In memory of Noor Inayat Khan, the first female wireless operator sent into occupied France by the SOE, who was executed on 13th September 1944. Dubbed the ‘spy princess’ because she was descended from Indian royalty, Noor sometimes referred to herself as plain Nora Baker by taking her American mother’s maiden name. In June 1940, after France’s occupation and surrender, Noor and her family fled to London where she subsequently joined the WAAF. Soon recruited by the SOE’s ‘F’ or French section as a ‘pianist’ or wireless operator, Noor was sent into France in June 1943 to join the ‘Prosper’ network under codename ‘Madeleine.’ As she arrived in Paris, mass arrests by the Gestapo saw the network decimated. Noor bravely refused to return home, single-handedly supplying all radio communications to London for a small network of agents, and avoiding Nazi detector vans by always being on the move. She survived over the summer, but her luck ran out in October 1943 when she was betrayed for 100,000 French francs by her French landlady. Chained and held in solitary confinement, Noor was brutally tortured but revealed no secrets to her captors. Along with other SOE members, she was executed at Dachau concentration camp in Germany, shouting liberté at the guards as she was shot.  In April 1949, Noor was posthumously awarded the George Cross. 

This brave woman was inspirational to the character of Miriam Nugent in A Parisian Intrigue, the first book in my WWII thriller series.