Spy Princess (12 page)

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 morning. 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 greatcoats, 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.

A
s 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.

From the window she could see the backs of the houses that lined the railway track. Cramped balconies with washing lines gave way to unkempt gardens, as Londoners found little time to tend their herbaceous borders in the war. Soon the scenery changed and she felt better as the rolling greens of the Surrey countryside unfolded before her.