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During World War II, women of all backgrounds work as spies: Krystyna Skarbek, the Polish aristocrat whose daring exploits earn her the title of "Churchill's favorite spy," Andrée de Jongh, the Belgian girl whose ambitious escape network will save hundreds of Allied airmen, Josephine Baker, the glamorous singer whose fame provides the perfect cover for her anti-Nazi activities, and brothel owner Kitty Schmidt, whose Nazi-run establishment offers both secrets and pleasures.
Stoic Vera Atkins was determined to build a network of female agents, Virginia Hall made a daring escape from France, Mathilde Carré was a treacherous double agent, Noor Inayat Khan was a Muslim princess turned fearless radio operator, young mother Yvonne Cormeau sought revenge, and Yolande Beekman was a young artist turned spy. Amid covert operations, betrayal, and mounting danger, they defy the odds, each demonstrating unparalleled courage - and some paying the ultimate price.
Stoic Vera Atkins was determined to build a network of female agents, Virginia Hall made a daring escape from France, Mathilde Carré was a treacherous double agent, Noor Inayat Khan was a Muslim princess turned fearless radio operator, young mother Yvonne Cormeau sought revenge, and Yolande Beekman was a young artist turned spy. Amid covert operations, betrayal, and mounting danger, they defy the odds, each demonstrating unparalleled courage - and some paying the ultimate price.
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00:01Women who are whip-smart.
00:04Women who are beautiful killers.
00:07Women with ice in their veins.
00:13Women who risk everything to cause mayhem behind enemy lines.
00:18The life expectancy given to some agents was only six weeks,
00:22with a survival rate of 50-50.
00:25Nothing was off limits.
00:27They used bombs to destroy trains and bridges.
00:30They were all three a trio of assassins.
00:34Or seduction to steal the enemy's most vital secrets.
00:39And when the guard opens the door,
00:41there's Batty standing naked in the moonlight,
00:44supposedly with a strand of pearls.
00:47What they do will change the course of history.
00:52These are the female spies of World War II.
00:57In this episode, six women defy the odds in Europe,
01:06risking their lives behind the front lines.
01:10Vera Atkins, the stoic spymaster.
01:14Virginia Hall, the limping lady.
01:17Mathilde Carré, the traitorous triple agent.
01:20Noor Khan, the princess-turned-spy.
01:23Yvonne Cormeau, the pianist.
01:26And Yorland Beckmann, the artist.
01:29Some would return home as heroes.
01:32Others wouldn't come home at all.
01:35They will stop at nothing.
01:40They have a vast accumulation of war weapons of all kinds.
01:45They have highly trained and disciplined armies,
01:48navies and air servicing.
01:51Is it possible they do not realize
01:54that we shall never cease to persevere against them
01:57until they have been taught a lesson
02:00which they and the world will never forget?
02:08Brave words in the dark, desperate days
02:11when the Nazis looked to be unstoppable.
02:13Hitler's army had stormed across Europe,
02:17overrunning country after country,
02:20crushing all opposition.
02:22British and French troops only saved by a mad scramble
02:26into little boats at Dunkirk.
02:29Under their own power or in tow,
02:31the amazing boats of Dunkirk crossed the channel
02:34with their valiant but exhausted passengers.
02:37So complete and so rapid was the route,
02:39the Allies were left with an intelligence blackout in Europe.
02:44Without networks of agents on the continent,
02:47they were in the dark, powerless to strike back at the Nazis.
02:51They shall themselves be cast into the pit of death and shame
02:56and only when the earth has been cleansed
02:59and purged of their crimes and of their villainies
03:03will we turn from the task which they have forced upon us.
03:07A task we shall now most faithfully and punctiliously discharge.
03:14In response, Winston Churchill wanted to fight a secret war
03:20behind German lines to set Europe ablaze.
03:24Britain would organise our resistance fighters
03:28in the Nazi-occupied territories.
03:29An insurgency to disrupt Hitler's war machine through sabotage, espionage and subversion.
03:39Churchill's brainchild, his secret army, was named the Special Operations Executive, the SOE.
03:47It caused havoc and shortened the war, but many of its agents were killed,
03:57often brutally on Adolf Hitler's orders.
04:01Some of the bravest of these operatives would be women.
04:05In July of 1940, when the Battle of Britain was in full swing,
04:18Winston Churchill summoned his Minister of Economic Warfare
04:22and told him to set Europe ablaze with a new organisation
04:26that would be known as the Special Operations Executive or the SOE.
04:32The largest number of SOE agents was sent into France
04:36because any allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe
04:40would necessarily begin with France.
04:42400-plus agents were sent into France and 39 of them were women.
04:51The women who would take up the challenge of the SOE
04:54did so knowing the odds were stacked against them,
04:57parachuting into occupied territory
05:00with little more than the clothes on their backs.
05:06I think to be an SOE agent, parachuting into enemy occupied territory
05:09must have been terrifying, thinking things like leaving their home,
05:14their family, friends, safety or relative safety of England
05:19and flying out into occupied France,
05:22jumping out of a perfectly serviceable plane,
05:24which to me is just terrifying anyway,
05:26and then not knowing if you're going to be picked up
05:28by the Gestapo or by resistance.
05:31These women would go on to play a crucial role
05:34as spies and saboteurs in World War II.
05:36But that nearly didn't happen.
05:45The British military top brass at first opposed the idea
05:49of women fighting behind enemy lines.
05:51They weren't allowed to take part in frontline combat,
05:55the thinking went.
05:57So how could they possibly be involved in guerrilla warfare?
06:00So why didn't Britain want to use female spies or women in combat at all?
06:06And the answer is every culture on earth has a combat taboo.
06:09War is for men and not for women and children.
06:13We fight wars to rescue women and children.
06:17So that's universal.
06:19Every culture on earth kind of has some version of this.
06:21Like real work. I had no idea you were so tough.
06:24Oh, you'd be surprised.
06:26But SOE leader, Colonel Colin Gubbins, took a different view.
06:31He saw no reason why they couldn't be secret agents,
06:34and knew there'd be times and places only women could work
06:38without being picked up by Nazi spy hunters.
06:41So, to their credit, though the Brits did not initially want women
06:48behind enemy lines and in combat, they didn't want women killing at all.
06:52It seemed so unwomanly.
06:54They understood almost immediately how good they were
06:57and that there were female traits that made them even better at it than men.
07:01It was recognised by the superiors, including Gubbins
07:04and the recruiting officer Selwyn Jepsen,
07:05that women would be able to move about the European or Western European countryside more easily.
07:11It was easier for them to go out shopping and they could hide things in their baskets.
07:15And it was easier for them to travel across the country, be it by train or bicycle,
07:20without arousing suspicion.
07:22So they really did get it right in using female secret agents.
07:26If they were to start recruiting female spies, though,
07:30someone would need to be in charge, calling the shots.
07:32That person was a Romanian-born emigrant Jew with a mastery of languages.
07:45Born Vera Marie Rosenberg in Romania to a German father and British mother,
07:50an education in Paris and language studies followed.
07:53Her social circle blended aristocrats, diplomats and intelligence agents.
07:57Moving to Britain in 1937, Vera took the surname Atkins, an anglicised version of her mother's maiden name.
08:06Vera was a very educated, very well-born Romanian Jew,
08:12but educated at the Sorbonne, perfect French, very elegant and never married and wanted to contribute to the war effort.
08:23So, got involved and it was her skills, her fantastic French, her intelligence that really made her critical to SOE as ADC.
08:36It wasn't just Vera's linguistic skills that caught official eyes.
08:41Before signing up, she sneaked into German-occupied Belgium and bribed a Nazi officer to get her cousin a passport so he could escape.
08:51Afterwards, Vera was smuggled back to Britain by the Belgian resistance.
08:56Little wonder the SOE came calling in 1941.
09:01Hers was a fast rise, first as intelligence officer, then principal assistant to the SOE's director.
09:11She sort of became the woman who shepherded all the women into the service,
09:17and her commanding officer was considered a bit of a bumbler, made lots of mistakes.
09:23She was considered really the brains behind the operation.
09:26She was recruiter, mentor and handler of the spies.
09:30A workaholic, her office in London swirled with cigarette smoke and talk of plots to defeat the Nazis.
09:36Vera took dozens of female agents from their safe civilian lives into a dangerous world where they'd blow up trains and bridges,
09:48run resistance cells, set up safe houses and save downed allied airmen.
09:54All the while knowing they had every chance of being betrayed and that the slightest mistake could mean their death.
10:01She helped recruit them. She helped sift through their training.
10:08She was there on the ground and she became sort of the mother hen to all of them, as well as to the wives of SOE men.
10:16She was managing the entire administrative side of this organization that is being built from the ground up and doesn't have anything.
10:26There is no precedent. There's nothing like it has ever existed before.
10:29She is making it all happen and she's the organizational mind.
10:34Under Vera's administration, the SOE went on the hunt for female recruits.
10:39Few of them knew why they were targeted.
10:42Speaking native French or near enough was a crucial factor.
10:46Many were French anyway or had a French parent and most had a cosmopolitan background.
10:51I think to be a good secret agent or spy you need to have an ability to blend in, to blend in with your surroundings, to have a knowledge of your locality and preferably of course the local language as well.
11:05So just this ability to be there, to exist, to not stand out, to not draw attention to yourself. And again, that's why women make very good secret agents and spies.
11:16Secrecy was paramount, much depended on the Nazis not knowing the allies were using female agents.
11:26Away from curious eyes, in a country manor house near Guilford in southern England, they were given a three week crash course in basic spy skills.
11:36Typically there was a five stage training program. There was preliminary paramilitary parachute wireless training and then an SOE finishing school.
11:48It was to last between six to nine months in an ideal situation. However, if an agent was particularly adept, it would be shortened.
11:56Then it got deadly serious.
11:59In the remote Scottish Highlands, they were shown how to blow things up and kill people.
12:06After parachute training in Manchester, they were taught forgery, safe breaking and coding.
12:13Before any agent left for Europe, Vera Atkins personally checked their clothing and everything they'd take with them, looking for anything that could reveal they came from England.
12:23Everything had to look authentically French. Vera was doing all she could to keep them alive, knowing that many might not make it home.
12:33She had a real pastoral role when it came to them. She made sure that they were comfortable with their roles.
12:41She saw them through training. She made sure they had wills written. If an agent was unsure or having second thoughts, she would sit them down and spend time with them.
12:50So she really took them under her wing and had a huge duty of care when it came to the women agents.
12:59More than 400 agents were prepared by Vera for missions in France.
13:03She personally farewelled almost every one of them. Men and women she regarded as friends.
13:13But closest to her heart were the female agents. Her girls, as she called them.
13:19She was quite beautiful. She was absolutely brilliant. And she was the mother hen who kept this entire operation going and championed the women.
13:28Vera collected her girls from all walks of life. They were as diverse as the danger and chaos in France needed them to be.
13:38There was one woman, however, that even Vera couldn't have imagined, would go on to become one of the allies most successful spies.
13:45Virginia Hall. She was the first SOE woman to infiltrate France.
13:53So remarkable were her exploits, the Nazis would soon dub her the Limping Lady.
14:00Virginia had only one good leg, but she managed to outfox the Gestapo the entire war, always one step ahead of the fearsome spy hunters.
14:11As a young student in Paris in the 1920s, she'd been captivated by France and set her sights on becoming a diplomat.
14:22But diplomacy then was very much a man's game.
14:27Only six of the 1,500 US diplomats were female, and Virginia's attempt to join them was rejected time after time.
14:36In her own words, she was cantankerous and capricious, but she was also determined, taking clerical jobs in the US embassies across Europe.
14:47But then she had an accident that would rule her out of foreign service.
14:51Virginia lost her left leg in a hunting accident before the war, but she remained in good spirits, and she had a wooden leg made to replace the leg that she had lost, and she named it Cuthbert, which shows a bit of humor, good humor.
15:08Nothing daunted Virginia. She resigned in disgust from her desk job in Estonia, just in time for the outbreak of war.
15:25She volunteered to drive ambulances for the French army, risking her life to rescue wounded soldiers from the dangerous front line.
15:37Though not yet recruited, began building her own small resistance network in France.
15:42She's there first, and she's there early, and she's in southern France, right? So she is somebody who is very much affected by, I'm working in Vichy France. She is working as a coordinator.
15:55Anybody who comes through southern France, downed airmen, new agents, trying to coordinate, build up this resistance network.
16:02Virginia Hall had a winning personality that was able to engender trust in a wide variety of people.
16:08For instance, when she was building her SOE network in the south of France, she was able to recruit a mother superior, who was running a convent, and a madame, who was running a brothel.
16:22When Paris fell to the Germans in 1940, she moved to London, where a chance meeting with a spy led her to contact the SOE.
16:31It was one of the most inspired intelligence recruitments of the entire war.
16:36SoE agent Peter Churchill met Virginia after she'd been in the south of France building her network for four months, and he reported back to London that she knew everyone, she was in with everyone, and she was liked by everyone.
16:52She was sent straight back to France to live the life of spy novels and action films.
16:59Virginia organized a resistance cell, set up agents with money, weapons, and supplies, found safe houses, and rescued downed airmen.
17:08So having an American there, an American passport, she has more mobility, more freedom, more reason to be there than any Brit, necessarily.
17:20So she is extremely useful, and she has French skills, and she is feeding stories to the New York Post, she's got great cover.
17:30So she's ideal in that situation.
17:34Despite her disability, Virginia wasn't content sitting back and coordinating other agents.
17:39In one daring effort, she managed to rescue 12 agents awaiting execution in a police station by smuggling tools to them, then spiriting them out of France.
17:54Being a woman initially gave Virginia a cloak of invisibility.
17:58The innate chauvinism of the Gestapo meant they couldn't believe a woman was capable of being a successful spy and saboteur.
18:08The Nazi chauvinism just sort of automatically made them see right past women.
18:13If you have an entire culture that's based on the supremacy of Nordic males,
18:18the idea that women are capable of anything other than reproducing more Teutonic Aryan children really doesn't filter through necessarily.
18:28You don't see women as capable actors. You definitely don't see them as the opposition force.
18:33And so you don't see the spies operating right under your nose.
18:37The chauvinism of the Gestapo meant that women had an advantage.
18:41The Gestapo really didn't believe that women were capable of this.
18:44They didn't believe that they could do sabotage and subversion.
18:46They weren't able to blow things up.
18:49They wouldn't possibly fight back against the occupying regime.
18:53They just didn't believe that women would do resistance work.
18:57The sexist cloak of invisibility wouldn't last forever though.
19:01Not when Virginia was so good at her job.
19:04Soon the Nazis were hunting for the woman they called the most dangerous allied spy in France.
19:08Hall's resistance organization was so successful that the Gestapo was soon on her tail.
19:17And Klaus Barbie himself was very interested in catching her.
19:21And he had these posters made up of her sketched lightness with the caption the lady who limps is the most dangerous allied agent we must find and destroy her.
19:35But she was a hard one to catch.
19:38Virginia had become a master of disguise.
19:41She could be four different women in a day with four different codenames.
19:46She even had a dentist grind down her nice white American teeth so she looked more like a French peasant.
19:51Such drastic measures were common for these female spies.
19:57SOE did a lot to where they could help cover agents tracks.
20:05There are pictures of they would give people plastic surgery especially some of the Jewish agents to make them look less Jewish.
20:12They would, yeah, take out fillings if they thought their teeth looked too well tended to because the French didn't have the same kind of dentistry.
20:23They were not above doing plastic surgery on you to help you blend in.
20:29Klaus Barbie, the notorious Nazi SS boss, known as the Butcher of Lyon, became obsessed with catching her.
20:38But he never did.
20:39After the Allies invaded North Africa and the Germans occupied all France in response, she knew she had to get out before the SS and Gestapo got too close.
20:52Lots and lots of spies get the name, the most dangerous spy in France, according to the Nazis.
21:00And certainly Virginia was an extremely effective spy.
21:03Ultimately, her cover is blown. She escapes over the Pyrenees on this false leg.
21:11Despite slogging it over the mountains for three days and three nights with one good leg, Virginia wasn't happy to be home safely.
21:19Back in London, she pleaded with her bosses to return to France, but her requests were ignored.
21:25After escaping to London, SOE wanted her to cool her heels behind a desk. But that was not at all what Virginia wanted. She wanted to go back in the thick of the action.
21:38So, she found another organization that would take her, and that was the American, the new American organization, the Office of Strategic Services, or the OSS, which was the precursor of the CIA.
21:53Virginia retrained with the OSS as a wireless operator in the hope of returning to France, but there were problems.
21:59The Germans knew exactly what she looks like, and Klaus Barbie still had a vendetta against her.
22:07So, she needed a disguise. She decided to disguise herself as an old woman. She dyed her hair grey, she found a makeup artist to show her how to draw lines on her face, and she wore voluminous skirts to make herself look heavy.
22:21Dressed as an old woman, her second stint in France is even more successful than her first.
22:32Her job was to train resistance groups to conduct sabotage and guerrilla ambushes in support of the looming D-Day invasion.
22:41Her network grew to 1,500 people.
22:44For the OSS, SOE and French resistance, the six months up to the Allied invasion were extraordinarily successful.
22:55The mayhem they caused meant German industry ground to a halt.
23:05After D-Day, Virginia and her fighters switched from guerrilla tactics to all-out war.
23:11And on August 26, 1944, she accepted the surrender of the German Southern Command at Le Chambon.
23:21In her final report to her OSS headquarters, Virginia revealed her team had destroyed four bridges, derailed freight trains, severed key train tracks in multiple places, and downed telephone lines.
23:34They had killed some 150 Germans, and captured another 500.
23:42But after achieving so much, why was there seemingly little public acknowledgement?
23:47I think the roles of women as spies and agents has drawn less attention than men, because it's men who tell war stories.
23:56It's men who get the decorations. It's men who get the glory.
24:01And in some ways, women, because they've had to disappear into the background anyway, just continue to do so.
24:07If anything, it was in some ways understandable for Virginia, considering the role she played during the war.
24:15She had a unique role within SOE because she was already on the ground when they recruited her, right?
24:20So she isn't somebody that they defined in London and that they train up.
24:24She is there. She is working. She's already basically doing resistance work.
24:30While Virginia did receive recognition, it was mostly done in secret.
24:35In 1943, King George VI made her a member of the British Empire.
24:41But she was still undercover at the time.
24:46In 1945, US President Harry Truman wanted to personally decorate her with a distinguished service order.
24:54America's second highest bravery award.
24:57But she rejected a public event.
24:59So the medal was awarded by the head of the OSS in her own home.
25:05After the war, she spent 16 more years in the service of the CIA, mostly as a desk-bound analyst.
25:12Her career derailed by sexism.
25:15A declassified CIA report confirmed Virginia was held back because she had so much experience
25:21that she overshadowed her male colleagues who felt threatened by her.
25:27Such consequences would be common for many of the women who re-entered society
25:32after incredible acts of bravery and heroism.
25:36But they'd be the fortunate ones. Many more never came home at all.
25:41The contrast is stark and tragic.
25:52The peace of a city square in London's Belgravia.
25:56The pain of Dachau death camp, where a gentle young woman was executed.
26:01There's a statue now of Nora Khan, unveiled in 2012 by Princess Anne, to go with her George Cross,
26:09Britain's highest civilian medal for bravery.
26:13And France gave her the Croix de Guerre gold star.
26:17All posthumous. All long overdue.
26:21Engraved on her statue is the last word she spoke before being shot.
26:25Liberté. Freedom.
26:28One of the SOE's most decorated agents,
26:31Noor was perhaps the least likely spy of the war.
26:36So Noor has by far the most exotic kind of interesting background of any of these women.
26:42She has an American mother and an Indian father of royal descent who was a Sufi mystic.
26:50And she was raised in Paris in this kind of cult-like environment of turn-of-the-century new religions and Sufi mysticism.
27:05And was an incredible musician and was incredibly privileged in this extraordinary world.
27:12When her family fled back to London after war broke out, Noor joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, where she learned how to operate a wireless radio and caught the eye of Vera Atkins.
27:27Instructors at the SOE Spy School were worried about what they saw were Noor's childlike qualities, gentle manner and lack of ruse, and they opposed her recruitment.
27:39The SOE realized that Noor was perhaps not the most perfect SOE agent.
27:48She was very unassuming, she was very quiet, she was timid, but she was also an experienced radio operator and they needed radio operators very badly in France.
27:59Her instructors said she was noticeable, the worst possible trait for a spy, as well as timid, gentle and unworldly.
28:10She was frightened of loud noises and heights.
28:16How could she possibly cope with the grinding terror that would await her?
28:20Unfortunately, the stress of her environment would play a role in her later mistakes.
28:28But for now, her skills as a radio operator made her invaluable.
28:33She was an effective radio operator, she was good at what she did, she was careful to radio from different places.
28:40So she ended up doing very good work, surprisingly good work. She surprised her SOE superiors because she was so good.
28:50She'd be the first female radio operator dropped into France.
28:54But just days after her arrival came disaster. All the other agents in her network were arrested.
29:04Suddenly, there was only one SOE radio operator left in Paris, Noor, now on her own and incredibly exposed.
29:13She is one of the most decorated SOE agents. Noor was in Paris in summer of 1943 when the Paris networks are collapsing.
29:22She becomes the only radio available while the world is ending around her.
29:30For several months from June 1943, Noor's messages could not have been more crucial to the war effort or the danger more extreme.
29:39Thanks to her, 30 Allied airmen shot down over France were smuggled safely to England.
29:47She arranged parachute drops of arms and supplies for the resistance and selected landing fields for the extraction of agents.
29:56Noor became so effective that the Germans put up a huge reward for her capture.
30:01It was then that she was urged by her SOE bosses to come home. But she refused. She wanted to rebuild the network on her own.
30:13It was incredibly risky work and her decision to stay was incredibly brave. Unfortunately, her luck wouldn't last.
30:22I would say that odds of her living through that at all were pretty much nil.
30:28She is doing all of the traffic work for everything that's left in a moment of declining security. Even if she had been the best radio operator, it would be a miracle had she gotten out alive.
30:37Everybody was looking for her. She was the target. She was the last link left.
30:44In late 1943, Noor was betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo. Interviews of her captors after the war gave a lot of detail about what happened to her.
30:54A German officer told how Noor had fought ferociously on arrest, how she'd bitten and clawed at him.
31:03She was very brave. She was captured. She was in Avenue Foch. She tried to escape. She got up on the roof. She pulls herself out of her own cell and tries to escape from Avenue Foch.
31:14She's thwarted by an air raid siren. But still, even in this moment of being completely surrendered to Nazis, she's still trying to make a break for it and trying to get out.
31:28In one prison, she was shackled hand and foot for 10 months while the Nazis tried to extract information about her network. But they never succeeded in breaking her.
31:40Once captured, the Germans say she never gave up a word, that they were incapable of turning her as a prisoner, that she didn't betray anyone.
31:54Her end was brutal. Half starved and injured after her interrogations, Noor was transferred to Dachau concentration camp, along with three other SOE agents, including her training partner, Yorlanda Beckmann.
32:10At dawn the next day, they were all executed.
32:14We seem to have a lot of evidence, a lot of decent evidence that she was tortured in the concentration camp.
32:24She was probably raped. When it was time for her execution, she was really quite brutalized. And it is because they didn't consider her, they considered her sort of part of the intermention, the people not worthy of being treated well, lesser beings.
32:49Just before she was shot, Noor shouted one last word, Liberté.
33:01Noor was a crucial and indispensable component of the resistance effort.
33:08But her story tragically showed how a mistake could cost a spy not only their life, but the lives of others.
33:16Because she'd gone against her training and broken a golden rule, instead of immediately burning her messages, she'd been keeping them.
33:24So she's one of the most decorated agents because she did sort of hold that thread together as they are pulling agents out all over France, because basically all of the early efforts of SOE have been blown.
33:40But then she is captured. All of her back traffic is captured. And what happens when you capture all these past messages is you can now decode everything.
33:51You can work through. The Germans have been listening to these telegraph messages, too.
33:55They have her codes. They can now see what all of the previous codes were. You can now understand the battle plans.
34:01Despite the terrible mistake, Noor's bravery in taking on one of the most dangerous jobs of the war can't be ignored.
34:11And her place in spying history will be forever celebrated.
34:15Alongside Noor at Dachau concentration camp, on her last day, was SOE agent Yolande Berkman.
34:31Yolande and Noor had completed their weapons and explosives training in the Scottish Highlands together, and they shared high linguistic skills and educations.
34:41Yolande Berkman was born in Paris, and most of her upbringing took place in Switzerland, although she was French, and she eventually moved to London with her mother.
34:56And there she enjoyed doing things like illustrating children's books and being involved with fashion.
35:03And she had a great skill for languages as well, French, German and Italian.
35:07It was the fate that the little girl who loved art, and seemed destined to be a designer, was instead drawn into the dark world of espionage.
35:17She had all the attributes the SOE were looking for.
35:21Yolande's language skills were what attracted SOE to her.
35:27They wanted people who were fluent, certainly in French, but her ability to speak these other languages as well, showed her as being a very skilled linguist.
35:36And also, as a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, she was learning certain skills that they required, such as wireless operation.
35:42Flown into France in late 1943, Yolande linked up with a Canadian SOE agent to form a network codenamed Musician, that destroyed trains, railway lines and fuel storage tanks.
35:59She was also crucial in distributing arms dropped by the RAF to resistance fighters.
36:09Yolande Beekman did all sorts of work for their network, called the Musician Network, and she also attended 20 parachute drops.
36:17Now this was an incredibly dangerous time, when the parachutes were falling from the sky, the aircraft were overhead, and of course the Gestapo could overrun the field where the drops were going to take place at any time.
36:31So it really invited a rest, or at least being spotted, and as a wireless operator, she was risking everything by being at those drops.
36:40By this time of the war, the Germans had established direction-finding teams to prowl the streets in vans fitted out to detect radio signals.
36:50As a wireless operator, Yolande was constantly in danger, and always alone.
36:56They were required to work alone, as few members of the network should know them as possible, because they were so susceptible, but so important, and so difficult to replace if they got arrested.
37:06And so it was a very lonely and difficult job, with a life expectancy of just six weeks.
37:13But Yolande made herself an easier target, sending messages at identical times, using the same frequencies, all from one location.
37:23It's not known why she didn't vary her routine or switch between safe houses.
37:28We think Yolande maybe had a lapse of security, and got a little bit too comfortable. And basically, she didn't move. She stayed in the same place time and time again.
37:39And when she began to realise that the Gestapo were closing in on her, she did eventually move. But maybe it was just too late.
37:48The Gestapo traced her radio signals to her street block. Yolande fled, but was arrested in a cafe.
37:55Immediately after her arrest, Yolande was taken to Gestapo headquarters in San Quentin, where we have evidence that she was at least beaten up.
38:06Eventually, Yolande, along with several other SOE women, were transported to Karlsruhe Prison.
38:11And we know they all demonstrated immense courage and bravery during this time in prison.
38:17They had no idea what was going to become of them.
38:21And it was getting late in the war, so there was a hope, a real hope, that they might just be able to spend their last few days living out the war in prison.
38:29And in September of that year, four women, including Yolande Beekman, were sent to Dachau, just outside of Munich, where, a few hours later, they were all shot.
38:39Radio operators were some of the most important and subsequently most aggressively hunted spies of the war.
38:51Yolande Beekman died alongside Noah Khan in Dachau.
38:55There was one SOE wireless operator who was so accurate and fast sending Morse code messages,
39:14that they called her the pianist.
39:29Yvonne Comeau could send up to 22 words a minute, almost twice the word count of other agents.
39:36Her speed kept her safe.
39:38The longer an operator kept transmitting, the more likely the Germans would pinpoint their location.
39:46Yvonne completed her SOE training with Noor Inayad Khan and Yolande Beekman.
39:51But she was the only one to survive the war.
39:58Like the others, she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, where she was found by Vera Atkins.
40:04Yvonne Comeau was very torn about whether or not she should join SOE,
40:10because she knew it meant a period of time away from home.
40:13Her husband had been killed.
40:15He had been evacuated from Dunkirk and was injured,
40:19and he was at home when their house was hit during the Blitz.
40:23He was killed outright. Yvonne survived.
40:26But they had a small daughter, and by Yvonne going away and risking everything in SOE,
40:33there was a very real chance that the daughter, Yvette, could be orphaned.
40:38Having lost her husband, Yvonne felt it was her duty to take his place,
40:42and the SOE gave her that opportunity.
40:45Especially with French and English backgrounds and operator skills second to none.
40:56Yvonne and many other wireless operators were nicknamed pianists
40:59because it was the speed with which they could send the messages.
41:03And Yvonne not only had the speed, but she had incredible accuracy.
41:08She was one of the most accurate wireless operators during the Second World War.
41:15Yvonne linked with the senior SOE agents to search the countryside for safe places
41:20where the RAF could drop supplies.
41:24Yvonne was pretending to be a travelling nurse, a cover story that worked well
41:28when she and another agent were stopped by German soldiers while on a scouting mission.
41:33They jumped into the car through the wireless set,
41:39which was hidden inside a suitcase on the back seat of the car,
41:42and they drove due south.
41:44But they came to a roadblock where everybody was being searched.
41:48And so they were taken out of the car.
41:50The soldier then came up to her and asked her what was in the suitcase.
41:54She said it was a radio.
41:56And in German, the word radio can also mean X-ray set.
42:00Her cover story had her registered as a district nurse.
42:03She had every reason to be carrying an X-ray set.
42:06And he essentially told her to get out.
42:10Yvonne evaded arrest for 13 months, sending a record 400 messages
42:15and receiving another 600.
42:17She also helped cut power and phone lines in the lead-up to the D-Day invasion.
42:22Once, she was shot in the leg by a German patrol, but escaped and saved her precious wireless.
42:32Yvonne was immensely effective.
42:34She was one to be looked up to.
42:36She had amazing security.
42:38Everybody admired her who came across her path.
42:41She did everything she could to fit in with the local area she lived in.
42:46And because of this level of security, this level of empathy with the locals,
42:51and understanding of the way of life, she just blended right in.
42:55And these messages she sent were so important and so, so perfect in the way that they were sent.
43:03After the war, Yvonne was awarded an MBE and the French Légion d'honneur,
43:11Croix de Guerre et Madaille de la Résistance.
43:16She would go on to live a happy and full life, passing away at the age of 88.
43:25And resurgent Paris, cheers to the strains of the Marseillais.
43:33After France was liberated, women who had collaborated or formed relationships with German men,
43:42were often forced to submit to having their heads shaven as a mark of shame.
43:47This was street and mob rule.
43:50But there was also the rule of law, and one court trial would grip the nation.
43:56In the dock was a spy known as La Chatte.
43:58The cat, a woman who became a double and then triple agent, Mathilde Carré.
44:05She was born Mathilde Lucie Bellard after she got married.
44:10She inherited the name La Chatte, meaning female cat in French,
44:16because she was considered to be very stealthy and sneaked around quite a lot.
44:23When war came to France, Mathilde had altruistic ambitions that would stand in stark contrast with her later work.
44:32After she graduated from the Sorbonne with a degree in law, she was looking around for things to do.
44:39And when war broke out, she volunteered with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver and nurse.
44:49After the fall of France, little useful intelligence was reaching the Allies in London.
44:54The main problem facing Allied intelligence after the fall of France was that the world had gone completely dark almost.
45:03There was no information coming out of France. Nobody knew what was going on.
45:08Nobody knew if resistance was building up, how the Nazi occupation was panning out.
45:13There were no agents sending out information. There was nothing coming out of France at all.
45:17And so the world had literally gone blind.
45:23A Polish Air Force officer stranded in France was tasked with setting up the first intelligent network there, called Entre Alliés.
45:31His name was Roman Czerniewski.
45:34Roman Garby Czerniewski, who was a Polish Air Force officer and also intelligence officer working for Polish intelligence that was already operating in France.
45:50The Poles asked him to set up a network, which he then called Inter Alliés.
45:56Captain Czerniewski needed a clever French partner for his France-based intelligence network.
46:03And he found one in the beautiful young woman with a law degree from the Sorbonne.
46:10Matilda Carey had been a very clever, but a somewhat neglected child.
46:16And she somewhat romantically decided that she wanted to die as a martyr for France.
46:20And so this was bubbling away in her background of something that was really going to give her life meaning.
46:28When Garby Czerniewski met Matilda Carey at the cafe in Toulouse, he was very much attracted to her.
46:39He was very much a ladies' man.
46:40He asked her first of all to help him brush up on his French, but also he wanted someone to help him actually run the network and become basically his second in command.
46:54He took Carey into the new network and into his bed.
46:59Together they built an extensive and flourishing spy network.
47:02What she was doing was with the people that she had recruited, some of them were working in ports, some were working on the railways and so on.
47:13It enabled them to be able to sort of monitor troop movements on the railways, get a feeling of whether or not things like the invasion was going to take place.
47:27Operation Sea Lion, as the Germans called it.
47:31So they were able to provide that information to the allies.
47:37Czerniewski might have been the instigator of the network, but it was Mathilde's willingness to scour Paris for information that earned the network the trust of more than 120 informants.
47:47Czerniewski was a very courageous person to begin with, she scurried around all over Paris, collecting information from people, meeting people in cafes and other locations, and they did actually have to keep moving around.
48:05He was scurrying around wearing this black fur coat, not exactly unobtrusive at that time, but for some reason she didn't seem to draw attention to herself.
48:18At least not at first, but the success of their network couldn't go unnoticed for long, and the Gestapo were always on the hunt.
48:26Anyone that was getting involved in intelligence, whether it was Mathilde's network or some other organisation, ran a very strong risk of being arrested by the Gestapo, taken away for questioning, interrogated, and probably taken to a concentration camp.
48:47On what would have been her first anniversary as a spy, Mathilde was arrested and taken in for questioning.
49:01Luckily for her, but unlucky for the Allied war effort, her interrogation didn't go down the usual pain and torture route.
49:09Mathilde Carre was captured by an Avvair agent by the name of Hugo Bleicher.
49:15When she was captured, instead of facing the imprisonment and the stark reality of the interrogations and the concentration camps, he gave her an option.
49:28He told her that she could turn, that she could become a double agent, she could work for him.
49:36Mathilde would become a mistress and double agent to Nazi officer Hugo Bleicher.
49:41In return, she was spared execution and put on the Nazi payroll.
49:48The once patriotic Firebrand had found she wasn't quite ready to die for France.
49:53Carre kept operating as if nothing had happened and started helping to destroy the network she'd set up.
50:03It was the most successful network at the time, and to have broken that up was just unforgivable.
50:14When she betrayed the network, she gave up codes and transmission schedules, locations of where agents were living and so on.
50:25She said at one point, this was later on, once she was in Britain, that this was the greatest act of cowardice that I'd ever done.
50:37I don't know that she really believed that. I think she just made that up because there was no contrition with her whatsoever.
50:49She had no compunction about betraying people.
50:52But then redemption beckoned. Confronted by a suspicious French operative, she broke down, confessed, and offered to become a triple agent.
51:02One of the agents that was sent to France, Pierre de Voncourt, he suspected that she was not being truthful and was actually tasked with killing her.
51:17But he, for whatever reason, couldn't bring himself to do that.
51:24It must have been her charm that saved her life and fooled the Nazis into letting her go.
51:29It must have been her own.
51:31Mathilde put it to Bleicher and his officers, you know, how would it be if you sent me back to Britain and I pretend to be working for them, but in fact I'm actually working for you,
51:47and penetrate SOE and British intelligence and really mess things up in that respect.
51:55Somehow it worked and Mathilde travelled to London.
52:00But once there, she turned herself in and spent the rest of the war in prison.
52:04Afterwards, she was deported to France to face trial for treason.
52:10She was sentenced to death.
52:11The French weren't pulling any punches.
52:14They realized that she had done a very bad disservice to France and the only way to punish her was by death, which in those days would have been the guillotine.
52:28And eventually that was commuted to 20 years prison sentence instead.
52:37While she was in prison, she kind of found God and became very religious, but that didn't still really help her to repent for what she'd done.
52:48From the limping lady Virginia Hall to the triple agent Mathilde Carré and the princess in between, Noor Inayat Khan, the stories of bravery and determination come hand in hand with danger and despair.
53:14Can we blame a woman like Mathilde for turning double agent when faced with death?
53:23While someone like Noor Inayat Khan withstands torture to save the lives of others?
53:28We can never know the true hardships of signing up for a life of espionage where bravery and determination go hand in hand with treachery and betrayal.
53:38And Betrayal.
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