khan sent to Germany.
1944
13 January: Yolande Beekman (and Gustave Bieler) arrested, Paris.
28/9 February: Madeleine Damerment and two other agents parachuted into France and immediately arrested by Gestapo.
2/3 March: Eileen Nearne lands in France.
5 April: Lilian Rolfe dropped near Orléans, France.
29 April: Nancy Wake is parachuted into France.
13 May: Vera Leigh, Andrée Borrel, Odette Sansom, Diana Rowden, Yolande Beekman, Eliane Plewman and Madeleine Damerment taken from Fresnes to 84 Avenue Foch, Paris. Sonya Olschanezky joins them. All moved to Karlsruhe, Germany.
6 June: D-Day landings begin, Normandy, France.
July: Eileen Nearne arrested.
6 July: Diane Rowden, Vera Leigh, Andrée Borrel, Sonya Olschanezky taken to Natzweiler concentration camp, Alsace, France, injected with phenol and cremated. SOE agent Brian Stonehouse sees their arrival.
6 July: Christine Granville parachuted into France, joins Jockey network.
31 July: Lilian Rolfe arrested, taken to Fresnes prison; taken to Ravensbrück concentration camp, August.
25 August: Allies liberate Paris; de Gaulle returns; victory parade 26 August.
10 September: Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment, Noor Inayat Khan and Eliane Plewman transferred to Dachau concentration camp.
13 September: Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment, Noor Inayat Khan and Eliane Plewman executed Dachau.
1945
27 January: Violette Szabo shot, Ravensbrück concentration camp.
5 February: Lilian Rolfe executed and body cremated, Ravensbrück concentration camp.
8 May: V-E Day, Germany surrenders. War in Europe ends.
1946
January: Vera Atkins goes to Germany.
16 January: Noor Inayat Khan awarded Croix de Guerre posthumously. Special Forces Club established, London, for surviving SOE members.
1948
7 May: Memorial to members of the Women’s Transport Service or FANY who died during the Second World War unveiled St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge. Includes the names of women who served with SOE.
1975
Plaque put up Dachau concentration camp in memory of Noor Inayat Khan, Yolande Beekman, Eliane Plewman and Madeleine Damerment; plaque also placed in Natzweiler crematorium dedicated to ‘Des quatre femmes Britanniques et Francaises parachutées exécutées dans ce camp’.
2003
Plaque uncovered Ravensbrück concentration camp.
2011
Memorial Trust for Noor Inayat Khan raises funds for memorial statue, Gordon Square, London.
Introduction
Women of Substance
In September 2010 British newspapers and the BBC carried stories of a ‘brave hero spy’ who had died alone in her flat in Torquay aged 89. The woman was Eileen Nearne. She had lived the final years of her life as something of a recluse, so few of her neighbours knew anything about her or of her extraordinary past life. As details emerged it turned out that Eileen Nearne, who her niece described as a ‘very private and modest person’, had been one of the remarkable women recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. Using a false identity she had been sent into enemy-occupied France where she acted as a wireless operator for five months, sending back more than a hundred coded messages to London. Captured by the Gestapo, she was interrogated and tortured but managed to survive – and ultimately escape from Ravensbrück concentration camp. In recognition of her importance, senior military officials attended her funeral and the eulogy was given by Adrian Stones, chairman of the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge, London, the club that was founded after the Second World War for surviving members of the SOE.
Perhaps it is not surprising that few people outside her specialist circle and immediate family knew very much about Eileen Nearne. Spying is by definition a secretive profession – a good spy passes unnoticed in a crowd – and very few women, or men for that matter, say much about what they are up to. It is also probably true to say that with some notable exceptions, most female spies or secret agents, from the courageous women of La Dame Blanche through to Noor Inayat Khan, have rarely received the recognition they deserve. There may be various reasons: women’s achievements are often ignored, forgotten or subsumed under those of men while the nature of the work itself is a hidden one. Either way the female spies who spring to most people’s minds are more likely to be women who have been immortalized through popular fiction and even legend.
Ask anyone to name a woman spy and the answer is most likely to be Mata Hari. She is probably the best known of all women spies; her exotic lifestyle, sexual behaviour and tragic death in front of a firing squad in 1917 have become the stuff of legend, and have probably coloured perceptions of women spies ever since. And yet Mata Hari was probably not a spy at all, or, if she was, she was inept and naive and quite untypical of the women who have worked in the field of espionage and intelligence gathering.
Even so, the image dies hard; only three months after Eileen Nearne was in the news, another woman made the headlines: Katia Zatuliveter, research assistant to Liberal Democrat MP Mike Hancock, who in December 2010 was alleged to be a Russian spy. Media images focused on her youth, blond hair and apparently raunchy lifestyle; she was being investigated by MI6 for possible connections to Russia’s foreign intelligence service, and certainly met the received image of a ‘typical’ woman spy, one that has been fostered and generated through popular fiction and writers of spy history for a very long time.
It could be said that there are two major stereotypical images of women spies: the Mata Hari spy, who uses her sexuality to extract military and other secret information from unsuspecting men – a stereotype that reflects spying’s tag line ‘the world’s second oldest profession’, one assumes second only to prostitution – and who may well have been duped into espionage, perhaps by financial need or love, and the highly virtuous woman who dies heroically for love of her country. Edith Cavell, also of the First World War, is a prime example of this. She, it could be said, represents the complete reverse, all that is good in women as opposed to all that is evil. But it can also be argued that both these images were fostered for propaganda reasons, and that they reflected prevailing and deeply-held views of womanhood. Either w
ay the images belittle women’s true skills and courage in the field of espionage and certainly the reality for women who have worked as spies during wartime is quite different from the popular stereotypes.
Although often seen as a male-dominated world, which it has been until women such as Stella Rimington helped to open the doors for women, espionage – the business of obtaining secret information from an enemy, particularly during wartime – has frequently involved women. During wartime women have played very significant roles in the secret war of intelligence gathering, whether working as undercover agents in the field, listening in to enemy intelligence, decoding secret information, or as resistance fighters, harrying an enemy while at the same time obtaining crucial military information. Some of their names, particularly those of women who worked with SOE, are quite well known; others such as the women who worked with spy networks in occupied Belgium and France during the First World War have all but been forgotten.
Until about the Second World War, many male writers, such as Hamil Grant, who published a history of espionage in 1915, considered that women could never make good spies; Hamil Grant believed they were not capable of sustained patriotism, were too inclined to be knocked off course by romantic attachments and would not do the work without financial gain. On the other hand, there were those who considered that women were by nature duplicitous and therefore were to be automatically regarded with caution and suspicion during wartime in case they were spies. Other writers such as Richard Hannay or Ian Fleming continued with the stereotypes, trivializing or sexualizing the female spies in their novels, and making them subordinate to men.
