Helen Fry
Women in Intelligence: The Spies Who Can Be Remembered

Helen Fry - Women in Intelligence: The Spies Who Can Be Remembered

- I just wanted to reiterate while we’re waiting for more people to come in, what I was saying last week in lockdown lecture that we are standing with Israel. There are a lot of my fellow historians, non-Jewish like myself, who are absolutely rock solid in their support of Israel and the fact that no form of terrorism can be tolerated. So we are behind the scenes having a number of interesting discussions actually on clash of cultures in the UK in particular and how we protect democracy. But more personally at the moment, standing with the Jewish community and discussing the rise of antisemitism and how we as historians can make history relevant and tackle these horrific circumstances which the Jewish communities finding itself in. So I thought I would just say those few words at the beginning. Okay, I’m going to make a start and we’ve still got people coming in, but I will start today. Today’s lecture, we are going to look at some of the incredible women in intelligence across two world wars. And I’ve titled this The Spies Who Should Be Remembered because in our histories of First World War, the Second World War, and generally not only in history of wartime but in histories of our intelligence services, women have largely been missing. And I’m going to focus on recovering some of the incredible heroism and brave stories of these women. And I particularly love the new jacket cover of my book, “Women in Intelligence”, it’s just out in the United States. It’s been out in the UK for some time now, for about a month. And I love it because it really encompasses everything we’re going to talk about today when we think of the women.

And what is emerging is that these women’s legacies have been hidden by official secrecy, by the fact that they and their male colleagues have signed the Official Secrets Act. They could not reveal what they were doing in their lifetime. And in fact, so much of what they’ve done will still always remain secret, but I’m going to look at some of what we can know today. And what I found was that, you know, their stories couldn’t have been told, say, 20 years ago. Many of the files that I’ve worked on had not yet been declassified. MI5, the Security Service here, equivalent to the FBI does not release all of its files. It releases some now and again when it decides to release a whole bulk into the National Archives. And we as historians are very lucky to be able to work through that with what we are given. MI6, the equivalent of the CIA, never releases its files, but you can find correspondence in the files of other departments like the foreign office, war office, even MI5. So we’re sifting through all these files to bring to life the stories of these women. And as you can see from this jacket cover, the women are represented in uniform across two world wars as well as in civilian clothes. You’ve got the young woman with her bicycle, and that will be reflected within the kind of women we’re going to discuss today. And most importantly, as you can see from the cover of the book, they’re women of action. They are ready to go. Well, they are actually moving. They’re not ready to go, they’re not stationary. They are on the move. They are ready for their roles. And what’s emerged is this incredible hidden history, and they are the spies who should be remembered. So next slide please.

And many of the men and women behind enemy lines in the First World War, 1914 to 1918, undertook incredible risks on behalf of the allies to gain intelligence out of the occupied countries, primarily Belgium and Luxembourg, and a small part of Northern France was occupied for a short time. Holland remained neutral. And one of the key things that the women were involved in was gaining intelligence in Belgium and Luxembourg for British Intelligence Services, needed to try and get the information out to look at the movement of German troops across occupy Belgium, from Germany to the Western front along the border with France. And if you could work out what those troops were moving towards, which area, what kind of troops, what reinforcements, artillery, armaments, what are they moving? And even towards the end of the war, if they’re going back the other way from the western front back to Germany, you see an army in retreat. So the eyewitnesses on the ground are incredibly important. And there was one particular network called La Dame Blanche, the White Lady. And that network had incredibly brave women who were actually gathering intelligence behind enemy lines. They were watching the rail networks, they were sending coded messages using invisible ink, and they actually provided intelligence, sent it back through various secret channels out through Hollands, where it would be couriered to either station in France or primarily into England. And that’s something that I’m working more on but parallel to that organisation, I want to talk about a woman, Gabrielle Petit or the Petit Service. It was named after her.

This incredibly heroic woman in her early 20s, who’s carrying out something very similar. She establishes her own spy network. So she is a spy mistress. She was born in Tournai in Belgium. And from there, on her own initiative, she decides to smuggle out intelligence. She’s helping some of our soldiers, our wounded soldiers, and in particular her own fiance, who’s wounded, to go out through neutral Holland to safety. And while she’s accompanying them over the border, she decides that… She takes in everything she’s seen, she takes in the movement of German troops, what she’s seen, and she writes down her messages and smuggles those out. And she makes contact with the British and the British decide that they will accept her as part of one of the British Intelligence networks. So she establishes a whole network on her own behind enemy lines, and that runs successfully against all the odds. Incredibly risky because within the first year, 18 months that she’s operating, around her, it’s estimated that in her region of Tournai, 45 spies have been captured by the Germans and most of them executed or shot. So what about Gabrielle Petit? In spite of this in her early 20s, she still takes the risk, but ultimately she is betrayed, and she’s one of those women like the British nurse, Edith Cavell and like some other Belgian women who become heroes, they become martyrs if you like, because in shooting them at dawn, the Germans actually created martyrs. They created women who provided the most incredible inspiration for the next generation of women. And Gabrielle Petit was arrested and eventually shot on the 1st of April 1916.

So this is about six, seven months, six months after British nurse Edith Cavell was shot by the Germans in the Tir National in Brussels. Same for Gabrielle Petit, six months later, the 1st of April 1916, she finds herself before the firing squad at dawn, at the Tir National, this horrendously desolate wasteland where the Germans shot suspected spies and others and traitors. And she was buried there not far from British nurse Edith Cavell. But her defiance when she’s actually facing death, she’s just 23 years old, she’s half the age of British nurse Edith Cavell who was in her late 40s when she was shot. Gabrielle Petit was prepared to risk everything because she knew the intelligence she was getting out to the British Intelligence Services was absolutely crucial. And I’ll just quote, just before she dies, she had this defiance, which is portrayed in one of the few port statues… It’s a bronze statue in Brussels, Previous slide, thank you. She says, “I will show them, the Germans, that Belgian women know how to die.” And as she’s being shot, she shouts . Long live, Belgium. And she refuses to be blindfolded. She looks those German soldiers in the eye, the firing squad. And she shouts must been incredibly destabilising for them, but she showed that defiance. And you can see that in the statue shows her courage, her defiance, and she’s sort of turning to one side. And the sculptor who did this had the intention that she’s sort of facing those demons. She said she was quite prepared to face her demons, meaning the German firing squad.

So incredibly brave woman who goes on to inspire more women to work behind enemy lines. They’re not giving up and they go on again to… She goes on to inspire her legacy, her death, her martyrdom inspires a new generation of Belgian women in the Second World War as well. Next slide please. But British Intelligence was well aware that the Germans were, you know, occupying their minds with trying to infiltrate German spies into the United Kingdom. And it was also believed, although the evidence is quite tricky to uncover for the First World War, this poster started to go around, particularly in naval bases for the merchant Navy and the Royal Navy. Women are being employed by the enemy to secure information from Navy men. And you know, that was possibly something the Germans were doing. As I said, I haven’t actually found any particular evidence. In fact that whole spy fever at the beginning of the First World War was later believed to be quite exaggerated that the Germans in the period leading up to the First World War and to the early First World War didn’t have as many spies operating in the UK as we believe they might have. And it seems as well that they didn’t really use women as spies in the First World War. You have Mata Hari, I’ll come to her at the end. But in terms of a widespread use of spies, it’s very tricky to uncover precisely a sort of concentrated network of women throughout the UK. But nevertheless, British Intelligence thought they was potentially dangerous enough and could be working undercover in the UK. Next slide please.

So the First World War, we had not very many women in uniform. We had some women working in France, the Hush WAACS that you can read about in my book. They were involved in code breaking amongst other kinds of intelligence duties. And at the end of the First World War, the women in uniform, primarily the Hush WAACS as they were called, were actually demobilise. In fact, one of ‘em actually went on to do a bit more code breaking in civilian life in the 1920s and '30s. But by and large, if a woman was serving in munition factories, in censorship, where they were censoring posts that was coming and going between the UK and potentially secret messages being sent through the postal system to Germany. So the whole sensor system where the posting was opened, and they would actually monitor and in some cases, actually blank out parts of of letters. So that was a really huge department that ran into several thousand over 3,000 women in the end just a handful of women by the end of the First World War. But of course, their roles pretty much ended if they were in uniform when it came to the end of the First World War. And they find themselves back to their traditional lives. They are still, you know, very… You know, fighting for their voices. They’ve been fighting for the suffragette for the right to vote, but now they’re back in their normal civilian life. I’m pretty frustrated. But there are a number of women that are working through the '20s and '30s in the civilian agencies.

So we think of MI5 and then Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. And in the 1920s, we have a number of women working within MI5, but tracking primarily the communist threat within the UK. And there were a number of communist organisations that had been infiltrated by Soviet spies. So it was a very, very real threat and considered a threat to democracy. But when we get to the 1930s, really interesting because MI5 is also tracking the threat from a very different spy. And that’s from the far right. On the right hand side, there you can see a white Russian woman called Anna Wolkoff. She was the daughter of a Russian admiral, and she ran some tea rooms in Central London, the Russian tea rooms, they were quite fashionable actually. We’ll see a photograph of Russian tea room shortly. And she was believed to be quite dangerous enemy of the state. She was involved with The Right Club. The Right Club was a sort of Anglo German, not appeasement, but was pro German. And what we needed to do was to infiltrate that organisation. And the one of the main men that MI5 tasked with doing that was a chap you can see with the pipe, Maxwell Knight. He was a bit of an eccentric character. He used to keeping exotic animals, parrots, and all kinds of other animals and birds. And he had this sort of vision, if you like, that we should have double agents that would infiltrate in the 1930s. Some of these groups like the far right, they would also infiltrate the British Union of Fascists led by Sir Oswald Mosley. But at the very centre of The Right Club, and one of the founding members was Anna Wolkoff. And she was believed to be a threat. Next slide please.

So Maxwell Knight engages a number of women, one of them pictured here, Olga Grey on the left and the tea rooms or kind of visuals of the tea rooms. And it was all sort of very sociable and seemed to be very harmless, women getting together, sometimes with men as well, chatting over tea and cake. But Olga Grey actually managed to become quite close to Anna Wolkoff. She visited the tea rooms, she did some secretarial work for the organisation, but actually she was really working for MI5, and she was tracking what they were talking about, whether there was political subversion. And she was reporting back to Maxwell Knight. She got incredibly close to Anna Wolkoff. And it was thanks to her evidence that eventually it was piecing together with a number of others in the network. And there were other women working alongside her, but Anna Wolkoff, eventually, there was enough evidence to arrest her and another group within her circle, within Wolkoff circle in May 1940. By May 1940, the Germans have overrun Belgium again, Luxembourg, but they’ve also overrun Holland, Denmark. They have gone into France. The whole of Western Europe is pretty much under German control and Britain is next. And in May 1940, there’s the mass internment policy interning some of the members of the British Union of Fascists, thousands of them were interned alongside a lot of German Jewish refugees who’d fled here from Nazi Germany as enemy aliens.

It was a security measure. And at the same time, MI5 started to arrest key political figures like Anna Wolkoff who could potentially be of national threat if Hitler ever invaded. So she was tried, and she received imprisonment. She wasn’t released until 1947 and the testimony that she gave… She was arrested in May 1940 but finally sentenced after a long trial at the Old Bailey, the famous Old Bailey Courts in London. She was sentenced in November 1940. And one of the key witnesses was Olga Grey. Of course, she’d been working under a false name. And there’s a very dramatic scene in the courtroom where Olga Grey gives her evidence. And Anna Wolkoff, you know, is absolutely fuming. She’s enraged, and there’s almost like a screaming match across the court because she realises that she’d been betrayed by someone who she believed was her closest friend. But of course, it blew Olga Gray’s cover. She then couldn’t carry on with similar work because there was stuff in the newspapers, and it was sort of everywhere. So women in Britain in the '20s and '30s were really important aspect of our security in the fight to save democracy from any threat from communism, but also from the far right and from pro Hitler groups. Next slide please. When we come into the Second World War, I want to focus on some of the women who were sent behind enemy lines, but also some of the women who were absolutely crucial leaders within the Special Operations Executive.

Now, there’s an awful lot of women in my book doing extraordinarily heroic things, but I want to pick out for you some of the highlights. Vera Atkins, pictured on the left there, you can see, very strong face, strong woman. She actually dispatched many of the female and male agents into France as part of F section, F for French section, during the Second World War. The first two female agents were parachuted, or they were dropped into France in 1942. It was really in the early days of the war, frowned upon, send women behind enemy lines. If they were working in occupied territories, which they did, the likes of the next generation of Gabrielle Petit were working in Belgium and Luxembourg and now France that was occupied and Holland. They were working, passing the intelligence back to the British and that was deemed okay 'cause they were living in their own country, they knew the landscape, but to actually parachute women in and they’re armed, they’ve learned unarmed combat, to send them behind enemy line is hugely controversial because they were not protected by the Geneva Convention if captured. They couldn’t pretend that they actually had been serving in uniform in quite the same way as the men. So they immediately came under suspicion. They’ve got the badge there, insignia of the Special Operations Executive, the dagger and the parachute in the top right hand corner. So Vera Atkins though wasn’t the only woman who was very senior within the Special Operations Executive, that unorthodox organisation that was to set Europe ablaze.

Next slide please. And quite literally the agents, men and women, were sent to sabotage the Nazi war machine and whether it was in France. And the French section is the one that we know most about, it’s the one that’s been written about most. But there were women who were parachuted into Belgium, a couple of women who were parachuted in on intelligence missions, hugely dangerous with very little support. And also women who were parachuted into the very dangerous areas of the Balkans, their heroism. And some of them, in one case, Hungarian Jewish refugees who were prepared to do this, lost their lives in action. Famously, of course, Hannah Senesh very famously in Israel today actually recognised as a huge heroine, but she actually lost her life in one of those parachute missions in what one of those difficult border areas in the Balkans. But the other area that was very significant for the Special Operations Executive was to get into Austria. Austria was really isolated, it was completely surrounded. You’ve got neutral Switzerland, but by and large, it’s completely surrounded by enemy forces, and then you’ve got Mussolini sort of south. So very difficult. How are you going to penetrate that area? It’s not quite the same as getting your agents into France or into Belgium. And one of the key women, there were three main women at the heart of the Austrian section of the Special Operations Executive, and I write quite a lot about them. Amazing. They’ve had no limelight so far for what they achieved. On the right is Clara Holmes.

She was known as Bill, nicknamed Bill, Bill Holmes. And she worked with Betty Hodgson and even stamper these three very close friends who’d worked together in the 1920s and '30s out of British passport office, in particular Vienna, but they had colleagues who were working out of other embassies and British passport control offices across Europe. The extraordinary thing about these women is that they’re undertaking unusual, for women, intelligence work in the 1920s and '30s. They are not just the secretaries. They are actually undertaking intelligence work. They are sending out their agents, they have contact with agents, they are agent handlers, they are running spy networks, and they are operating against communist spies. And of course, the spies working for Nazi Germany and in particular the German Secret Service, the Abwehr. So they become experts on particular areas of Europe. So in the case of Clara Holmes and her two colleagues, they’d worked for well over a decade in Austria, and they were experts on Czechoslovakia, on Hungary geographically and politically. They also had a huge social network amongst the aristocrats of Europe, but also amongst the intellectuals. They had a lot of Jewish friends who were musicians and intellectuals and not only them but their colleagues working out of other British passport offices like Berlin, Cairo. I know Cairo wasn’t occupied but Istanbul. They’ve got roots to the occupied areas, and they are trying to get Jews out of Europe. And certainly in the 1930s, there are a whole raft of women who are working for MI6 with their male head of station, the male MI6 chief, whether it’s Vienna.

Berlin, it was Frank Foley. They are working not only running the spy networks, but they’re actually rescuing thousands of Jews. It’s an incredible legacy and they did put their lives at risk in Nazi occupied Austria. But when it comes to Second World War, the relevance to the Special Operations Executive, these three particular women, Holmes, Hodgson, and Stamper are taken up by the Special Operations Executive. They’re temporarily attached from MI6 to SOE, and they are pretty much running. They’ve got a male head above them, but they’re pretty much running the German and Austrian section of the Special Operations Executive. And they’re recruiting, training, and sending agents. I’m pretty sure Holmes sent Hannah Senesh behind enemy lines. I mean, unbelievable, the work that they did in getting agents into an incredibly difficult area to link up with resistance groups, men and women agents. But to link up the resistance, and in particular as the allies are closing in '44, '45, we need resistance groups on the ground. We need safe houses, we need contacts. And we are smuggling women in. There are women working also in Poland in similar circumstances.

Hugely dangerous, very difficult to exfiltrate them, to get them out primarily through Italy, which was also problematic. If you just go onto the next slide please. And why I’m showing a photograph of men? Well, this is a group of Austrian Jewish refugees, they’re not the whole group. There were around 25 of them, and they were trained in the UK for the Austrian section of the Special Operations Executive. And there’s been a little bit of work done on their lives, not a massive amount. On the left, very charismatic figure, he’s Anton Walter Freud. He is one of the grandsons of Sigmund Freud. He’s the son of Walter Freud. Walter Freud… Sorry, Martin Freud. Martin Freud was Sigmund Freud’s eldest son. And Walter is Martin’s son. So who would know actually that one of Sigmund Freud’s grandsons was parachuted behind enemy lines in a dangerous operation, blind drop, no one to meet him at the other end? He was separated from the other two colleagues he was jumping with, just literally blind jump parachuting out of an aircraft in that southern area, the Styria area of Austria. He was recruited and trained, sent off for training, but actually dispatched, kitted out and dispatched. Could you go back one slide please? By these three important women, and in particular by Holmes and Stamper. Extraordinary. And what they went on to achieve, in the case of Walter Freud, he goes on to single-handedly take the surrender of the most important airfield.

He bluffs his way basically in the local Nazi commandant, but he single-handedly takes surrender the Helzberg Aerodrome. And that from a mission that was overseen by these incredible women, they were taken up by SOE, and in their citations for medals, it says, they were taken up for this work because of their expertise on Austria. Now, this has all been hidden for so long until the files have started to be declassified on the SOE, we had no understanding that the women, not only brave agents behind enemy lines in France and elsewhere, but that women were absolutely crucial, not only to the administrative working of SOE in Baker Street with the headquarters in Baker Street, but also actually as agent handlers. And in dispatching our agents on incredibly dangerous but important missions behind enemy lines. I just think it’s an awesome legacy, and it’s because of their expertise, an expertise in intelligence and agent handling, that’s been at least a decade working for British Intelligence. And another expert you can see on your left is Margot Morse. She was a sort of brainchild in Baker Street who was the administrative genius. It was quite a chaos with the paperwork and the indexing, but she manages to sort of completely sort out a lot of the chaos in Baker Street.

And she’s then assigned to other departments to sort out their mess if you like because you need a highly structured, organised headquarters. But the interesting thing, whereas when I came to write her story, her family made contact and they said, “You know, our aunt’s, we think… Well, she was definitely Baker Street. We don’t really know what she was doing.” Well, her slim file, her personal file has now been declassified. It’s very thin, just two or three pages. But they said to me and I’ve worked on that, they said to me, “Well, when we cleared out her effects, 'cause we’d done her… We’d sorted out her estate say 20 years ago, about 20 years ago, but when… 20 years later, we decided to look at some of her things, the photographs and in particular her jewellery box…” They found an assassin’s pen. You can see an example of an assassin’s pen at the bottom of the screen there. And they said to me, “I mean, you know, an assassin’s pen for solid works in the headquarters in Baker Street.” They said to me, “Had she ever used it?” And I said, “Well, it’s not hard, not easy to say from her file, it’s just three pages in her file. And of course, I said to them partly seriously, you know, "Is there any blood on it?” So I don’t know if they’ll send it off for forensic testing or something at some point.

But you know, very interesting, they had no idea that she had this incredibly secret life. And that’s not unusual for families to know that their relatives have done something secret, but it’s not possible to know the full extent of what they’ve done. But what her story shows is that women are at the heart of our intelligence organisations. They’ve just been hidden. We need to recover their legacies. It’s not just that women were there, it’s what they were doing. They were undertaking the most extraordinary work that was not necessarily confined to typing reports and translating documents. Important, of course, as that is in the machinery of our intelligence organisations. Next slide please. But the women too… And the next one please. But the women too were working in places like Italy behind enemy lines. We don’t often think about Italy. On the right hand side there, this is Renata Faccincani della Torre, she was an aristocrat who was working out of Milan from her family home at the age of just 21. She’s university educated. She’s running an intelligence station for the allies. She’s got a network that’s smuggling intelligence out through Northern Italy in one of only the few passes where you could get anything out in through the pass.

You couldn’t go through the Brenner Pass, you couldn’t go through normal route. She is an expert skier, had to find really obscure ways out and through her network to get the intelligence primarily first into Switzerland where it would then find its way out through again, equally secret roots to the UK. And she was also smuggling our airmen soldiers out of Italy. Incredibly brave. She is arrested by the Gestapo in February 1945 but she manages to bribe her way out. Awesome. I mean the courage, and again, it’s that defiance. And you find it’s women of all backgrounds, not just aristocratic women or humble women but educated women. Women who are seemingly have very ordinary lives. Doesn’t matter what their background, there were women who were prepared to step up to the mark, to do what was necessary behind enemy lines to help the allies, to help British Intelligence. But she was also smuggling intelligence to the American Intelligence officer in Bern, Dulles, who of course later went on to become head of the CIA. So she’s working also with American Intelligence, really, really important work and a hugely risky because as so many of them found, if they were caught, they would be shot or sent to a concentration camp for the women most often to Ravensbruck, where their chances of survival after absolutely horrific torture was very, very slim, but she survived. She managed to survive. On the left hand side, you can see the three main roots of escape lines across Western Europe. One of the lines, the Pat Line from Marseilles in the south runs over the Pyrenees down to Gibraltar. That’s where the American… Varian Fry was working to rescue Jewish intellectuals. We’re going to be doing more of that in a few weeks time.

But he was also within that network, the escape lines, there were women helping to smuggle airmen and soldiers as well as Jewish intellectuals and refugees over the Pyrenees. You have another sea route from Plouha in Brittany at the top there to Falmouth that was mainly managed by the men and seamen that would row across at night, never by moonlight, always completely in pitch dark, incredible missions in one of the most heavily defended areas of coastline by the Germans. And then from Brussels, the line that goes all the way through Paris to the other side of the Pyrenees, Bayonne to Bilbao over the Pyrenees against smuggling, men and women, female agents, male agents, our airmen soldiers including American airmen soldiers out. And they’re eventually smuggled down to Gibraltar where their flow, they’re repatriated. Next slide please. And we cannot underestimate the sacrifice that these women, as did their male colleagues make. Dedee de Jongh there, just 25 years old when she arrived in the British Embassy in Madrid and says, “I’ve got three escapers downstairs, three men that I’ve brought over the Pyrenees,” to kind of higher up over a secret route such that she couldn’t be found. And of course, they thought she was a German spy. They thought it wasn’t possible for this thin little slim woman to have possibly managed the arduous trek over the Pyrenees.

But she had, and it took a number of weeks to verify her identity and who she was. And she founded the Comet Line from Brussels through Bayonne into Spain with the De Greef family. And you can see them pictured in St. Anglet in their home along the Pyrenees. And I love that actual photograph. And that table was where they planned the meetings. It’s where they also took photographs of some of the airmen soldiers. They had group photographs before they managed to get over the Pyrenees. They survived. Dedee de Jongh survived. Andree de Jongh was her real name, but she was called Dedee. She is arrested in January 1943 and eventually transported to Ravensbruck I mean she has a horrific time, but she does survive. And then in the bottom there, Elsie Marechal, who again at just 18 years old is… This is taken just before she’s arrested in November 1942 with all of her family. She and her mother are the only members of her family that survive. They are prepared to sacrifice their lives. They knew the dangers. But for me, that photograph is one of my most favourite photographs, it’s very grainy, but Elsie’s, you know, her posture there, the defiance on her face, it’s the same defiance I encountered when I interviewed her some 80 years later.

You know, her face, no one’s going to get one over on her. And she was utterly defiant and prepared to fight for freedom and for the liberation of her country. Next slide please. But as I said, it was risky, and many of the women working on the escape lines would actually find themselves arrested, horrific torture, find themselves in concentration camps. One of the other women that helped that I’ve written about for the first time, her story’s not widely known, Mary O'Shaughnessy, she’s pictured at the very back there in the black outfit. This is one of the liberation photographs. And her family, when they were researching her story, suddenly saw this photograph and said, “My goodness, that’s Aunt Mary.” Just at time of liberation, she was in a pretty bad way, but you know, she survived and she did her bit. She helped on the escape lines, and she also smuggled out intelligence working around Marseilles. And we believe that she was also working with the likes of Varian Fry. Next slide please. But the women also were part of some of the greatest deceptions of the Second World War. And we’re coming to that part now. You’ve got a picture emerging now across First World War, in the interwar years of the '20s and '30s. Women are at the heart of intelligence work. And into the Second World War, we’ve got women working with their male colleagues behind enemy lines in intelligence networks. We’ve got women being parachuted into enemy occupied territory in the Second World War.

We’ve got uniformed women working in naval intelligence, air intelligence, army intelligence, also the equivalent in American Intelligence where they’re doing a lot of the analytical work. They are the hidden workforce that become experts in their field. And one of the biggest deceptions, I hope you’ve seen the film “Operation Mincemeat”. It’s fabulous. One of the biggest deceptions was Operation Mincemeat. The very small team photographed there in the sort of basement of the admiralty in London. They worked in incredibly cramped conditions, they looked quite cheerful in that photograph, but the women were at the heart of planning as well as actually producing some of the fake items for Operation Mincemeat. And Operation Mincemeat, you remember, was to float the dead body of Major Martin. He was actually a homeless man who’d actually… Well, not sure that he committed suicide, but the theories now that he accidentally ate something which had a bit of rat poison on it, it’s really difficult to know for sure. But he died and his body was given to naval intelligence by the mortuary in St. Pancras. Ewen Montagu, who headed this, he’s pictured in there, in that group photograph, he went to the mortuary and said, “Do you have a body we could use?” And they went to all kinds of lengths to have, of course, his fake invasion plans strapped in his briefcase to his arm.

But when the women interestingly looked at the whole plan for this and they’ve going to… His body was going to be launched, but from a submarine off the coast of Spain, which is what happened. With the fake plans, the Germans, obviously the body was brought in. The Germans believed that these were real invasion plans of an area of Greece and that allowed the troops to be reinforced around Greece, the German troops, and not around Sicily, Italy. So it meant that lives were saved when our allied forces landed in Sicily, Italy in the summer of 1943. But some of the women pictured there looked at this whole sort of story and said, “Well, okay, he’s got his briefcase with the invasion plans, but actually a man of his age would’ve had a girlfriend, and he would’ve been carrying a photograph of her.” So Pam was the girlfriend, and they created this team, fake documents, fake letters from Pam to her fiance, and obviously of course hid that on the body of Major Martin. And they even put this photograph of Pam who was one of the women of MI… Sorry. Of Operation Mincemeat. So she was one of the women of naval intelligence. Sorry, not MI5. Of Naval intelligence, and she gave over one of her holiday photographs. And I mean, the Germans believe these timely details. And there was also a letter from the bank manager saying, “You know, you owe us some money,” and that kind of thing. So making the story incredibly believable and the women were at the heart of that, looking at the whole deception and saying, “This isn’t going to work because…”

And those tiny detail that they were able to add into the operation like the photograph of Pam and the letters, the fake love letters. I mean, brilliant, absolutely brilliant. And the Germans fell for it. Next slide please. But this wasn’t the only major deception plan, there was the whole double cross system, MI5 and MI6 worked together, and there was this committee called the Twenty Committee. 20, XX. So it was double cross. And effectively there were a number of women, not just like the male agents, Garbo that we know, and Agent Zig Zag, the famous male agents, who provided deception ahead of D-Day. There were also a number of women. And what I’ve tried to do in my book is to name them all for the very first time because there are the occasional books, particularly on one of the women whose code name was Treasure. She’s one of the most famous ones, and it’s quite a bit written about her, Lily Sergeyev. But there weren’t a whole raft of other women, not all of their files have been declassified, but the minutes of the committee meeting of the Double-Cross actually references some of them. And so I think it’s important to recover their names. I’ve included them in the book, writing as much or as little as I could find so that they are acknowledged. And I’m hoping some of their files will be released in due course. But the woman you can see on the left is one of those agents, she’s one of the MI6 agents, she’s ecclesiastic, and there she’s photographing documents for her Abwehr handler. And she’s working for the sort of German Secret Service officer who believes she’s photographing… She’s photographed some British documents.

The British Intelligence has said she can have, it’s not really going to compromise anything. But here she’s in Lisbon, photographing other stuff. And the Abwehr handler thinks she’s really working for him. But in actual fact, she’s working for British Intelligence. And the OSS, the organisation, the forerunners of the CIA also had similar agents, and there are historians writing about the women’s who were working for American Intelligence. So have a look at those stories as well. So there’s a whole raft of these women doing this incredible deception work, and they are feeding material to the Germans. The Germans are swallowing it, they are buying this disinformation or misinformation. They did both. And on the right hand side, it’s a really rare example of a letter that’s been developed with the invisible ink message over it. I got terribly excited when I saw the real file. It’s really, really exciting because ordinarily these kind of letters don’t survive. So a number of the women were sending fake intelligence in letters, sometimes coded, sometimes not to their handler. Often the handlers were in Lisbon or Madrid, and they would write care of a fake woman in Spain or Madrid and Lisbon. And of course, in reality, that was being passed on to their German Secret Service handler.

German Secret Service handler thinking they’re really working for them. And this letter you can see horizontally is the original message, but vertically is the message that’s actually been developed from the invisible ink. I mean, it’s quite extraordinary. Quite extraordinary. And this is the letter in the hand of Bronx, she’s Elvira Chaudoir, Peruvian woman, daughter of a diplomat, Peruvian diplomat. She can move in all kinds of social circles, which is what her German handler loved, really believed that she was mixing in all kinds of high level circles, including military circles and gaining intelligence, you know, listening to what they’re talking about and sending that back to her handler. So she was very, very brave in that sense. But one of the things she did do, I mean, it was risky if they were caught, if the Germans ever suspected that they weren’t really working for them, then they would have the same fate as the other agents working behind enemy lines. And they did travel to places like Lisbon and Madrid. They were not writing all of these letters from England. So they were travelling and meeting their handlers incredibly dangerous, but Bronx, who’s handwriting this is what we see on the screen, ahead of D-Day in May 1944. And you can read about this in my book, the more detailed aspect of her plan. She’s giving fake information about a possible landing, an allied landing near Bordeaux.

And the Germans keep back a whole Panzer division that they don’t send up to Normandy or Britain or even towards Cali at this point because there’s, of course, the deception that the invasion’s going to happen around Cali. The Germans fought for that, but equally they held back more forces. So Bronx was really significant in some of the deceptions ahead of D-Day. Next slide please. There was, as far as we can tell at the moment, only one spy swap of the Second World War. And that was this woman, she must have been so important to us. She worked for British Intelligence, she worked for MI6. She was sort of undercover with a Special Operations Executive, working in and out of Turkey into trying to infiltrate. And she did infiltrate into Austria incredibly dangerous missions. She’s Baroness Miske, she’s British, but she’s married to a Hungarian diplomat. But she is eventually arrested and has a pretty rough time in the hands of Gestapo. But ultimately for some reason, it becomes unclear. Well, we certainly bargained for her and did a spy swap, the only known spy swap of the Second World War. And she goes on to work in the Cold War in very dangerous circumstances as if her experiences in the Second World War haven’t been dangerous enough. And she ends up spending nine years in a Soviet prison, but she survives. Incredible. Next slide please. I just want to mention briefly one of the brave women, Mary of Exeter. Mary of Exeter was a pigeon.

And she was sent on numerous missions from the pigeon loft in Exeter the southwest of England, two missions primarily into France. Incredibly, she survived all kinds of things. The Germans would send hawks up to try and attack our pigeons. The Germans knew we were sending pigeons behind enemy lines with messages or they were coming back with their messages. And the soldiers, the German soldiers could have at least 10 days holiday if they shot down a pigeon. The reward was great because you could imagine intelligence being smuggled out. She had three pellets removed from her wing. She was shot on one occasion, she survived. She’d had on another occasion, shrapnel embedded in her neck, damaged her muscles, so that was removed. She survives. The pigeon loft in Exeter is bombed. Exeter was a city that was heavily bombed as were many along the coast of England. And she was one of the few pigeons to survive across the war. She received 22 stitches for her wounds, and she’s given a medal for bravery. We here have a medal for animals for bravery called the Dickin Award. And she was given the Dickin Award for bravery. She survived the war. Incredible. Next slide please. And I’m often asked about the Germans. Did the Germans use female spies? Well, clearly they did. The extent to which they use their women for intelligence operations is less clear. I haven’t studied the German archives, but from what we can get from our end, it’s a very murky grey area because if you look at Coco Chanel, for example, she’s quite fashionable at the moment. In London, there’s an exhibition at the V&A, in central London, V&A museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, and I saw the end of the exhibition.

It says, “Well, you know, she’s thought to have been a German spy. She’s sleeping with German officers, but actually it’s also known she was working for the French resistance.” So my sense is that there were a number of women who sort of become the femme fatale, which obscure what women really did in intelligence like Coco Chanel, like Mata Hari in the First World War. And I have a lot to say about Mata Hari and how she has really obscured what women have done and achieved in intelligence. It’s not clear that Mata Hari was in the end really working for the Germans in the First World War. It’s very, very obscure. So we don’t know exactly how many women were really working for the Germans. How many of them were sort of double crossing? Was Coco Chanel a double agent? Was she really working for us? It’s really difficult to tell. I don’t know. Maybe the files will gradually be released, and we’ll get a deeper sense of how many women were genuinely working for the Germans as spies. Next slide please. And as we come to the end of the Second World War going into the Cold War, we have women like Monica Washburn, who goes on to do intelligence work in France for the allied headquarters, working with American Intelligence as well. And Diane Neave here pictured, who worked for MI6 during World War II, working with Polish liaison and Polish Intelligence that go on. These women went on to work there. Diane Neave is an agent handler as well with her famous husband, Airey Neave. Monica Washburn and Diane Neave were… They’re just two names that we have. Next slide please. Along with Daphne Park pictured coming up now at the top on the left hand side, the black and white photograph of Daphne Park.

We don’t really know what women did in intelligence into the Cold War. We have a lot of files declassified in the UK on double agents, on the atomic spies. The likes the equivalent of the Rosenbergs were sentenced in America. We had male and female atomic spies that were passing information to the Soviets. But in terms of our intelligence services, they’re clearly women beginning, they’ve had their expertise coming through the Second World War. There are women working in MI5 and MI6. It’s in the 1990s, the MI5 has its first female director. There have been two female directors of MI5, the equivalent of the American FBI. There has not yet been a female director of MI6. The woman on the right in the top corner is Anne Keast-Butler. And this year, she became the first female head of GCHQ. So the equivalent of the NSA. So unbelievable. We know… All we can say I think is that we know enough now coming through the First World War where women’s roles and intelligence begin to escalate, begin to increase. They get an expertise, whether they’re in uniform, they become heads of sections and specialists on German navy, on submarines, whatever it is, they become experts, and they head up intelligence sections. All that expertise has been hidden by official secrecy. And the same with the women of MI5 and MI6, they’re there working through the '20s and '30s. They have an expertise that’s needed and used into the Second World War.

And when the Second World War ends, we know the likes of Daphne Park, pictured at the top there, she goes on during the Cold War to become head of the whole of the Western hemisphere intelligence for MI6. She’s one of the few women we do know about. But there’s a whole hidden history of the men and the women of MI5 and MI6 that we can’t know about that perhaps we might never know what they’ve actually been involved in. And at the end of the Second World War, it is true, many of the women that were in uniform, the women of Bletchley Park, some of those go on to work for GCHQ in civilian roles. But of course, the vast majority of the women in uniform do actually go back to their ordinary lives. But what we find is there is a continuity, women have made their mark. They’ve made their mark such that we know that there were women that made a distinction in intelligence going through into the Cold War even if we can’t know their exact stories. And if you look up Anne Keast-Butler, what we all known… You know, we can know about her work. You can just see that that rising up through to where she is now, she has done the most incredible work as a woman in the intelligence field. And so how many more men and women have there been that we, as I say, can’t know about? So this is a history of women, who develop an expertise whose legacy has been hidden by official secrecy.

And then pictured below her Royal Highness Princess Anne, who became this year succeeded her late father, the Duke of Edinburgh, became the first female patron of the Army Intelligence Corps. Next slide please. So I’ll bring my comments to a conclusion today. And I hope… You know, I don’t normally promote my books on Lockdown University, but I hope you will take the opportunity to read this book, to buy it, to borrow it from the library. I think there are a number of relatives that might like it, but it’s a book for men and women. I don’t divorce the women from their male backdrop. These are incredibly inspiring women. They are far more, for me, all inspiring, and the story’s exciting. Those women that are coming out of the page, the women in intelligence, the reality of what, in this case, women, but of course, our men and our women have done in the intelligence field is far more exciting than the femme fatale, the glamour spies of the James Bond franchise I know we all love. I hope we do. Those James Bond feels. We do. We love spy films and the John le Carre films and the other stuff that’s coming out, but the reality of what women did, I think is even more exciting than the fiction. Thank you.