“Liberté!” — The story of a Princess Spy
“Liberté!” is said to be the last words Noor Inayat Khan spoke before Nazi soldiers shot her with a pistol. After months of evading capture, and further months of enduring torture, descendant of Indian royalty (a Sufi princess) and British spy, Khan, made history that is very rarely told.
An Unlikely Hero
In 1940, during WWII, things had become bleak. After Dunkirk and the fall of France, an invasion on Britain seemed imminent.
In retaliation, Winston Churchill authorised Hugh Dalton — the minister of economic warfare — to run a resistance movement. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was created. They were responsible for recruiting and training agents who would be sent behind enemy lines. One of the most difficult roles they recruited for was the Wireless Operator — according to the BBC, their life expectancy was just 6 weeks.
A Wireless Operator’s duty was to transmit and receive information using their short-wave morse transceiver which was concealed within a suitcase (left).
Khan was recruited to be a wireless operator by the SOE. In 1940 she had fled to England from her home in Paris (where she previously worked as a children’s author). She had made a pact with her brother, before being recruited, to fight Nazi oppression without directly killing anybody.
An Unlikely Recruit
According to an article by HistoryExtra, Khan was reported by those that trained her to be frightened of weapons, and to have fallen apart when she was questioned in mock interrogations. In spite of the doubts of her ability, the head of the F Section of the SOE, Maurice Buckmaster, recruited her anyway as they were desperate for recruits.
First Months Undercover
While agents fled to evade capture, Khan stayed in Paris and continued to transmit intelligence to her receivers.
On the 16th June 1943, after extensive training, Khan took off from West Sussex to Northwest France to meet with other agents. After meeting with the agents, Khan made her way to Paris alone, using the alias “Madeline” to her fellow agents, and posing to the public as a governess from Blois called Jeanne Marie Renier. There, she met with other agents in her network.
On the 24th June, her team were arrested. The Sicherheitsdienst (SD) — the intelligence agency of the SS, an organisation under the Nazis — worked their way through the ranks of her network.
While agents fled to evade capture, Khan stayed in Paris and continued to transmit intelligence to her receivers, and quickly found herself isolated.
She carried her wireless set in a suitcase around Paris, constantly on the move, going as far as to dying her hair, wearing disguises and staying with friends she’d made before the war to evade capture.
Capture And Betrayal
After months of evading arrest, Khan was betrayed by a tip-off to the SS from a ‘French-speaking woman’. She was suspected to have been apprehended at a safe house in Rue de la Faisanderie and taken to the SD headquarters, where she was questioned.
Despite her poor performance in training, her interrogators reported that they couldn’t extract any information about her at all — a commandant, Hans Kieffer, wrote in a report that they ‘could never rely on anything she said’.
Unfortunately, though she showed great resilience and resistance to questioning, she had carried a codebook with her where she annotated messages that she had received — which the SD had access to. They sent false messages and mimicked her style to fool the SOE, which resulted in the capture and execution of seven agents.
In November 1943, Khan attempted another escape with neighbouring prisoners (fellow SOE agent John Starr, and MI6 alliance member Leon Faye). They managed to get hold of a screwdriver and loosened the bars on their skylights to escape through to the roof.
Unfortunately, at the same time of their escape, there was an RAF air raid, causing the guards to check their cells and discover their breakout.
Khan was tortured for ten months, but she refused to talk.
This lead to Khan being deported to Germany, where she was taken to prison in Pforzheim. She was placed in solitary confinement and chained by her hands and feet.
Khan was regularly beaten — according to an account by an MI6 agent of the same network Faye had been in, who had been kept in a nearby cell.
Khan was tortured for ten months, but she refused to talk.
The Unfortunate End
After ten months of torture, she was moved by train to Dachau concentration camp. Shortly after she arrived, her and three other female agents were taken to the crematorium and executed by an SS officer. An anonymous witness told a Canadian Intelligence officer that Khan had been singled out for “special treatment” — she had received a near fatal beating before being shot with a pistol. She was just 30 years old.
According to the Imperial War Museum, of the 470 agents sent into France, 118 failed to return. To commemorate Khan’s bravery, there is a statue of her in Gordon Square, displaying her final words: ‘liberté!’. She was the first woman of Indian heritage to be awarded a statue.
