Authors: Shrabani Basu
Pressed further by Marks, the instructor described her father as a ‘crackpot’ and head of a mystical sect who had founded the House of Blessing in Paris where Noor spent her childhood. They all agreed at Beaulieu that the ‘crackpot father’ was responsible for her eccentric behaviour.
‘Do you know what the bastard taught her? That the worst sin she could commit was to lie about anything,’ the instructor told Marks helpfully. He also told Marks about an incident that underlined just how unpredictable and ingenuous Noor could be. Once when Beaulieu had sent her on a radio exercise, and she was cycling towards her safe house to practise transmitting, a policeman stopped her and asked what she was doing. ‘I’m training to be an agent,’ she said. ‘Here’s my radio – want me to show it to you?’ She then removed it from its hiding place and invited him to try it.
The instructor also related how after Noor’s mock interrogation by Bristol police, the superintendent in charge told Spooner not to waste his time with her ‘because if this girl’s an agent, I’m Winston Churchill’.
Marks prepared himself for a daunting meeting with the Indian princess. In the meantime he read each of the twenty stories from the
Jataka Tales
twice and knew one of them by heart. It was a story about a monkey chief who led 80,000 monkeys to their freedom by sacrificing himself and offering his body as a bridge. The monkeys were trying to flee the wicked king Brahmadatta. But one of the monkeys jumped so hard that he broke the monkey chief’s back. The story was about sacrifice and how the monkey was happy to sacrifice himself to save the others. Even the wicked king learnt that ultimately it is love that conquers.
‘Oh, Noor. What the hell are you doing in SOE?’ thought Marks.
Marks had anticipated he would conduct the briefing with an air of detachment, but when Noor entered the room, he was thrown. ‘As soon as I glimpsed the slender figure seated at a desk in the Orchard Court briefing room I knew that the only thing likely to be detached was one (if not both) of my eyeballs. No one had mentioned Noor’s extraordinary beauty,’ wrote Marks.
Marks asked her to compose a message of at least 250 letters and encode it for transmission. Noor got to work immediately writing the message in French but then spent 5 minutes changing it. She gave a satisfied smile at the end and completely forgot to encode it. Marks gently reminded her that London was waiting for the transmission. She apologised profusely and produced a poem code from her handbag. She told him it was her own poem and began to work on the encoding. After a shaky start she suddenly changed gear and finished her first transposition faster than any agent Marks had briefed. She handed it over with a pleased smile but forgot that she hadn’t finished encoding the rest of the message. Again she apologised, but completed the rest in under 10 minutes (again faster than anyone Marks had seen).
He then asked her to decode it herself. She took 20 minutes to do that. When Marks examined the worksheets he found she had made a number of mistakes. Noor looked as if she was close to tears. ‘You’ve made fewer mistakes than most,’ he told her, ‘but those you have made are very inventive.’ That made her feel a bit better.
Marks then decided to tackle ‘the princess’ in her own style. Basing his words on her stories, he told her: ‘Coded messages have one thing in common with monkeys: If you jump too hard on them you’ll break their backs – and that’s what you have done to this one. I doubt if Brahmadatta himself could decipher it, I know my monkeys in the code room couldn’t,’ Marks told Noor.
Noor looked up in surprise. ‘You’ve read my book,’ she said.
Marks recalled that the ‘intensity of her look reduced him to chutney’. He told her he had enjoyed it and it had taught him a lot. And then he told Noor that she had told him a lie, and made the code tell a lie.
Noor sprang to her feet and exclaimed, ‘I’ve
what
?’ The word ‘lie’ had had the desired effect. The Beaulieu instructor had been right after all. Marks tackled her. ‘You have given the wrong indicator-group. What else is that but a lie?’
‘I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ replied Noor.
Marks went through her work and said there were six lies and one half-truth. He said it would take 10,000 attempts before Colonel Buckmaster could read the message, to which Noor whispered, ‘Oh no.’
Marks then told the despairing agent: ‘I believe your Jataka Tales could help you to become a very good coder.’
Noor looked up in astonishment. ‘How?’
He replied:
Every time you encode a message think of the letters in it as monkeys trying to cross the bridge between Paris and London. If they fall off, they’ll be caught and shot … but they can’t cross by themselves, and if you don’t help them by guiding them slowly and methodically, one step at a time, giving them all your thoughts and all your protection, they’ll never reach the other side. When there’s a truth to pass on, don’t let your code tell lies.
Noor asked if she could try again. She now encoded at half her previous speed (which was still faster than most) and copied out the code-groups carefully. She ran her fingers across the messages as if searching for injuries before giving them to Marks. Both were perfect.
‘Thank you, thank you – but will it be all right if I think about pigs sometimes?’ she asked Marks. (One of her stories was about two piglets named Mahatundila and Cullatindila.) Marks told her that she must do whatever helped to cross that bridge and then asked her if she was sure she could keep it up.
‘Mr Marks, I promise you I will,’ she said.
Noor asked Marks what he wanted do after the war. He told her he planned to write a play, and she expressed such interest in this that he found himself discussing it with her, even though it had nothing to do with the purpose of their meeting. The play was about a girl who couldn’t laugh. She had stopped laughing at the age of five and was now eighteen. Many attempts had been made to get her to laugh, but nothing worked. Then one day she saw a dirty old tramp and burst out laughing. He was brought into the house and she found him even funnier. But the tramp refused to stay because he didn’t like being laughed at.
The tramp decided to find out what had stopped her from laughing. He discovered that someone had inflicted enormous pain on her. But the moment the tramp discovered this, the girl was cured. Ironically, the moment she was cured, she saw the tramp for what he was – a dirty old vagrant – and he had to go.
Noor thought the story was sad and funny and hoped that the tramp would go away without letting the girl know how much she owed to him. She asked Marks if the play had a title. Looking at Noor, Marks immediately thought of the title: ‘The Girl Who Couldn’t Quite!’
Noor told Marks that she was sure lots of people would come to see the play and promised that she would come if she could. It left Marks hoping that she would fail her test so she would not have to be sent to the field.
Then it was time for Noor to learn her security checks, the all-important means by which the SOE would know whether her radio messages were genuine or not. Marks realised he might have another uphill battle about ‘not having to lie’. Noor had used her security checks correctly, but she may not have realised that she would have to lie about them if caught.
‘Why should I do that?’ Noor asked. Marks explained that if she told the Germans the real check then they would pretend they were her and send messages to England in her name, thereby lying to England.
‘But there’s a better way. Suppose that I refused to tell them anything at all – no matter how often they ask?’ said Noor. Marks realised that she would rather die than tell a lie. To get around this problem, he gave Noor a security check that was completely new and said she would not have to lie about it because no one but Noor and he would know about it. ‘All you have to do is remember one thing. Never use a key phrase with eighteen letters in it – any other number but not eighteen. If you use eighteen, I’ll know you’ve been caught.’
‘Eighteen’s my lucky number,’ said Noor. ‘Yes, I could do that. And I promise you not to forget it. I promise you, Mr Marks.’
Marks wasn’t taking any chances with Noor, however. He told her to encode three messages at least 200 letters long and have them ready for him by midday next day. She had to include her true and bluff checks. When he left the room, Noor was saying to herself: ‘I mustn’t use a key phrase eighteen letters long’, and reaching for her pencil.
Marks was still hoping that she would fail the test so he could give her a bad report. Noor’s beauty and sensitivity had captivated him. He did not want to expose this delicate person to the Gestapo, possible torture and death. But Noor encoded six new messages and every one of her monkeys crossed the bridge securely, including her security checks. She numbered a key phrase eighteen letters long and handed it to Marks proudly.
On 10 June Leo Marks reluctantly gave the full go-ahead to Noor and sent the report to Maurice Buckmaster. He remembered his meeting with Noor all his life.
The Girl Who Couldn’t Quite!
was performed at the St Martin’s Theatre in 1948.
The next few days were a rush for Noor. Paris needed her urgently and it was just a few days till the next full moon.
The week before she left, Noor was brought to the flat at Orchard Court, manned by the famous butler Parks, where agents stayed before they left on their missions. The flat had a black-tiled bathroom that became quite a legend in the service. Often agent Peter Churchill would be seen here, fully dressed in a suit, sitting in the empty bath with his feet resting over the taps doing
The Times
crossword. At other times an agent might be found perched on the side of the bath going over the last details of his or her cover story.
The time the agents spent at Orchard Court was a brief period of luxury before their gruelling, dangerous stints in the field. Here the last checks were made, cover story rechecked, details pored over. The agents were given the latest news from France and their own specialist operations. If a certain operator was suspected of working for the Germans they were told to take appropriate action against him.
Parks presided over Orchard Court with skill. He was a former messenger at the Paris branch of the Westminster Bank and he had an excellent memory. He knew every agent by their training pseudonym and made each one feel welcome when they came to the flat for their last briefing. Parks knew exactly how to ensure that the agents did not bump into one another during their time in the flat. It was SOE policy to discourage the agents from meeting in the field, and the best way to do this was to make sure they did not meet too much in England. It was particularly important for agents never to tell anyone where in occupied France they were going. As it was highly likely that two agents who were due to go into the field would discuss this if they met in the flat, Parks had to make sure they never had the opportunity to do so.
Parks somehow managed to spirit people from room to room with complete delicacy. Sometimes he even spirited them into the bathroom. This might have become somewhat inconvenient for the visitors at the flat but the agents knew why Parks had to do it, and the genial butler was very popular with F-section.
At Orchard Court, where the walls were covered with maps of France and Paris, the agent was given suitable clothes to match his or her cover story. Maurice Buckmaster did not favour his agents carrying any spy devices: no hollow pens, false-bottomed briefcases or detachable heels. He thought these were on the whole more risky, as discovery by the German Abwehr would certainly lead to imprisonment or death. It was easier for an agent to bluff his way if he were found without any incriminating evidence and gadgets. It was better to carry a message in a folded newspaper. In a tight spot it could be discarded. It was, of course, best if the agent simply memorised messages and instructions.
Appearance was most important and a thorough check on French mannerisms and style was crucial. If the hairstyle was not suitably French, it had to be changed. If the agent had an English-style dental filling, then that would have to be replaced by an expensive-looking gold plug as was usual on the Continent.
All the agents’ clothes were specially tailored by Claudi Pulver, a refugee from Vienna, who put her design skills to use and tailored clothes for the agents in the European style. Shirts, skirts, even underwear was stitched in the most meticulous Continental style after careful research into clothes brought in by refugees. Sometimes spare French clothes brought by refugees and agents were reissued. Noor had to go to the showroom in Margaret Street to be fitted for her clothes.
The collars, the cuffs, and most importantly the labels were carefully checked. All laundry instructions had to be removed. An English label could give the game away, as could a wrongly sewn button, or the style of the collar. Name-tabs of tailors in the arrondissement of the Etoile were sewn in. A Jewish German tailor who had escaped the Nazis was also recruited. He could look at a suit and say whether it came from Czechoslovakia, Italy, Spain or Germany. For agents going to Germany, he made German-style suits and then aged them, since few people in Germany were wearing new suits. The clothes also had to be suitable for the person’s cover story. Noor, playing a nurse, needed a few simple dresses.
Every caution had to be taken to see that the cover story was watertight. If the agent had a slight trace of a foreign accent, the cover story would be made up to suit it. So if a person had a slight Canadian accent then a Canadian background would be worked into the cover story. Sometimes a Belgian accent would merit a story about Belgian education or childhood in Brussels.
Cover stories were meticulously checked and rechecked. The identities were created from places where the town halls had been bombed or destroyed and the records scattered. Sometimes an obscure town overseas which was in French possession was given as the birthplace, so it would be nearly impossible to check the details. Considerable research was done on the background. Aunts, uncles, whole families were all woven into the cover story and were located in districts where search was difficult or impossible. Real streets and real house numbers were always used. These were found with the help of French post office guides and telephone books.