The Spy Who Wouldn't Lie | The Unsung Heroines Of WW2 | 5
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Wondery Plus subscribers can binge full seasons of The Spy Who early and ad-free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. From Wondery, I'm Anita Arnand and this is The Spy Who.

Now, as a historian, I've always been fascinated by the stories that slip through the cracks, you know, those elusive ones. And I adore the stories of women who, until you reach back in history and pull them out, people haven't heard of. You know, the lives of great men are routinely picked and poured over, sometimes, frankly, to the point of exhaustion.

Just because a story is less familiar to us, it really doesn't mean it had any less of an impact on our present-day reality. Noor's story is one such example. This is a tale of courage and sacrifice.

Now, as we've learned in the preceding four episodes, Noor was raised a Sufi. She grew up in a largely pacifist household. She was artistic, she was creative, she was someone who held honesty as the highest virtue. Really, she is the last person you might have expected to become a spy. Yet, in some ways, her decision to become a Special Operations Executive, an SOE, wasn't quite as unusual as it first seems.

At the time Noor joined the war effort, thousands of women were signing up to play their part in one of Europe's most deadly conflicts –

It was a decision motivated by necessity as much as by patriotism. And even though women like Noor were willing to put their lives on the line, they still couldn't escape the prejudice facing women in the 1940s. What's really extraordinary to me is that these women, they were part of a society which had only deemed women recently worthy of getting the vote at all. You know, until 1928, women weren't

special enough, clever enough, capable enough of deciding what the future should look like. And yet here you have Noor and other women like her who want a hand in shaping the future. And they are willing to put everything, their very lives on the line to do that. And I find that extraordinary.

With me today to discuss the work of the SOE operatives like Noor is Rick Stroud, author of Lonely Courage, the true story of the SOE heroines who fought to free Nazi-occupied France.

Rick, it's so wonderful to have you here because I can't think of anyone better to take us through what is actually quite shadowy terrain at the end of the day. Thank you. I'm very, very pleased to be here. Let's start with the woman who's the beating heart of this story and the reason we've come together, Noor Anayat Khan. I mean, how special is she in the history of not just this country, but in the history of espionage and bravery?

She's very, very special indeed in the history of espionage and of bravery. And I'll say something right here at the beginning, which I would normally say saved the ending, but

The real reason that she's special is that she set a very, very high moral bar for us all to live up to. And as I think everybody listening already knows, she was a very gentle woman. She was the daughter of a Sufi who used to sing her awake in the mornings. She wanted to write children's books. And she was, when the war broke out, she joined the Royal Air Force and was trained as a radio operator. But on the last, after she'd been captured...

the man who was sort of in charge of her, the officer who was in charge of her, was told, give the Creole the works. And he said, and we know that he said this because he was debriefed after the war before he was hanged. He said, by the time I'd finished with her, she was a bloody mess. And as the dawn broke in that terrible dark prison cell, he pulled out his Luger,

to shoot her in the head. And before he did that, she looked at him and she said, "Liberté." And she could never have thought that her words would go beyond the stone walls of that prison. And so what this gentlewoman had done was to show us that however weak you and I feel, what we do matters and has given us something that we have to live up to because she lived up to it and all the women of the Special Operations Executive and lots of men and women all over the world.

gave their lives for that thing, for liberté. And so that, I think that Noah epitomizes that. She's sort of, she is the sort of essence of the bravery of ordinary people. We get support from Dove. Hey everyone, this is your girl Kiki Palmer, host of the Wondery podcast. Baby, this is Kiki Palmer. Listen up, because there's some messed up stuff we got to talk about.

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Let's take a step back, though, and talk about the SOE itself. Created in 1940, whose idea was it? What was the thought process that went into the foundation of the SOE, and how many people knew about it at the time? The thought process really began with Winston Churchill, who loved anything to do with spies, special operations, and he was a big fan of the SOE.

and i think he was basically a sort of boy's own paper guy and he famously said set europe alight and he commanded um men to start an organization which was secret and which was going to be called the special operations executive of course what an exciting name that is on its own uh and that worked okay and they were recruiting from all walks of life they had um

Varsity men, bankers, stockbrokers, lawyers, academics, Trotskyites, members of the Sinn Fein, Stalinists, anarchist burglars, robbers, pimps.

They even had a fashion artist, a guy called Brian Stonehouse, anybody who was prepared to fling themselves into the fight secretly, who could exist in the field secretly and work against the Nazis in my speciality, in F section, which was the section that looked after France. And then one day, quite soon after the SOE had been started, there was a guy called Selwyn Jepson,

who said, I think that women would be very, very good at this job. And I think that we should recruit them. And they said, oh, Selwyn, don't be so stupid. I mean, women are lovely, but they should be at home doing the typing. I mean, they're far too fragrant to be doing this kind of thing. Oh, for God's sake. Anyway, Selwyn went on and on and on. Eventually, he found himself in front of Churchill.

And he said, Prime Minister, I think that women have a cool and lonely courage that makes them better at this job. They're patient and they're good at working on their own. And Churchill looked at him and said, very well, carry on, good luck. And that was it. And then he began to scour the country to find French-speaking women. You must remember that it's all very well speaking French to a very high level, but spy-level French...

is a different thing altogether. And you're moving into an environment which is out to get you, that if secret policemen see you pour a drink in the wrong way or see your dress has got

some buttons on it that don't look quite right, they'll go, there's something wrong with her. Well, I mean, I'm sort of minded of that scene in The Great Escape where it is just one moment of relief. You know, good luck. Thank you. You are forever on edge. Just before we get in through the doors of the SOE, though, I have always been tantalised by how they went about tapping people on the shoulder. So, you know, if you were a Francophile or you did fit the bill, whether you were even a pimp, gangster, accountant or whoever, you know, the men were,

How were they identified as people who might be up to muster? I think it was word... We don't know exactly how. I mean, they obviously couldn't put an advertisement in the paper saying, S-O-E-H, watch it. But I think once you've got one person, they'll go, why don't you try Bill? He's a very good... He taught me French at Oxford. And I think the word just got around that if you were good at French and good at handling yourself, you'd be recruited. And I think that was...

the unofficial way that it happened. So I can understand how that works in a boys' club, but when you have suddenly turned your beam onto women, and famously, you know, the spheres of men and women's worlds in the 1940s did not overlap in a way in which they always appreciated the talents and abilities of women. Yes.

they would have had to do a lot more work to identify the right women for the job. They would have had to do a lot more work. They would have been helped in this, I think, initially by a woman called Virginia Hall, who was an American diplomat who'd lost a leg. Oh, she's an incredible character. She is incredible. Tell us more about her. I love Virginia Hall. Well, the short notes on Virginia is that she lost a leg and the American Diplomatic Service said, well, as you've lost a leg, you're no good to us.

and you can be a secretary, and she wouldn't have this. And she went to London. She made contact with the SOE. I don't know quite how she did that, but she had some fairly high-level contacts because she was a diplomat. She barged her way in. She barged her way in, which is a sort of characteristic that you would need. They trained her, and when they were training her, she was dressed...

As a man, I mean, in overalls. And there were people there who couldn't work out, is this a man or a woman? And they didn't dare ask her. But one time they were being trained to slash people's throats and she, with wooden knives, and to show how good she was, she smeared lipstick on her knife, slashed, you know, the false opponent's throat and then had red from the lipstick all over his throat. To prove the point, I did do it. To prove the point, I did do that. She was then sent into France and the advantage of her

was that she was an American, so she was a neutral. So she could exist in France quite openly. And she was very, very successful and got loads of circuits going and recruited people. And somebody at one point said, if you go into Virginia Hall's

kitchen, you'll meet every important agent and intelligence person in France. The thing about Virginia Hall is that she did so much, but towards the end of her life, the Americans never really rated or respected her. I remember one account about her sitting at a table surrounded by all the bigwigs of the United States at the end of the war, and they still weren't listening to her. They were still sort of treating her like she was a bit of the secretary. Yeah.

Well, I think that that's the, I mean, it still is. I think that's the sort of paternal attitude that a lot of men, particularly soldiers, have towards women. She was given a medal at the end of the war. She was congratulated eventually by the president. But in a way, the worst story is that of Christine Granville, who...

at the very end of the war, went into a Nazi jail where two agents, one of whom was her lover, were being kept prisoner. And when she went in, the governor of the prison, who was a German, had a revolver on the table. By the time she'd... Her personality was so strong...

that by the time she'd finished arguing with him, he was shaking and he'd given in. And he said, well, if you can get so many, a million, I think a sort of million pounds of huge sum of money, I will release these men. So she'd gone into a place where saying, you know, I know these two men. They could have arrested her and shot her in the spot. Time goes by, the war ends, she leaves the SOE and

She asks for a pension, and she's told her, no, no, you can't have a pension. And I've seen a piece of paper written by a civil servant which said, tell her to go back

to whence she came from. And she wasn't given a pension. And that was an outrageous thing. It was as though she'd never done anything. She'd risked her life. None of the women, I think, were properly looked after after the war. Now, let's talk about how many women. The SOE hired around 13,000 agents in all, and only 3,200 of these were women.

That's a remarkable figure, isn't it? There were 40 women recruited into F-section. Into F-section, which Nora Knight-Kahn was part of. It was a very small number. It was a very small number, yeah. Did they have that diverse background that the men did? Was that the same? Yes, it was. I mean, you've got the example of Christine Granville, who's a Polish aristocrat. And at the other end of the scale, there's Violette Szabo, who lived in

Stockwell and she was a shop assistant. And in between, you've got every other stratum of the society. Tell me about the training, the basic training that went on. Was it different for men SOEs and women SOEs? And what did they have to do? They had, A, to learn their speciality, which generally was radio operating. They had to learn sort of unarmed combat. They had to learn to be able to move across country and

They were taught to try to be invisible. The worst thing you can be if you're an agent is to have a tall, high profile. You want to be a grey person that nobody takes any notice of. The training was just the same as for the men. It was pretty rigorous. I mean, they're being shown how to deal with a much bigger man. They're being shown how to use explosives. They're being shown how to use wireless sets, etc.

They're getting exactly the same training that any bloke would get. I think the basic assumption of the trainers was that these were women

And this is sort of metaphorically, they were going, patting them on the head and going, there, there, dear little Allport, be all right. I've seen some of these and, you know, thanks to your brilliant writing and a couple of other historians, but they are so almost condescending. Like, you know, they're being bothered with having to train these bloody women and it's kind of a slight imposition on their time. Yes, no, exactly. Well, it is patronising. It's completely, I mean, with Noor Inayat Khan,

One of her trainers, I've seen the piece of, you know, the report that he wrote. He said, if this girl's an agent, I'm Winston Churchill. I've seen that. So very rude. Wow. Nice. Yes.

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Let's focus now on Noor specifically and her contribution to the war effort. Radio operator was the job that she was given.

What does that actually mean? What's the usual function of a radio operator? The radio operator was the person without whom nothing would happen. Because if you have no radio, you are deaf and dumb. You can't, and you're almost blind. I mean, you can't receive instructions and you can't transmit what you've seen to London. And you don't know what's going on. You're operating in a complete fog.

And remember that the German occupation of France had turned it into a vast black hole.

So the radio operator was the single most important person in the operation, really. Without the radio operator, nothing could probably happen. How big was the radio? When we're talking about the radio, how heavy, how portable was this thing? The radio would fit into an old-fashioned suitcase. It wasn't very big and it wasn't that heavy, but it was very noticeable. It had little catches on the side. You opened it up.

the radio was in there. It might have something on top of it to disguise it. But it was a difficult thing to carry about. And the Germans, of course, who were very, very good at counterintelligence, were on the lookout for that. And in order to work the radio, you had to get out an aerial, which was wire, which is about 40 feet long. That's a bit conspicuous. That's a bit conspicuous. And the equipment is

is clunky and it's conspicuous. It worked with Morse code, which means you had to know Morse code. It says tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And you had to get your transmission done as quickly as you can because the Germans had a very good system for finding where these radios were by triangle. They had listening posts, which would cover the whole of France, and they would lock on to a transmission that they could hear

They have three separate stations on it. And where those three... The triangulation. The triangulation, where those things met, that's where it was. So you had to get your transmission over, you know, in a minute or two minutes, as quickly as you could. Because then they'll be after you. They'll be straight after you. And once you've done that, you've got to pack it up and get out of it

as quickly as you can. You must have come across so many near-miss stories because, I mean, that's not much time. You've got a job to do and then you've got to move, move, move really quickly. Very, very quickly. I mean, I don't think there are some miss. I think it's almost every time you get it out,

they're onto you. Get it out. Tap, tap, tap. Pack it away. Get off. Get off. All the time. So, I mean, you'd have to be technically adept. You'd have to hold your nerve. You'd have to have immediately... You'd have done a recce or reconnaissance of how can I get out of here really quickly. But you also need information to send. Now, were these essays...

collecting information from other agents who would, I don't know, dead drop or, you know, tell them, look, you've got to get this back to London. Would it be stuff that they saw themselves that they were going and, you know, sort of looking through binoculars and picking up armaments, shipments? I mean, how did that work? No, I mean, there were agents in the field who were going around collecting that information.

condensing it into a sort of shorter form as possible, taking it to the radio operator, saying to the radio operator, code this up and send it. And that's what the radio operator did. The radio operator's principal task wasn't to go and get the information, it was to transmit it. They were too valuable to have them

Wandering around, yeah. Being brave. Sure. Tell me this, how pivotal was the role of the SOE and how useful to the resistance, for example, was the work that they did? It's very difficult to answer that question because the main point of the SOE was to gather intelligence, to turn the black hole into somewhere that we knew about. It was very, very important, but there are a lot of regular soldiers who

who dislike what they call these freelance operations. They think it should have been trained soldiers who knew what they were doing. Rather than Barry from Accounts, who was doing Accounts three weeks ago. Yes, exactly that. Or Noah, who was an aircraft mechanic. It's impossible to...

sort of quantify exactly how useful they are. But what you can do is to say that nobody in France or anywhere in the so-called free world knew that the war was going to end. So the very fact that there was a resistance going on and that there were people working against the Germans in occupied France was a very good boost for the French population and for the world. So in terms of morale...

I think they were absolutely essential. Let's talk about the two sides around the SOE operatives. If not husbands and wives and children, they would have had brother

brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, I mean, people who would miss them, what do they say to them? Look, you know, I'm off for six weeks. You're not, what? I think they would say things like, oh, it's all right. I'm being sent off on a course. I'm going to be down in Devon for a bit, or I've got to go up to Scotland for a special training course in mechanics. So I don't think it's that difficult to, you know, once you're recruited, once you're

in the operation and wearing a uniform, which they were, to sort of pretend, well, I'm just going to vanish for a bit. Don't worry, I'm fine. I'm just being Scotland. So, I mean, really, they were utterly invisible. Nobody talked about the SOE apart from the people who knew about the SOE. Nobody talked about the SOE apart from people who knew about the SOE. But SOE F-sections headquarters were in Baker Street.

And they were told, when you come to the headquarters, don't get off the bus at Baker Street near the headquarters. Go on a couple of stops and walk back.

And apparently one bus conductor said, ding, ding, Baker Street, any more spies? Really? That's true. People aren't stupid, are they? Not as stupid as some top brass might think. We heard in the series that Noah's time as a spy began just as the SOE was starting to fray at the edges, just before it was starting to fall apart.

I would not entirely agree that the SOE fell apart. I don't think it did. I mean, it had its problems. And there was an enormous network in northern France called PROSPER, which was penetrated and disintegrated.

And there was a subnetwork in Prosper which was called Churchill. And the reason that Noah Kahn was sent in was that Prosper had collapsed. Churchill didn't have a radio operator. Noah Kahn was only half trained and lots of people said she shouldn't be sent in.

And she went in. But I mean, the SOE operated pretty effectively, I think, throughout France with its ups and downs. Obviously, bits of it were blown apart. People were captured. Circuits were damaged. But I don't think it's right to say that it had fallen apart. Why was the SOE sending people who were half-cocked? I mean, if she wasn't properly trained, why was Noor Anad Khan being sent somewhere so dangerous?

Because they were desperate for radio operators. I mean, it was that serious. And the weird thing about Noor Khan was that she was extremely erratic. And she'd learnt Morse code in the Royal Air Force, where she'd volunteered.

So she could send messages with terrific accuracy and fluency one day, and then the next day couldn't do it at all and would break down in tears. And I think she had a nickname of something like Bangaway Bertha because her Morse code technique was so noisy. And she sent, Buckwellster sent, he said, I don't know what to do. I want to send her. We've got to get a radio operator in there. We don't have one. She's the best we've got. And it was partly to do with desperation. If you've only got

one radio operator that's almost halfway there and you're in the middle of the war, you take the chance. And people did say, please don't send her. And she's not ready. And you sort of, you know, an account of somebody who bursts into tears, you know, sporadically is somebody who is under an enormous amount of pressure. Yes. Stress as well. In all of the time that she was there, it was only a few months, she sent 120 people.

messages on every sort of part of what was going on. She would transmit at 1500 every day at three o'clock in the afternoon, and she would receive at 530. So she was constantly biking around

with this case, trying to hide it. You're always on the move, you're always carrying something heavy, you're always stressed about the message, you know, all of that. It gets very, very stressful after a while because you think you can't trust anybody. And she said, I'm getting so tired, I won't be able to go on doing this. Knowing everything that we know now, should they have pulled her out a bit earlier?

They definitely should have done, yeah. They were so reckless with people's lives. But I believe, I know in fact, that they were about to haul her out of there. And that's not an easy thing because you've got to get them out by Lysander aeroplane. It takes a lot of organising. And of course, the man who's organising it is working for the Gestapo. Oh, God, he's there. I'd forgotten about him. It's a no-win situation. Yeah.

But she was arrested days before they were going to bring her back to England. So close. Yeah. So close to coming home. I often think it's extraordinary when people sacrifice themselves for others or put themselves even in danger for others.

But the women of the SOE knew that they might face death. They signed on willingly for this, knowing that they could lose everybody they loved, everything that they knew, everything that was home, and they did it anyway. That's exactly right. They did it anyway. They came from all walks of life.

They were warned very, very graphically and clearly before they were recruited that this was a very dangerous operation, that if they were captured, they would expect no mercy from the Nazis and actually from their German captors. And worse than that, that they would face torture, brutality, starvation. They would be treated as what the Germans called the Naxen Nebel captors.

prisoners, which means night and fog, they would be turned into disappeared ones. They would never have existed. So they would just walk, they thought,

They would just walk into the fog, never to be seen, never heard of again. Their sacrifice is useless. Well, I mean, thanks to people like you, thanks to the stories that people listening to this podcast have heard, we're reaching into that fog and we're pulling people out. Tell me what happened to the SOE after the war. I mean, it was secret all the time by necessity through the war.

afterwards did people acknowledge it, the role of the people who were there, the means and manner in which some of them died? I mean, how much light was shed on them? Very, very little light was shed on them. The organisation sort of collapsed. That's when it did collapse, almost within weeks of the war ending. The SOE had no part to play there.

De Gaulle in France didn't want to give any acknowledgement that the SOE had helped. He wanted the liberation of France and the France resistance to be run by Frenchmen. So they were all sent out. A lot of the documentation was destroyed or dispersed. Destroyed by the French or destroyed by us? No, destroyed by us. And what's happened is...

is that some of that stuff keeps appearing in people's lofts or, you know, in their bottom drawers and all sorts of things. But a lot of paperwork...

about what happened has vanished. When it comes to Britain now, do you think enough acknowledgement is given to these extraordinary lives, some of which were lived in secret, lost in secret? Do we know all the stories that we need to know now? No, we don't know. I mean, I think there is a lot more acknowledgement of them and of their bravery. There's a little statue of Noah Khan in London. But there were two sisters, I can't remember their surnames,

one of whom died in a concentration camp and the other of whom left the SOE at the end of the war and lived in Brighton. And she was discovered dead

about eight years ago in her flat. Nobody knew who she was. Nobody knew how important she was. Having said that, a lot of people did vanish, but a lot of people, I mean, I'm always seeing obituaries now for very old women who were in the SOE and who've just died. I think people are more and more aware of them. Finally, Rick, and I don't know, I don't know how you begin to answer a question like this, but what do we owe

the women of the soe do you think well it's what i said about noah khan at the uh at the beginning that what we owe to them is to live up to the moral bar that they set for us that we have to live good moral lives and when we hear things going i think immoral things being said by our politicians or people in power wherever they are in the world however weak we feel

We have to stand up and be counted. And there's a poem that I'd like to read for you, if that's all right. Yeah, no, of course. Which was actually Violette Zabo's Code. But it's a lovely poem. And for me, it sums up everything that those women gave for us. And it was written by Leo Marx. And it goes, "'The life that I have is all that I have, and the life that I have is yours.'"

The love that I have of the life that I have is yours and yours and yours. A sleep I shall have, a rest I shall have, yet death will be but a pause. For the peace of my years in the long green grass will be yours and yours and yours. And that's what those women were for me. That's beautiful. Rick Stroud, thank you very much indeed. Thank you.

Just to remind you all, Rick Stroud's book is Lonely Courage, the true story of the SOE heroines who fought to free Nazi-occupied France. And that brings us to the end of our season on Noor-e-Nayat Khan. Do join us for the next season, The Spy Who Betrayed Bin Laden, hosted by Raza Jafri. Next time, we open the file on Eamon Dean, the spy who betrayed Bin Laden.

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From Wondery, this is the final episode in our series, The Spy Who Wouldn't Lie. This bonus episode of The Spy Who is hosted by me, Anita Arnand. Our show is produced by Vespucci for Wondery, with writing and story editing by Yellow Ant. The producer of this episode is Natalia Rodriguez. Our senior producer is Thomas Currie. Our sound designer is Matt Peaty.

Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Frisson Sync. Executive producers for Vespucci are Johnny Galvin and Daniel Turkin. The executive producer for Yellow Ant is Tristan Donovan. Our managing producer for Wondery is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Jessica Radburn and Marshall Louis.