Eavesdropping on the radio was often the only way the Germans knew Lysanders were up there. That didn’t help them locate the planes, but a pilot’s carelessness would let the Germans know what they were saying. Which was why Jimmy McCairns, who was flying his Lysander near Rymills—pilots often flew missions in tandem like this—was miffed that Rymills was letting half of Europe listen to his breezy conversation with Noor about the French countryside. Soon McCairns’s annoyance turned to bemusement. He realized that the chitchat between Rymills and Noor was making the Germans even more frustrated that they hadn’t been able to end, once and for all, these damnable, never-ending flights by such ordinarily inconsequential planes.
Earlier that evening, Vera Atkins, one of the SOE’s top officers, had picked up Noor in an open-air cabriolet. Noor and the other agents were flying that night to France. It was a “perfect June day,” Atkins would later recall, with “the smell of the dog roses.” Still, “taking the agents to the aerodromes . . . was very tiring.”
In a cottage next to a secret airfield in Tangmere, a small village in eastern England, Atkins referred to each passenger only by their code name. Making sure each agent remembered the password they would need when they met their contacts in France, Atkins gave each of them a French identity card, a ration book, and a small pistol. There might be trouble when they landed. The Webley M1907—four inches long and ten ounces in weight—looked like a water gun. Experts knew better. Calling it “a little hunk of dynamite,” they proudly described the trajectory of its bullets: when they “struck flesh . . . there was a tendency for the bullet to go giddy and turn sidewise. . . . Humanitarians condemned the tippy bullets. Those who knew war were not surprised or even shocked.” To an American aficionado of pistols, Webleys connoted “quality and reliability from ’way back, just as our Colt and Smith & Wesson names do. About this gun there was some of the forthrightness that helped make the British Empire great.”
Atkins then went through the agents’ pockets and examined every inch of their clothing, searching for any sign that they had come from England—labels, scraps of paper, cigarette packs, matchbooks, movie stubs, underground tickets, monogrammed handkerchiefs. Even teeth were inspected to make sure the SOE’s dentist had replaced English-style fillings with gold in the French manner. Agents had already gotten French-style haircuts from French barbers who were living in England, and they were wearing clothes that were either genuinely French or had been scrupulously copied from French styles by the SOE’s expert tailors. Sometimes name tags were sewn into the clothes from tailors whose shops were in the neighborhoods where the agents would be operating in France. Finally, Atkins pulled out a few items that would lend small, convincing details to the agents’ outfits—a pack of French cigarettes, a recent French newspaper, a photo of a “relative” for a handbag or wallet. If an agent needed a last-minute dash of authenticity, Atkins sewed on French clothing labels or French-style buttons.
In a few minutes, Atkins produced several “citizens” of the now-defunct French republic, a country that existed barely in name and hardly in spirit. Pierre Raynaud, an officer in de Gaulle’s Free French Army, was watching Atkins. Waiting in that same cottage at Tangmere for his own flight to France, Raynaud was impressed with Atkins’s eye for detail. Nothing escaped her. Then he glanced at Noor. She was studying a prewar French railway timetable. Raynaud concluded she was out of her depth.
Atkins asked if anyone wanted to meet with her privately. She did this with all of her outgoing agents. The custom contradicted Atkins’s reputation for being gruff and haughty. Noor requested a few minutes with her. Going upstairs, they closed the door to a bedroom. Noor was in such a good mood that she complimented Atkins on a brooch she had pinned to her lapel: “You are so clever. You always make sure you wear something pretty.” Removing the pin—a silver bird—Atkins pressed it into Noor’s hands. The gift was actually part of a long-standing tradition in the SOE—departing agents were frequently given a warm memory of England before leaving for the continent, usually something made of gold. For women, this might be a powder compact; for men, cufflinks or a fountain pen. None of these could bear any compromising marks that might link them to Britain. These small gifts had two purposes: in a pinch, they could be sold to a pawnbroker, and they reminded agents how much they were cherished back home.
Around 10 p.m., a Ford station wagon drove the agents in Noor’s group to the tarmac. After a squadron leader introduced the passengers to Rymills, Atkins gave each agent a farewell embrace, whispering to some of them “Merde alors.” Loosely translated as “You’re in deep shit now,” this was Atkins’s standard sendoff to departing agents. It was also what the SOE’s code wizard wryly called the agency’s “ultimate benediction.” To Noor, until recently the semi-cloistered daughter of a mystic, this may have sounded crude and vulgar. But Atkins’s crudity may have been exactly what Noor needed. Simultaneously harsh and benign, it hammered home to Noor the danger she had gotten herself into.
One by one, the agents climbed the ladder into the Lysander. Noor was too slight—only five feet, three inches tall—to raise either foot onto the ladder. An airman gave her a boost. Settling into the cramped passenger section behind the cockpit, Noor took several deep breaths. Tonight marked two “firsts.” One for her, one for the SOE. This was the first airplane ride in her life, and she was the first female radio operator the SOE was sending to France. For the colonel who headed the SOE’s French division, radio operators were the linchpin of the SOE. They let the French know there was a world beyond the occupation, that they had friends and allies, and that freedom wasn’t dead. Radio operators, said Maurice Buckmaster, helped “nerve the French to far greater degrees of endurance than if they felt themselves all alone. The greatest service we can render these patriots is the link with freedom . . . through our radio operators, a link which brings them gifts from heaven in the form of arms and explosives (and perhaps cigarettes and chocolate).”
At the age of twenty-nine, Noor was about to bring gifts to patriots she had never met.
Past midnight, Rymills approached a landing field northeast of the town of Angers in the Loire Valley. Frequently used by the SOE, the field was officially known as B20/A. Its code name that may have summed up the experience of others who had been flown into it: “Indigestion.” A few months before, the Nazis had executed sixty Resistance fighters in Angers’s town square. Tonight, everything was still. Rymills knew where to land when he saw his “reception committee” flashing a prearranged Morse-code letter with a flashlight. If Rymills had seen the wrong letter, he would have returned immediately to England. The field was laid out with a miniature flight path: three flashlights arranged in an inverted L-shape: the crossbar was at the upwind end; at the downwind end, the head of the reception committee and his outgoing passengers were waiting. Rymills landed just past the downwind light, taxied in a right-hand turn around the other two, then circled back to the first. Turning upwind again, he halted.
As Rymills’s passengers scrambled out of his plane, Noor clutched her pistol. She wasn’t afraid to use it. Shooting, she’d written in an essay she had never shown anyone during her SOE training, was like meditating. Both demanded fierce, intense concentration; both narrowed your attention to “the pure essence” of your task—“focusing one’s mind in a certain direction” until there was no distinction between outer and inner, other and self.