by Lynne Olson
But, when no torture occurred, he dropped the idea of suicide and began thinking about escape. His tiny room, which used to be a maid’s room, contained only a bed and a chair. A six-foot-tall ventilation shaft, looking like a square chimney, was topped by a large skylight that opened onto the roof. The bottom of the shaft was barred.
Faye had already proved to be a master of escape. He had done so twice before, including his dramatic flight from a Vichy prison in late 1942 in which he climbed down a sixty-foot rope to the ground. As he examined his room on avenue Foch more closely, he realized that with a screwdriver or other simple tool, he could probably loosen and remove the bars covering the ventilation shaft. Once that was done, he was physically fit enough, he thought, to stand on a chair under the skylight and hoist himself up to the roof.
Even if he got that far, however, other obstacles awaited him. Because he had refused to cooperate with the SD, he had never been allowed into other parts of the house, with the exception of the interrogation room, so he had no idea of its layout. Nor did he know anything about the neighboring houses and streets, including how heavily they were guarded.
Deciding he needed partners to help with his escape plan, he found two SOE agents who were interested. The first was in the room next to his—a young woman with whom he communicated by tapping out messages in Morse code on the wall separating them. She was Noor Inayat Khan, a twenty-six-year-old former Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) officer who, after the war, would be one of SOE’s most celebrated operatives.
Petite and slender, with a soft, high-pitched voice, Noor was the offspring of an American mother and a father who came from Indian Muslim nobility. She grew up in Paris, where she studied piano at the Paris Conservatory under the famed composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger. But her great love was writing, and by the time the war broke out, she had begun to make a name for herself by creating and broadcasting children’s stories. In 1940, she and her brother left Paris for England to join the war effort.
NOOR INAYAT KHAN
By all accounts, the quiet, gentle Noor was an unlikely secret agent. An SOE colleague who trained with her described her as “a splendid, vague, dreamy creature, far too conspicuous—once seen, never forgotten,” who had “no sense of security” and should never have been sent to France. In a fitness report, one of her instructors wrote that she “tends to give far too much information. Came here without the foggiest idea what she was being trained for.” The officer in charge of instructing her and other would-be operatives in survival tactics wrote that she was “temperamentally unsuitable” to be an agent and would be a major security risk in the field. He based that judgment in part on a mock interrogation of Noor by a Bristol police superintendent, whose force worked with SOE. After the interrogation, the superintendent informed the agency that “if this girl’s an agent, I’m Winston Churchill.”
Despite all the warnings, Noor’s training was cut short, and she was dispatched to France on June 16, 1943, as a wireless operator—the most dangerous job an agent could have. Her superiors acknowledged that she didn’t measure up in many ways but that it “was necessary, for overriding reasons of shortages of specialists—particularly wireless operators—to stretch a point in favor of a candidate.”
She arrived in Paris just days before the Gestapo roundup of hundreds of resistance members belonging to the Prosper network. Noor eluded the German dragnet, and, as one of the few SOE agents still free, she became virtually overnight one of its foremost operatives and the Gestapo’s most wanted British agent in Paris. Even though her sense of security had not noticeably improved, she managed to remain free throughout the summer and early fall, transmitting regularly to London. Then, in early October, SOE instructed her to link up with a circuit that was actually being run by the Germans. When she did so, she was promptly arrested by Gestapo agents, who acquired not only her transmitter but a notebook on her bedside table in which she had recorded every message she had received and sent since arriving in France.
Once in custody, however, she showed far more courage and mental toughness than most of her male counterparts. Within hours of her arrival at avenue Foch, she tried to escape by climbing out a bathroom window but found herself on a narrow ledge with no place to go. Her guards located her within minutes and dragged her inside. During her interrogations, she refused to cooperate, refusing all Kieffer’s blandishments and remaining stubbornly silent. “She told us nothing of value,” Kieffer told Allied officers after the war. “We could not rely on anything she said.”
Although Faye had no knowledge of her background, he was impressed by how fearless Noor seemed to be in her communication with him. When he told her about his plan to escape, she replied that she had already attempted to do so and couldn’t wait to try again. She suggested that they recruit another prisoner, an SOE agent named John Starr, whose room was opposite hers and with whom she was also communicating. Starr had heard her crying soon after she arrived and slipped a note under her door saying that if she wished to get in touch with him, she could do so through messages hidden in certain places in the communal lavatory.
Noor said that Starr, who had been a graphic artist before the war, would be helpful because he was doing some work for Kieffer as a draftsman, which allowed him to move freely about the house. As a result, he was familiar with its layout and perhaps that of surrounding buildings.
As it happened, Starr’s cooperation with the Germans extended far beyond drafting work—a fact that Noor did not know. Arrested in Dijon during the roundup of the Prosper network, he had spent several weeks in prison there and then at Fresnes before being sent to avenue Foch. Having experienced brutal treatment and near-starvation rations at both places, he was delighted by the leniency he found in Paris.
Starr showed his willingness to cooperate during his first interrogation by Kieffer, who showed him a large map of all the SOE circuits in France and asked him to outline on the map the area covered by his section in Dijon. He did so with what Kieffer thought was great precision and artistry, and the SD chief asked him to redraw the entire map. Starr readily agreed, and after he’d finished, Kieffer assigned him more graphics work. In effect, said the historian Sarah Helms, he became “Kieffer’s artist in residence,” which included painting the portraits of top-ranking SD officials, including Kieffer himself.
Starr’s cooperation became outright collaboration when he agreed to copyedit the English text of the false messages being sent to SOE as part of avenue Foch’s “radio game.” “It was he who corrected various spelling and editing mistakes for me and showed me the proper [English] way to write a technical report,” noted Josef Goetz, who headed avenue Foch’s radio playback operation. Starr also translated BBC French news reports for the Germans.
SOE agents who arrived after Starr at avenue Foch were astonished by his obvious friendliness with his captors. “The Gestapo boys are quite decent when you get to know them,” he told Brian Stonehouse, an agent who’d been arrested in Lyon. Another colleague, Harry Peulevé, later said of Starr, “His presence was unfortunate in that it may have been used to give confidence to newly arrested agents that they would be well treated. In fact Starr was used by the Germans as a living example of the way in which they would keep their word.” His cozy relationship with the Germans prompted newcomers to cooperate as well. To other SOE operatives, Starr justified his work with the Germans by saying he planned to escape at some point and was collecting intelligence about SD activities, including the radio game, to relay to London once he was free.
Léon Faye knew nothing about Starr’s collaboration. All he cared about was the SOE agent’s apparent familiarity with the mansion’s floor plan and his potential access to a screwdriver and other supplies needed for the breakout. At Faye’s suggestion, Noor sounded him out. Initially, Starr rejected the idea of an escape attempt, saying he saw no chance of its succeeding. But he changed his mind when Noor told him
Faye had promised to arrange a Lysander to pick them up and take them to Britain. When she asked Starr, at Faye’s behest, to tell her what he knew about the neighboring houses and streets, he said it was possible to reach the nearest street, rue Pergolese, through the adjoining houses.
With Starr on board, Faye decided to go ahead with the plan. He knew it was exceedingly risky, even for him—a seasoned, tough-minded résistant who had been matching wits with the Vichy police and Gestapo for three years. His partners, on the other hand, were a children’s book writer and a graphic artist who had only been in France for a few months and whose training for underground work had been minimal. As it turned out, neither was prepared, either physically or mentally, for what lay ahead of them. But Faye felt he had no choice now but to include them.
Using Morse code and notes hidden in the lavatory, he explained to the others how to loosen the bars across the ventilation shaft. Starr found a screwdriver in a maintenance closet, and the three surreptitiously passed it among themselves. The rope needed to rappel from the roof of the mansion would be made by tearing their bedspreads into strips. Starr promised to collect and bring with him a flashlight, additional tools, and, if possible, another rope.
The preparations took three weeks. On the morning of November 24, Starr left a note for Faye saying he had removed his bars and was able to get up to the roof. But from the tone of the note, Faye detected an increasing doubt on Starr’s part regarding the escape. For it to succeed, Faye felt, it was imperative that he not back out; Faye and Noor needed his knowledge of the area, along with the supplies he was bringing. Fearful that the SOE operative would abandon the idea if they waited any longer, Faye decided they would make the attempt that night.
He informed the others that he and Noor would climb out on the roof at 9:30 P.M. and wait for Starr, who, because his room was next to the guardroom, could not leave until 1:30 in the morning, when the guards on the current shift went off duty. At 9:30, Faye hoisted himself up through the ventilation shaft and onto the roof, carrying with him the rope he had made from his bedspread. Once outside, he became “drunk with happiness” when he looked up at the night sky and stars—the first time in more than two months that he had seen them—and deeply inhaled the cold, fresh air. But his euphoria began to fade when he realized that the neighboring roofs and buildings bore no resemblance to Starr’s description of them.
His worry increased when he approached the skylight over Noor’s room and heard a loud scraping noise below. He realized she had not yet fully loosened the bars over the shaft in her room and was working frantically to do so. “This girl is crazy,” he thought; it was doubtful that she’d be done before daybreak. Opening the skylight, he advised her to stop, put everything back the way it was, and go to bed. He added that Starr’s information about the surrounding area seemed to be worthless and that he was going to take a look around for himself. He promised that he would come back to tell her whether he was going to try to escape on his own or whether he would wait for Starr.
He then made his way to the side of the roof away from avenue Foch, which was narrow and sloping, with no ledge. With considerable difficulty, he reached a slightly wider space that overlooked a terrace of the house next door. According to Starr’s information, he would be able to see a street from there, but there was no sign of it.
Faye spent the next few minutes catching his breath and deciding what to do. Although he couldn’t see the street, he was sure that the house below must open onto it. Once he reached the street, he could make his way to the apartment of friends who lived nearby. They would help him contact Alliance, and with any luck, he could be smuggled out of France and be back in England within a week.
Should he leave now, or should he wait for Starr, who, notwithstanding his faulty intelligence thus far, might know who occupied the adjoining house? After several minutes of examining the pros and cons of each move, Faye decided to play it safe and wait.
Retracing his steps, he again heard Noor fiercely working on the bars. When he begged her to be more quiet, she failed to respond and redoubled her efforts, clearly determined to finish by the time Starr was ready to leave. Faye admired her “magnificent courage” but was concerned about what he considered her foolhardiness. Two more hours passed, and the noise of traffic died down in the streets, with the only sound coming from Noor’s implacable scraping.
At 1:30, he opened the skylight to Starr’s room and helped haul him up to the roof. Faye was tempted to leave immediately but decided they couldn’t abandon Noor. If she had stopped working on the bars when he first suggested it, she could have covered up what she had done. Now that was impossible: Her efforts would be immediately noticed by the guards when they entered her room later that morning.
From their brief conversation on the rooftop, Faye realized that Starr was fast losing his nerve and was no longer positive about anything. He led him to the other side of the roof to inspect the house next door. Starr told Faye he had no idea who occupied the house or, in fact, if it was occupied at all.
Finally, at 3:30 A.M., Noor was finished. Faye helped lift her out of the shaft, and moving in single file, the three fugitives clambered across the roof to the spot overlooking the neighboring house. Tying his makeshift rope to a pole, Faye threw it over the roof and climbed down to the terrace. The other two followed him. As Faye caught Noor at the bottom, he was horrified to see that her watch had a luminous dial that shone like a flashlight. Yet even then he couldn’t contain his joy. They had escaped from avenue Foch and with any luck would soon be back on the streets of Paris and on their way to freedom.
He turned the knob of the terrace door and found it locked. Then he noticed that one floor below, there was another small terrace with glass-paned French doors that could easily be broken. He debated whether he and the others should use the rope Starr had said he would provide and shinny down three stories to the ground, or jump to the terrace, then go through the house and down the stairs to the street. As it turned out, there was no choice: Starr hadn’t brought the rope or any of the other items he had promised.
As Faye considered this latest problem, he heard the roar of aircraft engines and looked up to see a large force of American Flying Fortresses flying directly overhead on their way back to England from a raid on Germany. Suddenly a loud voice rang out, complaining in German about a light, and a flashlight beam from a window at 84 avenue Foch was aimed toward the terrace on which they crouched. Faye believed their unseen challenger, probably an SS guard, had spotted the lighted dial of Noor’s watch, but he didn’t think the German could see them in the corner of the terrace in which they had taken cover. If they remained perfectly still and let things settle down, he whispered to the others, he thought they’d be safe.
Fifteen minutes passed. Starr, who had grown increasingly agitated, abruptly jumped to his feet, saying he had to leave now. Before Faye could stop him, he rushed to the center of the terrace, with Faye and Noor pursuing him. Just then, another flashlight beam from the window at 84 avenue Foch swept over them.
Quickly dashing to the edge of the terrace, Faye leaped onto the one below, followed by Starr and Noor. He smashed a pane in the French door, reached through and unlocked it, then groped his way through the darkened house until he found the stairs. With the other two behind him, he raced down the three flights and reached the ground floor hall. He cautiously opened the door to the street and peered out. An SS sentry was patrolling just a few feet away.
Faye quietly shut the door and waited. Starr and Noor crouched behind him. After a few minutes, Faye cracked open the door again and saw no sign of the sentry. He darted out and ran down the street in the opposite direction from the SS man, only to find that it ended in a cul-de-sac. He retraced his steps, but the sentry was waiting for him. A second guard appeared, followed by Gestapo agents in civilian clothes, all with revolvers in their hands. They backed Faye up against a wall and clubbed him repea
tedly with the butts of their guns. He fell to the ground, unconscious.
* * *
—
JOSEF KIEFFER WAS INCOHERENT with rage when he learned of the escape attempt. Not only had the fugitives showed their ingratitude for his lenient treatment of them, but the SD’s “radio game” would have been destroyed if Starr had managed to get away and inform London what was really going on.
Ordering the three to line up against a wall on the fourth floor of avenue Foch, he shouted that he was going to shoot them on the spot. After a few minutes, he calmed down. If they gave their word of honor that they wouldn’t try to escape again, he told them, he would allow them to return to their cells. Starr immediately did as he was asked. Faye and Noor refused. That same day, the two were deported to prisons in Germany.
Classified as “a very dangerous prisoner,” Noor spent the next ten months in solitary confinement, subjected to near-starvation rations and frequent torture. For the last four months of her life, her wrists and ankles were shackled. In September 1944, she was sent to Dachau concentration camp, where she was executed. She was thirty years old.
Faye, meanwhile, was transported by convoy to a grim prison fortress outside Bruchsal, a city in western Germany. Labeled as “Ein Wichtiger Terrorist, ein Spezialist des Entfliehen” (an important terrorist, an expert at escape), he was dragged in handcuffs out of the car and thrown into an underground dungeon, where his ankles were chained to the foot of an iron bed. There was no heat in the bare, unlighted cell, and the extreme cold was exacerbated by the fortress’s penetrating dampness. “Water remains permanently on the ground, and everything is soaked,” Faye wrote in a surreptitious journal. “My hands and feet are frozen all the time.”