Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (6 page)

One year later F Section had already deployed eleven women behind the lines, most of whom were seen off by Vera, and each, in her view, had more than justified the decision to send them.

Yvonne Rudellat, born in France, was first spotted in the London hotel where she worked as a receptionist. A mature woman of forty-five, separated from her husband, Yvonne was nevertheless considered “unworldly” by her instructors, although these same instructors also noted that this very quality would help her go unnoticed: “Her air of innocence and anxiety to please should prove a most valuable cover asset.” By March 1943 Yvonne had not only bicycled hundreds of miles across the Loire region, delivering vital messages, but had also taken part in the blowing
up of 300,000-volt electricity cables south of Orléans, winning the praise of her organiser, who said that she was “an extremely valuable colleague” and was “fast becoming a demolition expert.”

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 into 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.