The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish

To Jacques and our children,
Olivier, Hervé, Marie-France, Yves-Michel and Christophe

Foreword by Paddy Ashdown

Acknowledgements

SOE Organization

Prologue

PART ONE
Secret Lives and Loves in War-torn Britain

PART TWO
The Aftermath of War, the Dream – and the Reality

Epilogue

Roll of Honour

SOE F Section circuits in France

A few years ago, I was researching my book,
A Brilliant Little Operation,
about Operation Frankton, the top-secret raid on German ships in Bordeaux harbour in 1942.
I’d grown up on the extraordinary story of the ‘Cockleshell heroes’. Indeed, without them I would never have served in the Special Boat Service, which was formed in the aftermath
of their exploits. But what I discovered was that, at the same time as the marines were carrying out their attack, an SOE team of six British officers was a hundred yards away in a café
about to do the same thing. I was intrigued and wanted to find out more. In the course of uncovering this extraordinary story, someone suggested I should contact Noreen Riols, one of the few people
still alive who was actually involved in the SOE. I fell in love with her immediately, read her previous books and told her that she should write another about her life. She replied she was already
doing just that – and here it is!

Today, Noreen is a charming white-haired grandmother with a remarkable twinkle in her green eyes, and a wonderfully witty raconteur. But in the 1940s, still in her teens, she was a key member of
SOE. As one of the few surviving members of F Section, her knowledge of the organization and its operations was crucial in helping me understand exactly how Operation Frankton came about.

Perhaps it is her nature, perhaps it is the training which filters into the operative’s DNA; Noreen has always downplayed her role in SOE. She is being far too modest. Without people like
Noreen the SOE would not have achieved what it did. Her primary, although not unique, task was to be a decoy girl (she is the last living decoy) – testing potential agents, deploying
clandestinely to France, on their cover stories. This was vitally important because if they got it wrong they, and others, would die. Noreen played other roles in the organization, including the
delivery of the weird and wonderful coded messages that were broadcast by the BBC every evening to tell agents that operations were ‘on’, training new agents in the not always gentle
art of espionage, despatching them off on their missions and helping to debrief them on their return. She and the others worked tirelessly and often at personal cost.

SOE was acknowledged by no less a man than Eisenhower as having played a key part in the winning of the war on the western front which began in France on D-Day. Without it, and all those who
worked for it, the Second World War might have ended very differently. I am, therefore, delighted that Noreen has finally agreed to write a memoir of her experiences during the war. Like her, it is
witty, vivid and unsentimental, and it is also a story of remarkable courage and determination.

Paddy Ashdown,
May 2013
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon

Very special thanks to my dear friend Elspeth Forbes-Robertson, who, with endless patience, answered my calls for help and correction, researched and always promptly came up
with the right answer and also checked the finished manuscript at least three times in order to detect any lapses of memory’ on my part; to my great friend Lizzy Buchan, who not only
introduced me to my agent Andrew Lownie, for which I shall be eternally grateful, but also ‘pushed’ me to write this book; last but certainly not least, to Georgina Morley and her
wonderful team at Pan Macmillan, whose help and enthusiasm brought these pages to life; and, as always, to Jacques, my husband, who has encouraged and supported me throughout. To all of them, a
very big thank you.

In June 1940 France fell, and a great slice of Europe was now in German hands. With Soviet Russia as his ally, Hitler was confident that the collapse of Britain was imminent
and that a German invasion of the island would be a mere formality. But he hadn’t bargained for the bulldog spirit of Winston Churchill, that visionary who had predicted the threat of German
aggression seven years earlier. At that time, he and Anthony Eden had been lone voices crying in the wilderness, for the most part ignored or scorned by the British parliament. But in May 1940
Neville Chamberlain, who had naively believed Hitler’s promises of non-aggression, was forced to resign and Churchill succeeded him as prime minister. Almost immediately he defiantly
declared, ‘We will never surrender.’ His determination fired and inspired the British nation throughout the war.

Churchill understood from the very beginning that this war was going to be different from any other war Britain had ever fought. Only he had the foresight to see that the soft-shoe approach of
MI6, the official intelligence service, would no longer be effective. The gentlemanly warfare Britain had always fought was not possible: that age was over, and only ungentle-manly schemes would
succeed. Influenced by the German infiltration of agents into Europe during the 1930s – which had been so successful that almost every foreigner in Britain was suspected of being a
‘fifth columnist’ – Churchill called upon his close advisers to immediately organize such an army’, a subversive guerrilla force, responsible directly – and only
– to him. The Special Operations Executive, also known as Churchill’s ‘Secret Army’, was born, and its first leader, Hugh Dalton, was instructed by Churchill to ‘to
set Europe ablaze’.

Its founding was not the subject of parliamentary approval. Its budget and its very existence were secret: indeed secrecy became SOE’s code, and its officers used aliases when attending
government or other business meetings. SOE was a shadow world in which truth, as Churchill said, had to be protected by a bodyguard of lies. This secret army was to cover every occupied European
country and, working behind the Germans’ back, carry out acts of sabotage and disrupt their means of communication. It would be Churchill’s ‘fourth fighting force’, along
with the Navy, the Army and the Air Force. To be sure of victory, Churchill needed an army of ‘bandits’, to use MI6’s derogatory name for the SOE. And they were right: we were
trained to be bandits.

SOE was destined to fight a war on three fronts. It had not only Germany as an enemy, but also General de Gaulle and MI6. Often in a war there are ‘minor’ wars being fought beneath
the surface. The enmity – often bitter, even destructive – between SOE and General de Gaulle could be described as one of these ‘minor’ wars.

As the only woman survivor in France of SOE’s F (for France) Section, I am often asked to share my memories with various audiences in both France and England. I always accept these
invitations, since I consider it not only my duty, but also my privilege to tell the story of the courage and dedication of so many unsung heroes and heroines, many of whom I knew personally, who
fought clandestinely for France, and for freedom.

When SOE’s secret files were opened to the public in the year 2000, the media and many historians were drawn to the subject. Since then, I have been interviewed by both print and broadcast
journalists, all eager to know, from a former recruit, what happened ‘in the shadows’ during the war years.

Countless stories have been written and many films and documentaries made on SOE operations in occupied Europe. But, as far as I know, very little has been told of how these operations were
organized back in England. I was part of them, sharing many tense moments with agents not only before they were infiltrated behind the lines into enemy territory, but also on their return from
these missions. One of the highlights of my time in SOE was having the opportunity to meet so many men and women, both pilots and agents, who were totally dedicated to their high-risk missions, and
to witness their amazing achievements, mostly unknown outside the ‘racket’, and, even today, often unrecognized.

According to a Latin motto, ‘spoken words vanish, but written words remain’. Since a number of friends and journalists have asked me to record my secret experiences within SOE, I
have finally yielded to these requests – and this is my story.

Many of those who have heard my story ask me what happened afterwards. At their insistence, I have also recalled my life in war-torn England – and my post-war experience working for the
BBC World Service. There I found a similarly elite and fascinating group of people as those I had known within SOE and, as I had done during those war years, I learned so much in both those
inspiring environments.

My narrative is therefore divided into two parts: the war years and SOE in Part 1 and the post-war dream – and reality – in Part 2. The book ends seventy years after the war began
with a ceremony of remembrance at Valençay, a small town in the Loire Valley. Each year, on 6 May, we gather there in front of the memorial erected to commemorate and honour the memory of
the 104 F Section agents, fifteen of them women, who did not return. Through this annual commemoration, we hope to pass the flame on to the next generation and so keep alive not only the memory
but, through that memory, the spirit of those young men and women who gave their lives so that we might live in freedom today.

My mother thought I was working for the Ministry of Ag. and Fish. She died in 1974, just before her eightieth birthday, without ever learning the truth, and she wasn’t the
only one, because all those who worked for SOE, Churchill’s Secret Army, were subject to the Official Secrets Act. It wasn’t until sixty years later, in 2000, that the British
government opened these secret files to the general public. Immediately the media in all its forms pounced on the few survivors still upright, and the questions they most frequently asked me were:
‘How were you recruited?’ ‘Why were you recruited?’ ‘Who suggested you?’ I’d really like to know! Even after all these years, I still haven’t the
faintest idea who recruited me, or why.