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The summer of 1941 was a dismal time for Britain and its European allies in the war. The Nazis bombed major cities across the country in what came to be known as the Blitzkrieg, and much of Europe fell into German hands, leaving Britain vulnerable. This makes the work of the Special Operations Executive Officer (SOE) and the actions of the three key women in it all the more important.
The State-Owned Enterprise was formed in London in June 1940 as a volunteer force to wage secret warfare behind enemy lines. Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously ordered agents of state-owned enterprises to "set Europe on fire" through espionage, sabotage and the establishment of resistance networks in occupied Europe. State-owned enterprises recruited dozens of women as spies, including U.S. agent Virginia Hall and Indo-British radio operator Nur Inayat Khan. Both women worked with Vera Atkins, intelligence officer at the state-owned company's F ministry, who was responsible for recruiting and deploying agents in France. The film Call for Spies, directed and starring Sarah Megan Thomas and directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher, draws inspiration from the heroic stories of the two historical spies who are at the center of their covert operations.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > women's role as spies in World War II</h1>
Intelligence agencies recognized early on the important role that women could play in wartime espionage, which was traditionally considered a domain for men. The focus of the state-owned enterprises themselves is on guerrilla warfare outside ordinary conflict zones. Women were seen as less visible when it came to espionage, and that perception was exploited during the war to carry out tasks and tasks that men could not accomplish. In the wild, women may go unnoticed when couriers pass on important information, and a letter sent to a state-owned enterprise in the Netherlands states that in 1944, few women stopped at checkpoints to search themselves.
In some cases, female spies exploit their femininity, exhibiting stereotypes of vulnerability or helplessness in order to get out of trouble. As historian Juliette Pattinson points out in Behind Enemy Lines: Gender, Past, and Special Operations Executives in World War II, "Many wartime reports suggest that male agents have fewer resources and creativity than their female counterparts." ”
State-owned enterprises, located on Baker Street in central London, sometimes referred to as "Baker Street's Irregular Personnel", "Churchill's Secret Army" and "Ministry of Diligent Combat", had deployed 39 women to occupied France before era D. June 6, 1944, Invasion Day. Since it was vital to evade suspicion, the F Section recruited agents who spoke French and integrated into French life. Each agent was given a code name or alias and was trained in specialized skills including wireless operations (as Khan did), how to maintain cover stories, and how to prevent theft and pry locks.
Scholars note that since the war, the public has been deeply interested in state-owned enterprises and their female spies, and in some cases myths and facts have been confused to the point of inaccuracies in the past. Record-keeping in state-owned enterprises was not always well organized, and the lack of primary sources and evidence of the time made it difficult for historians to fully understand the organization's activities. Vera Atkins said in a 1986 interview: "Every [intelligence] scratch was under locks and keys, or was destroyed." ”
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > how Vera Atkins elevated the ranks of state-owned enterprises</h1>
Stana Katic as Vera Atkins
Born in 1908 in Vera Maria Rosenberg, Romania, Atkins moved to London in 1933 and adopted her mother's maiden name. She began working as secretary in the F Department in early 1941 and then became one of the senior officers of the department, responsible for the "housekeeping" related to each agent and acting as their guide. It is also widely believed that Atkins was the inspiration for the character of James Bond author Ian Fleming, Miss Moneypenny, secretary to the director of secret intelligence.
"I always find that individually, as a woman, has a great advantage if you know how to play things well, and I believe that all girls, women who go out, feel the same way," Atkins said in oral testimony included in the 2008 publication of "Voices of forgotten Secret War: An Internal History of Special Operations During World War II." When biographer Sarah Helm asked every female agent in a state-owned enterprise what they had in common, Atkins replied, "Brave ... You may find it in anyone. You just don't know where to look. ”
Trained state-owned state-owned agents sent messages back to London in a unique code, but in 1943, there were indications that the code had been intercepted and the Germans had begun sending transmissions under the guise of captured agents. But intelligence on Baker Street failed to find those signs, leading to the arrest and killing of 27 agents, including Noor Inayat Khan. Despite speculation that Atkins might be supervising, historians have concluded that failure to take on the danger cannot be attributed to any one person alone.
Even after the liberation of France in 1944 and the final dissolution of the SOE in January 1946, Atkins was determined to search for the missing SOE personnel, who totaled 118, of whom only 1 was killed. Atkins eventually tracked down all 117 people and brought their killers to a war crimes trial. Atkins was awarded the croix de Guerre designation in 1948, was named CBE in 1997, and died in 2000.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > Noor Inayat Khan is a princess who wants to make a difference</h1>
Radhika Apte as Nur Inayat Khan
Born in Moscow in 1914, Noor Inayat Khan had a colorful life from the start. Her father was descended from India's noble Muslim family, the famous Sufi teacher and musician Inayat Khan, and her mother was the American poet Pirani Ameena Begum. The entire family, including Noor and her three brothers, moved to London during world war I and then to Paris, where Noor spent her formative years. She enjoyed music and writing, and by the time the family fled France for Britain in 1939, she had become a children's writer.
While her family was committed to pacifism, Noor felt compelled to take some sort of action to help the war and joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. In an initial interview with the service, she said she hoped her efforts to get involved in the war would serve as a bridge between Understanding Britain and India. Her radio skills during her time in the Air Force brought her to the attention of state-owned enterprises, which recruited her in late 1942.
In a rigorous training program for state-owned enterprises, executives made mixed judgments about Knoll. One supervisor said in the simulation exercise: "Obviously, this student is very hard working on the exercise and has shown interest, but she has to learn to be more cautious." At the instigation of Adkins, Khan became the first female radio operator to be sent from Britain to French-occupied France in the summer of 1943, code-named "Madeleine".
Her work as a secret agent was crucial to the war efforts in maintaining communication between the London and Paris Resistance Forces. According to official documents, her work enabled weapons and explosives to be delivered to the Resistance Network, and her fluency in French and familiarity with Paris made her an important agent. But by then, the double resistance had infiltrated the Paris resistance network, and in October 1943, just a few months after her arrival, she was betrayed and arrested in her apartment in Paris, before being taken to the German security headquarters. Before the Gestapo discovered the apartment, she didn't have time to destroy the code in the apartment, causing them to send bait signals to state-owned enterprises in London imitating her.
Khan immediately made two escape attempts and was later held in solitary confinement for ten months in a prison in southwestern Germany, with his hands and feet bound. In September 1944, Khan, along with three other female state-owned operatives, suddenly moved to a concentration camp in Dachau, where he was executed. She did not disclose any information or intelligence to the kidnappers, and her last words were reportedly "freedom." Khan was posthumously awarded to George Cross and French Croix de Guerre. After the campaign campaign of biographer Shrabani Basu, in 2012 Khan erected a statue in memory of Khan near her childhood home in London, and in August 2020 commemorated a traditional British blue plaque for her family's residence.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > the heroic escape of Virginia Hall, "The Lady of the Line."</h1>
Sarah Megan Thomas as Virginia Hall
Considered "the most dangerous of all allied spies" by the Gestapo, George Hall came from a wealthy family in Baltimore. Sonia Purnell wrote in her acclaimed biography, Unimportant Woman: The Untold Story of Virginia Hall (the most dangerous spy of World War II), that she was "happy to defy convention," telling the story of the ambitions of young Virginians who set their sights on Paris to attend George Washington University.
During a hunting trip to Turkey in 1933, Hall tripped and accidentally shot himself. The leg had to be amputated below the knee, and she used a wooden limb, her nickname being "Kubert.". Although Hall held various clerical positions at European consulates and was fluent in foreign languages, several attempts to become a State Department diplomat herself were rejected because she was both a woman and a disabled person.
Frustrated, she quit her administrative job at the U.S. Embassy in Estonia and volunteered as an ambulance driver in France before the United States officially entered the war in 1940. A casual encounter with an undercover agent led to a connection with a newly formed state-owned enterprise. In August 1941, after training in England, Hall went to France as a journalist, and the French New York Post in Lyon, New York, called Brigitte LeContre, became the first female agent to settle in France.
Her identity as a journalist and her charming attitude meant she quickly built up her network and was able to recruit more people to join the Resistance. Hall also planned to jailbreak other captured agents under the code name Germaine, surviving alone in the wild for a total of 12 months before other female spies were deployed to France. "This 'noble lady,' whose state-owned enterprise commander concluded, almost single-handedly changed the way women played a role in combat," Penell wrote.
Hall's activities in mobilizing resistance were successful and attracted the attention of the French Vichy Police And the Gestapo; but because of her proficiency in disguise, the authorities never fully understood who "Jemaine" was. In late 1942, when the Germans had emigrated to France, Hall was unwell due to the discomfort of his prosthetic limbs and escaped the Nazi threat by trekking through the Pyrenees through a 7,500-foot passage to Spain.
Hall then returned to London and continued espionage with the U.S. Strategic Services Office (OSS), the U.S. counterpart of the state-owned enterprise. Hall, in collaboration with OSS in 1944 and 1945, directly liberated much of France through the leadership of the Resistance, and later became the only civilian woman in the war to receive the Cross of Distinguished Service for "extraordinary heroism."