http://tinyurl.com/noorlinks http://tinyurl.com/noorsociety _____________________________________________________________________________ \\\\\___PRINCESS NOOR APPRECIATION SOCIETY INTERNATIONAL 1998___\"-._ /////~~~ BEGUM NOOR CONNECTION ~~~/.-' _____________________________________________________________________________ THE PRINCESS WHO COULD NOT TELL A LIE {Compliments of the Daily Express} Betrayed by collaborators and let down by bureaucratic bungling, the women of Churchill's underground army still managed incredible feats, says Simon Edge The moon shone brightly as the British Lysander aircraft landed in a field in France. It was June 1943 and on board was an agent of the Special Operations Executive, the secret army of saboteurs Winston Churchill had set up to wage "ungentlemanly warfare" in Europe. That this latest agent was no gentleman was not in doubt. For Noor Inayat Khan was an Indian princess. And she was a secret agent like no other. As the daughter of a diplomat, Noor had been born in the Kremlin and then raised in France. Her early career, presenting a children's programme on Radio Paris and writing a book of fairy stories, was a far cry from the life of an underground saboteur. But the SOE was full of agents with non-military backgrounds - Noor's commanding officer had been a PR man for the Ford motor company. What really marked her out from every other agent in the history of espionage was her inability to tell a lie. Noor's father was a Sufi mystic, and she had been brought up with a fanatical devotion to telling the truth. This immediately caused problems when she was sent on an SOE training course to be a wireless operator. Stopped by a policeman one night and asked where she was going, she cheerfully explained that she was training for a secret army and offered to show him her radio. She was adamant that she would not lie if caught by the Germans, and her despairing instructors insisted she must not be sent behind enemy lines. As one of them said: "If she's an agent, I'm Winston Churchill." But there was a desperate shortage of radio operators, and Noor was sent to France against all advice from her tutors. In the event, their assessment could not have been more wrong. She turned out to be such an effective supporter of the nascent French resistance that she was one of three SOE women to be awarded the George Cross. The stories of all three remarkable women are told in the second part of the Channel 4 series Churchill's Secret Army, which goes out on Thursday Narrated by Sebastian Faulks, whose novel Charlotte Gray is set in the world of the SOE, the series makes much of the obstacles its agents had to overcome. They were hampered by bungling incompetence back in Britain, distrusted by other parts of the war machine who thought sabotage was unethical, and under constant threat of betrayal from traitors in their midst. Nevertheless, General Eisenhower would later describe the SOE's achievement as worth five extra divisions of troops, and the women members' role was crucial. Odette Sansom was a mother-of-three who volunteered to work behind Nazi lines in Paris. She provided vital support for agents trying to establish a resistance movement. But lonely and isolated, she was lured into a trap by a German counter-espionage officer who claimed to want to negotiate an agreement with the British, and she was imprisoned in Ravensbruck concentration camp. She survived, and her story was later made into the film Odette, starring Anna Neagle. A second tale of SOE heroism was also brought to the big screen. The film Carve Her Name With Pride, starring Virginia McKenna, told the story of a young widow from Brixton called Violette Szabo. Violette, who was half-French, also joined up as a radio operator and was instructed to use codes based on classic British poems. But SOE cryptographer Leo Marks worried that the Germans could crack the whole code if they recognised the poems. In a touching tale which brought welcome humanity into the life-or-death operations, he gave Violette a poem he himself had written to a girl he loved who had died in an accident. Violette used it to transmit secret messages before she too was captured and sent to Ravensbruck. Unlike Odette, she was executed. The story of the third woman, Noor, has not been told on screen before. But Marks, whose memoir Between Silk And Cyanide was recently published to great acclaim, remembers her well. "She was a nightmare to train because she would not lie," he recalls. "She had an appalling report from her codes training officer, and it was inconceivable that a girl like this should join the SOE. "I had to devise a security check without parallel, exclusive to her, that would enable her to let us know she was caught without her telling a lie to her captors - because Noor just would not lie." On one occasion during training, the young princess was so startled by an unexpected pistol shot that she went into a Sufi trance for several hours, finally emerging from it to consult a Bible. But in the absence of other trained volunteers, she was sent to France - where her performance amazed her superiors. "Noor Inayat Khan was highly intelligent, and she was fanatical," says Marks, now in his late 70s. "She survived without capture for five months when the average was three. "She probably should not have gone in, but having gone in, she was indispensable because she was so single-minded. When all the so-called expert radio operators were caught, Noor continued operating, and she refused to return to England." Although they were not organising the resistance themselves, the radio operators were crucial. "Without safe communications, the agents in the field who were under orders from Churchill to set Europe ablaze would not have been able to receive any orders. By breaking every rule except her own, Noor enabled communications to continue when they had absolutely no right to." Living undercover was hazardous. All SOE agents were issued with cyanide pills to take if they were captured and many, convinced that they could not withstand torture, were forced to use them. Noor's dusky skin put her at particular risk of detection because it was likely to attract the attention of the Nazis. But as the French network of agents collapsed around her - betrayed by a double agent named Henri Déricourt - Noor stayed at her post. Knowing the risks she was taking, her commanding officer in London ordered her to return in September 1943. But Noor refused to leave until she was satisfied that a replacment had been found for her. Eventually she agreed to be picked up by Lysander in mid-October, where there would be enough moonlight for the plane to land without lights. But when the time came, she dropped out of contact - only resuming transmission after the moon had waned, in the knowledge that she could not be picked up for another month. It could not last forever, and eventually Noor too was betrayed, although not by Déricourt. A jealous Frenchwoman had grown resentful at the amount of time her resistance boyfriend was spending with Noor, and although her jealousy was almost certainly groundless, she turned Noor over to the Nazis. In a mix-up which would have been comic had lives not been at stake, her captors discovered every coded signal she had ever sent. Before leaving England, she had been told to take great care in filing her messages. "Filing" was a jargon term for "sending", but Noor understood it in the secretarial sense - and the Germans found all her transmissions neatly card-indexed. She made a daring escape from captivity but was retaken and sent to Dachau. Like Violette Szabo, she was shot in the back of the head, and her GC was awarded posthumously. David Boardman, the associate producer of the Channel 4 series, has pulled no punches in the programmes. They expose the incompetence of superior officers in wasting valuable lives and failing to root out treachery. More than 100 agents met their deaths in the field, and for one 18-month period, every operative sent into Holland fell straight into enemy hands. But Boardman is confident that the story of the SOE is not one of wasted heroism, but of a key contribution to winning the war. "They helped increase the resistance by a factor of 10, and their role after D-Day was crucial. "They didn't set Europe ablaze, as Churchill first wanted, but they held a candle out in a very bleak hour for hope. Noor Inayat Khan was very, very daring, and she played a major role in keeping it all going." ____________________________________________________________________________ Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html Doctrine of International Copyright Law ____________________________________________________________________________