By moonlight on the night of 16-17 June 1943, Vera Atkins arrived at Tangmere airfield near Chichester in Sussex. As an agent handler and deputy head of ‘F Section’, the French section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), she was about to dispatch three women behind enemy lines to operate with the French resistance. One of them was Noor Inayat Khan, who became the first female radio operator to be deployed into occupied France. As she said goodbye to Vera in a cottage within the perimeters of the airfield, she noticed Vera’s broach – a silver bird – and commented, ‘You are so clever, Miss Atkins. You always make sure you wear something pretty.’ In a touching and moving gesture, Vera removed the broach and pressed it into Noor’s hand. Vera could see that Noor’s commitment was unswerving as she boarded a Lysander and left for France that night.

Under the codename Madeleine, and with fake identity papers in the name of Nora Baker to disguise her Indian Sufi roots, her role as a radio operator was an extremely dangerous one, with a life expectancy of only six weeks. Noor knew the risks. She had an inner courage and believed she was ready for the mission in spite of the disquiet from her instructors during training. One instructor had written that she ‘can run well but otherwise clumsy. Unsuitable for jumping’. Another noted that she was ‘kind hearted, emotional, imaginative. Came here without the foggiest idea what she was being trained for’. Her final training report said: ‘Not over-burdened with brains. It is doubtful whether she is really suited to work in the field.’ Thankfully for Noor, Maurice Buckmaster, the head of F Section, had dismissed the report as nonsense. Vera believed in Noor, too, and had tried to get to know her in the months before her mission. She found her to be different from the other agents: someone with special qualities, and somewhat ‘otherworldly’.

Noor Inayat Khan was born in Moscow on New Year’s Day 1914, a descendant of Tipu Sultan, the storied ruler of Mysore, who was her great-great grandfather. Her father, Inayat Khan, was a Sufi Master and teacher from a line of Indian nobles and musicians; her mother was an American born in New Mexico. Inayat Khan had met his wife while travelling in the United States. Shortly before the First World War, the family left Russia for Britain, then for Paris in 1920. Noor went on to be educated at the Sorbonne and was a fluent French speaker, which would be essential when she returned behind the German lines in 1943. In the years before the outbreak of the Second World War she was a writer, but all this was interrupted by the German occupation of France in May 1940, and the family fled to Bordeaux. Noor arrived in Falmouth, Cornwall towards the end of June 1940. Even though she was an avowed pacifist, inspired by the teaching of Gandhi, she wanted to do something to defeat the evil of Nazism – a moral calling that temporarily overtook her pacifist ideals.

She enlisted in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) but soon became bored of the mundane duties, wanting to do something more active. In February 1943 she was finally recruited to SOE and attached to the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY).

Once behind enemy lines in mid-June 1943, having been landed by Lysander near Angers, Noor made her way to Paris to link up with Francis Suttill, the leader of the Prosper circuit. Radio operators were a vital link between SOE headquarters in Baker Street, London and the resistance circuits whose members carried out acts of sabotage to disrupt enemy communications and railway infrastructure. They had to be hidden in safehouses and moved every couple of days to avoid being arrested by the Gestapo. Antennas were strung through attics in safehouses or camouflaged as washing lines to enable the radio operators to tap out secret messages in Morse code on their transmitters. It was lonely work, marked by long periods of waiting for a response from London; it was also fraught with dangers, because they were susceptible to being caught by the German counter-espionage units who used mobile detection vans to catch the operators during a radio transmission. Broadcasting for more than 20 minutes was dangerous.

In her clandestine role, Noor operated behind the lines in plain sight by masking herself as a children’s nurse, always hiding in different addresses. The dangers were ever present, and the network had been betrayed – by whom and why remains a controversial and largely unverified aspect of the SOE’s history in France. From 24 June 1943, just a week after Noor had been dropped in, the Germans began their round-up of members of the Prosper circuit.

Noor survived longer than most radio operators. She was able to stay on the run until her capture by the Gestapo on or around 13 October 1943; the precise date is not known. She was taken to the infamous Gestapo headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch in Paris, about to face what she had dreaded most – brutal Gestapo questioning and torture. During her training in England, she had struggled with her mock interrogations (something her instructors commented on) because she had found the experience utterly terrifying. Indeed, her instructor had remarked that she found it ‘almost unbearable… seemed terrified … so overwhelmed she nearly lost her voice’.

Now she faced it for real. Yet during her interrogation, she demonstrated a resilience and courage that has come to define how we remember her today. She exhibited such unwavering resolve that she unsettled her interrogators. Josef Kieffer, head of Nazi security in Paris, later admitted that she steadfastly refused to reveal any details about SOE’s operations. However, her notebooks had been found and, contrary to SOE security rules (and perhaps as a result of a misunderstanding on her part about filing messages), she had copied out all messages that she had transmitted to Baker Street. This provided an opportunity for the Germans, who continued to send messages to London, pretending to be her. Noor’s case was not the only one in which messages were sent to London under the guise of SOE agents who had already been captured; it was to be a devastating mistake in the SOE’s history.

During her captivity at 84 Avenue Foch, Noor attempted a daring escape by scaling the roof with two others during an RAF bombing raid on 25 November 1943, only to be recaptured nearby when the sirens sounded. Had she succeeded, it could have been one of the boldest escapes in history.

The Germans classified Noor as ‘highly dangerous’ and transferred her first to Karlsruhe in Germany, then to Pforzheim, where she was held in solitary confinement and shackled in chains. She resolutely still refused to give up any information. On 12 September 1944, she was swiftly transferred without warning to Dachau concentration camp, where she was executed the following day, alongside three other heroic female SOE agents, Madeleine Damerment, Yolande Beekman and Eliane Plewman. These agents were among 39 women sent into occupied France with SOE during the war.

The SOE endorsed unorthodox methods of warfare and, from its headquarters in London, planned for ungentlemanly warfare and active resistance against the Nazis – all endorsed and encouraged by Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Across the course of the war, thousands of women and men were recruited by SOE as agents, couriers, wireless operators and saboteurs to disrupt and incapacitate the enemy’s war machine. Women played a necessary and vital role across all SOE’s operations and theatres of war, not only as agents behind the lines but as couriers, forgers of papers, despatch riders, coders and packers of parachutes ahead of a clandestine drop. Female couriers were discreet and could move around enemy territories without suspicion and proved an ideal replacement courier after the arrest of a male courier. The female radio operators, like Noor, carried out the same level of operational work as the men. From 1942, the SOE permitted women to train as agents for their operations behind the lines. Vera Atkins sent the first female agents into France on 25 September 1942. They were Andrée Borrel and Lise de Baissac.

The women of the SOE distinguished themselves with exceptional bravery in the field; three were awarded the George Cross and two the George Medal. Noor’s extraordinary courage was posthumously recognised with the George Cross.

Many of SOE’s female agents in occupied France were captured and transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp where they displayed remarkable courage. In the end, most were shot, and their exact fate was unknown until after the war.

As the SOE was busy packing up its files and closing down at the end of the war, the indomitable Vera Atkins was furious that no one seemed to care about what had happened to the missing agents. Noor was among them, as her death had not been confirmed. Vera vowed to find every missing agent and confirm their fate, which she achieved in the postwar years in Germany. Her own discharge papers summed her up as ‘a capable administrator and organiser’, who ‘remains undaunted both by the difficulties or amount of work. She has courage and drive but is somewhat disinclined to accept instructions without argument. She requires handling but has proved a capable officer’. It was precisely this strong personality that defined her success as an agent handler and intelligence officer. Without her, we would not know today what happened to the women agents who never returned. She has done a huge service in enabling us to understand what these agents sacrificed.

Various statues and memorials have been unveiled to commemorate the agents of SOE, including a bronze bust of agent Violette Szabo, which is located on the Albert Embankment, opposite the Houses of Parliament. It pays tribute to all 470 agents of the SOE – men and women. Szabo also did not survive her mission and died in Ravensbrück on 5 February 1945, aged just 23. Noor is commemorated in London’s Bloomsbury area by a statue in Gordon Square Gardens and a blue plaque on 4 Taviton Street, on the house from which she left for Tangmere airfield.

Noor found a strength in the most horrific circumstances during her brutal captivity. Although she was terrified and could be heard crying at night in her cell, she overcame her fears, stood resolute and mustered all her inner strength not to give up her colleagues or SOE’s operations. She demonstrated a quiet, understated courage and resilience. For me, that has been captured in a vibrant and arresting painting of her which hangs today in the RAF Club in Piccadilly, unveiled by the Queen on 29 September 2023. It reminds us that, through Noor’s life, when betraying others would make life easier, moral integrity under pressure is the triumph over evil. She knew better than her instructors that she was ready for that mission – and she most certainly was.