Across two world wars, women living in occupied countries displayed extraordinary bravery and resilience in running spy networks and gaining intelligence for the Allies, often at great personal risk. To date their stories have largely been missing from the wider narratives of World War One and World War Two, as well as in women’s history. War was very much a male domain, and women were not permitted to serve in fighting forces or on the frontline. This did not prevent them from playing their vital part for the Allies. Female spies could move freely behind enemy lines because they were inconspicuous, largely ‘invisible’, to the enemy and therefore rarely fell under suspicion of the Germans.
These real heroines acted with great courage in carrying out resistance activities, gathering intelligence on enemy troop movements and positions, organising sophisticated spy networks, acting as couriers of secret messages and documents. They used invisible ink in letters, ran observation posts and distributed propaganda for the Allies. They could travel with ease because of their gender, cycling across enemy territory with tiny secret messages in their baskets (hidden under bread and fruit) or hiding messages in their corsets. As intelligencers, their common link was a knowledge of languages and the terrain in which they operated and none had any prior training.
British nurse Edith Cavell’s organisation in Brussels aided Allied soldiers to cross occupied territory and return to the UK. For nearly a century there has been speculation and debate as to whether or not she was a spy. What emerges is a complex picture but one in which it is clear that her organisation recruited agents, both men and women, to collect intelligence to send to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS /MI6) in London. It is now possible to say with certainty that she was a spy. Such clandestine operations was always fraught with danger and the risk of betrayal. Cavell was betrayed, arrested by the Germans and found guilty of espionage. She was shot on 12 October 1915.
Another courageous agent at this time was twenty-three year old Gabrielle Petit who ran ‘The Alice Service’, again gaining intelligence for the Allies. She was shot by the Germans in 1916 and showed defiance before the firing squad. As the squad raised their guns, she defiantly shouted, ‘Vive la Belgique! [Long live Belgium!].
A major intelligence network in which women played prominent roles was called La Dame Blanche (‘White Lady’). It took its name from the legend of the ghost of a white lady who, when she appeared, would herald the demise of the Hohenzollern royal dynasty, the ruling family of imperial Germany. The imagery is clear – by its work, La Dame Blanche would facilitate the end of German rule in Belgium. The network had over 2,000 agents, at least a third of whom were women. Aged between 16 and 80, they sat knitting outside their cottages, but in reality were observing the enemy troop movements by train as the train passed their doors, and coding their information into their knitted jumpers and scarves. The items were then sent over the lines the headquarters of British intelligence in France, where an intelligence officer decoded them. The operations by La Dame Blanche provided critical information on enemy troops that could help British intelligence to predict where the next major German offensive was to occur.
Amongst the women known to have worked for La Dame Blanche were the Weimerskirch sisters who ran a bookshop in Liège which became a ‘letterbox’ that functioned until the end of the war without being betrayed. Thérèse de Radiguès created, organised and directed a new observation platoon at Conneux, known as Post 49. It was run from her home, Conneux Castle, and consisted primarily of the local nobility who gathered intelligence from locations south of Namur. Her daughters were involved too.
By 1918, La Dame Blanche needed to expand and four specialist squads were formed to recruit and enlarge the network – these recruitment squads consisted entirely of women. For the women who lived to see the Armistice in November 1918, theirs had been a war that had given them roles previously never imagined in their restricted civilian lives. It was a war in which they had made a difference.
In the next war, women were ready to operate again in intelligence-gathering networks behind enemy lines. These included the Clarence Service in Belgium (a direct successor to La Dame Blanche) and Noah’s Ark (or ‘Alliance’) in France. The latter was run by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade and her agents given the codenames of animals to obscure their real identity. These networks were tasked with the urgent search for Hitler’s secret weapon sites (V-1 and V-2) and German troop movements in the occupied countries of Europe. Their work was both dangerous and prone to betrayal.
Far more is known about the women who were dropped into France with the Special Operations Executive (SOE), where they operated as agents, saboteurs, wireless operators and couriers. Their handler was Vera Atkins, originally Romanian Jewish woman, whose family had worked for British intelligence since at least 1900. Vera despatched the first women into France in 1942. It was thought that as women, with fluency in several languages, they would have a degree of invisibility. The reality was that many of the agents dropped into France were betrayed and arrested.
A number of the women paid a high price, suffered horrendous torture at the hands of the Gestapo and died in concentration camps. Amongst them were Noor Inayat Khan (‘Madeleine’) of Sufi Indian origin and the first female wireless operator to link up with the French Resistance. She was betrayed and executed in Dachau concentration camp on 13 September 1944, along with three other SOE colleagues. Also Violette Szabo – posthumous recipient of the George Cross, and Odette Sansom (‘Lise’) who worked as a courier behind enemy lines in France with the Spindle circuit. Of these three women, only Odette survived the concentration camp (Ravensbrück). Pearl Witherington survived, having been a courier behind enemy lines in France, and went on to command 3,000 men after D-Day. Back at SOE headquarters in Baker Street, the personnel who were affectionately known as the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’, were all part of a necessary workforce. Women were the mainstay of the signals department, where they prepared SOE’s poem codes.
Whilst F Section (France) has become the most well-known of SOE’s operations, SOE operated in other parts of Europe and theatres of war, including in Belgium and Denmark, and sent women behind the lines in these countries too. Three women – ‘Midge’ Holmes, Evelyn Stamper and Betty Hodgson – ran the operations for SOE’s Austrian and German section, called Section X. They recruited agents, organised their training and sent them behind enemy lines into Austria. Most famously, they despatched Walter Freud (a grandson of Sigmund Freud) back into southern Austria in April 1945. These women had already had a pre-war career with MI6 and were experts on Austria and Eastern Europe. Their expertise was extremely valuable for SOE’s operations in these countries.
It is clear that SOE was not only engaged in sabotage and the destruction of enemy communications, it was also tasked with intelligence gathering and, rather than being a secondary role, it was their primary mission.
Vital intelligence roles were played by women on the Home Front in working for MI5, Special Branch, combatting enemy spies in MI5 contra espionage operations, deciphering German naval codes in Naval Intelligence and analysing aerial photography from reconnaissance missions at RAF Medmenham. Well known is the incredible work of Bletchley Park’s female code-breakers and cryptanalysts, but even then, there are still new stories emerging of how these women transcended the norms of the period to undertake work traditionally carried out by male intelligencers and code-breakers. In this, women were as important for providing information on the enemy as the invisible spies behind the lines. They are also invisible spies – their roles obscured by official secrecy.
Far from being the femmes fatales that have frequently come to define the image of female spies in literature and film, the stories of the ‘invisible spies’ are much more exciting. Theirs is a rich legacy. In post-war civilian life, they carried with them the secrecy of their wartime roles. They could never speak about it, even to their own families. Others continued their clandestine work into the Cold War and beyond. Theirs is a relatively unknown history, hidden largely by official secrecy.
What emerges in my book is a complex picture, but one in which women contributed across all aspects of the British secret services at home and abroad. Alongside their male colleagues, they have shaped the ways in which intelligence has been carried out and developed. Their unique contributions made a difference to the end game. They lived and died for the cause of freedom. It is a legacy hidden for far too long. Now their stories are being reclaimed to enable us to speak of the invisible spies.
Helen Fry is a historian of espionage and her latest book is Women in Intelligence: The Hidden History Across Two World Wars.
