N is for… Noor Inayat Khan

/ historicallywoman

‘Not overburdened with brains’, ‘trembling and quite blanched’, ‘tends to give far too much information’—all are comments from superiors and observers of Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan, a British spy serving in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II. They aren’t comments you’d expect about a spy, and, indeed, Khan appears at first glance an unlikely candidate for such a sensitive mission. A Muslim pacifist who had a great dislike of lying and deception and once fell apart during a mock interrogation, Khan nevertheless proved intelligent, resolute, and utterly invaluable to the British cause. She survived for three and a half months in France before her capture—an incredible feat, given the networks around her were collapsing at an alarming rate.

Khan was born in Moscow in 1914 to an Indian father and an American mother, the oldest of four children. Her father was a Sufi Muslim who believed in tolerance and who raised his children in accordance with Ghandi’s philosophy of non-violence. Shortly after Khan’s birth, the family moved to London, and then again in 1920 to Paris. Upon her father’s death in 1927, Khan, aged just 13, took on responsibility for her grieving mother and younger siblings.

Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Khan had begun a career as a writer, publishing poetry and children’s stories in both English and French. She was also musically gifted, and was trained on both the piano and the harp. But peace eventually broke and the family were forced to flee back to England in 1940. 

Khan and her eldest brother, Vilayat, discussed what they should do, and both agreed that the threat of Fascism justified participating in the war. Khan said: ‘Well, I must do something, but I don’t want to kill anyone.’ 

Vilayat responded with: ‘Well, if we are going to join the war, we have to involve ourselves in the most dangerous positions, which would mean no killing.’

An official, black and white photograph of Noor Inayat Khan in her WAAF uniform. She smiles into the camera.
Noor Inayat Khan in her WAAF uniform, 1940

The pair more than followed through with this; Vilayat volunteered for minesweeping, and Khan joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). She was trained as a wireless operator, which would stand her in good stead for when she was later recruited to the SOE. She was posted to a bomber training school, but found the work there boring, so in 1941 she applied for a transfer and was quickly picked up by the SOE.

Khan was frank in her interview, unequivocally stating that her loyalty lay first and foremost with India, and that ‘If I had to choose between Britain and India I would choose India’. Such declarations caused reservations about Khan from the start, but a growing need for agents and Khan’s fluency in French and technical capabilities led to her being recommended to the F (French) Section.

Her training was fast and intensive, and it seemed initially that Khan wasn’t up to the task. She appeared frightened of weapons and her physicality was questioned—her feet were swollen and malformed leading to poor athleticism, and she suffered from chilblains on her hands due to freezing conditions in England. 

Nevertheless, as they say, she persisted, and, between the doubters, she had several supporters in the SOE. Head of recruitment Selwyn Jepson described her as having ‘infinite patience and great coolness … To my mind, she stood out as almost perfect for this aspect of the work’.

Similarly, the intelligence officer for F Section, Vera Atkins, insisted that Khan was committed and ready to be deployed. According to Atkins, ‘she had a purity of motive that was hardly of this world.’

Khan’s mission would be dangerous, one of the most dangerous of the war. She would be a wireless operator, responsible for maintaining a link between France and London and for sending and receiving messages about planned enemy operations or the needs of resistance fighters. Wireless operators were highly vulnerable—transmit for more than twenty minutes, and the signal would be discovered; get stopped and searched, and the bulky transmitter, which had to be transported in a large suitcase, would be found.

By 1943, the average life expectancy for a wireless operator was six weeks.

Doubts followed Khan right to the start of her mission, leading to Atkins calling her down to London for a meeting. There, Khan was given an out, a chance to honourably back out, but she refused. Her greatest worry, Atkins discovered, was her family; Khan had told her aging mother that she was going to Africa, not France, and she was finding both the lie and the act of saying goodbye heart-breaking.

Atkins and Khan came to an agreement. Normal procedure was that Atkins would send a regular ‘good news’ letter to an agent’s family, and then would inform them in the event of an agent’s disappearance. In Khan’s case, she was to maintain the appearance of all being well unless it was beyond doubt that Khan was dead.

At this time, Vilayat also tried to dissuade his sister from her mission, but, doubts settled, she was determined to go ahead. Later, Vilayat would express that ‘I have always had a feeling of guilt for what I said that day’, referring to his earlier conversation with Khan, when they committed to joining the war.

Khan was dropped into France on 16th June 1943 under the codename ‘Madeleine’. Almost immediately, things began to fall apart; the ‘PROSPER’ network she was a part of was discovered by the Gestapo, and all but Khan were arrested. This left her the only remaining operator in the area—she was given the option to leave, but she refused once more, and wound up undertaking the work of six operators.

She had to keep on the move and was constantly changing her appearance to avoid capture. Her main tools were hair dye and glasses, and her quick wits were of huge importance. One of Khan’s friends, Raymonde Prenat, recalled an incident when she was caught stringing up her radio wire, yet she was able to convince the soldier it was for entertainment only.

Prenat also remembered Khan being stopped on the Paris metro and ordered to open her suitcase—the suitcase which contained her transmitter equipment. Incredibly, Khan maintained her composure. She herself said of the incident:

‘The great thing … is not to lose one’s head if anything like that happens. I knew that only somebody who was familiar with a wireless would be sure of what it was. You see, he thought at first it was a transmitter, but he didn’t know what he should expect it to look like, because he had never seen one. And then he didn’t like to expose his ignorance, and so my bluff succeeded!’

Khan seemed to enjoy her work to an extent, but it was clear that she was tiring, so arrangements were made to extract her from Paris in October. Sadly, on (or around) 13th October, she was arrested after being betrayed. It’s not entirely clear who betrayed her—it may have been Henri Déricourt, a double (perhaps triple) agent, or it may have been Renée Garry, motivated by potentially unfounded jealousy.

Whatever the case, Khan’s time had run out, but she did not go quietly. Somewhat at odds with her pacifist upbringing, she violently resisted arrest, biting and drawing blood from one of the Gestapo. She was an uncooperative prisoner, attempting escape twice and refusing to give up any information even in the face of torture, despite her poor earlier performance in the mock interrogation.

Her captor, Hans Kieffer said: ‘Madeleine, after her capture, showed great courage and we got no information whatsoever out of her’.

“I like gentle creatures, but I don’t think I am gentle.”

Noor Inayat Khan, to her friend and, later, biographer Jean Overton fuller

Unfortunately, Khan’s resistance meant little. The Gestapo had her wireless and her codebook which contained a written record of her communications. Using this information, they were able to impersonate her, leading to the arrest of a further seven agents.

After the second escape attempt, which was thwarted by an ill-timed British air raid, Khan was swiftly taken to Germany and imprisoned at Pforzheim. She was kept there in solitary confinement for ten months, classified as ‘highly dangerous’ and shackled by the hands and feet at all times. According to other prisoners, she was regularly beaten and was fed minimal rations. 

A colour photograph of the memorial to Noor Inayat Khan. The top half of her body is sculpted in bronze and placed on a plinth, which is engraved with her name and years of birth and death.
Statue commemorating Khan in London

On 12th September 1944, Khan was transported to Dachau concentration camp, where she, along with three other female SOE operatives, were to be executed the following day. One account by Gestapo soldier Max Wassmer related that the four were all killed at the same time by a shot to the back of the neck, but there is significant evidence that this is an unreliable telling of events.

Instead, according to an anonymous Dutch prisoner, Khan was singled out for worse treatment. She was allegedly stripped naked and subjected to incredible violence and cruelty, before being shot in the early hours of the morning.

At the time of her death, she was thirty years old.

Khan was posthumously awarded the George Cross and France honoured her with the Criox de Guerre at its highest level, gold. In 2012, a statue of her was unveiled in Gordon Square, London—it is engraved with what is believed to be her last word: ‘Liberté!’

Noor Inayat Khan was undoubtedly a woman of exceptional courage and bravery. Her biographer, Jean Overton Fuller has described her work as such:

‘My object in writing it has been to make known the story of a brave woman so that it should not be lost to the world, a woman whose nobility of character was as much appreciated by the Germans, who were her adversaries in war, as by her friends at home – perhaps even more keenly by them, because they knew her in her hour of greatest trial.’

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