Spy Princess by Shrabani Basu Page A

in the Far East covered Burma, Malaya, Thailand, French Indo-China, China and Sumatra. In Ceylon, it had a base in Kandy. When the Soviet Union was drawn into the war in July 1941, 7 followed by the United States in December of that year, it gave Britain crucial allies and made it possible for it to plan to build up large bodies of armed men behind the enemy lines ready for the day when the Allied armies entered Europe.
    The SOE had six sections working in France. The two main ones were F-section and RF section. F-section sent agents trained in London to France to help the Resistance in sabotage activities. Recruits consisted of French-speaking Englishmen and women and people from British protected areas and French-speaking colonies. F-section was entirely British-run. Apart from a few exceptions in the early years, French exiles were recruited not to F-section but to RF section, which backed de Gaulle and worked closely with the Gaullist Free French headquarters in Duke Street. The Gaullist-run RF section consisted almost entirely of French agents and was based at 1 Dorset Square. RF section took their orders jointly from De Gaulle’s staff and from the SOE. Their aim was to disrupt both the Germans and the Vichy regime. There was some rivalry between the F-section and the RF section, as there was between the SOE and MI6. Other branches of the SOE in France consisted of the DF which ran escape routes, EU/P which worked in Polish settlements mostly in France, AMF which operated from Algiers, and the Jedburgh teams. The last were not meant to reach France till the main invasion, Operation Overlord (the Normandy landings), began in June 1944. The main aim of the French section was to prepare the ground for the invasion of France.
    In February 1942 Dalton was replaced by Lord Selborne, a friend of Churchill, who had backed him over his India policy in the 1930s. He was the grandson of Lord Salisbury and had greater access to the Prime Minister. From this period, the SOE started coming into its own, the groundwork having been done. The first agents had entered occupied territory and the organisation now grew in strength. At the height of its operations in 1944, about 15,000 people passed through the SOE. It employed 1,500 wireless operators and cipher clerks at four receiving stations in Britain and worked round the clock looking out for messages coming in from several hundred agents behind enemy lines. Some 10,000 men and 3,000 women worked for it around the globe in various headquarters, missions and sub-stations; about 5,000 of these were agents in the field, almost all of them men. They worked with an estimated two to three million active resisters in Europe alone. 8
    Most SOE recruits were receiving messages from the agents in the field and working as coding clerks and wireless operators. Others worked in planning, administration, intelligence operations, supply, research, security and transport. Some were employed in the ‘dirty tricks’ department covering explosives, forgeries and disguises. The switchboard began with 12 lines and grew to 200 at the peak of operations. In London, close to the Baker Street headquarters, nearby streets like Dorset Square and Portman Square housed various country and technical sections of the SOE at Orchard Court, Montague Mansions and Chiltern Court. Interview rooms were at the Victoria Hotel. Orchard Court at Portman Square had the offices of the F-section, where Noor would work.
    Recruitment for the SOE had to be done in secret. As with any intelligence organisation most of the recruits came from recommendations and personal contacts, and were family or friends or simply part of the old-school network. Later, as the need for recruits grew, a general instruction was informally put out to all services department to look out for people with language skills.
    Language was crucial to recruitment in the SOE. Maurice Buckmaster, head of F-section of the SOE, wrote in his book Specially