Spy Princess (10 page)

Noor was very aware that the situation in India was highly volatile at the time. In 1941, India’s eastern flank lay open to invasion from Japan. In March 1942, worried about getting Congress support for the war, Churchill sent Sir Stafford Cripps to India to meet with Congress leaders and address the ‘India question’. Churchill promised India full dominion status
after
the war if the Congress cooperated during the conflict. But the Cripps mission failed. Gandhi described it as a ‘post-dated cheque on a failing bank’ and called on Indians to ‘Do or Die’.

In London the War Cabinet watched the crisis in alarm and authorised Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy, to make widespread arrests including the entire Congress leadership if he needed to.

On 8 August 1942 Nehru called on the British to ‘Quit India’, launching a major movement, and overnight the top Congress leadership was jailed. They remained in jail for over two years (Nehru himself for two years, ten months) as the war raged in Europe. By the end of 1942, over 60,000 people had been arrested in India.

Churchill was remorseless. ‘I have not become the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,’ he declared.
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The British were using the resources of the Empire to fight the war and hundreds of thousands of Indians were being recruited to the services to fight in Africa, Italy and in the jungles of Eastern India and Burma. Noor was well aware of these developments, as her passionate address to the board made clear.

Unknown to her, even as she was speaking her mind on Indian independence, Indian leaders were being watched by Indian Political Intelligence, the British internal intelligence service MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) which dealt with external intelligence. A section of MI5 running deception, headed in Delhi by the flamboyant Peter Fleming, brother of James Bond creator Ian Fleming, was planting agents and double agents on Indian soil. One of these double agents
¹⁴
was to watch over Nationalist Indian leader Subhas Bose, who had escaped from house arrest in India in 1941 and travelled to Germany where he was trying to get German support for Indian independence.

Against this background of Indian unrest, Noor’s brutally frank answers must have stunned the board. Noor thought she had blown her chances and was upset that she had allowed herself to become emotional. But at the same time she was not one to lie about her beliefs. Vilayat told her the British may like her straightforwardness but Noor was not hopeful that she would get the commission.

On 2 September Vilayat passed his exams for the Navy and received a letter asking him to join HMS
Collingwood
in two weeks. Noor helped him pack and took away all his remaining possessions to Oxford. Around the same time, her friend Joan got engaged, left the post at Abingdon, and went off to Ireland where she settled down with her husband. Noor began to feel lonely. With Vilayat and Joan both gone, she felt she was the only one stuck in a rut in Abingdon. She did not get her commission till several months later but was promoted to Leading Aircraftswoman (LACW) on 1 December 1942.

But things were moving very quickly in another direction for Noor. Unknown to her, while she was working diligently at her Morse, the authorities at Military Intelligence were carefully following her progress.

On 21 October 1942, an internal memo of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) suggested that Noor Inayat Khan, WAAF No. 424598, be called for an interview at 1600 hours on 10/11/42 at Room 238, Hotel Victoria. The brief entry simply said: ‘Has interesting linguistic qualifications which might make her of value for operational purposes.’
¹⁵

The fact that Noor was bilingual, equally at home in French as in English, was of interest to the SOE. They had their own plans for the dreamy writer of children’s stories. Soon Noor received the formal letter inviting her for an interview at the War Office in London. She was to meet a Captain Selwyn Jepson at the Hotel Victoria in Northumberland Avenue on 10 November 1942.

Despite her disagreement with Churchill’s stand on Indian independence, Noor was now heading for a job in a department that had been specially created by Churchill. She was to be recruited as his secret agent in the war against Fascism.

A
fter a year with the WAAF, the shadowy world of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) would be a totally new experience for Noor. The shabby rooms of the Victoria Hotel, where she had to report, belied their importance. In one of the bedrooms on the third floor, the SOE had set up an interview room. It was here that they vetted potential recruits. The stark room consisted of a kitchen table, two hard chairs (one, according to SOE (F-section) chief Maurice Buckmaster, in a ‘permanent state of collapse’), and a naked light bulb. There was the faint smell of disinfectant and very stale shaving soap.

The SOE was born in the summer of 1940 when the Battle of Britain was in full flow. As the RAF clashed daily over the skies of London with the German Luftwaffe, Winston Churchill presided over his War Cabinet in the bunkers below Whitehall, making plans to fight the Germans on the beaches and in the air. But already a small group were plotting a different sort of battle, one that would be unconventional and one that was conceived out of the need to fight the very core of the Nazi regime. Britain was the last country in Europe still facing up to the German military machine. Hitler and the Third Reich had already overrun Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and finally, in June 1940, France. The war had now come to Britain’s door. On 16 July 1940, Hitler signed the Führer’s Directive No. 16, Operation Sealion, for the invasion of Britain.

That same night Churchill summoned his Minister for Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, and told him to ‘set Europe ablaze’. This was to be done by building a new secret service that would sabotage the German war effort and help the resistance fighters in the conquered countries. Dalton defined the mission as: ‘the corrosion of the Nazi and Fascist powers by action from within to be achieved by careful recruitment and training of agents and meticulous planning during a long preliminary period.’
¹
After the fall of France, the government realised that potential allies lay behind enemy lines and could contribute to staving off the invasion and, by general subversion, undermine and destroy the German New Order. Dalton thought this force could be a like a ‘fourth arm’.

Ironically, it was the very person accused of appeasing Hitler, former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who in his role as Lord President of the Privy Council, organised the details. On 19 July 1940 he signed the secret paper which became the founding charter of the SOE. It was Chamberlain’s last important act as he died a few months later on 9 November. The document said: ‘The Prime Minister has further decided … a new organisation shall be established forthwith to co-ordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas … This organisation will be known as the Special Operations Executive.’
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And with that the SOE came into existence. From now on sabotage and subversion would take their place alongside sea blockade and air bombardment as the main devices for bringing Germany down.

The SOE started out in three gloomy rooms on the third floor of St Ermin’s hotel on Caxton Street in the heart of Westminster. Nobody knew quite who the men in the rooms were. Sometimes they said they were from the Admiralty, sometimes the Army or the Air Ministry. Occasionally they described themselves as the Inter-Services Research Bureau or the Joint Technical Board, or Special Training Schools Headquarters, all of which were their cover descriptions.

Soon they took over the three top floors of the hotel. The SOE was answerable only to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Economic Warfare. Its work would be distinct from MI5, which dealt with security at home, and MI6, also known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which gathered intelligence from sources abroad. The SOE was to support the resistance movements in the various occupied countries. Churchill called it the ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ and gave Dalton two directives. First, the SOE was to create and foster the spirit of resistance in Nazi-occupied countries. Second, it was to establish a nucleus of trained men who would be able to assist as a Fifth Column in the liberation of the country. The SOE was an unorthodox organisation created to carry out war by unorthodox means in unorthodox places. According to SOE historian Michael Foot: ‘Nothing quite like it had been seen before and nothing quite like it would be seen again, for the circumstances of Hitler’s war were unique and called out this among other unique responses.’
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Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare, was a man of tremendous energy. He was determined to beat the Nazis at their own game and wanted to organise movements in every occupied country along the lines of the Sinn Fein in Ireland, the Chinese guerrillas fighting the Japanese and the Spanish irregulars who had defeated Napoleon in Spain. His
modus operandi
were to be industrial and military sabotage, labour agitations and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist acts against the German military and leaders, boycotts and riots.

Establishing the new organisation was not without its difficulties. The SOE was not popular with other intelligence services and there were clashes with the SIS. The SIS had reservations about the SOE methods of sabotage and terrorism, as activities like blowing up bridges attracted the attention of the Germans. The SIS preferred to work quietly, blending in with the local population. Stewart Menzies, head of the SIS, thought the SOE consisted of upstarts and amateurs and he recorded his opinion that difficulties would follow if two sets of agents worked independently in the same territory.
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Even RAF Bomber Command and its head, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, is said to have disapproved of the SOE. Harris’s preferred method in the war was bombing the Germans into submission and he did not like to spare his aircraft for clandestine activity. The problem was that the SOE was heavily dependent on the other services. It needed boats from the Admiralty to ferry agents across to the Continent, weapons and ammunition from the Army and aircraft from the RAF to drop agents and supplies. In the early years, most requests were turned down and the SOE had fewer planes, less finance and little equipment with which to ‘set Europe ablaze’. The SOE also had to share the same wireless operators as the SIS and this led to considerable confusion in the early years as messages were sometimes delayed. It was only in 1942 that the SOE acquired the right to build its own sets, use its own codes and run its own network.

These were not problems that would daunt Dalton. He set to work building the core team. The SIS had a dirty-tricks department called Section D (D for destruction) which had thought of imaginative schemes like destroying Romanian oil fields, blocking the Danube and sabotaging iron ore exports from Germany. But these had not yielded results. In the autumn of 1940, D-section was formed into a new department known as SO2 and placed under Dalton. This was done without consulting the SIS chief, Stewart Menzies, which angered him further. There was also a small subdivision of Military Intelligence called MI (R) which was planning paramilitary action. This was transferred to the Ministry of Economic Warfare. A third group attached to the Foreign Office called Electra House, which dabbled in subversive propaganda, was also handed over to Dalton. In the initial years, the SOE fused the work of all three departments and used their resources to get their plans on the road. Interdepartmental rivalry with the SIS remained high.

Dalton, an old Etonian, worked on the old-boy network and recruited many bankers and influential lawyers from Section D. These included Charles Hambro of the banking family, who had powerful connections in Sweden, George Taylor, a ruthless Australian with business interests around the globe, and a banker from Courtaulds. In the early years of SOE it looked very much like a gentleman’s club from the city and legal world. The SOE was divided into three sections – SO1 for propaganda, SO2 for active operations and SO3 for planning.
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By October 1940 it had extended its offices from the grubby St Ermin’s hotel. Although it retained the first three floors of the hotel it now moved its main base to 64 Baker Street, further down the road from 221B, home of the fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Later it took over Norgeby House, 83 Baker Street, and then the top floor of Michael House, the corporate headquarters of Marks & Spencer at 82 Baker Street, which housed the cipher and signals branches. SOE officials from now on came to be known as the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’, borrowing the phrase from Arthur Conan Doyle who used it in his detective stories.
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The SOE had different sections dealing with the occupied countries. It soon established offices around the world from Istanbul and Cairo to Delhi, Algiers, Kandy, Brisbane and New York.

All branches of the SOE had the same aim: aiding resistance movements in occupied countries through acts of sabotage. From Delhi, the SOE sent agents into Burma to counter the Japanese, from Cairo they armed resistance groups in North Africa and Italy. The Balkan theatre covered Yugoslavia, Poland and Romania, the Western European section covered France, Netherlands and Belgium and the Mediterranean theatre covered Greece, Italy and Spain. The SOE in the Far East covered Burma, Malaya, Thailand, French Indo-China, China and Sumatra. In Ceylon, it had a base in Kandy. When the Soviet Union was drawn into the war in July 1941,
⁷
followed by the United States in December of that year, it gave Britain crucial allies and made it possible for it to plan to build up large bodies of armed men behind the enemy lines ready for the day when the Allied armies entered Europe.

The SOE had six sections working in France. The two main ones were F-section and RF section. F-section sent agents trained in London to France to help the Resistance in sabotage activities. Recruits consisted of French-speaking Englishmen and women and people from British protected areas and French-speaking colonies. F-section was entirely British-run. Apart from a few exceptions in the early years, French exiles were recruited not to F-section but to RF section, which backed de Gaulle and worked closely with the Gaullist Free French headquarters in Duke Street. The Gaullist-run RF section consisted almost entirely of French agents and was based at 1 Dorset Square. RF section took their orders jointly from De Gaulle’s staff and from the SOE. Their aim was to disrupt both the Germans and the Vichy regime. There was some rivalry between the F-section and the RF section, as there was between the SOE and MI6. Other branches of the SOE in France consisted of the DF which ran escape routes, EU/P which worked in Polish settlements mostly in France, AMF which operated from Algiers, and the Jedburgh teams. The last were not meant to reach France till the main invasion, Operation Overlord (the Normandy landings), began in June 1944. The main aim of the French section was to prepare the ground for the invasion of France.