Spies Who Paved the Way for Allied Victory in World War II

19. The Desperate Need for Spies to Gather On-the-Ground Intelligence

Evelyne Clopet and her fellow spies were airdropped from a B-24 Liberator into Nazi-occupied France a month after D-Day, June 6^th, 1944. An Allied beachhead had been successfully established in Normandy, but in the weeks since, things had not gone well. Enemy resistance was fierce, helped in no small part by unfavorable bocage – dense hedges that proliferated throughout Normandy and that were a nightmare to fight through. As a result, the Allies found their hoped-for rapid breakout from the beaches reduced to a bloody crawl. Aerial reconnaissance of enemy positions helped, but much about enemy deployments remained hidden. Allied commanders desperately needed to find out exactly where the Germans were and what they were up to. For that, only human intelligence gathered on the ground by trained observers, such as Clopet and other Operation Sussex spies, would do.

The intelligence services of the Allies did not always get along with each other, and frictions and rivalries delayed the launch of Operation Sussex for weeks. Initial teams of “Pathfinders” were parachuted into France in February, 1944, to establish local networks, and scout out suitable drop zones for more spies and supplies. Their task turned out to be tougher than anticipated, and it took until April before the first Sussex teams were established on the ground and able to report back with their observations. The operation’s start might have been clunky, but by D-Day, things had smoothed out somewhat, and various teams of Sussex spies furnished Allied intelligence with a veritable flood of useful intelligence. As seen below, Operation Sussex proved vital for the success of the D-Day landing and the subsequent Allied breakout from Normandy.

18. The High Cost Paid by Spies for Information

Operation Sussex spies tracked the movements of the Panzer Lehr Division, one of Germany’s best formations. Between air strikes called down from the skies and sabotage by Resistance operatives on the ground, the division was prevented from arriving on time to thwart the Allied landings on June 6^th, 1944. Sussex spies continued to track the Panzer Lehr until late July, when it was virtually annihilated in Operation Cobra, the Allied breakout from Normandy. As Bill Donovan, head of the OSS, put it: “As long as we had the Sussex teams ahead of us it was like we had a brightly lit path, but beyond it was like advancing into a dark tunnel“. It was a highly hazardous existence, however, with potential doom at any moment. Such was the fate of Evyelyne Clopet. After she parachuted into Nazi-held territory, her Sussex team set up an intelligence-gathering network in central France.

The spies contacted Resistance agents, and connected them with Allied intelligence. By early August, information supplied by Sussex spies had helped the Allied break through German defenses, burst out of Normandy, and storm through France en route to eventual victory. Clopet would not live to see the final triumph, however. On August 8^th, she and five other Sussex spies, disguised as laborers, were stopped at a roadblock in a stolen German army truck. Discovered among their possessions were clandestine radio transmitters and equipment. One Sussex agent jumped off the truck and managed to escape amidst a hail of gunfire. Clopet and the others were captured, however. All were savagely interrogated by the Germans, tortured, and eventually shot. Martyred at age twenty two, Clopet’s name was inscribed in war memorials in Casablanca, Loir-et-Cher, and the Tempsford Memorial in Bedfordshire. A street in her hometown of Pornic is also named after her.

17. The Spy Who Loved a Country That Didn’t Love Him Back

William “Bill” Gun Chong, BEM, (1911 – 2006), a Chinese-Canadian born in Vancouver, was visiting relatives in Hong Kong in 1941, when the Japanese invaded. He escaped, then volunteered to serve with the British Army Aid Group, a paramilitary organization of spies and clandestine agents operating in southern China as a unit of Britain’s Directorate of Military Intelligence Section MI9. The British desperately needed spies who could speak both Chinese and English, so Chong was a catch. Given the codename “Agent 50” (“five-oh”), he was inserted into Japanese-occupied China to gather intelligence, shepherd POW escapees to freedom, and deliver desperately needed medical supplies. He spent the years from 1942 to 1945 traveling behind enemy lines, doing his best to avoid the unwelcome attentions of both Japanese patrols on the lookout for spies, and Chinese outlaws. Captured three times, he proved a slippery customer, and managed to escape each time.

Vancouver, where Chong was born and raised, seethed with anti-Chinese discrimination. He was a house servant and cook in Vancouver when WWII began. He had grown up in a country where he could not vote, or even use a public swimming pool alongside white Canadians. Opportunities for advancement and upward mobility were few for Chinese-Canadians, and equality was a pipedream. That did not keep Chong from becoming a patriotic Canadian. He might have loved Canada, but Canada did not love him back. He tried to enlist in the army, but was rejected by recruiters unenthusiastic to sign a “Chinaman”. As fate would have it, Chong played a greater role in the war than anybody could have imagined when he was spurned by the Canadian military. It began when Chong’s father died in Canton, and his sister, who lived in Hong Kong, needed her brother’s help to settle the estate.

16. Stranded in Hong Kong

Bill Chong traveled to Hong Kong in 1941, but probate took much longer than expected. Weeks turned into months, and Chong was still in Hong Kong in December, 1941, when Japan kicked off WWII in the Pacific and Asia by attacking American, British, and Dutch colonial possessions. Japanese forces invaded Hong Kong Island, whose garrison included Canadian units, on December 18^th, 1941. After a week of heavy fighting, during which thousands of civilians were killed, the Japanese forced the defenders to surrender and secured the island. Like many who found themselves living under Japanese occupation, Bill Chong was appalled by the brutality and rudeness of the conquerors. He grew particularly incensed after he witnessed a Japanese soldier execute a wounded Canadian officer, and decided that he would do something about it. Chong sold all his possessions in Hong Kong, burned his Canadian passport, and set out for mainland China.

Chong wanted to join Chinese guerrillas. However, a British military intelligence officer convinced him that spies were desperately needed, and that he would be more valuable as a clandestine agent. The Canadian military had scorned Chong when he tried to enlist, but the British eagerly snapped him up. Fluent in both English and Chinese, Chong was ideally suited for intelligence work, so he was assigned to the Directorate of Military Intelligence, Section MI9. When volunteers were sought for hazardous work with an MI9 subunit, the British Army Aid Group (BAAG), Chong stepped forward. Throughout the war, BAAG sent spies into Japanese occupied southern China and Hong Kong, to gather intelligence and help POWs escape from Japanese clutches. The escapees were then guided to Chungking, China’s wartime capital, where they were debriefed, before rejoining the war effort. Chong was given the codename Agent 50, and sent to operate behind Japanese lines.

15. The Hazardous Existence of Spies in Japanese-Occupied China

Chong’s first mission behind enemy lines was to find out what had happened to the British consul in the Portuguese enclave of Macau, with whom contact had been lost. Macao was officially neutral, but it teemed with Japanese, who had heavy patrols throughout the region. Chong completed his mission in Macau and reported back to BAAG, who promptly sent him out on more hazardous operations that called for heroic spies. Some of the missions involved scouting and reporting back on Japanese troop movements. Others entailed helping downed Allied pilots and air crews escape to the safety of friendly lines. Equally hazardous were his missions of mercy, delivering desperately needed medicines to BAAG outposts and resistance cells behind Japanese lines. It was physically exhausting work, that required Chong to travel the war torn countryside on foot. He sometimes covered up to fifty miles in a single day.

The exact number of escapees rescued by Chong is unknown, but many owed their freedom, even their lives, to him. Chong was decorated by Hong Kong’s governor in 1946. That made him the only Chinese-Canadian ever awarded the British Empire Medal. British intelligence knew and appreciated the fact that they had a hero on their hands. After the war, they asked him to stay on as an agent, and he agreed. Chong continued to work for British intelligence, and operated out of Hong Kong. He conducted missions into communist China, until he retired in 1976. He returned to Canada, but nobody knew of his background until somebody noticed a photo of him receiving an award from Hong Kong’s governor. He was talked into joining a veteran’s organization, and after word of his exploits spread, he became the subject of a CBC documentary. Bill Chong died in 2006, at age 95.

14. A Teenage Spy in Iran

Gevork Andreevich Vartanian was born in 1924 to Armenian parents in southern Russia. His father worked for the NKVD – the KGB’s predecessor. In 1930, his family moved to Iran. There, Vartanian’s father, under the guise of an Armenian businessman, spent the next two decades as a secret Soviet intelligence agent. The son followed in his father’s footsteps, and in 1940, sixteen-year-old Gevork was recruited by the senior Vartanian into the NKVD. In 1941, the USSR was thrust into WWII when the Germans launched a massive surprise attack, Operation Barbarossa, that nearly overwhelmed the Soviet Union. Iran, on the USSR’s southern border, took on special importance as a secure route through which to funnel supplies to the hard-pressed Soviets. Accordingly, the Soviets and British jointly invaded Iran in August, 1941, to secure its oilfields, and ensure that an Allied supply route to the USSR through Iranian territory was kept open.

The invaders deposed Iran’s ruler, the Shah, and replaced him with his more pliant son. Iran was then divided between the British and Soviets. German intelligence recruitment in Iran spiked, as the numbers of German sympathizers exploded. Vartanian’s workload increased, and his assignments were expanded from recruitment to include counterintelligence against enemy spies as well. The teenager proved himself a counterintelligence prodigy, and a veritable Pac Man at sniffing out and busting enemy spies. By early 1942, Vartanian’s team of seven intelligence operatives had identified over 400 German spies and clandestine agents in the Soviet zone. All of them were rounded up by Soviet troops and security personnel. In 1943, Vartanian was given a new assignment: ensure the security of the upcoming Tehran Conference. His mission was to identify and nip in the bud any enemy plans to disrupt the meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin – the Allies’ “Big Three”.

13. The Nazi Plan to Send Spies to Assassinate Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin

The Germans learned of the Big Three’s meeting after their military intelligence, the Abwehr, cracked a US Navy code. They discovered that a major conference was to be held in Tehran in October, 1943. The result was Operation Long Jump, which aimed to assassinate the Big Three Allied leaders. It was coordinated by SS general Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA – the Reich Main Security Office). To carry out the actual attack, Kaltenbrunner turned to SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, who had rescued deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from captivity in a mountaintop ski resort. Skorzeny was a highly capable, and highly dangerous, operative. Fortunately, the Allies got wind of the German scheme, and Gevork Vartanian was put on the trail of German spies in Iran. In 1943, German intelligence parachuted an advance party of six radio operators near the Iranian city of Qum, about forty miles from Tehran.

Vartanian followed up on their trail. It led the teenage spy to a villa in Tehran, where Operation Long Jump’s advance team had moved in with an Abwehr cell. From that base, the German spies radioed intelligence reports back to Berlin. Unbeknownst to the Germans, their transmissions were intercepted and decoded by the NKVD. The intercepts revealed that Skorzeny was scheduled to arrive in mid-October, along with the actual kill team. That was derailed when the Soviets raided the German nest of spies and arrested all its occupants. The NKVD then sought to turn the radio operators into double agents. They forced them to continue their transmissions to their handlers in Berlin, but now under Soviet supervision. It was an ambitious plan, that sought among other things to lure Skorzeny, the Nazis’ star special forces operative, into a trap. His capture would have made for a great propaganda coup.

12. The Teen Spy Who Saved the Day

The NKVD plan was derailed when one of the captured German spies managed to slip a prearranged code in one of his transmissions. It alerted Berlin that the messages were sent under duress. Operation Long Jump was cancelled, and Skorzeny never returned to Tehran. After WWII ended, Ernst Kaltenbrunner became the highest ranking SS member to face justice at the Nuremberg trials. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, sentenced to death, and hanged in 1946. Otto Skorzeny carried out special missions for the Nazis’ until war’s end. He was captured, but escaped from an internment camp in 1948. He went on the lam for a few years, and finally settled in Francisco Franco’s fascist Spain. Skorzeny spent time in Argentina, as an advisor to President Juan Peron, and as a bodyguard to his wife, Eva Peron.

Versatile, Skorzeny also worked as a military and security consultant for various Arab regimes, with occasional side gigs for Israel’s Mossad. He died of lung cancer in Madrid, in 1975. As to Gevork Vartanian, he received his country’s highest award, Hero of the Soviet Union, in recognition of his services. Vartanian met and married another NKVD agent. The duo spies spent more than three decades after WWII in Soviet intelligence, as it evolved from the NKVD to MGB to KGB to SVR. The couple got married several times throughout their career as part of their cover. Vartanian retired from the SVR in 1992, after which he trained young spies. His identity was kept secret until 2000, when his role in the defeat of Operation Long Jump was finally revealed. He died in 2012, aged 87. His funeral was attended by Russia’s then prime minister, and former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin.

11. From Playboy to Spy

Dusan “Dusko” Popov (1912 – 1981) was born into a wealthy Serbian family. His grandfather was a rich banker and businessman, and his father made the family richer still by adding real estate to its investment portfolio. Popov was set on the playboy path from an early age by an indulgent father, who built his kids a huge seaside villa, and gave them generous allowances that allowed them to host lavish parties there. However, while Popov’s father was indulgent, he did not simply spoil his kids rotten. He insisted that they get as good a top notch education as his considerable wealth could afford. Thus, by the time Popov was a teenager he was fluent in French, German, and Italian, in addition to his native Serbian. At age twenty two, he went to Germany to pursue a doctorate at a university there, not long after the Nazis came to power.

Popov befriended a rich German student named Johnny Jebsen, who had anti-Nazi views. While in Germany, Popov came to loathe the Nazis. When WWII broke out, his friend Jebsen, whose family’s business needed favors from Popov’s, informed him in 1940 that he had joined Germany’s military intelligence, the Abwehr. Popov passed that information to a contact in the British embassy. Jebsen sought to recruit him as an Abwehr agent, and the British urged Popov to play along, recruiting him as an MI6. He eventually turned Jebsen, and recruited his German recruiter into British intelligence as a double agent. Popov also fed information to his native Yugoslavia’s intelligence, making him a triple agent. In 1941, the Abwehr sent Popov to the United States, furnishing him with a small fortune and tasking him with gathering intelligence on American defensive measures.

10. The Real Life Spy Behind One of Fiction’s Greatest Spies

The information sought by the Abwehr included an extensive list of question about the defenses of Pearl Harbor, in which Germany’s Japanese allies were keenly interested. The British worked with the FBI to handle Popov while in the US, but FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men lacked the vision and finesse of their British counterparts. Rather than use Popov as a double agent to suss out German intentions and feed them false information, Hoover simply wanted to use him to catch German spies. Hoover failed to pass on Popov’s Abwehr questions to American military authorities – particularly the ones asking about Pearl Harbor’s defenses. After the Japanese attack wrecked the US fleet there a few months later, Hoover’s oversight should have wrecked his career. However, he buried it so deep, that it did not come out until decades later, after his death.

While in the US, the British assigned Popov a naval intelligence officer named Ian Fleming to watch his every move. The future author of James of Bond followed Popov around as he made the rounds of American night clubs and casinos, where he womanized, splurged the cash furnished him by the Abwehr, and made a killing on the roulette tables. The style and panache left an impression that found expression years later in Agent 007. Indeed, some famous scenes from Casino Royale were based on Fleming’s observations of Popov in American casinos. Eventually, Popov’s relationship with the FBI got so toxic that British intelligence recalled him to London. There, he continued to feed the Abwehr false information. His biggest contribution came in the intricate Allied deception plans, collectively known as Operation Bodyguard, that sought to deceive the Germans about the planned invasion of France, scheduled for the summer of 1944.

9. The Triple Agent Who Tricked the Nazis

Popov played a key role in a sub-plan of Bodyguard, known as Operation Fortitude, which created a fictitious First US Army Group (FUSAG) in southeast England, commanded by General George S. Patton. Popov sent made up details about FUSAG’s units, strength, and organization. The Germans swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Popov and Operation Fortitude paid off in a big way. After D-Day, the Germans were convinced that the Normandy landings were not the main event, but only the first in a series of landings. So instead of rush all available reinforcements to contest the Allies in Normandy, the Germans kept powerful formations in the Pas de Calais, to defend it from the “main invasion” by the fictitious FUSAG. Popov’s British handlers had hoped to convince the Germans to keep the Pas de Calais formations in place for two weeks after D-Day. Things worked out better than their wildest hopes.

Instead of two weeks, the Germans held back their formations for seven weeks. By the time the Pas de Calais defenders were released, it was too late. The Allies took advantage of the breather to build a powerful beachhead in Normandy, before breaking out to liberate France and Western Europe. After Paris was liberated, Popov was sent there to establish a British network of spies. After the war, Yugoslavia turned communist, and there was no future for the playboy Popov back in his home country. So he stayed in the West, where he prospered as a businessman. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his wartime exploits – a nice accompaniment to the medals given him by the Germans during the conflict – and eventually became a British citizen. A playboy to the end, Popov died in 1981, after years of heavy smoking and drinking, and many, many, women.

8. From Housewife in Rural England to Spy in Nazi-Occupied Europe

Many women actively participated in WWII. Few, however, followed the strange path of British housewife Odette Sansom, who went from raising her girls in bucolic England to sneaking into German-occupied France as a spy. In 1942, Odette, a housewife and mother of three girls in Somerset, England, heard a British Admiralty broadcast appeal for French coast photographs. Raised in northern France, she had some photos. She sent them, but to the wrong address: the War Office, instead of the Admiralty. She attracted the attention of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), an organization of clandestine agents and spies, that swiftly recruited her. A few months later, Odette was inserted into occupied France, as a member of an SOE cell. What followed were harrowing adventures, narrow escapes, romance, capture, torture by the Gestapo, and stints in concentration camps. By the time it was all over, she became WWII’s most highly decorated spy.

Odette was a bit of an oddity when she arrived in France: few women served undercover with the SOE at the time. Her first mission was to arrange room and board for her SOE network’s radio operator, who lacked a necessary ration card. She managed that and other early assignments. Then, things got complicated just a week after her arrival. In November, 1942, the Germans reacted to the recent Allied landings in North Africa, and invaded and occupied the nominally independent rump France, in which Odette operated. Odette’s network already had plenty of internal strife, and the new conditions made things worse. She was kept busy with her secret courier work between the SOE and various Resistance groups, while the network descended into chaos. That led to sloppy security work, which almost got Odette captured by the Germans during a failed attempt to arrange a clandestine night-time airplane landing.

7. Running With German Shepherds Snapping at Her Heels

In late 1942, Odette Sansom was almost caught when a French Resistance contact, tasked with finding an out of the way landing area, screwed up. The site was supposed to be suitable for the nighttime landing of a modified Hudson bomber, that was to airlift an SOE operative and four French generals back to Britain. Ineptly, the contact selected an airfield located about a thousand yards from a German antiaircraft battery. A new landing site was selected, this one an abandoned airfield about 500 miles away. After dodging Germans and collaborationist Vichy police, Odette and her party made it to the airfield, only to discover that the control tower and a nearby barracks were occupied by German troops. It was a trap, and the party was forced to scatter, with Germans hot on their tail. Odette crashed into bushes, with German dogs snapping at her heels.

She plunged into an icy stream, and battled the freezing current to the other side, before she finally shook off the pursuit. Not long thereafter, Odette was acting as a courier between the SOE and a French Resistance higher up. The mission took longer than expected, and she ended up missing the last train back home. All hotels were booked, and the last thing Odette wanted was to get arrested for violating curfew, and risk a search that might reveal incriminating documents. So she hid in a brothel that catered exclusively to German soldiers, run by a madam sympathetic to the Resistance. It was as safe a hideout as any, because such an establishment was the last place the authorities would expect to find anti-Nazis and enemy spies. However, on that particular night, the brothel was raided by German military police looking for a deserter.

6. Captured Spies Were Routinely Tortured, but Torture Couldn’t Get This Spy to Talk

To keep them from entering Odette Sansom’s room, the quick thinking brothel madam claimed that the room housed her niece, who was infected with highly contagious smallpox. Odette got away that time, but she was eventually tracked down and arrested by the dreaded Gestapo. She refused to disclose her secrets, so she was taken to Fresnes Prison outside Paris. There, as they routinely did with captured spies, the Gestapo brutally interrogated Odette. They tortured her with red hot irons to her back, and yanked out all of her toenails. She screamed in agony, but insisted that she knew nothing. Eventually, the Nazis gave up on trying to squeeze information out of Odette, and sent her to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp for women. There, the camp commandant, Fritz Suhren, kept her on a starvation diet, and housed her in a punishment block cell, from which she could hear other prisoners being tortured.

Odette survived, and testified against Suhren and various Ravensbruck prison guards after the war. The former Ravensbruck commandant was convicted and executed. As to Odette, she was personally decorated by King George VI after the war. She received awards such as Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), and the George Cross (GC) – the highest non-military decoration for gallantry. Between those and French awards, such as the Legion d’Honneur, she became WWII’s most highly decorated spy. Her adventures were depicted in the 1950 film Odette, starring Anna Neagle. Odette Sansom eventually married one of her fellow SOE spies, with whom she had become romantically involved during the war, but it ended in divorce in 1956. She remarried, to another SOE agent, with whom she remained until her death, in 1995.

5. From Crook to Spy

Eddie Chapman, AKA “Agent Zigzag” (1914 – 1997) was a safebreaker, thief, crook, all around career criminal, and one of WWII’s most fascinating spies. He became the only Englishman ever awarded a German Iron Cross. It was ironic on many levels, because he was also one of history’s most colorful double crossers, and a double agent who led the Germans astray. The false information he fed the Germans derailed the effectiveness of their “Vengeance Weapons”, and likely saved the lives of thousands of Londoners. Raised in a dysfunctional family, Chapman was a delinquent from early on. He enlisted in the British Army at age seventeen, but within a few months grew bored and deserted. When the army caught up with him, he was sentenced to a prison stint and a dishonorable discharge.

After his release, Chapman turned to fraud and crime to support a gambling habit and a taste for fine drinks. When WWII started, Chapman was hiding in Jersey in the Channel Islands from arrest warrants awaiting him in the British mainland. A botched burglary earned him a two year sentence in a Jersey prison. That was where the Germans found him when they captured the Channel Islands in 1940. Chapman offered to work for the Nazis. Eager for spies to send to Britain, the German freed and trained him in explosives, sabotage, and other clandestine skills. They then parachuted him into Britain in 1942, with orders to sabotage and destroy a bomber factory.

4. Agent Zigzag Proved to be One of WWII’s Most Effective Spies

Eddie Chapman was arrested soon after he landed in Britain. He immediately accepted an offer to become a double agent – an easy choice, since the likeliest alternative would have been a hangman’s noose. Given the codename “Agent Zigzag”, a plan was concocted to fake the bomber factory’s destruction. It convinced the Germans, and raised Chapman high in their esteem. From then on, his radio reports, carefully fed him by British intelligence, were treated as gospel by the Germans, who came to see him as one of their most effective spies. He was recalled and given a hero’s welcome by the Nazis. Soon after D-Day, he was awarded an Iron Cross and sent back to Britain to report on the effectiveness of the German V1 and V2 rocket strikes on London.

Chapman set up shop, and under British control sent the Germans inflated figures about deaths from their rockets. He also deceived the Nazis about the rockets’ actual impact points, which led the Germans to shift their aim. As a result, the V1s and V2s tended to fall on lower population density parts of London, with correspondingly fewer casualties. After the war, Chapman continued his colorful life. He went into smuggling, moved to the colonies, started a farm, and in violation of the Official Secrets Act, got his exploits published in The Eddie Chapman Story (1953), Free Agent: Further Adventures of Eddie Chapman (1955), and The Real Eddie Chapman Story (1966). The three books collectively formed the basis of a 1967 movie, Triple Cross.

3. The Princess Spy

Princess Noor Inayat Khan was born in Moscow in 1914 into an unusual family. Her father was a Sufi Master and Muslim noble, descended from the royal family of eighteenth century Indian monarch Tipu Sultan. He worked as a musician and teacher of Sufism. Noor’s mother, Pirani Ameena Begum, was born Ora Ray Baker, an American from Albuquerque, New Mexico. The couple met in New York City, but when her guardian forbade her from seeing Inayat, Noor’s mother sailed to London and married him there. Noor’s parents left Moscow for London, where they lived during WWI. After the war, they relocated to France. Growing up, Noor was described as sensitive, shy, quiet, and dreamy. Little about her indicated that one day she would secretly infiltrate into Nazi-occupied France during WWII as a member of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) – a clandestine organization tasked by Winston Churchill with “setting Europe ablaze!“

Noor studied music at the Paris Conservatory, becoming an accomplished harpist and pianist, as well as a virtuoso on the veena – a stringed Indian musical instrument. She also studied child psychology at the Sorbonne. Noor also became an accomplished poet, wrote children’s stories, was featured in children’s magazines, and was frequently heard on French radio. All that, before she was 25-years-old. When the Nazis overran France in 1940, Noor and her family fled to Britain. Although raised a pacifist, she and her younger brother Vilayat set aside their pacifism to fight Nazism. In November, 1940, Noor joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) as an Aircraftwoman 2^nd Class, and began training as a wireless operator. It was tedious work. To relieve the boredom, she applied for a commission in 1941, in the hopes of getting a more interesting assignment. Her requests for more challenging tasks attracted British intelligence.

2. The First Female SOE Wireless Operator in Nazi-Occupied France

Having grown up in France and being fluent in French, Noor Inayat Khan was a catch for British intelligence. She was recruited by the French section of the SOE, and in early 1943, was sent to receive special training as a wireless operator behind enemy lines. Other SOE female agents had been sent to France before Noor. However, the Muslim princess was the first SOE woman infiltrated into France as a wireless operator – the other women sent before her had all been couriers. Noor’s job was to maintain a link between the Resistance in France, and the Allies in London, sending and receiving messages to coordinate activities. Her mission as a clandestine wireless operator in Nazi-occupied France was extremely dangerous. It grew ever more dangerous as the war progressed and the Germans’ ability to detect transmissions rapidly improved. Clandestine wireless operators had to hide as best they could.

They strung up aerials disguised as clothes drying lines in attics, and tapped out messages in Morse code. The operators then had to wait, sometimes for hours, for a reply, or at least an acknowledgment that their message had been received. German signal vans constantly patrolled, hoping to pick up and triangulate clandestine transmission locations. Staying on air for too long risked leading the Germans straight to the wireless operator. So operators had to constantly relocate, as inconspicuously as they could – no small feat back in the days when transmitters were bulky contraptions that filled a suitcase. In 1943, when Noor accepted her assignment, the life expectancy of a clandestine wireless operator in Nazi territory was just six weeks. On the night of June 16-17, 1943, Assistant Section Officer Noor Inayat Khan, codenamed Madeline and using the fake identity Jeanne-Marie Regnier, boarded a black-painted Westland Lysander. Her destination: Nazi-occupied France.

1. The Steep Price of Heroism

Noor Inayat Khan was flown to a clandestine airfield in German-occupied France. There, she was met by French SOE agent Henri Dericourt, who coordinated air operations between Britain and clandestine networks on the ground in France. Dericourt’s service with the SOE was controversial. After the war, he was accused of having been a double agent working for the Sicherheitdienst (SD), the intelligence arm of the Nazi SS, and of betraying SOE agents and French Resistance members to the Germans. He was tried on the charges, but was acquitted. Nonetheless, suspicions lingered and surrounded him to his dying day. They included suspicions of having betrayed Noor. Assistant Section Officer Noor Inayat Khan survived for longer than the average six weeks life expectancy of clandestine wireless operators in Nazi-occupied France. She arrived in mid-June, 1943, and lasted for nearly four months, before she was arrested by the SD on October 13^th, 1943.

Noor was betrayed to the Germans either by Henri Dericourt, or a female agent named Renee Garry, driven by jealousy because her love interest was attracted to Noor. Captured documents led the Germans to mount a counter-intelligence operation that nabbed three more SOE spies. Noor escaped imprisonment twice, but was recaptured. After the second attempt, she was classified as a “dangerous prisoner”, and was kept in solitary confinement, with her hands and feet in shackles. Despite harsh conditions and harsher interrogations, Noor refused to give the Nazis anything. After ten months of cruel confinement, she was sent to Dachau Concentration Camp, where she was brutally beaten by an SS officer, before she was shot to death on September 13^th, 1944. Her last words according to an inmate who witnessed her death were “Liberte“. After the war, she was posthumously awarded the British George Cross, and the French Croix de Guerre.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Association for Iranian Studies – Gevork Vartanian and Tehran 43: What Do We Know About the Legendary Soviet Spy?

Basu, Shrabani – Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan (2006)

BBC, January 11^th, 2012 – Soviet Spying Legend Gevork Vartanian Dies at 87

Daily Beast – The Allied Spies Who Paved the Way for D-Day

Foot, Michael Richard Daniell – SOE in France: An Account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive in France, 1940 – 1944 (2004)

Globe and Mail, August 11^th, 2005 – How a Valiant Spy Tricked His Captors

History Collection – Uncle Fester Was a WWII Aerial Commando, and Other Celebrities in Wartime

Imperial War Museums – Odette Sansom, GC

Independent, The, January 14^th, 2012 – Gevork Vartanian: Spy Who Helped Foil Churchill Death Plot

Jakub, Joseph F. – Spies and Saboteurs: Anglo-American Collaboration and Rivalry in Human Intelligence Collection and Special Operations, 1940-1945 (1996)

Legion, Canada’s Military History Magazine, June 8^th, 2017 – Hush-Hush Heroes

Les Fussiles – Clopet Evelyne, Claire

Loftis, Larry – Code Name Lise: The True Story of the Woman Who Became WWII’s Most Highly Decorated Spy (2019)

Loftis, Larry – Into the Lion’s Den: The True Story of Dusko Popov, World War II Spy, Patriot, and the Real-Life Inspiration For James Bond (2016)

Macintyre, Ben – Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies (2012)

Popov, Dusko – Spy Counter-Spy (1974)

Russell, Miller – Codename Tricycle: The True Story of the Second World War’s Most Extraordinary Double Agent (2014)

Time Magazine, January 15^th, 2019 – The Extraordinary Bravery That Made This Woman One of World War II’s Most Remarkable Spies

Veterans Affairs Canada – Bill Chong Interview