Spy Princess

by Shrabani Basu

  That same night Churchill summoned his Minister for Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, and told him to ‘set Europe ablaze’. This was to be done by building a new secret service that would sabotage the German war effort and help the resistance fighters in the conquered countries. Dalton defined the mission as: ‘the corrosion of the Nazi and Fascist powers by action from within to be achieved by careful recruitment and training of agents and meticulous planning during a long preliminary period.’1 After the fall of France, the government realised that potential allies lay behind enemy lines and could contribute to staving off the invasion and, by general subversion, undermine and destroy the German New Order. Dalton thought this force could be a like a ‘fourth arm’.

  Ironically, it was the very person accused of appeasing Hitler, former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who in his role as Lord President of the Privy Council, organised the details. On 19 July 1940 he signed the secret paper which became the founding charter of the SOE. It was Chamberlain’s last important act as he died a few months later on 9 November. The document said: ‘The Prime Minister has further decided … a new organisation shall be established forthwith to co-ordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas … This organisation will be known as the Special Operations Executive.’2 And with that the SOE came into existence. From now on sabotage and subversion would take their place alongside sea blockade and air bombardment as the main devices for bringing Germany down.

  The SOE started out in three gloomy rooms on the third floor of St Ermin’s hotel on Caxton Street in the heart of Westminster. Nobody knew quite who the men in the rooms were. Sometimes they said they were from the Admiralty, sometimes the Army or the Air Ministry. Occasionally they described themselves as the Inter-Services Research Bureau or the Joint Technical Board, or Special Training Schools Headquarters, all of which were their cover descriptions.

  Soon they took over the three top floors of the hotel. The SOE was answerable only to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Economic Warfare. Its work would be distinct from MI5, which dealt with security at home, and MI6, also known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which gathered intelligence from sources abroad. The SOE was to support the resistance movements in the various occupied countries. Churchill called it the ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ and gave Dalton two directives. First, the SOE was to create and foster the spirit of resistance in Nazi-occupied countries. Second, it was to establish a nucleus of trained men who would be able to assist as a Fifth Column in the liberation of the country. The SOE was an unorthodox organisation created to carry out war by unorthodox means in unorthodox places. According to SOE historian Michael Foot: ‘Nothing quite like it had been seen before and nothing quite like it would be seen again, for the circumstances of Hitler’s war were unique and called out this among other unique responses.’3

  Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare, was a man of tremendous energy. He was determined to beat the Nazis at their own game and wanted to organise movements in every occupied country along the lines of the Sinn Fein in Ireland, the Chinese guerrillas fighting the Japanese and the Spanish irregulars who had defeated Napoleon in Spain. His modus operandi were to be industrial and military sabotage, labour agitations and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist acts against the German military and leaders, boycotts and riots.

  Establishing the new organisation was not without its difficulties. The SOE was not popular with other intelligence services and there were clashes with the SIS. The SIS had reservations about the SOE methods of sabotage and terrorism, as activities like blowing up bridges attracted the attention of the Germans. The SIS preferred to work quietly, blending in with the local population. Stewart Menzies, head of the SIS, thought the SOE consisted of upstarts and amateurs and he recorded his opinion that difficulties would follow if two sets of agents worked independently in the same territory.4 Even RAF Bomber Command and its head, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, is said to have disapproved of the SOE. Harris’s preferred method in the war was bombing the Germans into submission and he did not like to spare his aircraft for clandestine activity. The problem was that the SOE was heavily dependent on the other services. It needed boats from the Admiralty to ferry agents across to the Continent, weapons and ammunition from the Army and aircraft from the RAF to drop agents and supplies. In the early years, most requests were turned down and the SOE had fewer planes, less finance and little equipment with which to ‘set Europe ablaze’. The SOE also had to share the same wireless operators as the SIS and this led to considerable confusion in the early years as messages were sometimes delayed. It was only in 1942 that the SOE acquired the right to build its own sets, use its own codes and run its own network.

  These were not problems that would daunt Dalton. He set to work building the core team. The SIS had a dirty-tricks department called Section D (D for destruction) which had thought of imaginative schemes like destroying Romanian oil fields, blocking the Danube and sabotaging iron ore exports from Germany. But these had not yielded results. In the autumn of 1940, D-section was formed into a new department known as SO2 and placed under Dalton. This was done without consulting the SIS chief, Stewart Menzies, which angered him further. There was also a small subdivision of Military Intelligence called MI (R) which was planning paramilitary action. This was transferred to the Ministry of Economic Warfare. A third group attached to the Foreign Office called Electra House, which dabbled in subversive propaganda, was also handed over to Dalton. In the initial years, the SOE fused the work of all three departments and used their resources to get their plans on the road. Interdepartmental rivalry with the SIS remained high.

  Dalton, an old Etonian, worked on the old-boy network and recruited many bankers and influential lawyers from Section D. These included Charles Hambro of the banking family, who had powerful connections in Sweden, George Taylor, a ruthless Australian with business interests around the globe, and a banker from Courtaulds. In the early years of SOE it looked very much like a gentleman’s club from the city and legal world. The SOE was divided into three sections – SO1 for propaganda, SO2 for active operations and SO3 for planning.5

  By October 1940 it had extended its offices from the grubby St Ermin’s hotel. Although it retained the first three floors of the hotel it now moved its main base to 64 Baker Street, further down the road from 221B, home of the fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Later it took over Norgeby House, 83 Baker Street, and then the top floor of Michael House, the corporate headquarters of Marks & Spencer at 82 Baker Street, which housed the cipher and signals branches. SOE officials from now on came to be known as the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’, borrowing the phrase from Arthur Conan Doyle who used it in his detective stories.6 The SOE had different sections dealing with the occupied countries. It soon established offices around the world from Istanbul and Cairo to Delhi, Algiers, Kandy, Brisbane and New York.

  All branches of the SOE had the same aim: aiding resistance movements in occupied countries through acts of sabotage. From Delhi, the SOE sent agents into Burma to counter the Japanese, from Cairo they armed resistance groups in North Africa and Italy. The Balkan theatre covered Yugoslavia, Poland and Romania, the Western European section covered France, Netherlands and Belgium and the Mediterranean theatre covered Greece, Italy and Spain. The SOE in the Far East covered Burma, Malaya, Thailand, French Indo-China, China and Sumatra. In Ceylon, it had a base in Kandy. When the Soviet Union was drawn into the war in July 1941,7 followed by the United States in December of that year, it gave Britain crucial allies and made it possible for it to plan to build up large bodies of armed men behind the enemy lines ready for the day when the Allied armies entered Europe.

  The SOE had six sections working in France. The two main ones were F-section and RF section. F-section sent agents trained in London to France to help the Resistance in sabotage activities. Recruits consisted of French-speaking Englishmen and women and people from British protected areas and French-speaking colo
nies. F-section was entirely British-run. Apart from a few exceptions in the early years, French exiles were recruited not to F-section but to RF section, which backed de Gaulle and worked closely with the Gaullist Free French headquarters in Duke Street. The Gaullist-run RF section consisted almost entirely of French agents and was based at 1 Dorset Square. RF section took their orders jointly from De Gaulle’s staff and from the SOE. Their aim was to disrupt both the Germans and the Vichy regime. There was some rivalry between the F-section and the RF section, as there was between the SOE and MI6. Other branches of the SOE in France consisted of the DF which ran escape routes, EU/P which worked in Polish settlements mostly in France, AMF which operated from Algiers, and the Jedburgh teams. The last were not meant to reach France till the main invasion, Operation Overlord (the Normandy landings), began in June 1944. The main aim of the French section was to prepare the ground for the invasion of France.

  In February 1942 Dalton was replaced by Lord Selborne, a friend of Churchill, who had backed him over his India policy in the 1930s. He was the grandson of Lord Salisbury and had greater access to the Prime Minister. From this period, the SOE started coming into its own, the groundwork having been done. The first agents had entered occupied territory and the organisation now grew in strength. At the height of its operations in 1944, about 15,000 people passed through the SOE. It employed 1,500 wireless operators and cipher clerks at four receiving stations in Britain and worked round the clock looking out for messages coming in from several hundred agents behind enemy lines. Some 10,000 men and 3,000 women worked for it around the globe in various headquarters, missions and sub-stations; about 5,000 of these were agents in the field, almost all of them men. They worked with an estimated two to three million active resisters in Europe alone.8

  Most SOE recruits were receiving messages from the agents in the field and working as coding clerks and wireless operators. Others worked in planning, administration, intelligence operations, supply, research, security and transport. Some were employed in the ‘dirty tricks’ department covering explosives, forgeries and disguises. The switchboard began with 12 lines and grew to 200 at the peak of operations. In London, close to the Baker Street headquarters, nearby streets like Dorset Square and Portman Square housed various country and technical sections of the SOE at Orchard Court, Montague Mansions and Chiltern Court. Interview rooms were at the Victoria Hotel. Orchard Court at Portman Square had the offices of the F-section, where Noor would work.

  Recruitment for the SOE had to be done in secret. As with any intelligence organisation most of the recruits came from recommendations and personal contacts, and were family or friends or simply part of the old-school network. Later, as the need for recruits grew, a general instruction was informally put out to all services department to look out for people with language skills.

  Language was crucial to recruitment in the SOE. Maurice Buckmaster, head of F-section of the SOE, wrote in his book Specially Employed that the vetting process was elaborate. First the MI (Military Intelligence) sent in a list of people with language skills. However, ‘fluent French’ was not enough. Applicants could not have the slightest trace of a British accent and had to speak French like a native. Their appearance, too, had to be just right. They would have to be taken as a Frenchman by a Frenchman. That was the acid test. Though the first few recruits to the SOE were French, they were soon debarred from joining since they were recruited to the Free French led by de Gaulle. The SOE had to narrow down its recruitment drive to French-speaking Britons, which was not easy. Usually people who had one French parent or those who had lived a considerable time in France were recruited. Later, Canadians, Americans, South Africans and Mauritians were appointed.

  It was crucial to get the right candidate because the wrong one might not only put his own life at risk but endanger the rest of the group as well. Even the weakest link in the chain had to be strong or lives were at risk. An agent unable to speak the French of a Frenchman could risk the exposure of his whole group.

  Once the language issue had been cleared, the next test was that of character. There were many at the outset who felt that in order to counter the notorious Abwehr, the German security police, the SOE recruits would have to be drawn from among similar thugs who could beat them at their own game. But SOE officials did not favour this approach, finding that men with shady pasts often did unsatisfactory work. Instead they preferred a person with ‘character and steadfastness of purpose’. ‘Rugged honesty’ was one of the things on the checklist for candidates. He or she could be a professional with no military background. Even physical fitness did not matter too much as the SOE officials were convinced that training could work wonders for anyone. ‘We were vitally concerned with essential guts,’ wrote Maurice Buckmaster.9

  It was important to get the right person for the job, as the agent in the field would be working alone, often relying on himself with tenuous radio links with headquarters which could fail at any moment. The candidates were told that the job meant continuous strain, perhaps for years on end. There were no holidays, no home leave, no local leave, no Sundays or bank holidays. Instead the work involved endlessly pitting their wits against the German Abwehr and the French Milice (the pro-German French militia). Most serious of all, there was no protection, because the agents would not be in uniform, and they faced almost certain death if captured. Potential recruits were studied by psychologists at interviews and given full freedom to opt out if they felt they couldn’t handle the task.

  In April 1942, the War Cabinet passed a resolution to allow the SOE to use female agents in the field.10 The argument was that women would find it easier to move around under cover of shopping or doing the daily chores and were less likely to be questioned than men.

  And so it was that Noor was called upon to meet Selwyn Jepson, chief recruitment officer for the SOE. She had been under observation by Military Intelligence ever since her recruitment. She had already been trained in transmission and had increased her Morse speed during a specialist course. She had cleared the language test as her French was flawless. The rest would depend on the interview and her own willingness to join.

  Selwyn Jepson was a writer of thrillers who sometimes also wrote under the name of E. Potter. The son of crime fiction writer Edgar Jepson, he had been educated at St Paul’s school in London and at the Sorbonne in Paris. He was bilingual and had written several mystery books including The Qualified Adventurer, That Fellow MacArthur and Love in Peril. His book Man Running was later turned into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. Jepson was a skilled interviewer and appointed many of the women recruits in F-section. He generally used the bleak rooms at the Victoria hotel for his interviews. Jepson’s greatest skill lay in the fact that he could judge a person’s character fairly accurately in only a few meetings. He once said that he very seldom changed the impression a prospective agent made on him during the first quarter of a minute of their first interview.11

  On 10 November 1942, Noor met Jepson in the Hotel Victoria. She thought she had been called by the War Office. Jepson found that with Noor he could come straight to the point. He had never felt this way with other potential recruits. He recalled later that ‘in spite of a great gentleness of manner’ she seemed to have ‘an intuitive sense of what might be in my mind for her to do. Also, I realised it would be safe to be frank with her, that “her security” as we called it, would be good, that if she felt herself unable to take it on, she would not talk about the reason she had been called to the War Office.’12

  This was in startling contrast to the other potential recruits who were told that if they repeated anything of what they had heard in the room they would be violating the Official Secrets Act and face dire consequences. Most agents had two or three interviews in which they were broken in and a third where they were asked to decide, but Noor was recruited after just one interview.

  Jepson’s main task at these interviews was to look at the person’s motive and character. He needed to know why people would vo
lunteer to risk their lives – was it patriotism, an un-satisfactory private life, a need for revenge or just recklessness? He also needed to ensure that the potential agent sitting opposite him was not impulsive. Prudence and caution were, according to him, an agent’s most important qualities.13 Jepson had a long talk with Noor about her family and background and then moved on to France and the war. He told her about the current state of affairs in France and the aim of the British war effort to interfere with German plans. He explained to Noor what her duties would entail: that she would be working as a clandestine wireless operator in the underground along with other British officers, helping the Resistance to sabotage the Germans. Throughout the interview they spoke in French. Jepson felt that Noor was almost perfect for the job of a wireless operator. He felt she was careful, tidy and painstaking by nature and ‘would have all the patience in the world’ – an essential characteristic for a wireless operator.

  As Noor sat opposite him, Jepson told her that the assignment was one of extreme danger, that in the event of capture she could be interrogated by the Gestapo – a terrifying experience for anyone – and that since she would not be in uniform she would not have any protection under international laws of warfare. In short, that she could be shot and never return. She listened quietly as he spoke, absorbing the full implications of his words.

  Jepson told Noor that there was no monetary reward for the mission. She would receive her ordinary service pay (tax-free for SOE), without increment or bonus and it would be held for her in England while she was in France. If she came back alive it would be paid to her, if not to her next of kin. Her only personal satisfaction would be the knowledge of the service she gave.