by Ann Kramer
Where possible operators tried to find safe hiding places for their sets, but when they were on the move it was necessary to carry them. There were many near misses: on one occasion Yvonne Cormeau, whose cover was that she was a district nurse, and another well-known SOE agent George Starr (code name Hilaire) whose cover story was that he was a tobacco inspector, were in a car that was stopped by Geman soldiers. Yvonne Cormeau had her wireless set with her:
‘We were… told to get out of the car. Then they put us in a ditch with two soldiers. Both had a pistol, one in my back and one in Hilaire’s back. The feldwebel [sergeant] was telling somebody on the radio that he’d stopped a tobacco inspector and a woman, the woman had a district nurse’s card on her, what was he to do with them? My perspiration was coming down and the flies were sticking in my perspiration and I couldn’t move, because if I’d moved they would have shot me… Then the crackle came again… He came back… “Get in the car” – which we did at once… Suddenly he asked me what was in the case… which, of course, was my radio set. I opened it. I knelt on the seat and showed it to him. He asked me what it was. I said “Radio”, which, in German, means X-ray as well as radio-set. In view of the fact that I was meant to be a district nurse, he thought it was an X-ray set. He said, “Go,” and we got out very fast.’
Yvonne Cormeau had a number of narrow escapes, on one occasion being betrayed by a double agent; there were also ‘wanted’ posters displayed in the area where she was operating but she managed to evade capture, perhaps partly because she used car batteries rather than mains power, which may have helped her evade the detection finders. She operated for thirteen months in occupied France and transmitted more than 400 messages back to London, which was a record for the F section. She survived the war and was subsequently made an MBE and awarded the Légion d’honneur, the Croix de Guerre, and the Médaille de la Résistance.
Noor Inayat Khan
Noor Inayat Khan was one of SOE’s most unlikely women agents – she was born of pacifist parents and herself was a very gentle, self-effacing and modest young woman, who opposed violence and duplicity. She was perhaps the last person one might have thought would volunteer for a dangerous for a job behind enemy lines, which, by definition involved both duplicity and violence. But she did. Interestingly, she was not the only pacifist to volunteer: Francis Cammaerts, one of F section’s most outstanding agents, had not only been a pacifist before the war but also had applied for exemption as a conscientious objector until his brother was killed, and he felt he could no longer remain separate from the war effort and joined SOE.
Noor Inayat Khan was very different from most of SOE’s other female agents; for a start she was an Muslim Asian woman with a royal background. She was born in Moscow on 1 January 1914, the eldest of four children. Her mother, Ora Ray Baker, was American of British parents and possibly a distant relative of Mary Baker Eddy, who founded the Christian Science movement. Her father, Inayat Khan, was Indian, a musician, a teacher and a Sufi, the great grandson of Tipu Sultan, the eighteenth century Muslim ruler of Mysore, who had been killed fighting the British. Not long after Noor’s birth the family moved to London, where they lived in Gordon Square, then in 1920 moved to France, eventually settling in a house in Suresnes that had been bought for them by a Sufi benefactor. Noor’s father named the house Fazal Manzil, or the House of Blessing. Noor’s childhood was a happy one, full of music, dance and religion; her father was a well-respected Sufi teacher who taught his children the principles of honesty and non-violence. In 1927 Noor’s father died and Noor took responsibility for the family as her grief-stricken mother was unable to cope. An academically gifted young woman and a keen musician, Noor wrote stories and poems and played the harp. She studied music at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris – one of her teachers was Nadia Boulanger – and went on to study child psychology at the Sorbonne. She continued writing, particularly writing stories for children and by the late 1930s was becoming an established children’s writer. One of her books, Twenty Jakata Tales, was published in England in 1939. Her stories were also read on French and English radio.
When war broke out in September 1939 the family were still living in Paris; Noor, who loathed Nazism, did a Red Cross nursing course but by 4 June 1940 German forces were outside Paris. Despite their Sufi principles, which forbade killing, Noor and her elder brother Vilayat decided they should leave France for England to help the war effort in some way. Noor’s other brother and his family stayed in France, intending to help the Resistance in the south, while Noor, her sister, Vilayat and their mother managed to get a boat out of France, arriving in Falmouth on 22 June 1940.
Once in England, Vilayat joined the Royal Navy working on minesweepers and Noor enlisted with the WAAF as a wireless operator. She also changed her name to Nora Baker in keeping with her new life in Britain. In 1942 SOE, having spotted Noor because of her fluent French and wireless skills, invited her for an interview. Like all the other recruits, she did not know why but thought she was going to the War Office. Selwyn Jepson interviewed her in November 1942. He was very impressed by Noor and made up his mind immediately that she was the right recruit for SOE; she was patient and security-minded and in his view would make an excellent wireless operator. Unusually, Jepson spelled out the nature and the dangers of the work during their first interview and Noor immediately volunteered. She was however concerned about her mother’s well-being and how she would manage without her but in her formal letter of acceptance stated that she now thought her mother would get used to her absence, Noor would be able to provide some financial assistance for her, and that winning the war was in the end more important than family responsibilities.
Having been recruited into SOE and commissioned into the FANY, Noor embarked on her training in February 1943. Like other agents she was taught how to survive in enemy territory, how to use weapons and explosives and how to cope with interrogation and torture. She was also given further training in wireless telegraphy, codes, ciphers and Morse code. Her training reports were complementary, although she was described as being ‘pretty scared of weapons’, clumsy and lacking confidence. It was also said she ‘hadn’t the foggiest what the training was going to be about’. In March 1943 Lieutenant Colonel Gordon described her as ‘a person for whom I have the greatest admiration. Completely self-effacing and unselfish… extremely modest, even humble and shy’. She was also extremely conscientious. In April Lieutenant Holland reported that she had ‘thrown herself life and soul into the life of the school.’ He described her as ‘very feminine in character, very eager to please, very ready to adapt herself to the mood of the company, or the tone of the conversation, interested in personalities, capable of strong attachments, kind-hearted, emotional and imaginative’ and went on to say that her motive for volunteering was idealism. ‘She felt that she had come to a dead end as a WAAF, and was longing to do something more active in the prosecution of the war, something which would make more call on her capabilities and, perhaps demand more sacrifice.’ Interestingly perhaps he also commented that Noor didn’t ‘appear to have any romantic ideas of the Mata Hari variety. In fact, she confesses that she would not like to do anything “two-faced”, by which she means deliberately cultivating friendly relations with malice aforethought.’
Subsequent reports were more critical and as Noor neared the end of her training, most of her instructors had serious doubts. In May 1943 one report stated: ‘Not over-burdened with brains but has worked hard and shown keenness, apart from dislike of the security side… She has an unstable and temperamental personality and it is very doubtful whether she is really suited for work in the field.’ Buckmaster savagely underlined the statements, and wrote above them in pencil: ‘Nonsense’ and ‘We don’t want them over-burdened with brains’. He also wrote ‘Makes me cross’ on the bottom. Some instructors were clearly concerned about Noor’s ‘mystical’ and idealistic upbringing and wondered if this might set up an emotional conflict for her. It was suggested that care
be taken in the field that ‘she not be given any task which set up a mental conflict with her idealism. This might render her unstable from our point of view.’ Overall she was considered too emotional, rather exotic and not sufficiently security-minded.
Maybe the instructors were right; they certainly seem to have realized that Noor Inayat Khan was rather different from the other women. Even so, and despite these reservations, there was a desperate need for wireless operators and it was generally agreed that Noor was an excellent radio operator. Buckmaster decided she should be used and Noor was therefore told to prepare herself for a mission in France. The mission briefing, which was very detailed and included her various security checks, information about safe houses and so on, is still in her file at The National Archives in London. In a 2006 BBC documentary about Noor Inayat Khan, called Princess Spy, M.R.D. Foot was asked whether Noor should have been sent to France. He replied, ‘How can I tell? I thank God it was never my responsibility.’
Before Noor left for France, however, she was sent to Leo Marks, SOE’s code master, for some extra training in coding; her coding was apparently erratic. Just as he wrote about his meeting with Violette Szabo in his book Between Silk and Cyanide, so too Marks describes his meeting with Noor. Marks felt very responsible for the safety of agents and prepared himself for meeting Noor by reading not just her training reports but also her book Twenty Jakata Tales. According to his account, he was struck by Noor’s extraordinary beauty and sensitivity, and found himself wondering what on earth she was doing in SOE, to the extent that he hoped she would fail his coding instruction and not be sent into the field. In the end, because he knew that Noor had been brought up never to tell a lie – which in itself was a concern for the instructors – he told her that if she coded incorrectly she would effectively be lying to him. Her coding improved.
On 16 June 1943, Noor (code name Madeleine and with the cover identity of Jeanne-Marie Renier, a children’s nurse), together with another agent, Cecily Lefort, was flown by Lysander from Tangmere, Sussex, into a field in the Loire Valley. She was the first female wireless operator to be sent into France. A second Lysander left at the same time, carrying Diana Rowden. The agent who met Noor, Henri Déricourt, later proved to have been a double agent responsible for betraying a great many SOE agents. He was unable to help her with a safe house so travelling first by bicycle and then by train she made her own way to Paris. Her mission was to work as a wireless operator in the Le Mans region for Henri Garry, a locally recruited agent who headed the Cinema (later Phono) circuit, one of the sub-circuits of the Prosper network, which was headed by Francis Suttill.
Noor arrived in Paris, reached her safe house, began to meet circuit members and began transmitting to London within seventy-two hours of arriving in Paris; she had to use another agent’s wireless because hers had been damaged on landing. However, it turned out that Noor had arrived at a very bad time: within a week or ten days of her reaching Paris the Gestapo arrested the whole of the Prosper network’s inner circle: Andrée Borrel, Francis Suttill and Gilbert Norman. The Prosper circuit had grown too large and unwieldy, mistakes were being made, and agents themselves were not displaying as much security as they should: the initial three who were arrested regularly met together at the same café and restaurant and did not always speak in French. As the Germans uncovered more information, so the arrests continued, hundreds of local agents were rounded up and either shot or imprisoned, and a number of circuit leaders were also arrested. Some, such as Francis Antelme, managed to get out and back to England.
Noor narrowly escaped arrest and went into hiding, but after a while went back to a safe house in Paris, from where she continued transmitting to London. She was now the only SOE wireless operator in Paris, and in extreme danger. She was, of course, also the only remaining link between Paris and the SOE in London. Knowing about the collapse of Prosper, Buckmaster had instructed remaining agents to get out quickly but there is some uncertainty about what happened with Noor. According to most accounts, Buckmaster instructed Noor to come back to London but she refused, saying that she wanted to stay and rebuild the circuit. After the war the question of whether Buckmaster should have insisted that she return was hotly debated and it was also claimed, but not proved, that he had not actually recalled her. Either way, according to Colonel Gubbins, Noor’s situation was now ‘the principal and most dangerous post in France’.
Keeping constantly on the move, Noor continued to transmit, lugging her wireless with her, which was no small achievement. The set she carried weighed about 30lbs and she was a slight woman. Carrying such a heavy weight but making it look as if she was just carrying a small suitcase would have quite a feat. She had a number of narrow escapes; on one occasion two German officers stopped her and asked what was in the case; she told them it was a movie projector. On another occasion she enlisted the help of a young German soldier to loop her 70-foot long aerial onto the branches of a tree outside her room. She told him she wanted to listen to some dance music on the radio.
What neither Noor nor SOE knew was that the Germans had been listening into her transmissions for quite a considerable amount of time. Because of their listening equipment at the Avenue Foch, they knew when a new operator started transmitting and they knew that there was an operator, code-named Madeleine operating somewhere in Paris but they could not find her. Amazingly enough, she continued to transmit without being found for twelve weeks, twice the amount of time that any wireless operator was expected to survive. Noor would have known she was in danger but, no matter what her instructors’ reports had said, she was pleased to be where she was: in August she transmitted a message to SOE asking for new radio equipment and also sent a handwritten note asking for a FANY-style white mac and thanking Baker Street for sending her to Paris saying, ‘It is grand working with you. The best moments I have had yet.’
Eventually the Gestapo caught up with Noor on or around 12 October 1943, although she was betrayed rather than discovered. The sister of one of the people she was working with was jealous of her and betrayed her to the Germans for 100,000 francs. One evening when Noor returned to her flat, she found the Gestapo waiting for her: the flat was just round the corner from the Avenue Foch. According to some accounts, she put up a tremendous fight, so much so that one of the Gestapo threatened to shoot her, but eventually she was overpowered. On searching her flat, the Gestapo found a school notebook in which she had written down all her messages, in code and in plain language (‘en clair’). Apparently she had misunderstood the instruction in her mission briefing to ‘be extremely careful with the filing of your messages’; she thought this meant she had to keep her messages. Armed with this material and the information they already had about ‘Madeleine’, Noor was arrested, handcuffed and taken to the Gestapo’s headquarters at Avenue Foch.
Other captured agents were already at the Avenue Foch, including Bob Starr and others from the Prosper circuit, who had been arrested in earlier round-ups. They were held in rooms on the top floor that had previously been servants’ quarters but were now used as cells. Almost immediately Noor made her first escape attempt. Saying she wanted a bath, she managed to get out of the bathroom window onto the roof, but was caught. She was interrogated a number of times by Major Hans Kieffer, chief of the Paris Gestapo headquarters, who tried to win her trust, as he had done with a number of other agents, but she disclosed absolutely nothing. Interrogated after the war, Kieffer said that she was very brave and had told them nothing. In November 1943 Noor made a second escape attempt together with Bob Starr and another agent; they broke through the iron bars of their cell windows, got onto the roof and managed to get into a neighbouring apartment but were recaptured and Noor was sent to Germany. To all intents and purposes she just disappeared.
‘Madeleine, after her capture, showed great courage and we got no information whatsoever out of her.’
(Hans Kieffer, Commandant of the Paris Gestapo, deposition, 19 January 1947)
Back in Lon
don there was concern that Noor’s transmissions had stopped and nothing had been heard from her. Eventually, in early October, a message came through saying that ‘Madeleine’ had had a ‘serious accident and was in hospital’. The source of the information was someone called ‘Sonya’ but no one knew who she was and Buckmaster chose to ignore the possibility that ‘hospital’ meant prison. At around the same time the SOE began to receive messages that were apparently coming from Noor, although her security check had been omitted: this should have been a clear message to SOE that it was not Noor who was transmitting but again Buckmaster chose to ignore the implications. What had actually happened was that the Germans were using Noor’s radio, together with all the information they had acquired from the messages she had recorded in her notebook to send messages to London in the hopes that London would reply sending valuable information. The signs were ignored – in fact new W/T equipment was sent following a request – and it would be several months before SOE finally accepted that Noor was missing; her set was still transmitting until February 1944 although she had by that time been taken away.
Noor Inayat Khan was executed at Dachau concentration camp on 13 September 1944, at the same time as Eliane Plewman, Madeleine Damerment and Yolande Beekman. After the war she was posthumously awarded the George Cross, only the third woman during the Second World War to receive such a prestigious award. To date only four British women have ever received it. However it was not until after the war that the full details of her final months and in fact of all the women agents labelled as ‘missing believed prisoners of war’, were actually known.
