In 1943, 18-year-old Noreen Riols was
recruited to the F-section (F for France) of the Special Operations
Executive - also called "Churchill's Secret Army". She
first worked at the French section's office, so she was present at
the debriefing meetings with agents who returned from 'the field'
(i.e. from enemy-occupied France).
Later, Noreen was sent to Beaulieu,
where prospective agents were trained, and her part in the training
was to act as a decoy: sometimes the agents were to try to 'shadow'
her, or they would 'practice' passing secret messages to her or
receiving messages from her. Another aspect of her work was putting
some men's integrity to test: will they talk of their secret
assignments to a pretty girl on a romantic moonlight terrace, or can
they keep their mouths shut? As the commandant in charge of training
said to Noreen: "If he can't resist talking to a pretty face
over here, he most certainly won't once he's over there. And it won't
be only his own life he'll be risking, but the lives of many others
as well."
Noreen Riols has written her memoirs,
but it's not only her story. She also recounts a lot of stories about
the agents she had met and known. I sometimes felt that the book was
rambling - as if she was writing things in the order they occurred to
her, not in the chronological order they had happened. One agent's
story reminds her of another, and so on. Some people are mentioned
many times, and if you need a memory aid, there's a list of F
Section's circuits and agents at the end of the book.
Many of the stories are tragic, not
only of those who died or disappeared during the war. Life was not
easy for former agents after the war, either. Since their operations
had been secret and they had to remain quiet about what they had
done, many people's heroism was not recognized for decades. Riols
also talks about the enmity that the official intelligence agency,
MI6, as well as the French leader General de Gaulle showed towards
SOE.
Sometimes, Riols pauses to wonder how
this life, filled with anxiety, stress, 'no questions asked' and
endless lies to protect the operations affected the people involved
in it. Some seemed to cope very well, some had more problems. "Trauma
doesn't suddenly go away, it lives with you, maybe even colours the
rest of your life," Riols writes. Also: "I realized that it
is the way a person reacts to suffering which shapes them and forms
their character. I could either let the pain dominate me and make me
bitter, or I could use the pain to my advantage, learn from the
experience, albeit a painful lesson, but through it grow and become a
more rounded, more mature person."
I definitely recommend this to anyone
who is interested in World War 2, and/or agents and espionage.
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