The popular image of female spies as glamorous femmes fatales obscures a far more interesting history, writes Helen Fry.
The histories of intelligence, spies and espionage have traditionally contained few women in their storylines and this has led to women being the missing dimension in history for too long. The reality could not be more stark. Women were present, operating in our uniformed intelligence services as well as civilian organisations MI5 and MI6.
Their legacy has been largely obscured by two main factors. Firstly, official secrecy which has kept their work hidden, as in the case of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6, and secondly, historians’ unconscious bias in excluding them from their research and an assumption that if women’s roles were not evidenced, they must not have been of importance.
In the public and media, women and espionage are often linked to a few of the femmes fatales, like the First World War spy Mata Hari, who came to define the image of the female spy as an exotic seductress. Britain’s Security Service MI5 mounted an investigation into her work and concluded that she wasn’t even a spy for the Germans.
Nevertheless, the French authorities executed her in 1917 and her image as the exotic spy gained high acclaim. But the portrayal of such women as spy seductresses, alongside the casting of James Bond’s personal secretary as glamorous “Miss Moneypenny”, has proved extremely hard to shift in popular perception of female spies and is simply not historically accurate. The reality is so much more exciting.
Code-breakers and knitted messages
Amongst the first top secret stories to emerge has been that of the code-breaking site of Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. It has become synonymous with the intelligence successes of the Second World War, for its huge achievements in breaking German enigma and in part due to the blockbuster film Imitation Game, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley.
But it took more than 50 years for the clandestine work of its cryptanalysts and code-breakers to be declassified into the public domain. Two thirds of Bletchley’s 10,000-strong workforce were women. That in itself is an impressive legacy but, in fact, it only scratches the surface of what women have achieved in the world of intelligence across the twentieth century and beyond.
Women have been present in intelligence and espionage in all kinds of diverse roles. They have displayed extraordinary bravery and resilience in running spy networks from behind the German lines and gaining critical information for the Allies. They moved invisibly across the countryside with their secret messages in invisible ink, ran intelligence sectors and became agent handlers, and lived and died for the cause of freedom.
One such network was called La Dame Blanche (“The White Lady”) and operated in Belgium in the First World War. At least a third of its 2,000 agents were women. Many of these women observed the German troop movements by train and knitted coded messages into jumpers and scarves of what they had seen. So certain stitches represented particular German troops and regiments and how many. The knitted items were sent over the lines to British headquarters in France and decoded.
Undercover “secretaries”
In the next war, women were ready to operate again in clandestine networks behind enemy lines, including the Noah’s Ark network in France, headed by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. Her agents were given the codenames of animals. These networks were primed with the urgent search for Hitler’s secret weapon sites (V-1 and V-2) and German troop movements in the occupied countries of Europe. Their work was both dangerous and prone to betrayal.
Women also operated as double agents and deceived the German Secret Service in a number of deceptions ahead of D-Day, including in the planning of Operation Mincemeat, whereby the dead body of a Royal Marine floated off the coast of Spain with fake invasion plans. The only spy swap during World War Two in currently declassified files was one of Britain’s top female spies.
This history is beginning to surface and change our understanding of what women achieved and how central they were to intelligence operations. Women were embedded right across the uniformed services in army, air and naval intelligence, often in roles as analysts and photographic interpreters. They became experts in their particular field of intelligence and were indispensable to operations.
A picture of the work of the “secretaries” of MI6 is emerging that has enabled a glimpse into their true roles. Many worked undercover in British passport offices or embassies abroad, where they recruited agents, ran networks across Europe, the Middle East and other parts of the world, corresponding with their agents and contacts using invisible ink. They, like their (often male) head of station, received no formal intelligence training, had to learn on the job and developed their own modus operandi.
The women developed an expertise in the countries where they operated and were indispensable to MI6’s intelligence gathering and spy networks. They became experts on communism and Soviet spies, as well as on far-right groups and fascism and the threats posed from the rise of Nazi Germany. Their specialist knowledge and expertise in running agents and of particular geographical regions became indispensable to the Special Operations Executive (SOE), MI5 and MI6.
Heroism written into history
Expertise in a particular field was the main factor in the recruitment of a Secret Intelligence Service woman to the French Section of the Special Operations Executive. Vera Atkins became deputy head of the French Section, worked out of Baker Street headquarters and recruited and despatched male and female agents into France. She believed in the talent of women and their ability to become highly suitable agents and she was proved correct.
The first female agents and wireless operators were dropped into Nazi-occupied France in 1942 to help “set Europe ablaze”. Amongst them was Noor Inayat Khan (“Madeleine”) of Sufi Indian origin and the first female wireless operator to link up with the French Resistance. She was betrayed and executed in Dachau concentration camp, along with three other SOE colleagues.
Also sent in was Violette Szabo, a posthumous recipient of the George Cross, and Odette Sansom (“Lise”). Odette survived Ravensbrück concentration camp, having joined the SOE in 1942 and worked as a courier behind enemy lines with the Spindle circuit. Pearl Witherington was another agent who survived as a courier in France and she went on to command 3,000 men after D-Day. F Section sent circa 470 agents into France by Lysander or ashore in boats. They formed circuits behind enemy lines, ran couriers who carried messages for the network, and radio operators who communicated with London.
Files being released into the National Archives reveal that women were at the heart of some of the most important or dangerous intelligence missions across the twentieth century. It provides a glimpse into an exciting legacy about which so much more must still inevitably remain hidden. Even so, we are in awe of the heroism of the women who can finally be written into history.
For more information, see the author’s book, Women in Intelligence: the hidden history across two world wars (Yale University Press, paperback 2024).
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Only_NewPhoto / Shutterstock.com
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