Recent years have seen a welcome recognition of the many women who worked in top secret roles with the intelligence services, particularly during the Second World War. Helen Fry’s highly impressive new book on Women in Intelligence goes even further, describing how the two world wars, with men largely expected to fight on the frontline, led to a revolution in the use of women in intelligence. There had been a notable reluctance to use women when the British Secret Service Bureau was officially created in 1909 with Vernon Kell, the head of the “home section” that would eventually become MI5, concerned they would be too talkative and give themselves away. But as Fry demonstrates, the First World War put an end to such misogynist thinking.
She understandably goes into some detail of the many Belgian women who worked in La Dame Blanche, the network of Belgian ‘train-watchers’ ‒ named for the ghostly woman in white whose appearance was supposed to signal the downfall of the German royal family ‒ which collected the vast bulk of intelligence behind enemy lines. But she does not neglect the many lesser known women who put their lives at risk in other operations behind the German lines like Gabrielle Petit. A twenty-two-year-old Belgian woman who was recruited by MI1c, the early designation for MI6, and sent to Britain in the summer of 1915 under cover as a refugee and trained in espionage operations before returning to Belgium. She set up a network of agents in the Ypres sector to gather intelligence on German movements behind the lines. Although she and her agents provided dozens of reports it proved to be a short life, she was arrested by the Germans in January 1916 and shot a few months later.
Until fairly recently, only the female codebreakers of Bletchley Park had truly seen their contributions to British intelligence operations given recognition. Fry set herself the task of righting that wrong as widely as possible and has done a truly admirable job in collecting a broad swathe of women who worked for the various British secret agencies from the First World War right through into the Cold War. The women who carried out various roles at Bletchley Park ‒ not just codebreaking ‒ are inevitably covered but those who worked for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), MI5, MI6 and a welter of various armed forces’ intelligence departments, like the Inter-Services Topographical Department partly based in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The success of Fry’s determination to cast her net as wide as possible, and the difficulties of tracking down those who took their secrets to the graves, means that even where the women’s stories are known they frequently appear only as a tantalizing taster of their achievements, but the impeccable sourcing, and a bibliography brimming with individual accounts will ensure that readers keen for more detail of what are often truly inspirational stories can read more.
Michael Smith’s latest book is The Real Special Relationship: The True Story of How the British and US Secret Services Work Together.
