History's Secret Heroes: Series 3: Noor Khan: The Operator

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You're about to listen to a brand new series of history's secret heroes.

Episodes will be released on Tuesdays, wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK and can't wait, you can hear the full series right now, before anywhere else.

First on BBC Sounds.

Throughout hours of interrogation by the Gestapo, the agent remained silent.

She revealed no information about other radio operators working with her in Paris.

Nothing about the French resistance.

Nothing about the information she sent back to Britain.

Finally, the interrogator, Ernest Focht, took a break.

He noted the date, the 13th of October 1943.

Then he sent the agent up to the cells on the fifth floor of the Gestapo headquarters on Avenue Foche in Paris.

But the agent Noor Enayat Khan had other plans.

So Noor is determined to escape.

I mean, she wastes no time.

Khan said she needed to wash before being locked in her cell.

So Noor is a very petite young woman.

She was five foot two.

She had dark hair.

She was of mixed race.

Her mother was American, father was Indian, dark eyes, flashing dark eyes.

People were drawn to her.

She had this attraction.

The Gestapo officers agreed she could wash, but only if she kept the bathroom door ajar.

Khan replied angrily that the guards could not watch her undress and bathe.

And they're quite shocked, but they have to let her be.

Focht reluctantly closed the door.

So she goes into this bathroom and immediately she's jumped out of the window.

Khan balanced on the thin ledge that ran around the perimeter of the building.

There was a five-floor drop to the street below.

She took a sharp breath.

The lower floors had shallow balconies.

If she could make it along the guttering, she might be able to climb down to them.

She could run back to her circuit, back to transmitting intelligence to the British.

Khan clung to the side of the building, feeling for her handhold as her toes inched along the fifth-floor gutter.

Beneath her feet, the pipe creaked.

I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes.

True stories of deception, acts of resistance and courage from World War II.

Noor Inayat Khan, the operator.

Three years earlier, on the 5th of June, 1940, Noor Anayat Khan was in a car driving out of Paris, stuck in an unruly traffic jam of vans, trucks, and bicycles.

Mattresses were strapped to car roofs.

People pushed handcots.

Two-thirds of Paris's population fled before the city was occupied by the Nazis, and Khan was among them.

Her family was in the car with her, crammed in among all the possessions they could pack.

Aside from brief spells in London, Khan had spent 20 years of her life living in the suburb of Paris.

It's a beautiful house called Fazal Manzil, which means house of blessing.

Shrebani Basu is the author of Spy Princess, The Life of Noor Enayat Khan.

The large family house was on a tree-lined street.

From the upper windows in the distance, Khan could see the Eiffel Tower.

So Noor's father was an Indian.

He was a Sufi.

And Sufism is a branch of Islam that believes in music and meditation.

Noor played the Veena, she played the harp.

Her brother Vilayad played the cello.

It was almost a little India.

As a child, Khan's cousin, Mahmoud Mahmoud Khan, often visited the house.

He remembers Noor giving him a piano lesson.

A bit of scales, of course, but then after the scales, as a kind of reward, was playing this WhatsApp.

And she was very nice about it, entertaining about it.

Mahmoud was spellbound by his sophisticated cousin.

Even then, as a young boy, I considered very beautiful, very delicate, outward, a very lovely kind of appearance and approach, a very gentle person, but at the same time inwardly enriched things.

In June 1940, along with the rest of Paris, the Sodyllic lifestyle was under threat.

Khan and her siblings were brought up as pacifists with respect for all religions, not just their own Sufi faith.

She and her brother Valayat found the Nazi regime abhorrent.

They said, we can't stand back and watch.

They say that we are Sufis, we believe in non-violence, but it's not right to stand back and see what's going on.

The siblings agreed they owed allegiance to free France.

This is the country whose food, whose bread you have eaten, that's a typical Indian way of saying things.

You have taken all the benefits of the country, you fight for them.

So both of them decide that they were going to go to England, they were going to volunteer for the war effort, and they were going to do their bit in the war.

As the Khan family drove slowly out of Paris, they passed cars that had run out of fuel, abandoned at the side of the road.

As they see this devastation, they're just getting more and more determined.

And they're driving through this.

And as they're driving, there's a Luftwaffe attack, and the Stukas are bombing.

And Viliath, he just gets into a rage and he says, when I reach England, I'm going to join the RAF.

And Noor immediately says, and I'll join the women's wing.

The family made it to London.

Khan joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force.

And suddenly, she is just aircraftswoman with a number and a uniform.

It's such a different life from, you know, this genteel, almost aristocratic life that she has led in Paris.

She was a writer, she was gentle, she was a musician, and now she's going to sleep in a hut with others.

The Khan family was descended from royalty.

She'd been brought up to expect a life of elegance, elegance, marriage, children, and music.

How would she adapt to this new situation?

She actually enjoys it.

It's suddenly very liberating.

She feels she's doing something, and we know that a lot of women felt this during the war, that they had something to do and they were doing it.

At the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, Khan trained as a radio operator.

Her musical training helped with Morse code.

She had a fine dexterity and could remember complex patterns.

So she's making very rapid progress.

She's also making friends.

She travels to various stations, they go to Edinburgh, she goes to Aberdeen, enjoying herself, enjoying this very different life.

Khan was fluent in French and a talented code communicator.

It wasn't long before she caught the attention of military intelligence.

She's now called for an interview.

to the Victoria Hotel in London.

She thinks it's just for a commission in the RAF.

She has no idea.

Khan was led into a room for an interview with Captain Selwyn Jepson.

It's a very spare stark room.

It's got two kitchen tables and two chairs with one light bulb.

It's smelling of disinfectant and shaving cream.

She's not very sure why the RAF would have called her here.

And the man across the table speaks to her in French.

She has no idea why.

She replies in perfect French.

The conversation didn't last long because it didn't have to.

Captain Jepson was impressed by Khan.

Many years later, he writes that he could see those burning eyes looking at him.

And he saw her as a frail, shy woman, but there was a strength in her.

At the end of the interview, he offered Khan a position, but it would mean traveling abroad, leaving her family behind.

And he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent.

She will work undercover.

She will not be in uniform, so she has no protection.

And if she is caught, she's going to be shot.

And will she take the job?

The British needed radio operators in France.

These operators sent encrypted messages from the French resistance to London and back.

And in 1943, there was an alarming shortage of them.

The average life expectancy of a radio operator was six weeks.

The men were dropping like flies.

They needed to send people in.

They were going to send women in for the first time.

And Noor was going to be the first woman radio operator in a really dangerous field.

Khan trained with Special Operations Executive, a volunteer force dedicated to irregular warfare.

SOE was nicknamed the Stately Alms of England, for it was in the grounds of elegant country houses that its agents learned their spycraft.

She has to learn to use weapons, something she's never done in her life.

Dead letterboxes, live letter boxes, how to recruit agents, how to break locks, how to kill silently in the dark.

The physical training is very rigorous, running long distances, and reports say she's a very good runner.

So, you know, they have to crawl, they have to learn about explosives.

So all these things that she is learning, which...

is the life of a secret agent, nothing she's ever done before.

Despite Khan's physical speed and aptitude, some doubted she was suitable.

She was too dreamy, she would not be able to stand up to interrogation, she was too polite, too shy, too timid, and she was not the right person.

You know, they would call her the potty princess because her father was a crackpot preacher.

Noor looked different, obviously.

So she stood out.

And one of the fellow agents actually commented and said once he'd never forgotten.

And so many thought that as a secret agent, you're meant to blend.

But noor actually stood out.

There were also questions over the true allegiance of this woman with British, French, American, and Indian heritage.

India was still part of the British Empire.

The independence movement there was split over whether or not to back Britain in the war.

British Indian authorities had imprisoned more than 100,000 people who were involved in the quit India movement against imperial rule.

At one of the interviews, she was actually asked which side she would be loyal to, whether she would be loyal to India or to Britain.

And Noor lost her temper there.

And she said very frankly that as long as the war was on, she would back Britain.

But after the war was over, she believed in Indian independence.

And that is a startling thing to say to an interview panel.

They were shocked, but I think they also respected her total honesty, that this is what I stand for.

Despite this, Khan's recruiter, Captain Jepson, discouraged her from going to France.

He doesn't want this gentle young woman to go out to face the Gestapo.

He does try to tell her that, you know,

you can step back if you want to.

You don't have to do this.

But

Noor is determined.

There is no, no persuading her.

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Under cover of night on the 16th of June 1943, Kahn flew back across the English Channel to France.

She'd been forbidden to tell her family where she was going or what she was doing.

Her mother thought she was working as a nurse.

Fearing her mother would be concerned if she didn't hear from her, Kahn wrote a series of letters and left them with a colleague at SOE with instructions to send them at regular intervals.

As she flew over France, Khan looked across the dark fields below.

She was home, ready to fight for her country's freedom.

Khan was known by the codename Madeline.

Her cover story suggested she was a children's nurse.

Khan was given some francs and a gold compact she could sell if she was in dire straits.

She was also issued with a set of four pills.

One of the pills is a sleeping tablet that will make you sleep for six hours and they could put this in the enemy's drink and sedate them.

The second pill was to cause stomach upsets and they could put this in as well or feign for themselves that you know they have a stomach upset or something.

The third pill was one which would make you stay up for hours.

And the fourth pill was called the L pill which is basically the cyanide.

So if they wanted to, they could swallow this pill and it was a suicide pill.

When she arrived in Paris, Khan made contact with members of the Prosper Circuit.

They included an agent called Emile Henri Gary.

Khan also met his sister René, who she came to know well.

Khan went straight to work, sending messages back to Britain.

The radio, it's disguised inside a suitcase.

It weighs 15 kilos.

You have to carry this all around.

So you're carrying it on the metro, you're carrying it on your cycle.

And of course, you can be stopped.

Occupied Occupied Paris is crawling with a Gestapo.

It's crawling with informers.

Anyone can come up to you.

And of course there's the French Melis.

One day Khan was traveling with her suitcase radio on the metro when she was stopped by the authorities.

And he says, Mademoiselle, what are you carrying?

And she has to just talk her way out of this situation.

So she opens it a bit and says, It's a photographic apparatus.

Can you not see the light bulbs?

And of course, he had no idea what a photographic apparatus is and he's not going to admit that so he says oh yes yes of course and he he lets her go she's out at the next stop and she runs for her life

when she needed to send a message khan found a safe location set up the apparatus and hooked up an aerial often this was in a back room or an attic once though it was urgent so she had to improvise and she goes outside her flat and starts putting it up on a tree outside her flat.

And suddenly she stopped and there's a voice behind her.

Mademoiselle, excuse me, mademoiselle, what are you doing?

And it's an SS officer who lives in the same apartment block.

And once again, Noor has to put on all her charm and she has to think on her feet and she says,

I'm just listening to a, sorry officer, I'm listening to a radio station for some music.

And she very cleverly names a band radio station because why else is she doing this?

So she's committing a small offense and she's very charmingly admitting to it.

And he is so charmed by this woman, he says, I'll help you, mademoiselle.

And he puts up this aerial for her, not knowing that half an hour later, she is transmitting to London.

Whenever her message was transmitted, the Nazis traced the source.

They sent officers to the location to arrest anyone they found.

You have to find a spot, put up this aerial, transmit this message in code really quickly and accurately, and then just get the hell out of there as fast as you can.

Only a week after Khan's arrival in Paris, the Gestapo discovered the Prosper circuit.

The couriers were arrested.

Everyone in Khan's circuit was rounded up, but the Gestapo couldn't find the operative working under the code name Madeline.

Following her training, Khan went to ground.

And then, after a few weeks, London writes to her that it's very dangerous.

We'll send a plane, come back.

And she writes back saying no, I'm the last link left between London and Paris and I'm going to rebuild the circuit.

Khan was now doing the work of six radio operators while also working as a courier.

She transported money to the French resistance and told them where to collect weapons.

At the same time, she was still transmitting messages back and forth from London.

The Gestapo were on her tail.

They know know she's out there.

They're looking for her, but they can't catch her.

She is on the run.

She is constantly changing her hair, her style, so that nobody can recognize her.

She is doing everything she can to keep sending the messages back to London.

And London is shocked because suddenly Noor is their most active agent.

Khan tried to build a new circuit with her new agents.

What she didn't know was that the Gestapo had searched the home of a member of her old circuit.

They had found paper and notes referring to Madeline.

He let slip that Madeline is there as a radio operator.

And Madeline was her codename.

And suddenly now they know they're looking for a woman.

The Gestapo were determined to find Madeline.

By the beginning of October 1943, she'd been working as a secret agent for three months, much longer than their average lifespan of six weeks.

She couldn't take much more.

She gets letters from her mother which are being sent from London and that makes her really, really miss her family, obviously.

It was time for her to return from her mission.

London says you've done your bit.

We'll send a plane and she's ready to go back and she says bye to her friends that I'm going back to London.

One of Khan's remaining friends was René Gary, the sister of Khan's prospect circuit colleague, Émile Henri.

Gary often stayed in Khan's apartment, yet her contemporaries believed she was the one who betrayed Noor.

Well, the reason is age-old, René Gary, was jealous of Noor.

Noor was beautiful.

Everyone was in love with Noor.

And René was in love with this man, Anthelme.

He was a secret agent, too.

And Anthelme was in love with Noor.

So it was this little triangle.

And she goes to the Gestapo headquarters and she gives Noor's address for 10,000 francs.

On Wednesday 13th of October 1943, Khan returned to her Paris apartment.

She was ready to make her way back to London but a Gestapo officer was already there hiding behind the door.

As she entered the room he approached to make the arrest.

She fights back.

She's like a tigress.

They describe her as a tigress.

She bites her captor, she draws blood, and he can't just take her.

She's a tiny five-foot-two petite woman, but he can't take her to the prison himself.

He has to point a gun at her, make a call with his other hand, get in reinforcements, and it takes about four or five burly men to bundle this petite woman into a car and take her to the prison.

They drove her to 84 Avenue Foch, the headquarters of the Gestapo.

It was here that after hours of interrogation by Ernest Focht, during which she offered up no information at all, she demanded to wash before being taken to her cell.

Khan steadied herself on the guttering along the fifth floor of the building.

Suspecting she might try to escape, Focht had gone to the next room and saw Khan through the window.

Suddenly, this escape plan felt very foolhardy.

Focht and the other Gestabe officers called out to her.

They said, don't jump.

Think of your mother and they pull her back in.

Khan was locked in a cell, but she had not given up hope of escape.

In the adjoining cells were another SOE agent and a French resistance fighter.

She contacts them by tapping on her wall in Moscow, and they hatch a plot to escape, where they will escape from the roof from the skylights.

Over the next few weeks, Khan and these two men were able to steal a screwdriver, which they passed between them.

Each loosened the skylights of his or her cell.

On the night of the 25th of November 1943, all three prisoners made it out onto the roof of the Gestapo headquarters.

But the RAF start bombing, so the air raid sirens go off, and as soon as the sirens go off, they check the prisoners' rooms.

They come and find three prisoners missing and immediately find them on the roof, arrest them, bring them down.

The prison commander pointed his gun at Khan.

He could have just killed her on the spot, but he can't.

He can't get himself to pull this trigger.

And so he makes a phone call to Berlin and he says, get her out of here.

Kahn was transported to Furzeim in southwestern Germany.

She was classified as highly dangerous.

This meant she was kept in solitary confinement, her hands and feet shackled.

The Nazi interrogators would come in, and the instructions were to starve her and beat her, and the other fellow prisoners could hear her crying in her cell at night.

Even after ten months of this daily torture, Khan still refused to give up any information.

I feel the only way she survived is her inner strength, which came from probably her Sufi faith.

She would have thought a lot about her father.

She would have meditated, and that is the only thing that would have got her through this very difficult phase.

At the end of each day of interrogation, Khan was given a steel bowl containing a ration of potato peel soup.

After she ate, she turned the bowl over and scratched a message into it.

Through these bowls, she was able to communicate with other prisoners.

They shared messages of hope and information about what was happening outside the prison walls.

In June 1944, the prisoners heard about D-Day, the Allied invasion of France.

They promised to celebrate together when the war was over.

Soon after that, guards entered Khan's cell.

They did not interrogate her.

Instead, they told her she was being moved.

They go to Munich, and for the first time, she's out of this prison after 10 months.

Suddenly, she meets three other women agents.

And it's a little breath of fresh air for them because they can speak in English, they exchange news.

The guard removed their handcuffs and gave them some sausages to eat.

The women had a picnic together.

At Munich they changed trains.

They were told that they were heading to a farm to work.

Just before midnight they reached their station,

Dachau.

And as they walked in, they would have realized this is no place, no agricultural laborer, you know, happening here, no farms this is a death camp

after the war prisoners of war began to return to britain khan was not among them

it was torture for the family the war had ended their sister wasn't coming back they had no idea when she left britain khan hadn't been able to tell her family she was going to france

They later learned she had joined the secret service.

According to her cousin Mahmoud, though, the family didn't understand what it meant to be working underground.

The impression was that you had underground shelters from where you worked, like the people of the Battle of Britain.

So they thought that was that kind of service.

They never thought it was a service of what it actually was.

Khan's brother, Vilayet, wrote to the War Office to ask for information about Khan.

Yet it wasn't until April 1946 that the family learned what had happened to her.

If you have known her personally, then to feel a person that had to go to that terrible torture, that terrible suffering, and that terrible humiliation also,

that's very hard to bear.

On the morning of the 13th of September 1944, in the concentration camp at Dachau, Khan had been told to kneel.

Before the gun pointed at the back of her neck fired, Khan reportedly shouted out, Liberte!

They can't break her spirit.

Her family was told that Khan never betrayed anyone and never gave up any information,

even under torture.

She and her brother Vilad were very straightforward.

You take one stand and you stand by that, and you don't look right or left.

In that sense, that was really a strength, which unfortunately in her circumstances ultimately became a fatal strength.

Khan received many posthumous awards, including the Croix de Guerre and the George Cross, the highest civilian honours in France and Britain.

After the war, René Garry was put on trial by a French military court for betraying Khan.

She was identified by Ernest Focht.

As a former Nazi, though, his testimony was not considered definitive.

René Garry was acquitted.

Over the years, Mahmoud Khan has reflected on Khan's courage.

Had she been less brave or less inflexible, could she have played her cards differently with the Gestapo?

Some little

frightened question in me sometimes is if she had been somewhat more

diplomatic, somewhat more tactful, somewhat more careful about the harm the Germans might impose, maybe her fate might not be quite that horrible as it in fact was.

But that's only my

supposition and I'm a bit ashamed of it.

Though Noor Inayat Khan's family still miss her, they remember her with pride.

Coming up on this series of history's secret heroes, A group of Soviet women take to the skies to become night bombers.

She was about to drop this lighting bomb and took out the fuse, but the bomb got caught in the mittens that she strapped around her neck.

A fashion boutique in Sarajevo houses an enormous secret.

There were three hiding places within that shop, three false closets where you could hide people.

Next time, hiding in an attic in the Netherlands, a German Jewish refugee risks his life to create a satirical magazine that seeks to ridicule the Nazis.

Irreferent doesn't even begin to describe the...

I mean, it would be blasphemy to the Nazis to insult the Führer's mother, Kurt Bloch and the Underwater Cabaret.

I'm Matthew Seide and Sideways, my podcast from BBC Radio 4, brings you stories of seeing the world differently.

From that moment on, I feel like my life and the way that I view life itself just shifted, literally.

Stories about the ideas that shape our lives.

If a missile had come down and killed us all, it wouldn't have mattered.

It was just me and the moment of bliss in the middle of a war zone.

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Listen to Sideways, first on BBC Sounds.

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Your crocodile ferns would go to the size of crocodiles.

Wealthfront's cash account keeps your money thriving just like that, earning you an industry-leading rate with no account maintenance fees and with free 24-7 instant withdrawals so you can access your money whenever you need it.

Money works better here.

Go to WealthFront.com to start saving.

Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC member FINRA SIPC.

Wealthfront is not a bank.

The APY on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024 is representative, subject to change and requires no minimum.

Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY.

The national average interest rate for savings accounts is posted on FDIC.gov as of December 16, 2024.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

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