Spy Princess

by Shrabani Basu

  After the training at Arisaig (A-school), agents were sent to further special schools to specialise in their field of work. Some did courses in industrial sabotage, some learned the skills of choosing and describing outdoor zones and creating special reception committees for parachuted supplies, others learned the art of safe-breaking and lock-picking and the use of armaments. One of the final courses was for parachute training at Ringway Airfield near Manchester. From here, they were air-dropped into Tatton Park. The trainees usually did four or five practice jumps, one at night and one with equipment strapped to the leg. However, Noor did not go to Ringway as her instructors had already excluded her from parachute training.

  One of the last stages of training for all agents was the Finishing School. For Noor, this was Beaulieu (B-school) STS 36 in Hampshire. She was given instructions to travel with four other colleagues from Waterloo to Southampton on Sunday 9 May. From there they would go on to Beaulieu, the jewel in the crown of the SOE training schools.

  Here, deep in the New Forest, in the spacious grounds of the Montagu family estate and the ruins of one of Britain’s oldest abbeys, built in 1204, agents learnt the art of surviving behind enemy lines. After the rigours of training in Arisaig, this country house with its log fires, views overlooking a lake and relative luxury offered the agents a chance to unwind. A plaque on the abbey ruins today commemorates the agents who trained for their dangerous wartime missions here.

  The SOE had eleven houses scattered through the estate which served both as specialist training schools and as cottages to live in. Beaulieu Manor (now the National Motor Museum) was the headquarters of the Group B school. The Montagu family themselves lived at Palace House in the grounds. Palace House was also used as the local Air Raid Precautions (ARP) and Red Cross headquarters and was later earmarked as a stand-by headquarters for General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander. The main classes took place in The Rings, a rambling 13-bedroom mansion (now demolished). All the houses had different names. Boarmans was favoured by F-section, and it was here that women agents like Noor were trained. Warren House, further down the river, near Needs Oar Point and the House on the Shore at Sowley overlooking the Solent, were used for training agents to fire a variety of weapons. Inchmery House on the east bank was used as a commando training school for Polish and French troops of the Free French Combat Parachute Company. Clobb Gorse was also taken by F-section.

  The picturesque village of Beaulieu provided the base for some of the most clandestine work that would be done during the war. The tranquil surrounds of the New Forest with its wild ponies and ducks nestling along the riverbank was the setting for highly secret and dangerous missions. Preparations for D-Day saw components for the floating Mulberry Harbour being constructed in the oyster beds on the west bank of the Beaulieu river while over 500 landing craft and barges used the river during Operation Overlord. Units of frogmen and a secret underwater survey team were concealed in the grounds of the houses, along with SOE agents and commandos, while naval scientists experimented with new weapons. The whole area of Beaulieu and neighbouring Bucklers Hard were restricted areas during the war. On the east bank of the river was Exbury House, home of the Rothschilds, which was requisitioned by the Navy and came to be known as HMS Mastodon. Among its residents was the famous writer and engineer Nevil Shute, who experimented with a rocket-propelled pilotless aircraft called the Swallow, the precursor to the modern cruise missile.

  Beaulieu had included among its list of instructors the flamboyant Kim Philby, later discovered to be a Soviet double agent. He taught propaganda at Beaulieu. Ironically, Philby had himself learnt his skills from the Soviets since he had been working for them since 1933. By Noor’s time he had left for his career in MI6 but he was remembered in Beaulieu as a brilliant instructor who taught agents to live under a regime they detested without showing that they hated it.

  The training at Beaulieu was considered most crucial by the SOE. It was at Beaulieu that agents learnt to recognise their enemy and survive in the field. They were taught how to tell whether they were being followed and how to give the enemy the slip, how to contact a source, how to establish safe letter boxes, how to pass messages, and how to set up radio aerials. Agents were sent on field trips and often arrested to see if they could stick to their cover stories. Everything was a preparation for the final mission.

  Maurice Buckmaster would often come down from headquarters to cross-question recruits and subject them to Gestapo-style interrogation in order to break their cover stories. Agents would be dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night by someone dressed as a Gestapo officer. They would then be taken to an interrogation room, have a strong light shone on their face, and made to face a panel of what looked like Gestapo officers. This was done so the trainees would get some idea about the ruthless nature of these interrogations. They would have to repeat their cover story so many times that by the end of the interrogation it would be ingrained in their minds. If they survived without cracking, their confidence would be greatly increased and they would be able to face the thought of a genuine German interrogation. The rehearsals were grim affairs and the recruits were not spared. They were stripped and made to stand for hours in the light of bright lamps and though physical violence was never used on them, they knew that the real interrogation would probably include torture as well.

  If the recruits cracked badly under the strain, they were unlikely to be sent into the field. Buckmaster recalled later that the cruel jibes, the repeated and shouted questions and implacable persistence broke a man’s spirit, but he could console himself with the fact that this cracking at a rehearsal might well have saved his life – and others’ – by preventing the possibility of his doing the same thing with the enemy. It was no game.10

  Noor is said to have been terrified during her mock Gestapo interrogation at Beaulieu and became practically inaudible as the officers shouted at her. Dragged out of bed at night and rounded up by men in Gestapo uniform terrified her. Joan Sanderson said later that she found Noor’s mock session

  almost unbearable. She seemed absolutely terrified. One saw that the lights hurt her, and the officer’s voice when he shouted very loudly. Once he said, ‘Stand on that chair!’ It was just something to confuse her. She was so overwhelmed, she nearly lost her voice. As it went on she became practically inaudible. Sometimes there was only a whisper. When she came out afterwards, she was trembling and quite blanched.11

  At Beaulieu the agents were also taught to acquire French mannerisms, as this was crucial to their survival in France. Everything the agent did had to be done in a French style, whether it was combing their hair or leaving their knives and forks on their plates, answering the telephone or calling for a waiter. Often a man could give himself away by using an incorrect idiom in French, even though his accent and the individual words of a phrase might be perfectly correct.

  Trainees were told about the experiences of returning agents so they could learn from them. They were told how an agent once went into a café in France and asked for café noir (black coffee). This surprised the waitress as there was no other coffee available at that time in France. Such small slips, however insignificant, could arouse suspicion.

  Noor was told off in France for pouring her milk in her tea first in the English manner. The smallest indiscretion could give you away as there were informers everywhere.

  Maurice Buckmaster noted that another small example was telephone manners. The French never say Tenez la ligne (hold the line) as the English do. Instead they say Ne quittez pas l’écoute (literally – don’t stop listening) or more simply Ne quittez pas. The use of any other phrase would automatically make a Frenchman suspicious and could lead to the death of an agent if the Frenchman was a Vichy supporter.12

  The agents were taught how to coordinate with Baker Street from their stations in France through a series of postboxes which took messages from Paris all the way down to the Spanish border, over the mountains and to various ag
ents in neutral capitals.

  Though Noor had lived in pre-war France, it was a very different place now it was under the Germans. Her rigorous training prepared her for survival in a city that was occupied by the enemy. She learnt about the conditions of life in France, what identity card she would need and hundreds of other relevant details. She was taught to recognise the uniforms of the different police forces and learn how closely the local police worked with the Germans. At classes in The Rings and Boarmans she was shown photographs and taught to recognise the faces of the enemy: the German soldiers and the French Milice (pro-German French police). She was taught to look out for the Abwehr, the military arm of the Germans, based at the Hotel Lutetia on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris, and the SD or the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence wing of the SS based at 82–86 Avenue Foch. She attended lectures on the Nazi party, the German army and the Gestapo and heard returning agents describe how to deal with interrogations.

  There were also lessons on codes, map reading, micro-photography and how to recognise and make forgeries. Agents were taught how to use and arrange messages on the BBC which would alert them in the field. The French service of the BBC was used regularly by the SOE to send coded messages to the agents. Before each drop, reception committees in France would listen for news of an expected delivery of agents or arms and supplies. After the evening news bulletin read in French, the announcer would give a series of personal messages called avis. These would be broadcast every night at 7.30 p.m. and then again at 9.15 p.m. from the BBC World Service headquarters on the Strand in London. Among the items of trivia and poetry in the programme were scattered lines in prearranged codes which would tell the agents on the field about arrangements for a drop. So the announcer in slow clear tones would say ‘Moïse dormira sur les bords du Nil’ (Moses will sleep on the banks of the Nile), which could mean that an agent was arriving by Hudson aircraft.

  The early evening broadcast would alert the agent. If it was repeated on the later broadcast, it was a confirmation. They would then get ready to receive the agent or the parachute drop in the fields. Very often meaningless sentences were added just to make the messages personnels sound genuine.

  The methods at Beaulieu were classic spy school. Noor was taught how to be constantly vigilant, how to organise safe houses, how to pass a message to someone in a crowd without attracting attention and how to keep her identity a secret. Every single aspect of the training was aimed at helping the agents to save themselves and function effectively.

  Noor immersed herself completely in her training. For the first time she felt she was working towards a positive goal and was doing something worthwhile. On one of her visits to London from Beaulieu, Noor told Jean that she had been promoted to something special and she was working with girls who were of a ‘superior type’.13 She also mentioned that she was staying in a beautiful old house with stained-glass windows. Jean remembered her being very keyed up and excited and looking better than ever.

  Meanwhile, the shortage of radio operators in the field was reaching crisis proportions. An SOS from Paris led the SOE to ask Noor if she was prepared to go straight away, without completing her training. Typically, she agreed immediately. Vera Atkins gave her a cover story and prepared her for the final stages before departure. Noor was to be flown in by Lysander aircraft and landed on the ground. There are no details of the flight except the flight records kept by the Air Ministry. They show that on the night of 21/22 May, Noor and another agent, Jacques Courtaud, were flown into France but the flight had to come back from Compiègne because there was no reception committee.14 The field agent in Paris had not heard the radio instruction because of jamming. Noor suffered the anxiety of this flight in vain.

  There is slight confusion in Noor’s personal files at this stage. They make no mention of her flight to Paris in May, but show that from Beaulieu she was sent on a training operation to Bristol.

  It is unclear whether Noor made her first trip to Paris during her trip to Bristol or immediately afterwards. Her file says she was in Bristol between 19 and 23 May 1943 as part of a 96-hour scheme. These clash with her dates for the Paris flight. It is unlikely that Noor would have been sent to Paris without completing her 96-hour course in Bristol. This final training-push gave recruits the most realistic idea of what it was like to work in the field and was considered essential.15 It is likely therefore that Noor left for Paris after returning from Bristol, which means her Bristol test run would have been around 17 May.

  Noor’s assignment was to visit Bristol with a workable cover story, recruit contacts, fix up live and dead letter boxes (people and places from where agents could retrieve messages) and find a flat from which it would be safe to transmit. She would have to take all the precautions of security, watch out for being followed and handle the police if she was caught and questioned. She would be watched by SOE staff to see if she made any mistakes. Her detailed notes of the exercise are in her file.16

  Noor decided to go to Bristol in the guise of gathering children’s impressions of air raids for a book and providing articles for the BBC on this subject. This was considered a good cover story as she was a writer of children’s stories and had been broadcast on the BBC. To make it look even more genuine, she actually interviewed children at Bedminster and at the Mangotsfield War nursery. She chose the cover name of Nora Kirkwood. The SOE thought this was very workable. Noor also chose a permanent cover story while at Bristol. She chose to say that she was a secretary at BOAC and that she was an Air Raid Patrol (ARP) warden with night duty three times a week. This would give her the excuse to go out at night without coming under suspicion.

  The first thing Noor had to do was find herself a safe place to stay where she could work comfortably. She rented a room in a boarding house belonging to a Mrs Harvey at 30 Richmond Park Road, Clifton. But Noor found Mrs Harvey to be a very inquisitive person and she would have left the place if accommodation had not been so difficult to find. Mrs Harvey, she said, was ‘frightfully conventional and police-minded’. She also wrote that ‘general accommodation was very scarce and landladies as a whole (were) uncongenial’.

  All the while Noor was observed by the SOE. They noted that she took the usual security procedures against search and surveillance. She did not carry any incriminating papers with her as she memorised her orders before leaving base.

  Noor’s first point of contact was a Mrs Laurie, head of the Irish Traveller’s Censor Office, who had been instructed by the SOE. The first interview was arranged by letter. Noor set up a meeting on the pretext that she was looking for a job in the Censor’s Office. During the meeting she introduced the password naturally in the conversation as she had been taught to do in Beaulieu.

  She arranged a second meeting with Mrs Laurie on the cover that she would come to hand in her completed application form. Noor now put forward her real proposal to her contact. She did so with ease, asking Mrs Laurie to cooperate in a line of communication in the event of an invasion. Mrs Laurie agreed to all her suggestions.

  Both Noor and Mrs Laurie had to make reports to the SOE about the meeting. Noor reported that Mrs Laurie was a ‘very suitable contact’. She described her as ‘responsible, understanding and tactful, security minded from experience and duty conscious as far as own country interests were concerned’. Mrs Laurie reported that Noor had ‘put up a good show’ but added that there was something very suspicious about Noor’s manner. SOE dismissed this as nerves.

  Next Noor had to locate a place to set up a live letter drop. This would be a person who would be used by her and other agents as a letter box to pass messages. She did this successfully with a porter at Bristol University and a secretary at the Empire Rendezvous in Whiteladies Road, explaining that she was moving to Bristol but as yet had no address.

  She then selected two dead letter boxes. Dead letter boxes were unused hidden places where agents could exchange messages. Noor chose an oblique angle in the stone steps of the ruins of Bethesda Chapel in Great George Stre
et and behind a fuse case in the call box at the end of Queen’s Road, Clifton. The SOE found both of these ‘very suitable’.

  In the short time that she had, Noor had to now establish six rendezvous where she could set up meetings with contacts. The SOE had given her detailed instructions on the nature of the arrangements. Three of these were to be for a person of the same social standing as the agent. For these, Noor chose the University Library between 1 and 6 p.m., the Clifton Lawn Tennis Club on Beaufort Road before 12 noon on a Sunday, and the entrance to the Victoria Rooms after 11 p.m. She noted that the dances and parties at the Victoria Rooms finished at 11 so it would be relatively safe to meet there.

  The other three rendezvous were to be with an elderly working-class woman. For these Noor chose the waiting room at the bus station at the Knowles Centre between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m., St George’s Church on a Sunday at 12 p.m. and the waiting room on platform 9 at Temple Meads station after 11 p.m. Again the SOE thought the choices were good.

  Noor used her Beaulieu training and observation skills to complete the rest of her project. She had to identify three operational sites where a wireless could be set up and used. This meant posing as a tenant and searching for flats available for rent. She did this with considerable speed. The first flat she chose was 9/34 Cornwallis Crescent, where the rent was £80 and the electric supply of 210 volts. Noor noticed that there were two parts of the flat to be let, the top maisonette and the basement flat. She reported that the two intermediate floors were occupied by a Mrs Sutton (the proprietor), who lived alone. She was aged between seventy-five and eighty and was very deaf. Noor found her to be a kindly old lady, most helpful and rather ‘half-witted’. She noted that this was very suitable for the job as she would not know what the flat was being used for. The next step was finding a place for the aerial. Noor moved quickly around the apartment without arousing any suspicion and found that the top maisonette was a complicated structure offering several places of concealment. There was one exit by the door. The back window gave way to a long balcony which would provide roof escape.