Rudellat was one of several women working with SOE's largest resistance group in France, led by a charismatic SOE agent named Francis Suttill, whose alias was “Prosper.” Another of Vera s women, Andrée Bor-rel, was Suttill's personal courier and had been praised by Suttill himself as “really in every way the best of all of us.” Before escaping to England in 1942, Andrée had already worked with the resistance, smuggling shot-down Allied airmen out of France. So poor was Suttill's French accent that it was doubtful he could have got his organisation up and running without the savvy Andrée to act as his negotiator. The couple had travelled the length and breadth of central France posing as an agricultural salesman and his assistant but in reality recruiting followers, sabotaging railway lines, and receiving arms drops. Over the first five months of 1943, 240 containers of arms and explosives were dropped to Prosper's cells by aircraft flying from England.
By late May 1943 Vera was preparing two further women to join subcircuits of the Prosper network. One, a Frenchwoman named Vera Leigh, who before the war worked in an haute couture hat shop in Paris, had proved an excellent trainee. “Dead keen” and “the best shot in the group,” said her instructors. However, the second woman due to join Suttill was causing Vera some anxiety; this was the young WAAF officer Nora Inayat Khan.
So large was Suttill's network by now that he had urgently requested a further wireless operator (he already had two) to work with a suborga-niser and to act as backup to his own wireless man. An acute shortage of qualified wireless operators meant that F Section had to pick out a new trainee, and the only one who was even near ready to go was Nora.
Twenty-nine-year-old Nora had a most unusual background. Her father, Hasra Inayat Khan, was descended from the “Tiger of Mysore,” the last Mogul emperor of southern India, which meant Nora was by lineage a princess. Her father had also been a mystic teacher and philosopher who travelled the world spreading the word of Sufism, often taking his family with him. Nora was born in the Kremlin in 1914 as her father happened to be teaching at the Conservatoire in Moscow at the time. Nora's mother, Ora Ray Baker, was a relative of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science Church, and had been born in America of British stock.
Nora's origins, however, were not the concern; SOE agents often had unconventional backgrounds. What mattered to Vera was that Nora could pass herself off as French. This she most certainly could, for her main home as a child had been Paris, where she was educated, studying child psychology at the Sorbonne. After university she became a noted author of children's stories, adapting legends and folklore for children and working on children's programmes for Radio Paris.
However, Nora's “childlike” qualities, particularly her gentle manner and “lack of ruse,” had greatly worried her instructors at SOE's training schools. One instructor wrote that “she confesses that she would not like to have to do anything ‘two faced.' ” Another said Nora was “very feminine in character, very eager to please, very ready to adapt herself to the mood of the company, the tone of the conversation, capable of strong attachments, kind hearted, emotional, imaginative.” A further observer said: “Tends to give far too much information. Came here without the foggiest idea what she was being trained for.”
Later others commented that Nora was also physically unsuited, claiming she was so striking, with her doll-like Eastern looks, that she would not easily disappear into a crowd. Physically tiny, Nora also received poor athletics reports from her instructors: “Can run very well but otherwise clumsy. Unsuitable for jumping.” “Pretty scared of weapons but tries hard to get over it.”
But as Vera pointed out at the time, Nora was training as a wireless operator, and in that field she was getting quite adequate reports. Her “fist,” or style of tapping the keys, was somewhat heavy, apparently owing to her fingers being swollen by chilblains, but her speed was improving every day. Like many talented musicians—she played the harp—Nora was a natural signaller. Furthermore, insisted Vera, her commitment was unquestioned, as another training report had readily confirmed: “She felt she had come to a dead end as a WAAF, and was longing to do something more active in the prosecution of the war, something which would demand more sacrifice.”
So when Suttill's request first came, Vera saw Nora as a natural choice, and although her final training in field security and encoding had to be cut short, she judged her ready to go.
Nora's new identity, or cover story, in France would simply have to be made to match her outwardly gentle character, said Vera. And by the time Nora came back to Orchard Court for her final briefings in May 1943, Vera had devised a cover story for Nora as Jeanne-Marie Renier, whose profession would be that of children's nurse.
Buckmaster wholeheartedly agreed with Vera that Nora should go to France and was furious when the commander of B Group Special Training Schools said in his final report on Nora: “Not over-burdened with brains” and “it is very doubtful whether she is really suited to the work in the field.”
“We don't want them over burdened with brains,” wrote Buckmaster on the report; “nonsense… makes me cross.”
And yet in Vera's view, Nora had always been something of a special case. Her mission would be a particularly dangerous one, precisely because she was going not as a courier but as a wireless operator. Nora was in fact the first woman wireless operator to be sent by SOE to France. So successful had the women couriers been that a decision was taken in early 1943 to use women also as wireless operators, which was even more dangerous work, probably the most dangerous work of all.
The job of a wireless, or W/T (wireless telegraphy), operator was to maintain a link between the circuit in the field and London, sending and receiving messages about planned sabotage operations or about where arms were needed for resistance fighters. Without such communication it was almost impossible for any resistance strategy to be coordinated, but the operators were highly vulnerable to detection. Hiding themselves as best they could, with aerials strung up in attics or disguised as washing lines, they tapped out Morse on the keys of transmitters, often for hours and usually alone, as they waited for a signal in reply saying the messages were received. If they stayed on the air for more than twenty minutes, their signals were likely to be picked up by the enemy, and detection vans would then trace the source of these suspect signals.
When the signaller moved location, the bulky transmitter had to be carried, sometimes hidden in a suitcase or in a bundle of firewood. If stopped and searched, the operator would have no cover story to explain the transmitter. In 1943 an operator's life expectancy was six weeks.
But it was not only the special danger of Nora's mission that had caused Vera extra anxiety in this agent's case. Nora had also been harder to get to know than any of the other women; she had been harder to fathom. This unusually self-contained young woman had been brought up in an intensely spiritual way. There was something, as Vera saw it, “otherworldly” about her. This impression was conveyed not only by her looks and manner but also by her thin, quavering, pipelike voice. And as Vera had noticed during their first meetings, Nora's powerful bonds with her family were particularly hard to break. Nora's mother was a widow by the time the war started and was highly dependent on her, the eldest of four children. Furthermore, Nora had a special bond with her elder brother, Vilayat. By early May, when the decision was taken to send Nora to France, Vera's concerns had been allayed, but just as final preparations for the agent's departure were beginning, her anxieties were once again aroused.
In midmonth Nora parted from her family in London for the last time. She had been staying at a country house in Buckinghamshire, a place where agents had a final chance to adjust to their new identities and consider their missions before departure. Vera was in touch with the agents at this time through their conducting officer, a companion—female in the case of women—who watched over them in training, reporting on their progress to Vera in London.
Nora's conducting officer had told Vera that Nora had descended in
to a gloom and was clearly troubled by the thought of what she was about to undertake. Then two fellow agents staying with Nora at the country house had written directly to Vera to say they felt she should not go. Such an intervention at this late stage was most unusual. Vera decided to call Nora back to London, to meet and talk. They arranged to meet for lunch at Manetta's, a restaurant in Clarges Street, Mayfair. Manetta's was the kind of place Vera liked to meet: it was lively but had secluded corners.
Vilayat Inayat Khan remembered trying to stop his sister going on her mission at exactly the time of the meeting at Manetta's. I spoke to him at the family home in Suresnes, near Paris. Nora's harp sat in a corner.
“You see, Nora and I had been brought up with the policy of Gandhi's nonviolence, and at the outbreak of war we discussed what we would do,” said Vilayat, who had followed his father and become a mystic. “She said, ‘Well, I must do something, but I don't want to kill anyone.' So I said, ‘Well, if we are going to join the war, we have to involve ourselves in the most dangerous positions, which would mean no killing.'
“Then, when we eventually got to England, I volunteered for mine-sweeping and she volunteered for SOE, and so I have always had a feeling of guilt because of what I said that day.”
“Might you have been able to stop her?” I asked.
He said no, though in May 1943, when he was on leave, she came suddenly to him and showed him a pill that, if she was captured, she should take to commit suicide, and “I was shattered, shattered. I knew what it meant. I said, ‘No, no this is going too far. Let's go and say you are not going to do it anymore.' She said, ‘I can't do that,' but I think she was very disturbed.”
I asked Vilayat if Nora ever talked about the people she was working with or the job she was going to do. “No, because it would have broken her code, but somehow it all came through to me to some extent. I knew she was landing in France, and I was scared stiff. And I was aware of new people in her life, somehow controlling her. I was aware of their presence. And I learned later, of course, that she had been given this code by Vera Atkins and the others to withdraw and say nothing and so on. But it was so difficult for her to be secretive with me. I could read right through her. I would not say that she betrayed her code, but I could read through what she was saying. That was her whole teaching.
“Have you read her stories: Jataka Tales?” he asked, referring to one of the books Nora wrote for children. “It is all about a man who cannot lie.”
Did he remember Vera Atkins?
Yes, of course, he said, he had met her when the war was over. “I would have said she had short hair maybe, or it was pinned up. Was it? And I remember her as elegant. Not pretty, but she looked distinguished. She was not charming but rather remarkable in her way.”
When Vera arrived at Manetta's, Nora was already there waiting. Vera ushered her downstairs, where red leather seats lined the wall. She did not wish to unsettle Nora in any way or give the impression that she or Buckmaster had any doubts about her. But she did wish to talk about the worries she had heard.
Above all else she wished to confirm that Nora believed in her own ability to succeed. Confidence was the most important thing for any agent. However poor Nora's jumping or even her encoding, Vera knew that those agents who did well were those who knew before they set off that they could do the job. Her intention was to let Nora feel that she had an opportunity to back out gracefully should she so wish. Vera began by asking if she was happy in what she was doing. Nora looked startled and said: “Yes, of course.”
Vera then told her of the letter she had received and what was said in it. Nora was upset that anyone should think she was not fit for the job. “You know that if you have any doubts, it is not too late to turn back,” Vera said. “If you don't feel you're the type—if for any reason whatever you don't want to go—you only have to tell me now. I'll arrange everything so that you have no embarrassment. You will be transferred to another branch of the service with no adverse mark on your file. We have every respect for the man or woman who admits frankly to not feeling up to it.” She ended by adding: “For us there is only one crime: to go out there and let your comrades down.”
Nora insisted adamantly that she wanted to go and was competent for the work. Her only concern, she said, was her family, and Vera sensed immediately that this was, as she had suspected, where the problem lay.
Nora had found saying goodbye to her mother the most painful thing she had ever had to do, she said. As Vera had advised her, she had told her mother only half the truth: she had said she was going abroad, but to Africa, and she had found maintaining this deliberate deception cruel.
Vera asked if there was anything she could do to help with family matters. Nora said that, should she go missing, she would like Vera to avoid worrying her mother as far as possible. The normal procedure, as Nora knew, was that when an agent went to the field, Vera would send out periodic “good news” letters to the family, letting them know that the person concerned was well. If the agent went missing, the family would be told so. What Nora was suggesting was that bad news should be broken to her mother only if it was beyond any doubt that she was dead. Vera said she would agree to this arrangement if it was what Nora really wanted. With these assurances Nora seemed content and confident once more. And doubts in Vera's mind were also now settled.
Vera always accompanied the women agents to the departure airfields, if she possibly could. Those who were not dropped into France by parachute were flown there in Lysanders, which were short-winged monoplanes and light enough to land on very small fields. The planes were met by a “reception committee” made up of SOE agents on the ground and local French helpers. The reception committees were alerted to the imminent arrival of the plane by a BBC action message inserted as a message personnel; these were broadcast across France every evening, mostly for ordinary listeners wishing to contact friends or family separated by war. The messages broadcast for SOE, agreed in advance between HQ and the circuit organiser, usually by wireless signal, sounded like odd greetings or sometimes aphorisms—“Le hibou n'est pas un éléphant” (The owl is not an elephant)—but the reception committee on the ground would know that the message meant a particular operation would now take place. “Roméo embrasse Juliette,” for example, might mean a Lysander flight was coming in that night.
Nora was to fly by Lysander with the June moon to a field near Angers, from where she would make her way to Paris to link up with the leader of a Prosper subcircuit named Emile Garry, or Cinema, an alias chosen because of his uncanny resemblance to the film star Gary Cooper.
Once on the ground, Nora would also make contact with the Prosper organiser, Francis Suttill, and take on her new persona as the children's nurse Jeanne-Marie Renier, using fake papers in that name. To her SOE colleagues, however, she would be known simply by her alias, which was to be Madeleine.
There were two Lysanders leaving that June night in 1943. Also departing would be two other women: Diana Rowden, who was going out as a courier to the Jura area in the east of France, and Cicely Lefort, who would be doing the same for the Jockey circuit in the southeast, as well as an agent named Charles Skepper, who was going to Marseille.
Two open-topped cabriolets took the group to the airfield at Tang-mere, near the Sussex coast east of Chichester. It was a gorgeous afternoon, and the hedgerows were smothered in dog roses. Nora hardly talked on the journey, and to Vera she appeared serene.
By the time they reached the cottage at Tangmere that was used as a base for the pilots—members of the so-called “Moon Squadron”—night had fallen, and inside the cottage supper was being prepared. Places were laid along two trestle tables in front of bare, whitewashed stone walls. Part of the cottage had once been a chapel, and random numbers around the walls were thought to have denoted the Stations of the Cross.
After the meal Squadron Leader Hugh Verity, the genial head of Lysander operations, led the group into another small living room, which had been converted into an ope
rations room. On a table were a black telephone and a green scrambler, and on one wall was a large map of France bearing red marks, mostly over the coast, which Verity explained were high-risk areas for flak.
Vera and the three agents pulled up chairs as Verity started his briefing. The weather forecast, just telephoned in from the Met Office, was fair, with a slight risk of mist at ground level. Verity indicated the flight path on the map and showed the agents a photograph of the landing field, three kilometres north-northwest of Angers, that had been taken by an RAF photo reconnaissance unit. It showed a tiny open space surrounded by woods and a river looping towards the southern end. Verity explained that, from their seats under the glass hood of the plane, they would be able to follow the loops of the Loire, which on a clear night like this would be lit up by the moon. They would be surprised how quickly they got used to the moonlight, he said, and it was quite adequate for reading a map—or even for finding the hip flask of whisky stowed in front of their seat. Verity always tried to relax the “Joes,” as the SOE passengers were called. Nobody was allowed to know their names. And as he talked, Vera constantly watched for signs of nerves in her agents, observing just the occasional shaking cigarette.
After the briefing Vera said a few words. Air Ops in London had called to say that the BBC message announcing their arrival had already gone out, which meant the reception committee would be in place. She then took each agent to one side, to go over cover stories one last time and to carry out her final checks of their clothes and equipment.
Sarah Helm Page 4